A Lot We Do Know

In a supermarket in Fort Myers, two women trade notes about news from family back in the North of Canadian wildfires, poor air quality, difficulty breathing. One uses the term “climate change,” and the other agrees that the severity of the fires and the unprecedented smoke is a consequence.

A man overhears and rushes toward them, speaking loudly with the emphasis of a jabbing index finger aside his face: “No! People light fires! Not climate change! People! People light fires!”

No matter how loud his voice, with it we hear the echo of “Guns don’t kill people! People kill people!” And so a canned excuse to deny the need for gun control–even modest regulations that would still allow any sane adult to obtain one or more–is adapted to deny climate change.

For the record, the fires in Ontario are the result of a prolonged, record-annihilating drought rendering forests vulnerable to bolts of lightning. Unlike the firing of a bullet, there’s “no human required.”

Put it that way, and denialists such as the fellow in Fort Myers may simply reverse objection. If people are innocent, then nothing can be done. Contradiction? Maybe, but the aim is the same: Inaction.

Guns’ rights advocates also have an alternate objection to any attempt at regulation. They’d never call it an “objection,” but it serves as one, and they sure as hell know it. Works like an anesthetic. We hear it all the time, some of us repeat it:

Thoughts and Prayers.

On a local television station in Des Moines, a meteorologist begins linking changes in Iowa weather patterns to human-driven changes in Mother Earth’s climate. Days later, citing mounting harassment and death threats, he resigns.

Another adaptation? Yes or no, this has been happening at polling venues all across the country where long-time poll workers have been harrassed and threatened for not excluding certain batches of votes–usually those delivered from precincts with large minority populations. Many have quit their jobs; some have moved to other towns.

An elderly woman and her daughter in Georgia went into hiding after Donald Trump accused them of counting cases full of what he called fabricated Biden votes, showing a surveillance video of them handing a case. Never mind that the case later proved to be legit, Fox News played the insinuating video on a loop and the MAGA crowd fell for it.

Did I mention that the two women were African-American? Do you think that might have mattered to the MAGA crowd? How so?

But those questions take us off subject. Question to get back is this: Will other meteorologists ever start telling their viewers of the connections of extreme droughts, severe storms, and increasing erosion to climate change? Or will the threat of violence in America’s heartland keep them presenting daily weather–from 115-degree days in the Pacific Northwest to a deep freeze in Texas, from ruined apple and pear crops in New England to floods along the Mississippi–with smiles and jokes and soothing laughter?

I’d ask why every woman meteorologist I ever see is always dressed in clothes so tight, she’d be far more comfortable and her smiles more convincing if the desired colors were just painted on, but that question might be off-limits for an unpreferred pronoun.

From all over the country we can add similar stories, both from local news and from friends and relatives who witness it first hand.

Over the years, my friend in Santa Rosa has described encounters much like that in Fort Myers regarding a full range of environmental disasters from flooding and mudslides to wildfires. This week my friends in Vermont are posting pictures of raging rivers flooding places where floods have never before been seen, only to gain comments that deny the obvious cause.

Our attempts to penetrate this wall of denialism has been difficult enough, but I’m afraid we are making it worse by accepting, agreeing with, and even parroting the ultimate denial that is now gaining traction. First noticed it last month in the statements of congressional Republicans looking to cut American aid to Ukraine–and last week, aimed at me for publically taking a side in a local controversy:

There’s a lot we don’t know.

Well, of course! We know little of the history between Russia and Ukraine, but we do know who invaded whom. We know little of the inner workings of a public institution, but when a conflict becomes public, we know who makes it public.*

Such controversies raise questions that must be asked, not buried under the rug of “There’s a lot we don’t know.” The line is insidious. Because it can be applied to anything, it describes nothing. But it does serve as an all-purpose rationale for inaction.

There’s a lot we don’t know about climate change, but there’s more than enough that we do know. If we don’t use it to confront the finger-jabbers that cross our paths and rally behind scientists willing to tell us what is real rather than what is comfortable, ha-ha-ha, the forecast is obvious.

Not to mention as hopeless as “thoughts and prayers.”

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*This refers to the Newburyport Public Library, a conflict described in my recent blogs, “No City for Volunteers” and “American Zeitgeist.”

https://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2021/climate-change.html

Aboard the USS Neversink

While I was consumed over the week of the 4th, of all times, by a controversy over a public library, of all places, Mouth of the River Editor-in-Chief Helen Highwater, of all people, has kept her eye on news from DC that demands attention.

Perhaps to rechannel my attention, she begins with a quote from Herman Melville:

If there are any three things opposed to the genius of the American Constitution, they are these: irresponsibility in a judge, unlimited discretionary authority in an executive, and the union of an irresponsible judge and an unlimited executive in one person.
White-Jacket, 1850

From that springboard, Highwater dives into the recent Supreme Court decision invalidating affirmative action, citing with her eagle-eye and talon-pen, a fishy footnote on page 30:

The United States as amicus curiae contends that race-based admissions programs further compelling interests at our Nation’s military academies. No military academy is a party to these cases, however, and none of the courts below addressed the propriety of race-based admissions systems in that context. This opinion also does not address the issue, in light of the potentially distinct interests that military academies may present.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, reports Highwater, pounces on that note to argue: “The majority does not dispute that some uses of race are constitutionally permissible.”

The dryness of that sentence does not dull the blade. Sotomayor’s thrust is that, while ladders into legal, medical, engineering, and business professions are taken away, there will always be a ladder, nay an escalator, for people of any color into the armed services.

And where else but in a footnote could six Supreme Court justices try to finesse such irresponsibility?

Highwater followed this lead into the amicus curiae filed by the Biden Administration on behalf of Harvard and the University of North Carolina, which the Supreme Court decided against. In the summary, she found this:

Diversity in the halls of academia directly affects performance in the theaters of war. … Indeed, because most of the military’s officer corps come from service academies or ROTC, the diversity of these institutions and programs directly impacts the diversity of our military’s leadership.

The importance of maintaining a diverse, highly qualified officer corps has been beyond legitimate dispute for decades. History has shown that placing a diverse Armed Forces under the command of homogenous leadership is a recipe for internal resentment, discord, and violence.

“In other words,” translates Highwater, “white supremacy is a recipe for disaster.”

In an aside, she adds, “Not that I have ever been a fan of ROTC, but SCOTUS has just decimated (perhaps literally if not figuratively) ROTC’s potential effectiveness.” Highwater and I are both graduates of South Dakota State University, home of a fairly large ROTC program, so she knows whereof she speaks, and I can vouch with certainty. Moreover, it occurs to me that, though ladders and escalators will continue to take people of color into the service, they will no longer reach the higher ranks.

A footnote to mask the face of systemic racism.

Over 170 years ago, regarding class if not race, Herman Melville made that same critique of the US Navy in White-Jacket, a book that the publisher made a point to send to every member of the US Senate and House of Representatives. The restriction of officers’ ranks to the privileged class survived the expose for decades to come, but officers had one less prerogative to flaunt their privilege.

Melville’s detailed descriptions of flogging aboard naval vessels surpass anything that we read twenty years ago about waterboarding. Quentin Tarantino would envy the visual precision; the Marquis de Sade would admire the effect; Dick Cheney might have thought it a blueprint. Not long after the publication of White-Jacket, the widespread practice of flogging was banned.

Though the book doesn’t directly address slavery as did Melville’s short story, “Benito Cereno,” it does portray a few African-Americans as respectable, dignified, amiable sailors. Treatment of them by the officers speaks for itself, including one scene that might make the hair on your arms stand on end. Then there’s this rebuttal to the first and foremost rationalization for enslavement and Jim Crow always made by Southerners:

Nor… is the general ignorance or depravity of any race of men to be alleged as an apology for tyranny over them. On the contrary, it cannot admit of a reasonable doubt, in any unbiased mind conversant with the interior life of a man-of-war, that most of the sailor iniquities practiced therein are indirectly to be ascribed to the morally debasing effects of the unjust, despotic, and degrading laws under which a man-of-war’s-man lives.

Quite easy to substitute the words “the country” for “a man-of-war” in that passage. It’s a parallel that Melville draws throughout the book with a ship named the Neversink to represent the USA.

Coincidentally, Highwater responded to the Melville quote in my recent blog, “American Zeitgeist,” that critiques the complicity of Christian chaplains with abusive captains on board naval vessels. Melville noted “how efficacious, in all despotic governments, it is for the throne and altar to go hand-in-hand.” Highwater seeths:

“The throne and the altar.” That’s the MAGA deal, isn’t it? I’ll leave you to run your things from your altar if you secure the throne for me. Deal? I’ll pack the courts to back us. I will repudiate any interference as fraud. I will be your retribution. All I demand is total faith and loyalty.

Add White-Jacket to the list. Would a nation familiar with Moby-Dick put a monomaniac in the White House? Or with Melville’s Confidence Man put a huckster there? Or with Redburn tolerate cruel treatment of immigrants?

Forgive me, but the controversy I mentioned up top began for me when I complained about the absence of those books, save Moby-Dick, from the local library. All I’ve gained, apart from privately expressed support, are two rebuttals in the local press, both of which dismissed my mention of Melville.

But don’t pity me. Something quite satisfying about being told, publically, to “let go” of the Pequod, a whaling ship memorialized in 1851 during the very week that Newburyporters flock to see the Nao Trinidad, a replica of the ship Magellan sailed round the globe circa 1521.

As Highwater quipped when she first saw Sotomayor’s deadpan stab at her right-wing colleagues’ equivocating footnote:

“Somtimes the satire just writes itself.”

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Full sail on Lake Superior last summer. Photo from *SooToday*, newspaper of Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

On Lake Erie, entering Cleveland Harbor last summer. Photo by Paul Giglia
https://fineartamerica.com/featured/nao-trinidad-tall-ship-rear-view-paul-giglia.html

Really Don’t Nevermind

Delivery to a candy/ice cream store just as it opens at noon. Big, bright place, white walls, colorful signs, pics of smiling people licking cones, biting chocolates. Three young staffers and an older guy, likely the manager, putting things in place. Nice morning, too, humid but peaceful with birdsong in the air.

As soon as I open the door and step forward, a blast of guitars amplified to the max with punishing percussion ridden by a raging, angry scream, “Here we are now, entertain us!” actually knocks me back that step.

Gathering and bracing myself, I roll the dolly to the back of the store some fifty feet away, deposit two 30-lb. boxes, and start back. The lyric, which I recognize from a huge hit in 1991 that prompted much discussion in college classes I taught back then, is repeating over and again for the minute or two I am inside the store:

Here we are now, entertain us!

Likely caused much discussion in classes on many campuses. These were the years marked by reports of student protests and altercations with police all across the country, not for any military reason or call for social justice, but, as they chanted while smashing windows at the University of New Hampshire, and as the Beastie Boys urged some five years earlier:

You got to fight for your right to party!

But back to the song that near knocked me out of Happy Sweets (name changed to protect the oblivious): Yes, I knew its title and the album it’s on, the name of the band and the singer/songwriter. Years later, or eight years ago, my son-in-law was a sound editor on the documentary film, Cobain: Montage of Heck.

I recall the speculation after Kurt Cobain’s suicide that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was intended to taunt his audience, his own fans. I took no side in that, and played the role of diffusing heated arguments between students taking opposing sides–after igniting them in the first place by bringing the subject up.

Few of my students thought his suicide stemmed from his frustration at watching head-banging fans from his perch on stage night after night, and I didn’t debate that possibility other than reading various newspaper commentaries at the time. The most telling commentary came from the song itself:

Load up on guns, bring your friends.

It’s fun to lose and to pretend.

She’s over-bored and self-assured.

Oh no, I know a dirty word.

If that’s not suicidal, it sure is nihilistic. But I pressed neither word, nor did I pounce on the call for guns or about what might be “fun to lose and to pretend.” Instead, I honed in on the one word in that stanza implied by the conundrum of “Here we are now, entertain us!” and insisted:

Whenever you say that you are “bored,” you are conveying nothing about the subject, no matter what it is. But you are revealing something about yourself, and it’s not flattering.

The way they looked at me, you’d have thought I was speaking Norwegian. Those were also the years, after all, that some popular TV show started the fad of yelling Booooorr-ing whenever someone didn’t like or want to do something. Nowadays, a remark like that might get me fired for making students “uncomfortable.” Luckily, I still had a fair share who enjoyed debate, and, not to brag, but I always had a way to lighten things up. In this case I actually sang the end of it:

Maybe “Here we are now” was Nirvana’s answer to Jethro Tull’s “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.”

My affinity for Tull was always well-known after the unlikely–and shocking to hard-rock fans–presentation of the very first Grammy for Heavy Metal in 1989 went to that venerable, eclectic band of my ge-ge-generation. Got a lot of mileage lording that over the Metallica and AC/DC fans in my classes. I can still picture the seething face on the husky redhead looking like he was ready to kill me. I would have deserved it.*

But tempers cooled, and by the time I linked the opening line of Thick as a Brick to the refrain of “Teen Spirit,” they laughed the laugh of people who just heard an accuser accuse himself of the same accusation. Did Cobain think his music just a whisper met by shouts of the incurably deaf? That would make a guy scream.

Ah, the memories! At Happy Sweets, none of the staff seem to notice my arrival or departure, and there is no way they can hear my steps or the roll of the dolly. All of them have their backs to me as they place new posters on the wall with pictures of happy parents and children smiling over their shoulders. Not wanting to risk anything that might stall, even for a moment, my getting back outside, I remain silent all the way to the door. No question the first time I ever rushed out of air-conditioning to return to what GBH’s Henry Santoro likes to call a “hot, hazy, and henry day.”

At the last moment, between the “Here we are now” and the “entertain us!” of the twelfth or twentieth time I hear the lyric, I hear, “How are ya?”

Turning my head back, just enough to pass for polite, I step out the door and hear my voice answer, “I don’t know.”

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Stills from an animated sequence of Cobain: Monatge of Heck:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4229236/

*https://loudwire.com/metallica-gentlemanly-1989-grammy-loss-jethro-tull/#:~:text=The%20nominees%20that%20year%20were%20AC%2FDC%20%28Blow%20Up,the%20viewing%20audience%2C%20but%20other%20musicians%20as%20well.

Recalling the A in USA

If 1776 is America’s birth, then 1620 is its New England conception; 1607 for Virginia.

Since it took both—and a few others—to put the “U” in USA, it shouldn’t matter who came
first, only that large, loaded ships entered deep, snug harbors. But let’s leave the analogy right there.

What does matter is that we now confuse the settlers of the early 17th Century with the
founders of the late 18th.

Separation of church and state is among the reasons America became independent, but not at
all why it was first settled.

With just one exception, every New World colony began as a Christian entity, each charter
with a provision to “spread the word of Our Lord” or “add to the glory of God.”

In North America, many began with religious practices unwelcome back in England and
Holland.

Massachusetts Bay was founded by those who thought the Anglican Church had become too
liberal and ornamental—too Catholic, “papist” or “popish” as they decried it. Hence, the name
“Puritan.”

Didn’t take John “City-on-a-Hill” Winthrop and fellow ministers long to start banishing those who would not conform—most notably Rev. Roger Williams for preaching “a wall of separation
between the Garden of the Church and the Wilderness of the World.”

With that contraceptive analogy, says biographer John M. Barry, Williams meant that when you mix religion and politics, you get politics.

Two years after they sang “Hit the Road, Roger,” the Boston ministers banished Anne Hutchinson for preaching a covenant based more on an “inner light,” or personal faith, than on a
minister’s interpretation of scripture.

Their motive was ulterior. According to biographer Eve LaPlante, Hutchinson attracted a
following, a ministry, which was—and, in the religion holding the most political sway today, still
is—exclusively a man’s world.

By this time Williams founded Providence and invited Hutchinson, her husband and 14
children, and several other families to settle a nearby island in Narragansett Bay.

Before long the two settlements combined to form Rhode Island, that lone exception to
Christian rule, the only colony based on the principle of complete religious freedom.

Thus, the exception became America’s rule when Jefferson and Madison delivered Williams’
“wall of separation” as a constitutional principle a century and a half later.

Yet another analogy to conception and birth.

With labor pains felt to this day: Hutchinson may as well have been speaking to Fox News when she protested that the ministers accused her of heresy for merely asking questions. Rev. Thomas Shepard shot back:

The vilest errors that were ever brought into the church were brought by way of questions.

So much for critical thinking. Nor is much lost in translation of that into the ideological straightjackets now worn by those who effectively cry “heresy” with menacing sounding phrases such as “class warfare,” “critical race theory,” and “woke.” At times, we are so deaf to this that we give them such phrases, most disastrously “Defund the Police.”

So absolute is their obsession with privatization that they vilify mere mention of public interest. Complexities such as health care reform are not debated but dodged by repeating pre-demonized simplicities such as “Obamacare” and “socialism.”

Why risk a debate over accessibility when you can pre-empt it with screams of heresy softened in coded phrases?

Mitt Romney’s pet phrase, “economic freedom” rang like Pavlov’s bell all through 2012 to no avail, but in 2016, “Make America Great Again” was loud enough to leave no doubt that a purified political party and a soon-to-be-stacked Supreme Court would turn back America’s clock.

On the surface, who can argue with a coded phrase? Beneath the surface are occupational safety, worker’s rights, clean air and water, public health and nutrition. All of which are dismissed by a cry of heresy concocted back in the Reagan years: “Nanny state.”

And if you question this by mentioning, say, 29 coal miners killed in West Virginia or 11 oil-riggers killed in the Gulf of Mexico, then you are “against free enterprise.”

Still, there’s a huge difference between heresy in the 17th century and heresy in the 21st.
Intended or not, denying the wall of separation—especially regarding science—allows
corporations, now that they are people, to wear Christianity like holy protection according to some Gospel of Safe Pillage.

If that’s a church, it’s the Church of the Trojan Horse.

For all their differences, the earliest settlers and the enlightened founders shared one vital
conception of a nation: a spirit of public interest.

To privatize that is to terminate the “A” in USA.

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ROGER WILLIAMS SHELTERED BY THE NARRAGANSETTS. Artist: A. H. Wray https://www.worthpoint.com/worthopedia/roger-williams-native-indians-antique-94692440

American Zeitgeist

As we sing and celebrate “the land of the free and the home of the brave” this long weekend, I’ll be recovering from criticism of my recent writings about the public library in the local paper.

What I’m about to say is not about the Newburyport library, but if you want to be filled in on that, simply scroll back to my last blog, “No City for Volunteers.”

This is more about time than place, and I suppose it could happen any place, as I fear it might be America’s current Zeitgeist, a German word which means, “spirit of the times.” To paraphrase Sinclair Lewis, It Can Happen Anywhere.

Here, two critics struck a common note that took me by surprise: According to one, I have no tolerance for anything written after 1847. The other says he knows I’m “upset about Moby-Dick, but need to let it go.”

Clearly the first writer does not subscribe to this blog. A quick count shows that I’ve not just read, but reviewed 24 books in the past 24 months–all but four of them picked up in the “New Releases” display in the lobby of NPL.

Before that, by June of 2021, I had already written several that gave me the idea to offer them to NPL to start a feature on the website with “reviews of books, especially new or recent releases, written by patrons.” On June 6th, 2021, came the assistant director’s reply:

Thank you for your suggestion and if we decide to highlight reviews from community members, we will advertise this option. I took a quick tour of your site and you’ve done a great job with the reviews! I wish you the best of luck with your work. Happy reading!

Never heard back, nor did I see an advertisement. Can’t help but laugh at the thought that, were I a techie, I’d have volunteered to handle it myself. If you don’t get that joke, the very headline of “No City for Volunteers” gives it away. As already promised, what you’re reading now ain’t going there.

My reviews? All favorable, since I won’t write about a book or film unless I’m encouraging others to read or see it. Let me hasten to add that every film I’ve reviewed was made after 1847.

The second writer used the title, Moby-Dick, as shorthand for several Herman Melville novels I’ve mentioned in columns not just regarding the library, but regarding immigration, racism, white nationalism, cult of personality, monomania, the environment, the colonization of Pacific Islands and the damage done by missionaries there—all of them relevant to 2023.

There’s also the separation of church and state. In White-Jacket (1850), the novel that preceded Moby-Dick, Melville describes the captain of a Navy’s man-of-war…

… who frequently conversed with [the chaplain] in a close and confidential manner. Nor, upon reflection, was this to be marvelled at, seeing how efficacious, in all despotic governments, it is for the throne and altar to go hand-in-hand.

Melville’s fourth novel, Redburn (1849), was the basis of a very well-received column last November linking scenes and reports from the Rio Grande in our nightly news to Melville’s observations on the docks in Liverpool where thousands of Irish and German immigrants boarded ships bound for America. A link to the blog version, “A Thanksgiving Toast,” appears below.

Via the newspaper’s editor, I sent critic two a note asking if he’ll crack that joke when people are told “let it go” regarding books and lessons of the 1930s and ‘40s.

We already have Holocaust deniers, and just this past week, we witnessed what a corporate-controlled Supreme Court can do in a land that has lost sight of the New Deal.

Once upon an attention span, those in power were the ones who “weeded” what we read. Now we do it ourselves–all while condemning the governors of Florida, Missouri, South Dakota, Tennessee and elsewhere for doing the same thing to books we happen to favor.

Reminds me that critic one said I was stuck in time and invoked Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A’Changing” in an attempt to bring me into the present. Oh, times are a’changing alright. Problem is, they’re changing back.

Fly all the flags and fire all the pyrotechnics you want, sing all the patriotic claims you can, the American Zeitgeist right now is to leave America behind.

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“48 Stars above the Registry Room” Ellis Island, February 2018. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/39855767865/

A Thanksgiving Toast

Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, February 2018. Photo by Michael Boer

No City for Volunteers

Went into City Hall unannounced Tuesday to ask if the mayor knew of a most unusual and stunning post on the website of the public library, and was greeted as if I was Satan himself.

Oh, the secretary was polite, and she promptly arranged an afternoon meeting with the mayor’s chief of staff. On my return two hours later, I looked up from a long drink at the lobby’s water fountain as a man walked past on his way out the door.

“Quite a letter you had today!” he snapped over his shoulder as he left the building without looking back at me. I recognized the voice. It was Mayor Sean Reardon.

Within moments, Chief of Staff Andrew Levine appeared, led me to his office, and as he closed the door behind us let me know:

“I don’t want to talk to you, but I’ll hear what you have to say.”

He appeared to be hearing my objections to the post on the library’s site, but he preferred to talk about my commentary in the Daily News which he condemned as “cruel” and “destructive” (link below).

After about twenty minutes of what my generation would call “give and take,” but what his generation might consider “verbal abuse,” I somehow left thinking not so much about the library controversy, but about the nature of volunteerism in Newburyport.

Last week, readers of the Daily News were treated to not one, but two front page stories of actions taken against volunteers.

The first is the subject of the scene described above. Now posted on NPL’s website, prominently at the top of the drop-down menu when you click “About Us,” it is styled as a grievance against eight retired senior citizens who have for years assisted local historians as well as random residents looking to track down ancestors or property deeds.

The second is a lawsuit against the city’s Zoning Board of Appeals, five volunteers whose task is to balance the interests of neighbors with those of any one or other neighbors whose plans to build or pave will impact the neighborhood. The whole idea of civic boards of independent resident volunteers is to save the city’s taxpayers the expense of litigation and ensure that all decisions are made on a local level.

Hell with that! Filed in Massachusetts’ Land Court, the second case has a perverse twist: The plaintiff, Twomey Funeral Home, is represented by a former mayor of the city. Nothing illegal about that, nor is it any more surprising than former members of Congress returning as lobbyists. But here we have a former “public servant” suing volunteers from among the public she once served.

Her business card might harken back to her campaign slogan of some thirty years ago: From “Lisa Listens” to “Lisa Litigates.”

If this happened anywhere in America before, say, 1985, that would be the headline.

For the sake of a blog about volunteerism in Newburyport, I’ll leave the details of that case to others. Instead, it’s worth connecting it to the better known and far more controversial dispute that sent me behind enemy lines yesterday.

Most of the 14 staffers’ 950-word union grievance cites “verbal abuse” and “bullying.” But the added charge made by the 14 staffers–that the vols “accept money on behalf of a city department–proved most telling in my meeting with the mayor’s assistant yesterday.

When I pointed out that this, according to the vols’ rebuttal, published in the Daily News the next day, “simply refers to taking a quarter for a Xerox copy,” Levine nodded.

“So that’s all it was?”

“Yes.”

I waited for more. Not getting it, I stated the obvious, that the charge, without specifics, insinuates sums of money much larger, that the role of “volunteer” is being used by opportunists who have turned a non-profit public place into their personal pork-barrel.

Levine shrugged.

“So, even though you know it’s just pocket change, you see nothing wrong with their posting the insinuation on a city-sponsored website?”

He said that the vols were able to make their side known, as they did in the Daily News, and denied that the unspecified charge in any way insinuates anything more serious.

I pressed, “You see nothing wrong with that?”

He shrugged, “It’s money.”

The revelation was too stunning for me to pun on the phrase “ethical bankruptcy.”

I entered City Hall Tuesday thinking that the library staff had posted its screed without approval from the mayor. When I left the building, I passed the statue of William Lloyd Garrison. Occurred to me that many city and state governments in his time regarded Garrison as Satan himself. Humbles me to think I’ve stumbled into the role, as I’m way too naive for it.

Given what I learned, however, I’m very well prepared to take any role, listening or litigating, in an Oscar Wilde send-up titled, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

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https://www.newburyportnews.com/news/local_news/letter-infantile-complaints-against-library-volunteers/article_b71cdebc-14e1-11ee-a40b-c3ab8c474bc1.html

From the collection of the Blochaus Gallery in Newburyport: https://www.theblochaus.com/ https://www.artworkarchive.com/

What’s in Your Library?

Call this an update.

With few exceptions, newspaper columnists avoid writing follow-ups or sequels to what we put in print.

We’re a century and a half removed from the days of Dickens and Twain when writers could serialize their work. As Boston University professor Natalie McKnight, author of Idiots, Madmen and Other Prisoners in Dickens, reports:

[Dickens] characters would become part of their lives, and readers couldn’t wait to get the next installment. There’s the famous (and true) story of people standing on the docks in New York City waiting for ships coming in with the next installment of The Old Curiosity Shop, desperate to find out whether Little Nell would live.

Most renditions of that story tell us that the shipment of magazines was not on board, and a riot ensued. Ah, the days when the public craved the written word!

Today, we write stand-alone commentaries with ever decreasing word-counts to accommodate a rapidly disappearing attention span. So let me simply state that last summer I wrote one headlined, “Weeding our reading,” regarding a recent policy of public libraries across the USA that took hold at the Newburyport Public Library.

Makes no difference now whether or not “weeding” is related to the head librarian’s recently announced resignation. What does matter is that a replacement be more committed to reading than to weeding.

Put another way, in a bookstore, you might expect a pop-culture novelist such as Brad Meltzer to have ample shelf space while literary giants from the 19th and early 20th centuries have but one or two volumes of their best-known titles. That’s commerce.

Nothing wrong with libraries providing everything Meltzer ever wrote, but shouldn’t there be a commitment to writers who have stood the test of time and helped shape American history and culture?

The NPL’s answer to this question–de facto or otherwise–is an emphatic no. And it has been “no” for at least a year when I started noticing that directly under the eight or nine novels of Brad Meltzer would be just one or two by Herman Melville.

Fiction is arranged alphabetically, so this is easy to find and see for yourself. A week ago this day, you likely saw two. Of course, that assumes that they put the partial anthology I returned the day before—a gift of the late and beloved former mayor, Edward G. Molin—on the shelf rather than weeding it. The other is an unweedable but highly readable copy of Moby-Dick.

No Billy Budd, no Confidence Man, no Redburn, no Piazza Tales that include “Bartleby the Scrivener,” “Benito Cereno,” and “The Enchanted Isles.”

Other valued, spirited literary chroniclers of American history and geography fare not much better at NPL. Of course, if I based my case on, say, Willa Cather or John Steinbeck, a narrow mind might interrupt me to ask: What do Cather’s O Pioneers! on the Plains or Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle in California have to do with an historic Massachusetts seaport?

With Melville, the question answers itself.

Imagine going to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and finding a few slight mentions of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, Satchel Paige and Roberto Clemente, while images of popular players in this year’s line-ups dominate the hallowed halls of America’s pastime. What chance would Louis Sockalexis or Josh Gibson have of being known at all?

That’s NPL.

Fortunately for Newburyport, all of those titles are available at Jabberwocky Bookshop which, while commercial, has dedicated itself to literature of all tastes, ages, and fields.

Wish I could recommended Illume, a new bookstore in Market Square, but its “highly curated” minimalist vibe is 180 degrees from Jabberwocky’s relaxed keep-browsing ambience.

Single copies of books face you from the shelves, each with a handwritten one-line recommendation, mostly pithy and memorable, such as Winston Churchill calling Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels “the one book I’d want to take with me to Purgatory.”

But then you see All Quiet on the Western Front named “one of the greatest books ever written,” and you might stagger out onto the sidewalk wondering which is worse: A bookstore offering recommendations by Donald Trump or a library curated by Bottom Line, Inc.

Yes, let’s give the library credit for its many educational and other civic programs, for its esteemed archival center, and for featuring books lately banned in schools elsewhere in the country.

Still, the brakes must be slammed on weeding done for the sake of a bottom line as much as for cultural conformity.

After all, isn’t a strict adherence to a bottom line itself cultural conformity?

One of Moby-Dick’s most descriptive chapters concludes that “Nantucket is no Illinois.” Today, the NPL must show that Newburyport is no more Walmart than it is Tallahassee.

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Don’t know how architectural groups rate “best” and “worst” when they decide their top and bottom lists and give out awards, but the section that connects the modern addition on the left to the Federalist Tracy House on the right deserves at least an honorable mention. Inside, the transition is seamless, and the entire building feels as one.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/newburyport-public-library-52-squares-of-north-country-unfading-black-roofing-slate–391250286359115418/

Patriotism a la Carte

Can’t tell if what I’m about to announce is shameless bragging, desperately coming out of some kind of closet, or flat-out delusion, but here goes:

I’m a model patriot, as patriotic as anyone you can find.

This is not at all to disregard those who have ever served this country at great risk, some for many years, or those who have served it in professions such as teaching that pay far less than what they could earn elsewhere.

Nor is it to claim that I’m anything special. I’ll bet that every friend and most acquaintances I have can make the same declaration. I wish I could say more than half adult Americans can as well, but that seems at best a coin-flip no better than the law of averages every two years.

Rather, this is to restore recognition of a patriotic duty that has been overlooked for decades and discredited in recent years. Implied in our Constitution, provided by our Bill of Rights, and spelled out in the Federalist Papers, America depends on what Jefferson and Madison called “an informed citizenry.” You can wave a flag all you want, but if you’re not paying attention to the nation’s challenges and needs, any claim you make to be patriotic rings hollow, if it rings at all.

Despite that, some will actually boast–with wide eyes, raised voice, thrown back chin, and cutting hand gestures–that they don’t stay informed, as if it proves they are smarter than those of us who do. To them, the rest of us are at best wasting time; at worst, we are “woke.”

What does “woke” mean, after all? An abbreviation of “aware,” a play on “awake,” it best translates as “informed.” It is the 180-degree opposite of “ignorant.” Yet we have people all across the USA talking like it’s COVID-24, a major political party running on “anti-wokeness,” and a governor who boasts that his state is “where woke goes to die.”

Notice, too, that they keep adding the word “mob,” expressing fear and hatred of “the woke mob.” What mob? Has there ever been a gathering of loud, angry, menacing people banging on the doors and windows of a school library demanding the return of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings?

Do they think that when we say To Kill a Mocking Bird we are mocking them, calling them birds, and threatening murder? If you think I’m being silly, I welcome your comparison of my silliness to that of the censorship of that book.

Those who fall for this may choose to believe that the footage Fox News continually shows of the civil unrest we saw following George Floyd’s murder in 2020 is still happening in American cities. As anyone paying close attention can tell you, “mob” is code for “city” and all things urban, beginning with diversity.

Only mob we’ve seen since the 2020 election was the one attacking the Capitol two months later. No one will ever accuse those gullible suckers of being “woke.”

All of this distortion and confusion is to be expected from the many who voted for the gaslighter who said, in a nationally televised debate seven years ago, that not paying taxes makes him “smarter.” If you’re going to dodge one patriotic duty, why not dodge them all and vote for Capt. Bonespur?

Sadly, we now have many self-described moderates and even liberals saying the same thing. I’m hearing it from people I barely know, if I know at all, no doubt because I write opinion columns for the local paper with my thumbnail photo next to the byline. People recognize me and assume I want to hear their opinions.

Once upon an attention span, their greetings and their opinions were all welcome regardless of agreement, but in recent years it too often begins with something for which I have lost all patience.

Seriously, if you happen to see me in a supermarket trying to decide which picture of Paul Newman I want to see on a bottle of dressing while I wolf down a Greek salad, please don’t tell me that you “no longer follow (or watch or read) the news.”

Might take a while to get a load of Creamy Ceasar out of your hair. Better you wait until I’ve entered the aisle with cereals since Cheerios would be so much easier to deal with. Kidding aside, I may be just one more such encounter away from no longer shopping in a Newburyport supermarket, driving to another town instead.

If you happen to spot me in produce or dairy, baked goods or household items, I’ll be glad to listen, answer, trade notes on many subjects. But if you say you “don’t follow news” and then start offering opinions about what’s in the news, God grant me the restraint to turn and walk away rather than weaponizing a dozen eggs or a container of cottage cheese. God have mercy if a jar of molasses is already in my cart.

Best keep your uninformed opinions to yourself. While you’re at it, take all your indignation at those who have peacefully tried to gain your attention–to wrongs that need righted–while you wave our flag and… Well, why be graphic when talking to the blind?

If American democracy is based on the premise of an “informed citizenry,” then staying uninformed is by definition an anti-American act.

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Whenever I find a graphic to accompany a blog, I’m sure to add the website in the caption. For this, the site, according to a screen that appears when I click “view page,” no longer exists. Was it due to a short attention span? More likely it was posted as a graphic to accompany a story first reported by Newsweek in 2015 that eventually proved bogus. Wish I could credit the cartoonist, as this certainly enhances my point.

Victory of the Vanquished

While many never thought they’d see the day when a former American president would be charged with a crime, I never thought I’d hear a day when the word finally began so many conversations and written messages.

But it makes perfect sense. Among the legal maxims Americans most prize is the one Martin Luther King made the main point of his “Letter from Birmingham Jail”:

Justice delayed is justice denied.

Still, no matter how tight and comprehensive the case, you-know-who still walks free, is presumed innocent, campaigns for the presidency, and for now has a judge whom he appointed–and who already ruled in his favor to delay the investigation–hearing the case.

As happened with the 60 or so frivolous lawsuits filed in battleground states in the weeks after the 2020 election, the point is to stall. His contradictory claims regarding documents now are as bogus as his fabricated claims of voter fraud then.

Donald Trump has warped Shakespeare’s “time is of the essence” into “time is the essence.” Now, 29 months after openly inciting violence against America’s Capitol, he hopes to delay the courts just another 17 months–when Republican legislatures in key states will control the electoral vote no matter the popular vote. When president, his complaint to his aides was “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Now he’ll be demanding of his campaign strategists, “Where’s my Gerald Ford?”

He doesn’t need to get elected; he just needs to get a Republican who will pardon him elected. Name one candidate running in the Republican primaries who will not agree to that. All the while, he may as well be singing the Rolling Stones’ “Ti-i-i-ime is on my side.”

Yes, it is.

Did I hear on NPR today that over a thousand people have been charged, many already sentenced, for their participation in the attack on Jan. 6, 2021, some for years due to their roles in planning and execution, others for a year or two for breaking and entering?

All while Trump kept talking up a storm. No matter that he called for it–stand back and stand by–months ahead of time, incited it–and I’ll be there with you–in real time, and openly hints at pardons for all involved–I’m your retribution–as he buys time with another campaign.

In truth, he doesn’t buy so much as he sells. Every new report from law enforcement in New York, DC, and Georgia becomes the opening line on yet another solicitation. January 6 was not a “failed insurrection.” It was–and still is–a highly successful fundraiser.

Not just for Trump but for all his Republican supporters.

Donald Trump has turned Justice delayed into Injustice monetized. That’s why so many Republicans running for local, state, and federal offices around the country continue parrot his perverse claims of a rigged election. Yes, it appeals to the MAGA crowd. More importantly, however, very wealthy right-wing donors who have gamed the capitalist system and want to keep it that way pump millions of dollars into right-wing campaigns.

Those who read newsletters of political observers such as Robert Reich or listen to progressivess such as Bernie Sanders are familiar with this big picture. More than one cable news commentator has linked the hesitancy to try Trump to our failure to try Richard Nixon 50 years ago, something that would have taken the uncertainty of “unprecedented” out of the equation.

Roots reach further back in our history. The tireless Heather Cox Richardson’s daily newsletter has more than once described how Andrew Johnson’s letting Confederates off the hook after the Civil War led directly to Jim Crow–in turn leading to voter suppression happening now.

We can reach back further yet. From an allegorical commentary on revolutions in Europe, most notably France, in Herman Melville’s novel, Mardi, published twelve years before the Civil War:

Those there were who rejoiced that kings were cast down; but mourned that the people themselves stood not firmer. A victory, turned to no wise and enduring account, said they, is no victory at all. Some victories revert to the vanquished.

No one is saying that bringing a criminal ex-president to justice is going to be easy or pleasant. He has openly hinted at violence, and he has thug supporters ready and willing to commit it. But we do have law enforcement that we can support. We also have a Constitution that we must uphold.

Might be tempting to let punishment slide if we can just have a verdict–or two, or three–on paper, and elect those who will let that stand as a symbolic victory over corruption.

No. We tried that with Andrew Johnson. We tried it with Richard Nixon. If we do it now, Melville’s warning will prove prophetic yet again.

Yes, it will.

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They may no longer have any billboards along US highways, but we’ve seen them at Republican rallies and hear them endorsing Republican candidates to this day. Not bad for a criminal organization that conducted a reign of terror that included the lynching of an estimated 2,000 African Americans in the South from 1867 well into the 1930s. Notice the words “Fight Integration.” Integration became the law of the land with the Civil Rights Acts of the mid-60s. This was taken in 1972 from the front seat of my Dodge Dart by college friend Steve Salvo as we drove to Florida for spring break.

Don’t Drink It Lightly

As soon as I saw the ad for a new beer called “Flight,” my imagination went on a flight of its own.

On the runway I thought I was trying to square the Yuengling Brewing Company’s choice of name with something on the menu of most brew pubs, and which waiters are quick to recommend if you show any hesitation in your choice of beverage.

As any connosieur of suds can tell you, a flight is an assembly of six or so beers and ales, porters and stouts, pilsners and lagers in small glasses artfully arranged on a wooden tray. The idea is that you and anyone with you can sample them before ordering one in a pint. It costs no more than a pint, and it lubricates cheerful conversation that your selection will be sure to elevate–yet another recent buzzword in the jargon of brew pubbers.

On takeoff, Yuengling’s choice of “flight” appears to be a way of telling us that it is a light beer without the stigma of the term “light beer”–something upscale for those who prefer to believe they are above the crowd. This happened about thirty years ago when Sam Adams brought out “Lightship.”

Many thought it failed because no one realized it was a light beer. I toast to differ: By far it was the best light beer on the market, but who with a taste for a craft beer such as Sam Adams wanted anything light? And who with a taste for anything light wanted anything from Sam Adams?

By the way, the handsome dude in the vest raising a tankard on the label before they changed it about ten years ago was Paul Revere, not Sam Adams. But neither of them is on my passenger list, so back to Yuengling:

Did it choose the name as a way to tap into the brew pub mystique?

Let’s leave that question in the air and pour through other possibilities they may have considered. Fasten your seatbelt because turbulence foams ahead, though nothing your designated pilot hasn’t quaffed before. I mean, who hasn’t flown through, taxied around, and landed in the alphabet?

Alight — Very nice double-entendre that suggests an easy landing while telling you it’s beer.

Blight — In a column years ago, I made a reference to “Bud Blight,” a name I still use when talking about the world’s worst beers. No matter that the column was an April Fool’s Day spoof of local restaurants–two re-named with anagrams, “Flop Sailor” and “Sloop Fair,” as giveaways in this old seaport town–the editor thought it a typo. She probably should have censored my description of pea soup. There’s a lot you can do with the word “pea” without changing the spelling. And in food? Oh, boy!

D’Light — Another choice double-entendre, French for “of light” and a guarantee to make you happy.

Elite — Be sure to pronounce it EE-Light, but change the spelling a la Miller, and let the printed word imply itself. This should appeal to those who aspire to a higher taste, a la Michelob’s “You can have it all” ads back in the ’80s.

High Light — Tempting, but invites confusion with Miller’s “high life.”

K’Light — Might shine if advertised with kleig lights.

Li’Light — Suggesting “little” as in less calories, but the hokey sound would appeal only to the straight and narrow. Not a brewery’s demographic (NBD).

Lightly — For people who drink decaf or prefer white bread over whole wheat or rye. NBD.

Plight — Another one for the satirists, though it might appeal to the chronically depressed.

Slight — Ditto satirists, but with potential for those with inferiority complexes.

X-Light — X seems to be the go-to letter for anyone wanting to imply power, edginess, and/or a mystique. Lately it has served as a neutral plural to avoid the Spanish Latino or Latina by people who somehow fail to notice that they need only omit the O or the A to have both noun and adjectival versions, both neutral. Consequently, this one risks the implication of being unnecessary.

There are other ways to do it, of course. Just last month Modelo of Mexico took the Spanish word for gold and introduced “Modelo Oro,” so sonorous with all those Os, with a pitch calling it “The Gold Standard of Light Beer.”

With that in mind, here’s an addition to our list above:

Blinded By — Might work if the ads were set to the interminable Manfred Mann hit back in the Seventies.

As we’ve already seen with Lightship, a brewery could draw a name from its own brand as portrayed in its public relations. For example, Anheuser-Busch might offer:

Clightsdale — Who doesn’t love those mega-horses? But who could keep a straight face seeing them representing anything called “light”? People would buy it for laughs, as they do goofy greeting cards or gag t-shirts that say things like “Best thing about the good old days was, I wasn’t old, and I wasn’t good.”

A contradiction in terms? Who cares? Remember when Molson tried to latch on to the cross-currents of the Nineties’ Zeitgeist by emphasizing the words “extreme” and “smooth” in the same ads? Did they hire Ronald Reagan’s PR team? In a world of “You can have it all,” there’s no such thing as contradiction.

By now you may be wondering if I have tried Yuengling’s Flight. A fair question to which there are four answers, one of which might be ruled foul by an umpire owning stock in liquor stores but fair by any ump seated in cabin and picking up his own tab:

First, anytime I see the words “light” or “diet” or “lo-cal” or “fat free” on any bottle, jar, box, carton, or barroom tap, my mind says “taste free,” and my taste buds say “no, thank you.”

Second, “light” is a euphemism for “watered down.” In days of old, it was called “small beer.” There’s a character in one of Shakespeare’s histories who says it should be a felony to drink it. According to his journal during the rebel campaign against the British across New Jersey, George Washington would disagree. In it, he tells us he brewed “small beer” to give some taste to the polluted creekwater he had to boil before his troops could drink it.

Third, as far as I know, except for re-named, straightforward “Sam Adams Light,” the best brewers do not make it. When Coors Light first appeared back in the Eighties, I asked a friend who took up home brewing what he thought of it. He gave me a stink-eye stare as he savored a sip of his own superb, creamy creation before he finally and very, very dryly answered: “I think it’s redundant.”

Fourth, I won’t spend a cent on any product made by companies that finance right-wing candidates and causes. Coors, if it was honest, would have a pitchman named John Birch. Yuengling went out of its way to make its support for Trump known in 2016.

That last reason suggests something else they may have had in mind down there in Pottsdam, Penna., when they chose the word “Flight” for their new brew. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking, let’s hope it’s one-way.

May not be a drink I’d buy, but surely a plane I’d fly even if I have to walk back.

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