For a Patriotic Super Bowl

Is it some kind of cosmic joke that the New England Patriots won the right to play in the Super Bowl just as the Republican Party’s Reign of Hate descends on New England.

While still trying to decide whether the interception or the blocked field goal attempt was “the play of the game,” I’m already hoping that the stunning and emphatic withdrawal of the Republican candidate from Minnesota’s gubernatorial race might be the play of this election year, showing other Republicans the need and the urgency to not just disavow but to openly oppose their national party’s employment of terrorism.

And then there’s the team name: Are we worthy of the name “Patriots,” or is the name no more than an article of clothing or an accessory like a flag pinned to a lapel or a cross suspended from a necklace?

On the night before the game, a relative from Biddeford, Maine, emailed to report that the state is “under siege. 100 and counting arrested. 4 with records, all people of color.” That prompted a blog that I posted the next morning which included this description playing on the word “ice”:

Along Commercial Street in Portland, tubs of (ice) surround you in fish markets as the clerks take fish atop them to weigh on scales, and then throw more fish on the tubs, straight off the docks just steps from their back doors.

When the Seattle Seahawks won the late game, sending themselves to the Super Bowl as the Patriots’ opponents, I was reminded of Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy’s satirical, point-by-point comparisons of two cities whenever a Boston team plays in a championship. Whimsical? When the Patriots were about to play the then-St. Louis Rams in the 2001 Super Bowl, he pitted toasted ravioli against clam chowdah. After each entry, he entered an “advantage.” In this case, “Advantage, Boston.”

But what is there that really needs to be said in a comparison of Seattle to Boston, or of the Pacific Northwest to New England, during America’s current Reign of Hate?

As for the Super Bowl, was my description of Portland’s waterfront a subconscious step into Shaughnessy’s device? Could I simply add: In Seattle’s Pike’s Market, fishmongers throw 20-lb. salmon across their stalls like laterals pitched by a quarterback to a man in motion.

Considering that far smaller haddock and cod are dumped out of trays held over the ice bins in Portland, New England’s fish markets resemble the traditional dump of Gatorade over the coach once victory has been secured. Advantage, New England.

But more than anything else, more than the outcome, more than the score, and even more than the quality of play, what the Super Bowl must deliver is a statement. The NFL has a spotted history with Trump, alternating rebuke with accommodation. But the state-sponsored-terrorism inflicted on Minneapolis is way beyond any previous objections or qualms.

This weekend, the NBA’s player association condemned it, one all-star calling it “murder.” NBA coaches and commentators have spoken out, and the Minnesota Timberwolves chaplain issued a statement as accusatory as Balwin’s Fire Next Time and as irrefutable as King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.

All the signs we hold outside along streets and all our calls and letters to members of Congress are important and need to continue. Like fish being put on display in a market, it’s prep work. They still await the arrival of customers.

Democracy is now on display. Super Bowl LX, off to a promising start with Bad Bunny and Green Day in the halftime show, could deliver more customers than any.

-766-

In keeping with my overall analogy, I’ll name this, the blocked field goal attempt, as the play of the game. Not sure what an interception of ICE would look like, but blocking it would be a good start. Photo by Lauren Leigh Bacho/Getty Images

A Winter Margaritaville

Stock up and hunker down was my plan from Sunday all the way to Wednesday if necessary. And so here I am watching the snowflakes fly every which way out my panoramic window overlooking the whiteness that blankets the marsh before it becomes one with a white sky over a distant horizon.

Barely an hour since the first flakes fell, so plows have yet to make their island rounds. Tire tracks left by a few brave or careless motorists are quickly covered. Honestly, I don’t care if the plows take today and tomorrow off. As for Tuesday, I’ll miss my weekly coffee klatch in Cafe Chococoa for a chance to tell my guitarist friends that Song Sung Blue is about much more than Neil Diamond and well worth seeing. Then again, I now have plenty of time to put that in an email.

By wild coincidence, on a 2026 appointment calendar that is almost entirely blank, Tuesday is marked for an annual check-up with my dermatologist before the klatch, and a bi-annual check up with my primary care physician soon after it. Yesterday, I left messages on two phones that I wanted to “cancel as a precaution, but if I can get my car out of the driveway, I’ll show up anyway in case the time is still open.” The “precaution,” of course, is to avoid the fee one is charged for failing to show up.

For now, I sit awaiting the start of a football game in Denver where the forecast is sunny, at least at kickoff. With my modest flat-screen propped against that window, I look forward to a surrealistic combination of colorful picture in a massive dull frame. Picasso surrounded by, say, the architectural plans for almost any structure built in America these last 40 years…

Wait! What is this coming into view? Five of them, all with stocking caps pulled down and scarves wrapped around their face and tucked into thick parkas. If they had guns and were chasing Somali-Americans, I’d be watching more than one ice-storm. (A Somalian connection, you ask? Other than votes cast blue, just what else do you think Minnesota and Maine have in common?)

But I ingress… Kickoff is at 3:00. I’m tempted to wait until 3:15 to avoid the National Anthem. Used to be that I always tuned in early to hear it. Not only that, but I wrote letters of complaint to the Boston Red Sox, to WEEI, to one sponsor, and to both Boston dailies during a year when it was omitted from the radio broadcast. When that failed, I contacted the Massachusetts Attorney General on the grounds of false advertising, as WEEI returned from a commercial break saying, “the National Anthem was brought to you by…” even though they never aired it. At gatherings of friends and family to watch games, I’d ask for silence before it played.

Now, however, the Trump Administration has turned “land of the free” into a glaring lie. And the Republican Party has turned “home of the brave” into a sick joke. Why should I stand for that? On the other hand, it has been NFL–and NBA–players and coaches that have made the loudest statements against the rise of racist authoritarianism starting back in Trump’s first term. That includes the refusal of entire teams–the Golden State Warriors and the Philadelphia Eagles–to accept the traditional invitation to celebrate their championships with the president in the White House. Last night, the Minnesota Timberwolves postponed their game with the Warriors in honor of the nurse murdered by ICE that morning.

While I wouldn’t bet on any kind of statement being made this afternoon in Denver or tonight in Seattle, reports suggest that the Superbowl’s halftime show with Latino star Bad Bunny may yet prove that Colin Kaepernick did not lose his career in vain.

Whatever does or does not happen, and no matter who wins, both games will serve as consolation for what has not happened on social media today. No one is sending me any message hoping that I’m safe, telling me to stay safe, worrying for my safety, offering me safety on the mainland. For years, I’d receive at least a dozen such alarms, and at first, I simply reassured those who worried. But not long after the serial deluge began, I began making fun of them, and so, I just now realize, they have forgotten me.

As the concluding line puts it in what has to be the most popular summertime beach song ever sung, “It was my own damn fault!”

All the more reason to wrap this up, log out, tune in to the pre-game show, and find that lost shaker of salt.

-765-

The Shoebox during Snowmageddon–as well as the Snowpocalypse and Snowzilla–of 2015. Photo by Kim O’Rourke

From a Broken Heartland

Well, it’s been a loud week in Minnesota, not far from where I once lived out there on the edge of the prairie.

In a previous life, I would have been snug in my trailer barely a dozen miles from the state’s border on a winter weekend. On an early Saturday evening, I’d have been tuning into Minnesota Public Radio to hear A Prairie Home Companion. Listened to it here in my coastal home for over three decades before it ran its course.

What would today’s “News from Lake Wobegon” sound like?

That question was on my mind when I left a No Kings rally in Ipswich, and I might try to answer it except that Garrison Keillor is about to begin a US tour on Jan. 31.* He can and will speak for himself. Quite a coincidence that the closest the tour comes to me will be on April 16 in Portsmouth N.H.–right across the Piscataqua River from Maine where ICE began its second state invasion just days ago.

Remember all those indignant Republican invocations of the 10th Amendment–a.k.a. “States Rights”–during the Obama years? No doubt a PHC show this week would include a skit on memory loss. Would Guy Noir try to find it?

One detail right up Keillor’s alley is the name that ICE has given its second Confederate attack on yet another state of the Union disdained by its authoritarian master: Operation Catch of the Day. So clever that we shouldn’t be surprised if someone with a sense of humor urges either Noem or Trump to claim the name is a sincere attempt to advertise Maine’s seafood industry.

As a satirist, Keillor might have a hard time trying to make fun of an operation that appears to satirize itself. “Catch,” is here intended as a double-entendre: We catch “aliens” where you catch fish. And when you’re out in your little boat hauling in cod or lobster, you have to preserve them, and so what do you need for all the time it takes to bring them to market? Along Commercial Street in Portland, tubs of it surround you in fish markets as the clerks take fish atop them to weigh on scales, and then throw more fish on the tubs, straight off the docks just steps from their back doors.

ICE! The name must have seemed fitting enough in Minnesota. Don’t know about records in Wobegon or Minneapolis, or even Lake Benton where I went on dates, but I recall hearing a radio report of minus-35 temps in International Falls. Reports tell us that thousands of Minnesotans braved sub-zero wind chills yesterday to protest the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old mother–only to witness the cold-blooded murder of a 37-year-old nurse whose only crime was taking a video of what he saw.

Included in those numbers were 100 members of the Twin City’s clergy at the Minneapolis Airport as they tried to convince airlines to stop serving ICE. In Ipswich today, signs with the outline of the K-shaped state seemed to replace the Greenland flags of last week. When I mentioned this to a woman who asked what “Mpls” stood for, I added that I long ago met two Methodist ministers in Minneapolis and wondered if they were there. She looked around: “I wonder if any of them are here.”

What would be the sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Responsibility if the young Father Wilmer delivered it? And would the semi-retired Father Emil approve? And what would the staid Lutheran Pastor Ingqvist say? Or the lively Pastor Liz? Or Max and Georgiana, lively characters as I recall, who both laughed when I told them, “There’s Methodism to your madness”?

What of the rest of us? Are we perpetually responsible? Are we responsible at all? Would those questions be considered at The Chatterbox Cafe, Cafe Boeuf, or The Sidetrack Tap? What would Harold Star opine in his Herald Star?

If Lake Wobegon was “a little town that time forgot,” time has caught up to it now. Today it is very much a part of a nation that appears determined to be one that “the decades cannot improve.” It’s as if we have forsaken The Enlightenment for the Dark Ages, a repudiation that was actually called for by a candidate for president in the Republican primaries of 2012. Her name was Michele Bachmann, and she was elected to the US House from 2007 to 2015 by the northern suburbs of, ah, um, yes, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

And that’s the news from Lake America, where the land is no longer free, where people at home beg senators and representatives in DC to be brave, and where children are used as bait to bring adults with dark complexions within reach of masked goons eager to fill quotas that are as apparently open to murder as to deportation.

-764-

A stencil on a wall in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

*About the Garrison Keillor Tour:

https://www.stubhub.com/garrison-keillor-tickets/performer/8288

Befitting a Witless Cult

Most reports will tell you that Special Counsel Jack Smith testified for five hours today.

Yes, the TV show disguised as a congressional committee meeting ran that long, but for just how many of those 300 minutes did Smith speak?

Very few, as the Republican members kept immediately interrupting his attempts to answer to recite their talking-point lines with performative anger and indignation for Fox Noise and for their own campaign videos to air this fall.

Democrats also unleashed a few speeches, but they let Smith give detailed answers to their questions–some of which were the very same asked by a Republican only to stop Smith before he could answer.

The trick is older than Machiavelli. Cast a complex question as if the answer is yes or no, and when the answer begins with anything but yes or no, pounce on it and interpret it as the answer you want–in this case, to imply wrong-doing–and repeat the premise of your question. Today, Republicans were repeating their own questions so they could repeat the whole process. All of it loud and bellicose.

This is why they had so many questions about Cassidy Hutchinson, the White House staffer who testified before the Jan. 6 investigative committee. She admitted that a single statement in her exhaustive testimony was second-hand. Forget all the first-hand testimony she gave, that was all they needed to label her a “liar.” Because Smith interviewed her, it was guilt by association. And who would change that verdict when, later, answering a Democrat who allowed for a thoughtful, thorough answer, Smith would reveal that Hutchinson’s testimony was not used in his charges?

Repetition may have been the biggest trick. As a trick constantly played by Trump every time he speaks or tweets, it is logical that his cult employs it. How many times did they decry the Jan. 6 Committee as “being appointed entirely by Nancy Pelosi” or for having no loyal Republicans on it? I don’t recall one Democrat objecting that Republicans themselves refused to participate. Do Democrats think that the American public remembers that? Or ever knew it?

More than one Republican also cited a timeline to accuse Smith of “a rush to judgment” to “interfere with the election.” Not once did a Democrat mention that Biden’s Justice Dept., thanks to the selection of a cadaver as Attorney General, dragged its feet for two years for fear of being charged with “politicizing the department.” Even in the face of death threats to local poll workers. Silence here may be more understandable, as Democrats would be faulting the administration of one of their own. But their fear of being charged with politicizing” has led directly to their being charged with, yes, “politicizing.”

At one point, Smith answered the charge with this gem: “It’s not incumbent on a prosecutor to wait until someone gets killed.”

Other than these lapses, Democrats did quite well. Raskin was inspiring as always, Swalwell the most damning by pointing out that Republicans, “including members of this panel,” trash Trump in private but do his bidding in public. (Speaking of charges that went unanswered!) Moscowitz of Florida deserves an Oscar for comic relief, most hilariously his exchange with Raskin ending with an incisive if sarcastic, “You mean, like Gore in 2000?”

Perversely, Republican Nehls of Texas could be considered hilarious with his bonkers claim that the Capitol Police leadership was to blame for the riot–but that’s unwitting, befitting a witless cult. He announced that he would be the chair of a committee that would prove it, which is also a sick joke. Nor was there anything funny about such a remark being directed at four Capitol police officers, who had been slurred and/or beaten on Jan. 6., sitting right behind Smith in the front row. Apparently, yet another part of Trump’s rewrite (i.e. cover up) of the event will be to make the higher ups of the police force responsible for their “lack of preparedness” that day.

When the show was over, cameras caught those four officers standing at the door to shake hands with Smith. Nothing funny about what all five of those men endured for those five hours, but the sight recalled Moscowitz’s gleeful mention that he would be on Nehls’ committee when he introduced himself to Smith.

Smith never laughed. He never smiled. He never raised his voice. And over five hours, I doubt he spoke fifty minutes.

-763-

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/jan-6-cop-curses-at-republican-blaming-capitol-police-for-insurrection/vi-AA1ULzx4

A Call for Snap Elections

Tomorrow (Thursday) at 10:00 am Eastern, Special Prosecutor Jack Smith will testify before a Congressional committee that will air on CNN.

For the first time, the American public will hear the evidence that a Trump-appointed Florida judge blocked from view before the 2024 election.

Or, at least we’ll be able to hear it. By now it’s a safe bet that the MAGA crowd will denounce it as fake without hearing a single word much less a summary. Also that Fox and other propaganda outlets will omit what they cannot spin and emphasize the screeching denials of Republican committee members such as the rapid-fire-and-ramble-on Jim Jordan, and that the Republican Party will continue its goose-step to the Cult of Personality.

Will it make a difference?

Will more of us be calling for the 25th Amendment even though only the vice-president can invoke it? Seriously? J.D. Vance is a man willing to repeat the deranged claim that residents of Springfield, Ohio–his own constituents at the time–were eating cats and dogs.

That leaves Congress, a body in which the controlling party refuses to act. They get away with it, partly because most of the public pays only superficial attention at best. And partly because the public blames any and all failures of Congress on both parties. Not only that, but they ridicule the party that tries to tell them that action is possible–while rewarding the party that insists action is impossible.

Result? The firefighters are punished while the arsonists are rewarded. Just ask the police who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 against a violent mob that has been pardoned despite evidence, despite convictions, in some cases despite confessions–and is now being considered for financial compensation for their time in jail.

Finally occurs to me that the party controlling Congress really is “Republican in name only.” Pundits often note that they’re a far cry from the senators who told Nixon he had to resign. We should also note they are just as far from the senators and representatives who overrode Reagan’s veto of their attempt to sanction the Union of South Africa for Apartheid. Indeed, the current crew has unanimously signed on to Trump’s welcome mat for “persecuted white farmers” of South Africa who apparently now seek white supremacy here in another USA.

These are not Republicans. They are Cowards.

Can we make it from here to November with a president who threatens war with other countries, and orders military takeovers of American cities? Or is it states, first Minnesota, now Maine, next…? Can we make it with an anti-vax squad in charge of the National Institute for Health and another crank flank working to destroy the Dept. of Education from the inside? Can we make it with every environmental regulation since the creation of the EPA gutted? Ditto with labor laws and occupational safety? Ditto with the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe?

Coal is beautiful and clean if you subscribe to the Cult of Personality.

Will elections take place, or will we be under martial law? And if they are held, will a president who has already said he should have seized ballot boxes in 2020, and who keeps hinting at canceling elections try to rig it?

Sorry for so many questions, but I’m from the Eisenhower years, once immersed in beliefs such as “the greatest form of government in the world.” Our loss of any claim to peaceful transfers of power has already disabused me of the notion, but it raises a question that I have yet to hear:

Why is it impossible to rid ourselves of a leader so obviously dangerous and corrupt?

Canada and all European countries have a parliamentary procedure that allows for “snap elections”–also called a “confidence vote.” In 1980, in their haste to teach the liberal Pierre Trudeau (Justin’s dad) a lesson, Canadians elected one Joe Clark to be their prime minister. For far less damage and far fewer crimes than Trump, Clark was out of office in eleven months.

American journalists have the bad habit of calling these, “special elections.” That’s misleading, as there’s nothing “special” and something written into a Constitution.

For a moment, let’s put aside the parties, the personalities, and the cult of personality. Can we honestly continue to claim that we have the “best” form of government when we can be stuck with the mess we have for at least another year, if not three, if not indefinitely?

Go ahead and waste time calling for the 25th A. But please consider that there’s another Constitutional amendment for which this mess calls.

-762-

https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/donald-trump-denies-white-house-asked-to-add-him-to-mount-rushmore-but-believes-its-a-good-idea/q8xupwfus

What Made It Necessary

Not long before he was killed, Martin Luther King expressed a profound fear that America was soon heading into “Dark Ages.”

Just seven months after King was gone, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States. Before long the country was treated to the Watergate scandal, but the anti-war movement had remained strong, and America had withdrawn from Southeast Asia. Not exactly an American Enlightenment, but not entirely dark.

Later came eight years of Reagan followed by 20 years of wanna-be Reagans, a time of rising economic disparity and cultural clashes that kept polarizing us but which never shut anyone up. Hardly a Renaissance, but a far cry from the Inquisition.

Following the economic collapse of 2007-08, the Obama years were genuinely hopeful with a modest healthcare plan and wide-ranging attempts to restore the arts. Yes, the first is a pittance compared to what any other NATO country has, and the latter a dim echo of JFK’s Camelot, but there was never a hint of, say, the Crusades.

King’s prophecy may have seemed hyperbolic over these past five-plus decades, but it is now a literal fact of American life.

This didn’t happen suddenly, not did it just start a decade ago when the Golden Calf rode a de-escalator into the lobby of his own Tower of Babel to announce an openly racist and hateful bid to become president of the United States.

Throughout the years of the Civil Rights movement right to his death in 1968, King recognized the strain of racist hate and paranoia that runs from the colonial plantation owners through the Confederacy, through the KKK, and now all the way past him to today’s MAGA movement. But it wasn’t simply race. It was the proposition that Americans must be concerned about others, rather than in it only for themselves. Hence, the ridicule and revulsion shown toward such things as Hillary’s “village” and toward Michelle’s interest in child nutrition. “Empathy” to them is a bad word that verges on a threat.

The personification of self-interest just happened to be in the right place at the right time to ride a wave propelled by the very idea of a Black man in the White House. The press called it “backlash,” with a few editors more in tune with the times calling it “whitelash.” But the wave already had the power of many Americans’ resentment of anything that attempted or suggested equal opportunity, or diversity, or inclusion. All an opportunist had to do was convince them that such efforts were always at their expense. Fox News made that quite easy.

And so here we are today, stripped of King’s dream and living his nightmare. Universities bow to authoritarian commands; news outlets censor themselves; public schools ban books; medical research is shut down; science is suspect; history is erased and concocted. Perhaps with the most gripping symbolism of all, we have the personification of self interest, the herald of the crude and stupid, the reality TV show barker putting his foul name on the Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts–only to have artists of all kinds cancel their shows, leaving it to washed-up, discredited hacks who suck up to him.

Last week, a friend posted an anonymous poem, a tribute to Martin Luther King that began with these three lines:

You took my name and stripped it of my danger.

You took my words and drained them of their fire.

You took my dream and severed it from the nightmare that made it necessary.

The references are, of course, to so many “celebrations” of this day that cherry-pick quotes, avoiding all that have to do with economic disparities and injustice, to create “a smaller version” of the man.*

Chances are that this sanitization will never happen again. Either we wake up from the nightmare and stop it, or one year from now, the holiday will be replaced by one for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The administration has already re-written the history, and given the attacks on all things regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion–including the very words themselves–there is no way that they will allow this holiday to stand by itself. If it is not erased, it’ll be clumsily absorbed into a celebration of the MAGA crowd that stormed the Capitol.

Hey, they were all protesters, right? Just like King.

-761-

*The full poem:

You took my name and stripped it of my danger.

You took my words and drained them of their fire.

You took my dream and severed it from the nightmare that made it necessary.

You took my hope by electing people in the White House who said civil rights did not advance us; it just hurt white people.

You did not want the King who spoke of structural sin.

You did not want the King who named capitalism as exploitation.

You did not want the King who said America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

So you built yourselves a smaller version of me — a harmless King, a polite King, a silent King.

A King who only speaks once a year.

A King who never mentions prisons, or police, or poverty, or war.

A King who smiles, but never disrupts.

The Worst & the Darkest

If America’s Reign of Hate began with a TV show, maybe we can end it with one.

Face it: The combination of cruelty and crudeness of The Apprentice made him appealing to enough Americans to elect him president in 2016. And if you think that was a fluke, then you were in a coma when he won again in 2024.

He is Archie Bunker reincarnated, but with Archie’s harmless hard-headedness turned into the merciless humiliation of “You’re fired!” To those soaked in resentment constantly stirred by Fox News, those two words carried a decisive authority that made Hillary (“Stronger Together”) and Michelle (“When they go low…”) sound like wimps.

Moreover, Archie’s incidental racism is now full-blown white supremacy disguised as a law-and-order effort to control cities. To avoid the charge of racism, it is cast as suburban and rural vs. urban. If you’re still amazed that your Republican friends refuse to acknowledge that the Capitol was invaded by a mob on Jan. 6, it’s because the Republican dictionary defines “mob” as “city.”

The foremost unremarked reality of America today is that what we call Reality TV shows have nothing to do with reality, and yet enough of us are so enthralled by them that we have elected to live in one. Unreality is our new reality. George Orwell’s 1984, intended and always before read as a cautionary tale, is now an operator’s manual.

But enough of the problem we all know. To solve it, let’s start the show:

A friend suggests that we “turn The Apprentice upside down. Call it The Secretary. Instead of ending each show with ‘You’re fired,’ this would have the Chairman saying ‘You’re hired!’ to the worst candidate.”

Might take some effort to find a team of people capable of taking stage directions who are as shockingly pompous and/or ridiculous as Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Steve Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, RFK Jr., Karoline Leavitt, Cash Patel, and Pam Bondi. But I like the strategy of holding up a fun-house mirror to a reality already grossly distorted. There has to be some point at which even those who superimpose The Chairman’s face on the American flag can, oh say, see how anti-American they yet wave.

So, too, the title “chairman” suggesting a corporate CEO (with a subliminal echo of Chairman Mao) is more honest than “president.” But I might prefer a title to highlight the thuggish bent of someone who hints at threats of violence and who has rewarded those who have committed violence on his behalf. Call him “The Godfather.”

Also, The Secretary suggests there’s just one. We want a depraved, demented, delusional team worthy of the one now running the country. Our title should be a warped reversal of Pres. John Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest.”

Could be a variety show (remember those?), but of various TV offerings. Start with a game show. Contestants are asked basic questions such as naming the three branches of government. The one coming closest to “Mar-a-Lago, the Westminster Country Club, and Trump Tower in Manhattan” gets the points.

Then a reality segment of an ICE raid. Describe it as lawful, neighborly, and helpful, and you get points. Then a sitcom of Noem answering questions in her latest costume, hat, lip fillers, basketball-hoop ear-rings, and necklace with cross. Describe her as intelligent, coherent, and honest, and Points R U.

Maybe then a weather forecast to let the Marines know the best time to land in Greenland, or the Navy when to surround Cuba, or the Army when to ransack Seattle. Extra points if you can recommend restaurants and nightclubs where our troops can enjoy themselves.

The highlight would be a segment with Miller & Vance wielding charts to show the need for a forever domestic war. Orwell predicted “forever wars” to sustain a police state, but those were with foreign powers. We, as “Oceania” (America), would have only “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” (Russia and China) to choose from, though we could switch either from ally to enemy or vice versa at any time and insist that it had always been that way, that no change ever happened. Alternative facts beget alternative history.

With a forever domestic war, think of all the cities and states our federal government could attack and occupy where our troops would already know the language and be able to read signs to specific targets like grocery stores and elementary schools. Call this segment “Out Orwelling Orwell.”

The contestants would then be asked for the best course of action based on what they’ve seen. Those reluctant to send US troops into US cities would be gone from the show upon return from the last commercial break. And there would be no lack of ads to accommodate all the Republican donors eager for a piece of the action.

Also banished during commercial breaks will be invasion-curious contestants who have qualms about Congress (whatever that was) or the courts. Left on our screens will be those gung-ho to inflict punishment at home and abroad–though they might want to wear masks.

The last segment will be a rendition of the National Anthem as played by a marching band. Points will be determined by who can keep a straight face while singing “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” Upon those who do, The Godfather himself will bestow the blessing: “You’re hired!”

With the point made like that, Americans might ask not how our current Reign of Hate began, but ask what we can do to stop it.

-760-

L-R, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem look on as US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order that aims to end cashless bail, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2025/08/25/68acaf5ee4d4d8291a8b459e.html

Call Her ‘What If’

Whether or not the very title, Call Me Ishmaelle, makes obvious the book’s premise, let’s start by saying that author Xiaolu Guo’s re-imagination of Moby-Dick is based on historical record.

No telling how many young women successfully disguised themselves as young men for the sake of adventure and got themselves hired, mostly as cabin-boys, on merchant and whaling ships that crossed oceans in the 19th Century. Guo mentions four whose stories and memoirs have appeared in print.

Her acknowledgments also include Skip Finley’s Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy (2020). May not have been true in the early 19th Century when Herman Melville’s novel is set or even in 1851 when Moby-Dick was published, but Guo’s adaptation begins in 1860 by which time freed African-Americans rose through the ranks to become captains of ships.

Suffice to say that, while the critics label Ishmaelle “gender-flipped” or “a feminist re-telling,” they are not wrong. But the book is so much more, that they reduce it even as they think they praise it.

Moreover, Guo tells a very different story. While the characters are parallel, most of them play quite different roles. Unlike Ishmael who keeps his head down on the Pequod, Ishmaelle becomes very much a part of the plot. With the exception of a few musings at the end of chapters and at the end of the book, her narration stays focused on the Nimrod‘s pursuit of Moby-Dick, a far cry from Ishmael’s frenzied philosophical and historical tangents while telling us of the Pequod‘s voyage.

Captain Seneca is as close to Othello as to Ahab, with an added grievance or two that propel him. And his surprise addition to the crew, Muzi, a Taoist “monk” who advises him with the I Ching, is 180 degrees removed from Ahab’s Satanic Fedallah.

Advising Ishmaelle is Mr. Entwhistle, or “Woody” as he is inevitably known, who likes to remind her that, as he first puts it, “Everything is a task. Living is a task. There is only one thing that is not a task.” What follows is among the more revealing passages regarding her inner turmoil, the glaring difference between Guo’s narrator and Melville’s, and by implication between men and women:

‘And what is that, Woody?’

‘Death. Death is not a task.’

Well, I thought he was right. Death is not a task. But that was like saying that a carpenter is a carpenter, a fish is a fish, a boat is a boat. There was no need to interpret these things. But to be a whaler was different. A whaler had a mission to conquer, to kill. Life for a whaler was not about one task after another task. Life for them was a huge heroic mission involving killing or being killed. I was never sure if I was a real whaler. I did not have this desire to conquer or to kill. I did not have this unstoppable urge to chase. But I did have the desire to know about the world, and to discover. So I was neither a carpenter nor a whaler. I was not sure what I was. For the last several months, I had been a man called Ishmael, now I was a woman called Ishmaelle. Though to myself I was both.

While there’s no Father Mapple and no “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall” sermon, the Nimrod’s crew includes a surgeon, Mr. Hawthorne, who takes Ishmaelle under wing. By the end, we’ll learn that Hawthorne discerned the disguise early on. He soon becomes a father figure to the girl-boy when he learns of her knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs. Guo is offering an inside joke with the name: Not only was Moby-Dick dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville’s friend, but herbal medicine played a leading role in The Scarlet Letter.

Captain Seneca also took note of Ishmaelle’s way with herbs. Because of it, he spared her any punishment when she was found out. Might add that he put her attacker in irons for three days, but that’s a slap on the wrist considering just what the attack entailed. When the third mate was lost overboard, he amazed the crew–and I dare say this reader–by promoting her to the position that includes leading one of the three boats that leave the ship for the chase.

Like so many secrets in Guo’s intrigue-rich tale, Seneca’s reason will be made as clear as it is logical. When Ishmaelle denies his claim that she has some secret power over “the white devil,” Seneca explodes:

You cannot lie to me and dissemble! You witch, you have been brought to me, brought onto this cursed bark. You are the path to the whale. You have beguiled that whale, you will ensure I prevail!

A black captain vs. a white whale. A woman in the role of a man. Eastern religion guiding a Christian boat. The backdrop of an imminent Civil War before the story sets sail. A cameo appearance of witchcraft as it dives toward conclusion.

Taken in full, Call Me Ishmaelle isn’t a “gender-flipping” of Moby-Dick, nor is it a backstory such as Sena Jeter Naslund’s page-turning Ahab’s Wife (1999), or the tale told from another point of view such as James (2024), Percival Everett’s uncompromising re-telling of Huckleberry Finn.

The only category into which Guo’s novel might fit, if it exists, is the category of “What if?” It’s a category, a question, a premise in which the imagination has no limit.

-759-

https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/book-talk-call-me-ishmaelle-xiaolu-guo

Let’s Get Horny

Well after dark, I drive down High St., squinting at the line of on-coming headlights, and, quite suddenly, there she is.

A pedestrian casually strolling across, perhaps 20 feet in front of me, looking straight ahead, as if I’m not there, as if all those headlights coming the other way are there only to light up her way.

I pump my brakes rather than slamming them and taking the driver behind me by surprise. But she is already stepping across the center line, so I would likely miss her anyway.

No idea what, if anything, the next driver coming the other way does to avoid her, as I keep my eyes on my side of the road. But I do know this: Had my car or any car hit her, Newburyport would be in yet another uproar over “careless drivers” and the need for “lower speed limits.”

No matter that she crosses where there is no crosswalk. In Newburyport, pedestrians–and bicyclists–are always blameless, and the motorist is always guilty, evil, and immediately condemnable to hell.

Last month, in nearby Ipswich, a woman was hospitalized when her horse was spooked by a bicycle on a nature trail. The horse had to be put down, and police, last I heard, were seeking the cyclist.

If that happened in Newburyport, some people would demand that they find the owner of the nearest parked car to blame and hold liable.

Over the top? Maybe. But the basic story is something I’ve heard described by friends in other cities and states. Across the country, the reality we face in 2025 may be far closer to my exaggeration than it is to what all of us over the age of, say, 40 once took for granted.

Don’t know when it ended, but once upon an attention span, pedestrians followed two “Rules of the Road”:

Make eye-contact with the driver before crossing in front of a moving vehicle;
Wear light, bright clothing after dark.

Both are matters of common sense to a Truman baby–and I’ll venture to say to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter babies such as my daughter. The points are so obvious that they should not need making.

The woman who appeared not far before my driver’s side headlight wore black slacks and a dark gray coat and hat. She may have looked my way before I saw her and decided she would reach the center of the road before I reached her.

All I can say for sure is that she never made eye-contact. Crossing the center line, which was as far as I saw, she never broke her unhurried stride.

We hear about reckless drivers all the time. Cars that go too fast, run red lights, tailgate, cut us off, never yield, blast their horns unnecessarily. As one who drove delivery vans for 25 years, I saw more of that than most.

This was as true in the Eisenhower years as it is now. I still laugh at the memory of my uncle in Akron telling my father, “Ohio drivers may kill you accidentally, but we’ll never be rude to you.”

That, of course, countered the notorious reputation that we hear to this day of Boston drivers who “consider directional signals a sign of weakness.”

Today’s epidemic of reckless pedestrians was unheard of. Was it the “You can have it all” 1980s that started to erode the idea that we must pay attention to the world around us?

Was it the advent of the cellphone that conditioned so many to think that they live in bubbles? Or just act as though they do without having to think at all?

I’ll leave that for others to answer, and I’ll leave the problem for others to solve. All I can think of is that it might help to start scaring the intestinal content out of these oblivious fools.

Horns, after all, are a safety device when used as intended.

-758-

Baby, you can drive my album cover! This VW ad seems to suggest that cars may use crosswalks. Did VW hire a Newburyport ad agency?
https://mx.pinterest.com/pin/18858892159148238/

On this 12th Day of Christmas

For as long and loud as its frontman’s bellow was a week before Christmas Day, Project 2025’s main point was quietly slipped in at the very end.

Two weeks before the invasion of Venezuela, there was nothing anywhere close to a national emergency for which such prime time addresses are called. Many pundits dismissed it as a campaign speech, a list of all the usual talking points, all of it false.

They are mostly correct, but they missed the last-second dog-whistle intended to rile up the MAGA base.

Before we get to that, let’s recognize that one of the claims, though exaggerated, has a grain of truth to it: The 2010 Affordable Care Act–”Unaffordable” in his phrase–was intended to benefit insurance companies.

As usual, he immediately twisted that exaggeration into a firehose of lies obvious to anyone over 30 with a memory by calling it “a Democratic scheme” because insurance companies “own the Democratic Party.”

When Democrats began crafting a plan for national health care, many pushed for universal coverage, a single-payer system such as those which exist in all other countries with high standards of living and that rank high in every poll taken to measure quality of life.

Worth noting here that, of 132 countries, the USA ranks 38th, between Hungary and Barbados in one such poll taken by World Data. Another, World Population Review, lists only the top eleven, and we are not on it. Because they make health care a priority, it’s a safe bet that we are not even close.

When Republicans screamed of socialism, Democrats hoped to compromise by expanding Medicare. Republicans did not budge, and they repeated horror stories of “government-run” medicine and hospital care.

Before long, some Americans were repeating tales of “death panels” and of women waiting eleven months to deliver babies. Nor was there any convincing them that medicine and care would still be run by hospitals and health professionals. Government involvement would be limited to coverage.

Nor would they hear that, of all the countries that have adopted universal health care, not one has repealed it. That includes Norway where it began in 1912 and other countries where it began in the aftermath of World War II. Few political candidates, even those far-right, attack it. Those who do, lose.

But America runs on scare-tactics, and Democrats retreated yet again, this time to a plan based on one devised here in Massachusetts under Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.

To the contrary of the frontman’s 18-minute shout, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who steered profits to insurance companies with the Affordable Care Act to which enough of them finally agreed.

After regaining control of the House in 2011, Republicans tried to demonize the plan as “Obamacare” and have since tried to repeal the bill dozens of times. They refer to their own polling results–never mentioning that, in southern states, 70% are in favor when the question says “Affordable care Act” while 70% are against when it says “Obamacare.”

“Repeal and Replace” became their slogan even though they offer no replacement. Excuses for this range from his laughable “concept of a plan” during the campaign last year to the insulting lunacy of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) telling reporters last week:

“The challenge Republicans have always had is trying to unify behind a single proposal. We’ve just got too many good ideas.”

Republicans have no more plans or ideas than fish have 401Ks. All they have is a wrecking ball called Project 2025 which calls for White Christian Nationalism–the glue for all else it contains.

With 2025 coming to a close, it was perversely fitting that he sang the praises for the Project’s “accomplishments.”

Though amused, pundits were perplexed by his unrelenting loud and rapid pace, as fact-checkers hustled to show every claim as fraudulent as the crosses worn by his henchwomen like camouflage around their necks.

They thought it was over when he finally paused and took a breath. They missed, and so failed account for his last two words:

“Merry Christmas.”

We know that this wish has long been a hot-button issue, red meat for his base. They demand it be made exclusively. Hence, it now serves as a battle cry against humanitarian calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

With all other faiths left unacknowledged, the entire speech may well have been nothing but camouflage for the pursuit of uniformity, privilege, and exclusion.

We also know of Project 2025‘s goal to erase all traces of DEI. Oh, how the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday must irk them!

Don’t be surprised if Republicans propose to replace it with this 12th day of Christmas to honor the MAGA movement’s attack on the capitol five years ago, blending their perverted patriotism with The Epiphany to impose Christianity on the USA.

And as names continue to change on buildings and on maps, don’t be surprised if you awaken one day to a new national slogan:

E Pluribus Conformitas.

-757-