Democracy by Default

Across the Merrimack from Newburyport in the northeast corner of Massachusetts is one more town before you cross into New Hampshire. Known mostly as a beach resort with a honky-tonk playland on the North Atlantic, Salisbury’s year-round population is barely 5,000.

Size, however, does not matter to the MAGA crowd whose organizers in the recent years have strategically run for local elected offices and sought appointed positions on commissions and boards.

Salisbury must have seemed ripe for MAGA inroads thanks to one bizarre auto body shop on a main drag that features large political signs targeting such Democrats as “Joe and the Ho.” To be fair, many Salisbury residents have complained about owner Rob Roy’s signs only to run headlong into the First Amendment, which the MAGA crowd interprets as the right to be crude and stupid.

Salisbury’s town officials were neither when they appointed Samson Racioppi to the town’s Housing Authority in 2018. But they were careless, if only because no one else applied for the post. Prior to 2018, Racioppi had a well-documented history of promoting anti-gay and anti-Semitic groups.

Since then, he has hired buses to bring people to the January 6 insurrection, oranized protests in support of Wisconsin gun-boy Kyle Rittenhouse, and organized the anti-gay parade in Boston in 2019. More recently, he ran for a seat as a state rep, but Massachusetts Republicans are not so Trump Uber Alles as they are most elsewhere in America, and so Racioppi was defeated in the primary, receiving just 112 votes of 2000 cast.

Another verdict will be cast on Racioppi tonight when Salisbury’s selectmen decide whether to renew his membership on the Housing Board. Difference is that this time they know of his affiliation with several right-wing hate groups.

Anybody paying any attention knows, as it has been reported on the front page of the Boston Globe as well as detailed by the New England chapter of a group called Confronting White Supremacy. He also made Newsweek, while hatemonger Roy had to settle for the Boston affiliate of CBS. Word is circulating that the Globe intends to cover tomorrow’s Board of selectmen meeting, but I have not been able to verify that. I do know that a Newburyport Daily News reporter and at least one of the paper’s guest columnists will be there.

No doubt Racioppi will be there on his best behavior. My friends in Salisbury tell me that the recent law school graduate knows how to carry himself and play the role of Mr. Polite & All-Smiles. And he’ll be sure to show up without close friends such as Diana Ploss whose campaign for governor he helped last year. Ploss, for those who never noticed her fringe existence, is a known anti-Semite who featured a ” Minister of Hate” in her live Facebook feeds. Charmingly, she indicated July dates as ” Jew-lie.”

As he told one reporter, “We’re looking at it as if it’s a war, right?” When asked if he would participate in another January 6, he enthused,” Of course I would do it again.”

By sundown tonight, Salisbury town officials will decide whether this man will continue to hold a civic position. Says my friend, “This is not about politics. This is about right and wrong. This is about decency. This is about gay people and Jewish people feeling comfortable in their own community and knowing their elected officials have their backs.”

This evening I hope to see and eventually report that the Salisbury Board of Selectmen repudiate people who associate with anti-Semites, engage in the intimidation of minorities, and, oh by the way, aid and abet attempts to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. Looking ahead–because the MAGA crowd will persist in this in all corners of this state as much as every other–the Board might also consider a resolution to investigate applicants for official boards before making appointments.

If you want to see democracy at work–or possibly destroyed–the meeting is open to the public, Salisbury Town Hall, this evening (July 17) @ 7:00.

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Samson Racioppi

As for Rob Roy: https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/salisbury-auto-shop-owner-defends-controversial-signs/

Looks like a nice place to spend a Monday evening.
https://www.legendsofamerica.com/salisbury-massachusetts/

Samson Racioppi with his “Straight Pride” flag:

https://www.masslive.com/?chr=1627222035675

Of Paradise & Parking Lots

Once or twice a month, two women, one who barely qualifies for a senior discount and another with but a year or two to go, arrive at the Screening Room for a Wednesday matinee.

Since that’s my day as a projectionist, we’ve been on a first name basis since about a year ago when they first made a habit of spending a day in Newburyport and taking in a movie. They have always remembered my name after I made it easy for them by pointing out that I’m in the trunk of every car.

That would include the car that takes them the 30 or so miles back and forth to where they live. I’m not going to name the town, nor am I going to use their real names in what I’m about to report. Not because they asked to remain anonymous, but because it wasn’t until the show was over and the lights were out that my own light went on.

This past Wednesday was very slow. When Nikki and Liz arrived some 20 minutes early, I was in a chatty mood, telling of the Nao Trinidad, the replica of Magellan’s ship that had been docked in Newburyport during the week of the 4th. They saw it with their husbands, and Nikki mentioned a conversation about history that included an aside, “I’m a librarian.”

Couldn’t help but file that away until the subject of Magellan had sailed out the door of the Screening Room lobby and was safely onto State Street. I gave the pause a three-count and looked at Nikki:

“You’re a librarian?”

“Yes! In X——, and Liz is on the board of the X—– Public Library.”

Looking back and forth at both: “I’m about a decade older than you. My introduction to the Lawrence Public Library would have been about when you were born. I’m sure I was assigned certain books to find, but overall, those grade-school visits were more like discovery than anything else, like Magellan sailing round the Horn into an ocean full of islands unknown and unimagined.”

They smiled, no doubt thinking they were in for a pleasant, nostalgic trip into their own profession. I paused, keeping eye-contact, one to the other: “May I ask what might be a contentious question?”

They glanced at each other and both said yes.

“Does the word ‘weeding’ mean anything to you?”

Both women registered mild surprise that a non-librarian would know what is now a librarian’s term of art, though I’d say “artlessness” would be more honest. Nikki’s explanation was consistent with what I’ve heard from librarians, what few I know, from here to the west coast, citing a computer program that lets librarians know just how often a book is checked out. She looked over at Liz who nodded agreement, and I could see that both were reading skepticism on my face.

I hoped to soften my response with a brief laugh: “That suggests that some algorithm decides what books remain and what get tossed out.”

They seemed to speak at once: “Well, no, we do look at it.” Liz went on, “We also have to consider the condition of the book, and whether it’s in or out of print.”

Sounds to me like an urgent reason to keep older volumes, but I couldn’t tell if being out of print was considered a strike against them. I told the two that such was the case in Newburyport where, among other literary and historical treasures, a two-volume collection of John Greenleaf Whittier’s letters and journals published by his family in 1894 is no more.

Nikki seemed to commiserate: “But I bet there’s plenty of Danielle Steele!”

“That’s my point. Something already well-known, safe, expected. Don’t let Magellan round that Horn!”

Liz noted that the concern was for shelf-space, and Nikki nodded, adding that X—— has a very small library. I don’t doubt that’s true in X—–, but in N-port there is no lack of empty shelves. A day after this conversation, I happened to be in the Ipswich Public Library where entire rows were empty.

Nikki turned the tables on me: “What do you think weeding is?”

I kept making eye-contact with both of them: “I think the word is a euphemism for ‘dumbing down’.”

The two women looked stunned.

“And I mean that literally! You’re paving a paradise of literature and history, and putting up a parking lot of pop-culture. Is there no difference between a library and a bookstore? And what’s the difference between weeding and what the governor of Florida has ordered for public schools?”

Liz: “That’s a total ban. We might weed books, but you can still find and read them”

Me: “No! That’s just what DeSantis says, anyone in Florida can still find and buy and read those books. That rationale is identical whether the reference is to bookstores, to interlibrary consortiums, or to websites. So much for libraries as places of discovery!”

Nikki: “But we aren’t stigmatizing books the way these right wing groups are.”

Me: “No, not at all, but you are erasing them. So the result is the same. We’re erasing history at the same time we accuse others of suppressing it. And we wonder why they laugh at us? Only real difference is that right-wingers claim credit for and boast of what they erase. Algorithms allow us to wash our hands. Who’s in denial now?”

Again, they seemed to speak as one, as well as glancing at a clock on the wall approaching showtime: “Well, yes, we do need to keep an eye on that!”

“And I thank you!”

They slid into the theater as another customer approached to buy a ticket. What I have recorded above is but an extract of a longer conversation far more in agreement than debate, and the quotes are approximate. I was glad that I mentioned my involvement in the annual marathon readings of Moby-Dick in New Bedford and my recent, public feud with the N-port Public Library without getting lost in the (forgive me) weeds of controversy. That ensures that, if they want to know more, it’s all there, a matter of public record. (As well as covered in recent blogs.)

My one regret is that my stop in Ipswich was a day after rather than a day before this conversation. The IPL at the time had just four volumes of Herman Melville at the end of a shelf of over a dozen by pop-fiction writer Brad Meltzer. Recalling Nikki’s crack, I wandered into the aisle marked by the letter S. Danielle Steele had 82.

At that moment, I hoped I had made it clear to them that my argument isn’t about any contest, or any score, or lessening anything for the sake of anything else. Beyond the aisles with S and T was just one that offered everything from U to Z.

Past that were two rows of of stacks, I think five shelves each, top to bottom, perhaps twenty feet long, completely empty.

Don’t know about X—–, but like Newburyport, that’s quite a parking lot.

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Lobby of the Philips Exeter Academy Library, architect Louis Kahn. Photo: Michael Boer https://www.flickr.com/photos/onewe/albums/72157629278698261/with/6859625645/

Love at First Sound

Began for me my freshman year in college when I was still a commuter, back in my room in my family home while classmates partied late in the dorms.

For them, turntables played the soundtrack of their first year of freedom, and the music was rich. Beatles were at the end of their not-all-that-long winding road, but the Stones were still a crossfire hurricane when Carole King reset the Sixties’ stage with the tapestry of adulthood. Pete, Bob, and Joan went with the furniture and kept us forever young.

There was no lack of color or variety. From purple haze to mellow yellow, from let the sun shine in to rain on the roof, and from a pinball wizard in Soho to tin soldiers in Ohio, we took turns heeding Aretha’s “Think,” joining Grace’s Volunteers, and puffing magic dragons.

No question that the Fifties and early-Sixties were American rock-and-roll’s Golden Age. But I came of age right at the time of the British invasion, and it is that rock that many devoted radio stations have dubbed “classic.” Books celebrating the era, from the mid-Sixties into the early-Seventies, keep appearing every year. Just last decade there seemed to be a contest to pick rock’s most significant year:

1965: The Most Revolutionary Year in Music (2015)

1967: A Complete Rock Music History of the Summer of Love (2017)

1969: The Year Everything Changed (2011)

Never a Dull Moment: 1971, The Year That Rock Exploded (2017)*

As a high school grad in 1968, the year when everything–politically, socially, psychologically–did actually, thoroughly change, I heard all of this and had my favorites. As a freshman in the academic year of 1968-69, I may not have partied night by night with new college friends, but I spent weekends with my old high school crew, cruising the backroads of Groveland and West Newbury in the court of the Crimson King.

It was during weeknights in between when turntables spun in college dorms that I was more in tune with a shortwave radio, a high school graduation present to satisfy a fascination I had since eighth grade. When doing homework, I’d find BCN on the FM dial and leave it there, but during any break and before turning in, I’d turn to the weird band at the top and scroll sideways through the static. At any voice or music, I’d stop, but most were far from clear, and I’d move on. Then came the night that I heard talk that was crystal clear.

Couldn’t understand a word, but I could tell it was Eastern European before I thought I heard the announcer say the names “Brezhnev” and “Khrushchev,” suggesting it was Russian. He went on, and I turned out the lights and hit the pillow staring straight up at the ceiling wondering if I was listening to Radio Moscow or Radio Free Europe. Quite a difference there.

He talked at length, and I was about to pull the plug–closer and easier to find in the dark than the small on-off switch–when he paused briefly and resumed in a whole new tone. Before long I heard, in English, the name “Rolling Stones,” which snapped me wide awake even though I had no idea of what was being said of them. Then came the words, “Gimme Shelter,” followed immediately by the sultry guitar opening of that song.

That night, like most others, I probably smoked a joint before I turned to shortwave, but it had to be redundant. Could it get any higher for a teenager in Lawrence, Mass., in 1969 than to bask in the devil’s sympathy broadcast from the USSR in the dead of night? Take my newfound wings and learn to fly…

Over 50 years later, I spend Tuesday mornings sitting in Chococoa, a Newburyport coffeeshop, with three guitarists who often talk about chords and progressions and diminished this and major that while I, a flautist, quietly pretend I know what it means. That’s fine. I’m content to inhale Kenyan dark roast and savor a lemon-ginger scone in blissfully ignorant silence, so such talk does not fret me.

More often we speak of music that we hear, that we like, that we play, and so we talk about our gigs–for me that’s now just the fall Renaissance festival, sometimes jamming with the Buzzards Bay Buccaneers–and whatever musical news we’ve heard or read since we last met. If I’m the odd-man out in the guitar-talk, I make up for it with a projectionist’s advantage of describing films such as Elvis, Chevalier, and Summer of Gold before my friends have a chance to see them–as well as documentaries such as Little Girl Blue, Amazing Grace, and I’m Your Man in fine detail.

Comparisons, from near to far-flung, abound. A mention of chordal suspensions in Tommy will draw one of the same in Henry Purcell’s Renaissance operas. An account of a performance of Seals and Croft at the Blossom Music Center outside Akron years ago will trigger memories of folk, rock, jazz, and classical concerts at venues such as Red Rocks in Colorado and Tanglewood here in Massachusetts, as well as Steve’s view from onstage at the Alaska Folk Festival.

And random connections. When John insists that “Summer in the City” was the Lovin’ Spoonful’s best song, I let him know that the bassist wrote a biography of the group a few years ago and titled it with the lyric: Hotter than a Matchhead. I also let him know that I once dined in Chez Piggy, wacko lead guitarist Zal Yanofsky’s restaurant in Kingston, Ontario.

Borrowing Dylan’s word, our conversations are all free-wheeling. And the wheels ran on both tracks of comparison and connection when Rob reminded us of the repeated hammering note that serves up Janis Joplin’s wail, “Cry Baby.” Whatever the subject before he mentioned it, the rest of us launched into a list of songs with riveting openings, single phrases that command attention, and remain through the years immediately identifiable.

First that came to mind is what I called the single “chord” that opens “A Hard Day’s Night.” John half agreed: “‘Chord’? That was more of a musical mash.”

Mash? How about one of memorable instumental openings? If you like pinacolada, all day and all of the night, let me take you down to the House of the Rising Sun on a dark desert highway where the taxman has got you, babe!

We agreed that as far as we knew, Beethoven should be credited as a forerunner of this category, if it be a category, with the iconic four-note command opening his Fifth Symphony–made all the more suggestive when adapted as a basis for its sweeping, celebratory third movement. As John notes, we limit it with the oft-used description of “opportunity knocks” when the tempo he gives it later on sounds more like opportunity realized. And I have since learned that it is the only musical composition that has a scripted “audience part.”**

From four notes to six opening Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung.” Not long ago I headlined a Daily News column, “Sitting on a park bench,” knowing that anyone close to my age would hear that with a force that grabbed their attention. Whether they kept reading was another matter, and a peaceful, pastoral piece about taking walks along a salt-marsh may have been quite a surprise to those who did. But readers in the following days confirmed my hunch.

Before Tull’s six were the Rolling Stone’s eight to open “Satisfaction,” although we might credit just the first two notes for doing the trick. The Supremes’ topped–or bottomed–that with a single word, “Stop!” before singing “in the name of love.” Could we credit Aretha with yet more efficiency by using a single letter? I vote no, as the R is too musically linked to the E-S-P-E-C-T to stand alone, although I certainly agree that the seven letters qualify the song for a place high on the list of commanding openings.

Back to instrumental intros: After reliving my Moscow Night in 1969, I fast-forward to a summer afternoon aside Mount Wachusett in Central Mass in the early-Nineties when Shenandoah took the stage and launched into a riff that had us, about 2,000 strong as I recall, bouncing for a few minutes. We barely noticed that Arlo Guthrie was onstage with them, strumming away, before he edged slowly toward the mic front center and, in that distinct, nonchalant nasal tone of his, exhaled, “I don’t want a pickle.”

I still hear the roar. But for the sake of a category of music commonly known, let’s stick to riffs on best-selling records. We might credit Sonny & Cher for “And the Beat Goes On” and Nancy Sinatra for “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” but both of those openings were improvised and offered on the spot by Carol Kaye, virtuoso bassist with the legendary studio musicians called the Wrecking Crew that recorded to perfection the songs of many groups–including the Association, Gary Lewis and the Playboys, and at times even the Beach Boys–who then played them on stages where standards were less exacting.

So Kaye gets two entries, as might Paul Simon if we count the lyric invitation of “Hello darkness my old friend.” Yes or no, there’s what he calls the “banjo-roll” that opens “The Boxer.” Once asked why he never played it in concert, he said, “because I can’t,” but I see that recently he has had banjo virtuoso–and superb interviewer/host of a PBS show, My Music–Rihannon Giddens join him onstage. I know that she has added lyrics that extend the reach of Simon’s “American Tune” to 1619, but have yet to find that she delivers that intro.***

When America delivered a victory to Barack Obama in 2008, Stevie Wonder’s “Signed, Sealed, Delivered” opened the victory celebration with a joyous bounce that fit the faces of the Obama family and everyone on the stage with them as soon as the first note was heard, well beforethe added exhilaration of Wonder’s voice. Here’s hoping we hear it again in November next year.

Rather than keep adding to this list into next year, let me state the obvious: Anyone could make a list as long or longer, as strong or stronger, with completely different titles. Anyone twenty or fifty years younger than I could do it with a list of songs I don’t know, musicians I’ve never heard of. Anyone older might opt for the instumental accompaniment to “Moon River,” “That’s Life,” and “One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock rock!”

Not to mention the demographics of glam rock that would favor David Bowie and Queen, yacht rock with Steely Dan and Loggins & Messina, and heavy metal for the musically impaired, the mentally challenged, and the emotionally stunted.

For demographics that include me, Stan Rogers’ ominous opening of “Barrett’s Privateers” is my pick for folk music, while the defiant raunch that opens the Standells’ “Dirty Water” is irresistable to fans of Boston’s pro sports teams. For wind musicians what can possibly outdo Rahsaan Roland Kirk’s opening bars of “Serenade for a Cuckoo”? Really gives us the bird, and the bird is most welcome.

How about I say that I’m here only to start the list, and anyone reading is free to add? Of course there are emphatic openings of songs that immediately devolve into idiot wind. The absurd pronouncement of Arthur Brown’s “Fire” and the cackling laughter of the Surfaris’ “Wipeout” would, in my book, be more fitting in a petition to repeal the First Amendment than on any list of songs I’d recommend. But that’s just me.

One I have not mentioned only to save it for last. And, yes, it is my choice for best, but more importantly it’s my choice for most relevant. In the Sixties it was intended to wake us up and keep us woke. And, oh, how we need that now! From the Chambers Brothers:

“Time Has Come Today.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aEj5U8kHbc

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*The books on 1969 and 1971 are page-turning, eye-opening reads, and I urge anyone interested in rock music or in the era to read both. The 1965 and 1967 entries are delightful treats that I recommend for those my age who care to indulge in nostalgia.

https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/humour/audience-part-beethovens-5th/

***John adds that, though called a “banjo roll,” it can be played on guitar. And so it is on the original single in 1968 and on the album, Bridge Over Troubled Water. Whether Simon could play it then but can’t now, or if it was played by Fred Carter Jr. who has a guitar credit on the album is not clear. Meanwhile, here’s Simon’s duet with Giddens on “American Tune”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPWNiVdnU8Y

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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