Memories Are Unmade of This

So easy to overlook and laugh at the little lapses of memory that signal old age. Forgetting why we went into a room, where we put a book or a glass or glasses just moments ago in our hands, whether we returned that phone call or paid that bill.

I once paid a bill twice, not noticing the identical entry just above the second entry in my checkbook. Three months later I called when the same company sent a bill for $0.00. “Something went wrong,” I said. The woman on the phone was nice enough not to say just what had gone wrong. Cheerfully, she pointed out that I still had $20.00 credit on what would be due three months hence.

Then there are the missteps: putting a hot pot of coffee into the fridge, putting on shoes before pants, making the batter for potato pancakes step by step only to remember that you don’t have the last ingredient–the potatoes. Yes, I have done all those and more.

Some are serious, but I’ve been nearby to make a quick correction, and I now observe the rule of looking at the stove to make sure that I’ve fired up the burner under the kettle and that the kettle is not empty. S’pose I could do that by nose, as those empty pots sure smell funny, but the flame is immediate–like the pain from a casserole dish you forget is just out of the 425-degree oven.

This past week, however, I had one that, frankly, is cause for alarm. If I’m lucky, it was not a sign of a permanent condition, but a singular act of God to put me back in place after the pride I was taking thinking myself so sharp, so savvy, regarding the internet and its algorithims.

An email from a friend asked if I did much business with Amazon. He opened with a “sorry to bother you,” which I thought was a laugh, and there was a lack of punctuation that I ignored. Also, I just self-published a book that is new on Amazon, so I figured the real question was about availability, which I answered.

Within minutes I had an answer that began, “Good to hear back from you,” and then said he had a problem with his credit card, wanted to buy his niece a $200 gift certificate (“put a smile on her face”), and could I cover it until we next met? All so bizarre, I started examining the details that appear when you click “to me” under the sender’s name. The second email address (edress?) began with his last name, as did the first, but it was all different between there and .com. I checked my history of emails with him. All matched the first; the second was nowhere to be clicked.

I alerted him with a separate email, and then forwarded the exchange. Satisfied that I had stopped crime in it’s clumsy tracks, I made a note to turn my act of cleverness into a column that readers would print out and stick to their refrigerator doors as a reminder to be vigilant and a model for how to do it.

That would have to wait until I finished a column I thought just right for a historic seaport’s newspaper, a tribute to the inventor of the Beaufort Wind Scale on the semiquincentennial of his birth. All I had to do was extract it from the appendix in my first book, Pay the Piper, the very last item written for that book in 2014.

Reminding me of Francis Beaufort was a surprising gift I found in my mailbox last week, the Eldridge Tide and Pilot Book 2024. Pulling it out of the wrap, I spotted the plain, matter-of-fact fonts and a lot of low-point black text on the mustard yellow cover. Why would anyone send me a phonebook? I wondered, and then, Do those things still exist?

To some degree, this was a joke after I started telling people that the causeway–the one and only road–from this island to the mainland was closed during a high tide when there was no storm. Every winter, it’s closed a handful of times for high tides accompanied by a storm surge, but what happened a few weeks ago was new, and so I announced:

“I now need to consult a tidal chart to see if I have to leave two hours early to get to work, or hole up in a pub before I drive home.”

Fort Myers, a long-time sailor, took that so literally, she sent Eldridge. Fascinating stuff, especially the harbor maps up and down the Atlantic coast in a book that goes way beyond tides in explaining the meaning and uses of lights, signals, flags, and buoys. So reminiscent of Beaufort, that I went looking for a hook that would interest Newburyport readers and combine the two. Presto: The 250th anniversary of Beaufort’s birth.

Spent most of a day on it and had a full draft before putting it aside and going to the kitchen to make coffee. About when I lit the burner for a kettle of water, I had this odd feeling that made me turn and stare at the log that I keep of the headlines and dates of my Daily News columns. Then, in a rush, I went to it and flipped pages, also in a rush, to the entries for 2014. A sigh of relief was momentary, as my nose caught that unwelcome scent from the stove. In another rush in the other direction, I picked up the kettle, used it to push the empty pot off the flame, and then put the kettle down where it should have been.

Another sigh of relief was just a brief, as another vague memory crept in. Back to the log, I took a look at March, 2015. There it was, “As Irish as shooting the breeze.” A St. Patrick’s Day piece for a descendent of Huguenots who fled France’s “Wars of Religion” and landed in Ireland 200 years before he, Rear Admiral Francis Beaufort, was born in County Meath.

I had spent the entire day writing a column that I wrote nine years ago.

I returned to the kitchen where I made certain that coffee was in the French press before I poured the water, another occasional lapse of mine, and made sure that the burner was turned off. I left the laptop closed, put the press and a cup on my nightstand, and sat up in bed to sip the coffee–and to plot the outline of an essay admitting of an infirmity for my cleverness to transcend at best, disguise at worst, and offset at length.

At least until I burn down the house.

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https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-put-out-a-grease-fire-article

My Futile Five Minutes

For my Newburyport readers and friends, and also for anyone who read my accounts of controversy at the Newburyport Public Library last summer, here’s a report on the NPL Board of Directors meeting Wednesday, or at least my futile five minutes worth.

Quotes may be inexact (and possibly out of sequence), but I think I caught the truth of it, and three others present–also in support of the expelled volunteers, the Archival Center, and the head archivist forced to “retire”–concur.

A key to the cast of characters: Sean Reardon is Mayor, and Ed Cameron is Pres. of City Council. Both are ex-officio members; Cameron did not hold that office and so was not on the NPL board when the controversy broke. Full disclosure: He is a guitarist & vocalist for The Pathological Outliers, a local band that I quite favorably reviewed in a blog, “Driving Rock & Roll’s Car,” summer of ’22.

Kevin Bourque is the new library head, and Jessica Atherton his top assistant believed to be one of two “senior” librarians behind the move to gut the Archival Center of volunteers and of the head archivist of ten or twelve years. Board member Jim Connelly, a lawyer, appeared to be the chair, as he was the only one who spoke–save one remark by the mayor–during “public comments.” Andrew Levine (not present) is the mayor’s chief of staff.

———

My Five Minutes

Nothing like a long drive to think long thoughts, and it took one to and back from Meredith, NH, Thursday to make any sense of Wednesday evening.

Looks like the board now has three empty seats, as just seven directors (inc. Reardon & Cameron) and Bourque & Atherton sat at the tables facing nine people.

I went intending to remain silent, unsure of my ability to contain my temper. But when no one answered Connelly’s opening invitation, at least not within a few beats, I announced that I had no comment, but one question. He told me I had five minutes.

To set it up, I repeated the scene of my meeting with Levine on June 27 regarding the 950-word smear, specifically the one line about “accepting money.” I did this in our first meeting on Jan. 30.

I made sure to turn my head from side to side, trying to make eye contact with all of them. Some looked down, some inc. Reardon met my eye.

Then, the question to the board: Were you aware that this was posted on the NPL site for at least three, possibly five weeks, including the money charge even though it was already established that it was nothing more than coins?

Connelly: “I’m pretty sure your five minutes are up.”

Me: “Fine, but that’s the question, where’s the answer?” I looked from side to side. Averted eyes. Blank stares. “It’s a simple yes or no question. Were you aware of it?” I kept lookin, pausing, repeating.

At one point, Reardon answered, addressing me by my first name, which took me by surprise for some reason. He said he asked that it be taken down when he learned of it.

Me: “But three weeks went by after I told your chief of staff about it.”

He said something about info not being conveyed, and I was a bit too stunned to realize that what he said, at least the wording of it, was an admission that he thought something was wrong with the statement. Given another chance, I’d ask him to name who was responsible for it. And exactly what he thought was wrong.

I kept looking at the board members, getting nothing in return, while re-phrasing and expanding the question, “Did you know? Did you approve?” until Connelly (the only one who spoke of the five) repeated: “Your five minutes are up.”

“Did this board know of the post?”

Connelly began to answer with talk of union personnel agreements. I cut in:

“I’m not talking about union contracts. I’m talking about ethics.”

“Well, your five minutes are up.”

I wish I had a white flag with me, or at least a white hankie that I could have held over my head and waved when I sat down. They simply called for the next speaker, and one got up and made a strong, comprehensive, and coherent case for the vols, the Archival Center, and the archivist they had just silently watched forced out.

When she was done speaking, the board looked just as it did when I was done. I do not believe that a single word of what either of us said registered with any of them.

EXCEPT: I think that just the fact of us talking, and the fact of others sitting there, have to be making them uneasy for what might yet come. Put another way, what we saw last night was a group of people who are hoping to wait us out.

Following this, they went to their mundane business. Bourque spoke forever in a sing-song voice that had me wishing I had a package of Excedrin III or a bottle of Jim Beam. Admirably, the other speaker kept an ear on it enough to insert a question about how use of the Archival center is or will be measured. And another took a lot of notes which may or may not include all six times Bourque said “enhance the user’s library experience.”

POSTSCRIPT: Only yesterday did I learn that the camera to record us was something new, never done before. A few tell me that this is a tactic to intimidate and discourage anyone from the public who might be disagreeable. I don’t doubt that assessment, but it’s lost on a Renaissance faire performer of 25 years with an instinct, maybe an involuntary reflex to ham it up at the sight of any such device aimed at me. On the other hand, I do admit I was surprised by it and wished I had gotten a haircut that afternoon.

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Post Presidents Day

When the tab at the Screening Room counter came to $18.25, I couldn’t resist: “John Quincy Adams becomes president!”

The customer smiled, perhaps politely, and so I went on: “He lived in Newburyport three years, an apprentice to a lawyer.”

“Oh!”

“He played flute. Played in jam sessions at the Wolfe Tavern.”

Now she’s wide-eyed:

“We elected a Newburyport flautist president of the United States! Let’s do that again!”

Yes, another dozen patrons are now waiting to buy tickets, but that’s the advantage of a small cinema: Jack the Ripper doubles as Jack in the Booth, and so everyone knows they won’t be late for the start of the film.

Not only are they not impatient, they’re paying rapt attention. So, I blather on:

“JQA, the only ex-president to serve in Congress. For 17 years to his death in 1848, he was the leading congressional voice for abolition.”

I pause until they think I’m done. “He had the most productive post-presidency of any—until Jimmy Carter showed up.”

Reactions in the lobby were approving and emotional, as this happened the week that Rosalynn Carter passed away. I finally focused on work, hurriedly selling tickets and a few concessions.

The Carters’ never-ending work with Habitat for Humanity and the Carter Center’s mediation of conflicts, protection of human rights, and promotion of economic development are all well-known.

And recognized, as with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.

Having already devoted a Presidents Day column to Carter (“For a Sunday School President” 2018)**, here’s something else about his administration that went largely unnoticed, even at the time it happened:

Based on Rosalynn’s idea when Jimmy was Georgia’s governor, they launched an exchange program for localities in the state with others in Central and South America.

As First Lady, Rosalynn organized it on a national scale. Those who joined the “The Friendship Force” never stayed in hotels, but were matched with hosts according to what they had in common.

The foreign locale would send the same number with the same arrangements. In both places, guests would go to their hosts’ places of employment, schools, recreation centers, museums, cultural and athletic events.

In 1979, about 200 of us in Bismarck, North Dakota, signed up for ten days in Hamburg, Germany, home of namesake Otto Von Bismarck. My host was an editor of Die Zeit (The Times), possibly the largest circulating national newspaper auf Deutsch.

Our stay included a day-trip that required a half-hour train ride to the Bismarck estate. All of us North Dakotans and all German hosts were there to pick from the platters of endless trays of shot-glasses filled with schnapps.

Ever since, I’ve shaken my head at the stereotype of Germans as rigid, joyless people—which I would come to realize was the point of the Friendship Force.

Back in North Dakota, all of us—those who flew and those who played host—had high praise for the experience, urged friends and family in other cities to see about starting one, and still reminisce about it while wishing it might be re-created.

The Carters—before, during, and after their stay in the White House—come to mind when reading about John Quincy and Louisa Adams in Massachusetts, in European courts, and in Washington DC.

Rosalynn was Jimmy’s closest and most trusted advisor. Louisa was as much of a diplomat in St. Petersburg and London as JQ. Rosalynn had a knack for seeing through people that Jimmy lacked. Louisa made her hidebound husband more approachable.

If we had a Mount Rushmore for post-presidencies, there’s no question that Carter and Quincy Adams would be the first two faces on it.

For two more, the debate could be heated. Taft? Cleveland? Teddy Roosevelt? You could argue that Eleanor Roosevelt’s post White House years qualify her as FDR’s proxy.

Viewed through that lens, it’s clear that a post-presidency owes as much to the First Lady as to the office-holder.

And that such a Mount Rushmore would honor not four men, but two couples.

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Photo by David M. Gallo
https://www.thefivefoottraveler.com/visiting-mount-rushmore/

*This is an op-ed column that I had under the headline, “On another Mount Rushmore,” in the Newburyport Daily News today, my 16th Annual “Presidents’ Day Address” as I started calling them in 2012 or so. This was delayed by three days, but this is Washington’s actual birthday, so here’s to technicalities.

**There’s also one for Quincy Adams in 2014, “He left his pipe in Newburyport,” which is included in my collection, Keep Newburyport Weird.

Presidents’ Day Special

Something not yet mentioned following news of the $399 golden sneakers: Old Glory wrapped around the back over the heel.

According to the “US Flag Code: American Flag Etiquette, Rules, and Guidelines,” a joint resolution passed by Congress in 1942:

The flag should never be used for any advertising purpose, nor embroidered on cushions or handkerchiefs, printed on paper napkins or boxes, nor used as any portion of a costume.

Most historians summarize that as “no commercial use,” and up until 1980 you never saw a flag or the image of one used to advertise anything or made a part of anything put up for sale. Then came the Reagan campaign with a PR team that wanted every photo-op filled with smiling faces of people in the background and to the sides waving small American flags. They got the idea, by the way, from fascists who rose to power in Europe 50 years earlier, but we’re not allowed to make that comparison, so I suggest you search for archival footage while I swallow the First Amendment.

What the Reagan campaign did was not exactly commercial use, but the tactic was so in-your-face, ever-present, colorful, and successful that advertisers took note. Gradually, Old Glory appeared in ads as part of a backdrop while cars drove by, while people shopped in stores, while Clydesdales delivered kegs of beer to bars, while a singer sang the National Anthem from the back of a cab stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge, and an umpire in Yankee Stadium held a cellphone to a microphone on a stand at home plate. Play ball!

As variations on the theme, ads were filmed at historic sites. At first you’d see Lincoln and Washington as statues in peaceful parks, but before long they were jumping into and rolling out of cars being chased on city streets. Hard to tell if they were playing stuntmen or stuntmen were playing them. Might have had to do with the Jeep Wrangler that drove right up Washington’s Mount Rushmore chest. Or was it Lady Liberty’s robes? Maybe that’s why the statue now stands for an insurance company.

During the Superbowl in which the Patriots beat the Eagles–two patriotic names there–I saw an ad that made me spit out the word “descecration.” The party’s host, a Navy veteran seven years my senior, told me that his father shared my opinion. That made me feel hopelessly antiquated, but, hey, we scored a touchdown and the beer was really good. I relaxed and enjoyed the nailbiter of a game, but something nagged me for weeks until the dawn’s early light snapped on: That’s not an opinion. It is literally in a Code to honor and display the flag in a section titled, “How Not to Display the American Flag.” (Emphasis the Code’s.)

Also in that section is a reminder of many flags that we have see since 2015–Old Glory with Orange Blowhole’s stern face embossed on it, other Stars and Stripes morphed with Stars and Bars. On cars and pickup trucks, on motorboats, in front of homes, but mostly at Trump rallies, including some used as battering rams on that “normal tourist day” at the Capitol and flown by “very fine people” marching in Charlottesville four years earlier:

The flag should never have anything placed on it.

Curiously, I never heard anyone who expressed indignation over African-American athletes kneeling during the National Anthem raise any voice over nine years of Trumped-down American flags. No surprise, then, that they won’t notice the flag’s crass placement on the backs of shoes, or that they’ll fork over $399 to his legal defense, put the shoes on their feet, and violate the Code themselves.

Some wag on social media posted a meme calling them “Air Treasons.” Good one! Ditto the pitch, “When you’ve GOT to run!” Before long, someone added, “They’ll give you bonespurs!” Then came a title for a movie adaptation, “White Men Can’t Jump Bail.”

Great stuff, but it all puts the emphasis on the seller. I’d rather put it on buyers too unaware to beware (or “anti-woke” as they so proudly hail), and call them Suckers!

The pitch? God, Guns, Guts, and Gullibility!

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https://www.almanac.com/us-flag-etiquette-rules-and-guidelines

A Scan of Hi-Tech Scams

Santa Rosa tells me that California is considering a bill proposed by AT&T to eliminate all landlines. She says it may pass this summer.

When the call ended, I was still shocked. As friends and family find alternately frustrating and amusing, I’m one of the few remaining American adults who does not own a cellphone. And I’ve been both adamant and taunting about it, calling it a hi-tech ball-and-chain, and declaring that I’ll never be at anyone’s beck and call. On a less boisterous note, I do grin and bear the extra steps up I must take to secure tickets for the next Jethro Tull concert or enter a place with a locked door and a sign that begins, “Please call…”

Coincidentally, this came just hours after I stopped at a library to get a printout of a gift certificate I’d been sent in an email. But I couldn’t access my email due to “two-step verification,” which requires you have either a mobile device or a laptop with you. Here’s a modern day Catch-22: Had I a mobile device, I would not have needed the library’s computer. Moreover, if this is how it’s done, what’s the point of a password? And why aren’t those questions about your mother’s maiden name or your favorite song a suffcient second step? Are we being forced to buy mobile devices? I left without any printout, but my head had printed-in several notes, a flexible outline, and a headline with the word “Scam” that may yet prove useful.

Coincidental to that coincidence, it was just days ago I listened to someone tell of numerous states and cities considering “Must Accept Cash” laws. Local, state, and federal officials across the country are responding to complaints lodged against businesses–including hospitals and clinics–that require payment by credit card. Republicans and Democrats alike endorse it. Massachusetts passed such a law two years ago, but right here in Newburyport at least one medical clinic refuses to accept cash.

Of course, COVID escalated the use of cards rather than cash, and we seniors are left with the lingering habit. Younger folk prefer the cards, as anyone who works behind the counter of a cinema can vouch. Some may think that cards are all there is. More than once, I’ve had people young enough to be my kid or grandkid pop a head in the door to ask, “Do you accept cash?”

Credit cards may be convenient elsewhere, but at a cinema, most customers show up at the same time. And since it is within ten minutes of the start of a show, lines form. And at a small arts cinema where the ticket-taker, concessionaire, and projectionist are all the same person…

‘Scuse me while I spit the next sequence of words out of my spleen, hit delete, and take a few deep breaths…

Ah, that’s better! I get a lot of laughs by loudly thanking customers for using cash, raising my voice, putting my open hands aside my mouth, and feigning to look over the folks in front to those in the back of the line. Followed by, “Oh, you didn’t hear me?” which gives me the excuse to say it again. Louder.

Many seem to think of this as a simple trade-off, a small fee to pay for convenience. I wonder how many of the many ever consider that this “small fee” has to absorbed in the retail price. That, by the by, means that the price goes up for everyone–no matter payment by credit or cash, no matter buying a movie ticket or a tank of gas, a cup of coffee or a winter coat. And how many of those many then complain about inflation they experience while standing in supermarket checkout counters or looking at restaurant menus?

Difference sounds slight when considered one at a time, but they add up in little time. That’s why folks on social media keep posting reminders to pay a restaurant bill with a card if you must, but leave the tip in cash. Working for what’s called a “tipped minimum wage,” those who work for tips cannot absorb increases as well as any business that accepts credit cards.

And what is to blame for those increases? Inflation is so much easier to comprehend than any talk of “absorbed costs” or “price-gouging”–plus. it’s a single word. Not to mention that you can blame it on whoever is in charge at the time. No thought required. No need to question modern American dogma: Guvmint Bad, Capitalism Good! Why, it’s as convenient as the use of Visa to buy a bag of Sour Patch Kids.

But more: Not only are the credit card companies bilking us while we blame the very politicians who have tried to regulate them–and reward politicians who protect them from regulation–they have enthralled us with what they call, “Cash Back.” We’re now supposed to believe that they are doing us a favor because they are “giving back” some of the money we pay for products and services. No. They are reducing the amount they are skimming from us with the inflated prices they have caused by the imposition of their (spleen-word deleted) cards. They have so many fooled by this, that I hear and overhear their Madison Avenue-ese in real-life conversation:

“Cashback.” As a verb, a single word, as in “How do you cashback?”

Putting the phone down, still dizzy at the thought of a state going wireless, I gathered my thoughts as I often do, sitting still and looking out the window over the marsh. And I saw it right away, something that was there all along:

All these years, I’ve been looking out the window, through the wires, over the marsh.

Historians like to remind us that states act as laboratories of innovation and change that, if successful, the rest of the country might follow. For example, we have Oregon to thank for mail-in voting. In time, the rest of the country may consider the example that Maine is setting with the success of ranked choice voting.

Before California becomes a lab for wireless, there is strong opposition to AT&T’s plan. Residents who have been through the trauma of the state’s increasingly frequent fires and mudslides in recent years note that cellphones are more vulnerable than landlines to power outages.*

If there’s yet another technological answer to those fears, I’d like to see telephone lines taken down. And wouldn’t that be the time to put all remaining utility wires underground? Trucks and crews will be at every possible site. Just add an excavator.

I can always leave the ball-and-chain behind or turned off. Convenience isn’t worth it. But a clear view of the horizon is.

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* https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/california/bay-area-residents-att-landline-service/3447198/#:~:text=Thousands%20of%20people%20have%20been%20expressing%20outrage%20to,all%20who%20want%20it%20in%20their%20service%20area.

https://www.newsweek.com/att-map-shows-california-areas-that-could-lose-service-1870227

A Dizzy Dancing Way to Feel

As we gather on modern-day America’s most representative holiday for the game that is the climax of it all, I remain stuck on last week’s Grammys.

So out of tune with popular music since the heyday of Dire Straits and Warren Zevon, I had no idea what songs were nominated or what any of them sounded like. Truth is, I was writing about a talk I had just heard at a local museum. All I wanted was background with an occasional announcement that would make me look up.

Ordinarily, I’d have put on a football or baseball game, but the Grammys are wisely broadcast on the first Monday night in ten months that has neither. So instead of a raised broadcaster’s voice or roar of a crowd to get my attention, I listened for blast-from-the-past names.

Speaking of things that most represent America, Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” from the 1980s slowly rolled onto stage with the unmistakeable swaying two-note bounce that made me look up before I or anyone else could see the guitarist/songwriter herself emerge from the shadows to sing it. Then it became a duet with a country singer unknown to me who made it a hit yet again just years ago.

Many marvelled at the combination of a radiant black woman folk singer in lyrical conversation with Luke Combs, a relaxed white male country singer. “A fleeting gift of harmony,” as one called it. The reference is, inescapably, to race, and it could as well apply to Stevie Wonder’s tribute to Tony Bennett who was projected on a screen behind the stage as they traded the lyrics of “For Once in My Life.”

To me, both were more generational than racial. True, Wonder is more my age, too old to be receiving a proverbial torch, but with Tony Bennett passing it, Wonder is still in the game. A few friends sent me pictures of Chapman busking in Harvard Square back in the 80s before the cafe owners started inviting her inside. She passed the torch to numerous buskers who perform to this day in the very recessed doorways she once played. As we saw and heard, she‘s still in the game.

Admittedly, I may be yet under the spell of Joni Mitchell’s rendition of “Both Sides Now” near the Grammys’ end. Slowed down, it was resigned yet content, a bookend to the coming-of-age tune seasoned with both whimsy and skepticism that caught our attention back in the turbulant 60s. With young Brandi Carlile on guitar beside her, you could see the torch being passed.

For anyone my age, that phrase, that metaphor, can’t help but recall what may be this country’s most memorable inaugural address, JFK’s “Ask not” challenge aimed at Boomers. Seven years later, I was in a college classroom listening to a youthful English teacher calling that our generation’s commencement address.

Today, I settle in to watch the full-blown American pageantry of a championship game punctuated by multi-million dollar commercials shown for the first time, a loud and flashy half-time show of global superstars, and the romance of a Grammy-winner and a popular, slap-happy star player that fascinates the public much the way that of Jack and Jackie did back in the days of Camelot. Can’t help but wonder:

Was Joni Mitchell’s rendition of “Both Sides Now,” as she sat in a chair and held her cane, my generation’s valedictory address?

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https://genius.com/Joni-mitchell-both-sides-now-lyrics

Zone of Insistence

To say that The Zone of Interest is about the Holocaust would be as misleading as it is true.

From Anne Frank to Oskar Schindler, we expect stories about Nazi Germany to focus on Jewish people and those who hid them or aided their escape. We are taken into the homes they flee, the trains on which they flee, the places to which they flee–or we are stopped where they are caught.

Adapted from Martin Amis’ 2014 novel of the same name, Zone puts us in the home and garden of the Nazi commandant of a concentration camp, his wife, and his four “strong, happy, healthy children.” The film is set not in Auschwitz, but just outside the camp’s 20-foot wall, topped by barbed wire. The only Jewish people we meet are two maids who almost never speak–unless you count the untold thousands on the other side of a 20-foot wall that the commandant’s wife is methodically covering with vines and flowers while saplings take their time to grow as high as that wire.

Nor do we hear the name “Jew” or any description of what happens in the camp until halfway into the film, not even a hint. Instead, we see commandant reading his little girl a bedtime story, one hand brushing his fashy back in place.* We see the wife trying on a fur coat before a mirror and then handing it to the maid with instructions to re-sew the lining–and hearing her tell friends that she found a diamond in a tube of toothpaste. One laughs, “Oh, they are so clever!”

From scene to scene, from garden to kitchen and from porch to barn, they are a normal family with a dog, mostly happy with an occasional hiccup, such as one daughter’s strange dreams. All while we see the smoke rise over and the muffled screams and gunshots surge through that ubiquitous wall. You might wonder why the title is anything but Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.”

Something about the word “zone” might answer this. Not the literal, spacial meaning, but the implied vibrancy of when we say that someone is “in the zone” or “zoned in.” To borrow what we often say of the Nazis, there’s no film that compares to Zone–from the black screen that opens it, through the red screen that divides it, to pulsating blank screen that ends it.

Zone Director Jonathan Glazer draws something out of us rather than putting it in or just showing it. Call it psychological horror, much of it done with sound, color, and camera angles with many long shots that would pass as surveillance tapes. Close-ups of the faces of the commandant and his wife are few and far between.

As if to defy the camera, most of the horror is off-screen or behind the wall.

Though there is no violence at all on-screen, this is not for the faint of heart. Entertaining? Well, it was gripping without a hint of a joke. But I can give it one unconditional recommendation: For those who appreciate the sheer craft of filmmaking, The Zone of Interest is must-see, must-hear, must-feel.

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*A hairstyle popular with Nazi men who shaved their heads under a circle above the ears, leaving the hair long on top and combed straight back. We saw a brief revival of this in 2017-18 after it was modeled by Donald Trump’s “very fine people” in Charlottesville.

https://www.wbur.org/news/2024/01/11/the-zone-of-interest-jonathan-glazer-review
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7160372/

A Whale of a Prayer

First weekend after New Year’s is the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading in New Bedford, as close as I come to a religious observance these past five years.

This year, Recuperation Monday was most unusual. For starters, I finished breakfast at 3 p.m.

Also, because it fell on the 8th, I was acutely aware of my cousin John Hyzuk, a longtime Plum Islander far more popular than I realized judging from the condolences sent my way.

Would have been his 73rd birthday as well as my mother’s 99th. She might have stayed up for the livestream of my reading at 1:30 a.m. Sunday, despite tuning in early for my scheduled time at 1 a.m.

John would have laughed at the thought. In fact, in 2020 and each year since, he did exactly that. But he always pressed me to answer a question he found irresistible when I first told him of it.

He had quite a taste for the unusual, the eccentric, the bold. Pretty sure his favorite song was Warren Zevon’s “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” which tells us something.

When I called Ishmael the ultimate “Excitable Boy,” John’s interest piqued. So, upon return from a pilgrimage to Herman Melville’s grave in the Bronx a few years ago, I was eager to tell him of the blank scroll on the tombstone. He immediately asked why?

“It’s a debate that has never been resolved.”

“Debate?”

“Some think it was Melville’s white flag to a hard, cruel world. Others think it was his middle finger.”

John’s reaction left no question as to which side he preferred.

Another local plumber recognized me as soon as I arrived at the Whaling Museum. Was sure to be in the audience for his turn, and like most of the 200-plus readers, he brought the text to life. No matter that he listed the categories of whales, his voice caught the smart-assed mix of whimsy and indignation, humor and reverence we call Ishmael.

When I was in grad school, I wrote a paper on a bold premise: If the Bible is “God talking to man,” then Moby-Dick is man’s response. This fascinated a few English profs at South Dakota State, at least when I laid it out over a few pitchers of Grain Belt at a downtown bar.

Admittedly, pure academic speculation with a few quotes leaning my way. Any great work of art will be open to several interpretations, some inevitably contradictory.

D.H. Lawrence and Somerset Maugham agreed that it was “written by a man in love,” as one called it. According to biographer Michael Shelden, that was a reference to Melville’s affair with Sarah Anne Morewood, a neighbor whose elderly husband’s devotion to business kept him in NYC most of the time that the novel was written at Melville’s Arrowhead Farm in the Berkshires. On the other hand, male relationships in the book, particularly that of Ishmael and Queequeg, have led others to call Moby-Dick a gay tract.

Moby-Dick has also been interpreted as an atheistic, even nihilistic treatise—a far crow’s nest cry from the accepted categorization of adventure story mixed with industrial manual. Also, “proto-Darwinian,” eight years ahead of Origin of the Species, with Ishmael cast as a “blue environmentalist” and “climate refugee.”

Most relevant today is C.L.R. James’ Mariners, Renegades and Castaways (1952) calling it a forerunner of the totalitarianism genre long before Brave New World and 1984. James himself is now a forerunner of numerous pundits comparing Trump’s boast of retribution to Ahab’s bent on revenge.

Whether Melville was responding to God or not hardly matters. As his friend, Nathaniel Hawthorne worried, “He can neither believe nor be comfortable in his disbelief.” What does matter is that he was and still is speaking to US.America didn’t listen then, and 10 years later sank into Civil War.

Save a few hundred Dick Heads who think that New Bedford offers a great weekend getaway in January, nearly half of America is just as deaf now – while many more pay little or no attention.

That would be more than enough cause for a white flag on a tombstone, but I prefer my cousin’s verdict set to the white whale roar of Warren Zevon.

May sound too aggressive for a church, but that’s why this excitable boy is a congregant. And why I call it prayer.

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Every year I also attend the Old South Presbyteruan church on the Friday night closest to Dec. 10, the birthday of William Lloyd Garrison to hear a talk in his honor right around the corner from the home where he was born. Uncomfortable in my disbelief, I bring questions.
Photo by Richard K. Lodge, my former editor at the local paper and one of the organizers of of the annual Garrison lecture.

E Pluribus Whitewash

Ever notice how we treat history as if it is a disconnected chain of events? Sounds like a contradiction in terms, but historical novelist David Tory’s description is undeniable:

All Americans know that the English landed in Jamestown and Plymouth to form colonies, that a revolution gained American independence, that a Civil War ended in some mess called Reconstruction, and then World War I was followed by World War II. Few of us ever account for more than a century between the first two, and another three-quarters before the third. The last two items skip, respectively, just a half- and less than a quarter-century, so at least we’re getting closer.

Could probably go on, but I’d rather not think of anything that happened in my lifetime as history. No matter, as Tory sure gave us enough to make the point: Americans know what the highlights are, but have no idea how we went from one to the next.

That, folks, may sum up the core of today’s heated debates over the teaching of American history in public schools. There’s a reason that the Labor Movement is never included in history texts, and why the Great Depression and the New Deal are downplayed. And a reason why there’s not a single monument to the Mexican War in Washington DC–and why we so often hear “Remember the Alamo,” but never hear Pres. US Grant’s admission that it was a land-grab–in his phrase, “a wicked war.”

Today’s razor wire fences in the Rio Grande would be hard to justify if the full story of westward expansion were known. Better to think we were offering Christianity and a better way of life from sea to gilded sea. Sounds crazy? How much different is it from Florida schools now teaching that slavery was beneficial to kidnapped Africans forced to work on plantations because it taught them basic employment skills?

A useful example occurred during Washington’s years as president. No, I wasn’t there, but I read more than one account of how Washington and his Secretary of War (now Defense) Henry Knox sent troops to the frontier which, at that time, was Ohio and Kentucky. As we all know, white settlers fought with tribes, and as we are all led to believe, tribes were nomadic, and whites created peaceful settlements that the tribes invaded. So, of course, the US Army rode in.

In fact, the troops sent by Washington were not to protect settlers against the tribes, but to protect the tribes from the settlers–or at least to stop the settlers from encroaching on tribal land. Washington and Knox were intent on honoring treaties they themselves signed, but settlers kept wanting more. Once Washington and Knox were gone, Adams and Jefferson may not have felt the same commitment, and/or their attention was drained by the on-going intrigues of England and France on the other side of the Atlantic.

By 1803, Jefferson could buy a territory called Louisiana that extended from the Gulf of Mexico to the Canadian border between places now called Minnesota and Idaho. That, in turn, sent an avalanche of settlers southwest, and friction with Mexico was inevitable. Pres. Polk’s claim of “American blood on American soil” served as a pretext to make an invasion seem like self-protection–not to mention as a model for the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and “weapons of mass destruction” over a century later.

To borrow Tory’s logic, this is a missing link from the well-worn narrative that happily takes American school children from Thanksgiving to Manifest Destiny, a term that implies divine approval. Take it a step further, and it reveals that the “destiny” was not at all “manifest” if the very “Father of Our Country” wanted to put the brakes on it. But the term does suit the insistence of many today who prefer to believe that taking everything save a few reservations was right and just–or, in one impossibly euphemistic word, patriotic.

As we often hear, they were nomads not using the land anyway. Turns out that statement was not entirely true, as many tribes had settlements to which “hunters and gatherers,” as we like to call them, returned for months at a time. That “nomadic” designation for Native Americans is equivalent to the claim that enslaved Africans “were very well treated by plantation owners.”

Tory noted that the first ships that landed in Jamestown and Plymouth and elsewhere in the New World returned to England with Natives whom they taught to speak English and return to serve as negotiators for their settlements with the tribes. This suggests, in Tory’s phrase, that the English–at least the landowners and merchants who remained in England–were “paving the way” for peaceful co-existence and a healthy relationship between trading partners.

This squares with the treaties signed by Washington and Knox and their futile attempts to honor them a century-and-a-half later. Just six years after Washington left office, Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase made our destiny, divine or not, manifest.

Like so many large segments on the timeline of American history, these are the lines, curved as they may be, of connection between the highlights–highlights that, taken out of context, are easily and deliberately distorted.

Because they all involve the history of minorities, of labor, of expansion–to the Mississippi, across the Prairie, to California, and all the way to the Philippines–they are stories that many of us would rather not know.

Of course, no one can admit that, and so people hide behind a claim that it makes their children “uncomfortable.” All while they accuse those who want America’s full story taught as being “Woke.” Not to mention that they cancel history while accusing others of “Cancel Culture.” What they want is not history. It is therapy.

Now there’s your contradiction in terms.

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*American Progress* by John Gast (1872)
https://lewebpedagogique.com/mindthegap/2023/11/17/2-paintings-on-manifest-destiny/

Historical Cozies

By the time he was finished, novelist David Tory whet our appetites for the next installment of his Stanfield Chronicles by reading a passage that has Isaac and Abbie entering a room, sitting by a fireplace, and having “cozies…”

He looked up at us and pronounced the “dot, dot, dot,” leaving the punctuated euphemism to our imagination before crashing his own scene with a fire gone wild. Makes you wonder just what was the temperature of an early-17th Century cozy? And how long were Isaac and Abbie going at it?

Welcome to the world of historical fiction. Tory was cautious about defining the category that he represents quite well with his first two page-turners: Exploration which takes us from England in 1613 to the landing of the Mayflower, and Retribution which picks up the adventures of Isaac Stanfield in 1620. A third installment, ending in 1635, is already drafted, and for the folks in the Custom House audience who have read the first two (my ears are still ringing), it can’t come soon enough.

Tory is an unlikely writer of any fiction, let alone historical. After following his father’s advice to attend “the University of Life” rather than enrolling anywhere, he eventually took an interest in history and soon questioned why it seemed a string of “events we are supposed to know” without knowing “how we get from one to the other.” Yes, the Mayflower landed in 1620, but why did it set sail to begin with?

Such is the curiosity of an avid sailor with a long career in computer programming where he lost patience with “having everything in front” of him. Research, by his definition, is behind, and so he haunted libraries where he uncovered surprises, such as the two distinct groups of English settlers he identified as Virginians–wealthy Londoners wanting plantations–and New Englanders–merchants along England’s coast looking for trade.

Without having to say it, Tory gives us the origin of the tension between North and South. Nor does he have to remind us of his tale’s implications for efforts around the USA today to curtail connections of dots of “what we already know” in American history. In the lead up to 1620, the year 1619 is unavoidable, after all. And we know what kind of reception the New York Times‘ history of that year gained on its 400th anniversary.

And who has ever been taught that the ships to the New World returned to England with Native Americans who would be taught English and brought back to serve as negotiators between the tribes and the settlers?

This may or may not explain why he preferred not to pin down a definition of historical fiction, which very basically is the invention of characters and dialogue to dramatize actual events.* To make it vivid, Tory created a narrator who took part in the action and told the story in the present tense and first person. Call him Isaac.

Tory made us laugh when he admitted that “Isaac” at times stopped him from writing what he intended and talked him into something else. The realization, when we stopped laughing, is that we weren’t just hearing of historical fact, but of the fiction that brings it to life.

It was a moment most representative of the Custom House Maritime Museum’s “Warm Talks for Cold Winds” series initiated last winter on Sunday afternoons. This year, they appear to be scheduled like films at a cinema–not long in advance. So keep an eye on their website for more to come:

https://customhousemaritimemuseum.org

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* Not to be confused with speculative fiction (aka “alternative history”) which changes an event, as if to ask, “What if?” Many examples, but one that caused a sensation was If the South Had Won the Civil War first published as an entire issue of Look magazine, November 22, 1960. Nine-years-old at the time, I can still see the maps showing Alaska as still part of Russia, an independent Republic of Texas, and the Confederate State of Cuba.

Three years to the day later, a president from Massachusetts was assassinated. All of which has been on my mind lately as we are now just ten months of finding out that maybe the South did win the Civil War.