What’s in Your Library?

Call this an update.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

With Melville, the question answers itself.

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

That’s NPL.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patriotism a la Carte

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Victory of the Vanquished

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

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

Justice delayed is justice denied.

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

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

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

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

Yes, it is.

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

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

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

Not just for Trump but for all his Republican supporters.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, it will.

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

Don’t Drink It Lightly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The back of a t-shirt sold by the Ginger Man pubs in Texas and in Manhattan and Boston. I’ve had and worn out two, one that said Austin, the other Houston on the front. I wore one into the Ginger Man in Manhattan on an evening five years ago that the founder of the small chain, Bob Precious, happened to be there. He joined my friend and I for conversation and fetched us a round on the house.
https://thegingerman.com/

For this, try squinting your eyes and imagining that the year is 2017, and the shirt is brand new.

Jokers Need Not Apply

When the supplemental checks ceased some 18 months after most places were shuttered for the plague, I realized I had to get back to work to make ends meet.

Wouldn’t take much, as I’m already on Social Security, but I’m one of those who, let’s just say, joined the workforce late. As I tell my friends, I had my retirement in my twenties, so now I must work till I drop.

Fair enough. Problem was that the cinema I’d been with since 1998 changed hands during the shutdown. When it finally reopened with so many restrictions on attendance, I couldn’t imagine how the new owners could possibly afford an employee. So I never asked.

I had also been driving a delivery van for a chocolate and fudge company that hadn’t called. Since I had already asked for a reduced schedule before the shutdown, they may have figured that I had finessed a painless, de facto, “never-can-say-goodbye” retirement.

Was it just lucky coincidence that my third gig at a Renaissance festival began on the very day that the COVID payments ended? That’s just eight weekends, but it covered me for three months. I bought time.

And I finessed it. With my year-round employment seemingly off the table, I recalled a previous life–1986 to 2002 to be specific–when jobs began just after Labor Day, broke for the holidays, began again after New Year’s, and ended with sessions called “summer” even though they were over by the Fourth. If you’re good at riddles, you recognize the life of a teacher. In my case, the adjunct circuit for college writing instructors.

This allowed me to make myself known to the heads of English departments at the ten or so remaining campuses within a forty-mile radius where I did not burn bridges 20 years ago. By applying after Labor Day, I was able to delay any commitment until after New Year’s while letting them know I’d be ready on a moment’s notice.

Bizarre as it seems, that’s how a lot of that scheduling was done back in my day. According to the five dept. heads I heard from, that’s how it’s still done. They even gave me specific dates in January 2022 to get back in touch.

I never did. Two weeks after the start of the renfaire, the Screening Room brought me back for a night a week. Since they, a married couple, can double-team on busy weekends, and since all theaters require technical preparations and book work on Thursdays and Fridays, we settled on Wednesdays. With that, I’d need just one class each semester, the Tuesday-Thursday format always preferred by adjuncts, a far cry from the four, two each at two schools covering five days and who knows how many miles, that most adjuncts juggle.

That need disappeared two weeks after the faire ended. With the holiday season about to start, I recalled the various friends and relatives of the chocolate company’s owners showing up to make various special deliveries, mostly large orders for businesses to give their employees. A few of those would get me to January, so I dropped in.

“How would you like a regular Thursday route?”

“You mean year round?”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Yes!”

My enthusiasm amused him, but he had no way of knowing what was behind it. He thought he was offering me a part-time job, but what he really gave me was a ticket to avoid a return to the classroom.

At dinner on that Thursday in late November, 2021, I was most thankful for that.

Thankful for my own sake, rueful for what it says about all else.

When I began teaching on the adjunct circuit, and before that in the early Eighties when I taught as a graduate assistant in South Dakota, classrooms hummed with curiosity and expectation, engaging and vibrant. Maybe it was just me and my own bring-back-the-Sixties wildness, and I was too naive to notice anything else. Maybe it was having students brand new to college taking their first classes outside of their hometowns and tight-knit high schools.

In South Dakota it all began when students smiled and smirked and laughed openly at my Boston accent. When they heard me laugh back, it was all I needed: “What’ll your parents say when you tell them you have an English teacher who can’t pronounce the letter R?”

In one class, some wag shot back: “They’ll say you should be disqualified from correcting our spelling!”

I knew he would do well. I also realized that, with or without a regional accent, if I could make a class laugh, the subject would teach itself.

And that’s how it went through the Eighties and into the Nineties when college and universities for some bureaucratic reasons started making everything standard and formal. I call it “The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.” There was no room for improvisation and even less tolerance for any challenges that might be out of any student’s “comfort zone.” Education at its best was out of bounds.

Laughter? Better be in bounds, and those bounds are small. You could make all but one laugh, but if that one took it literally, took offense, you were toast.

I was toast, and when I asked at a faculty meeting, “Is this a college or a nursing home?” I was burned toast. It was a slow process, and I saw the effect in the classrooms where students had slowed down, perhaps because they knew that they were the ones being processed.

Since then, reports from friends in academe have not been encouraging. Without realizing it at the time, I did leave just in time to avoid the advent of cellphones and ringtones sounding in classrooms. Never mind hurting a student’s feelings, I’d be hurting their noses and knocking out teeth if I or another student were interrupted by one of those–or I’d make a wisecrack about it and hurt cellphoner’s feelings.

In academe as I left it and as I hear it described today, spontaneity means suicide, and there’s no room for serendipity on the syllabus.

Argue that if you will, academe has become no country for this old man. Despite that, when it came time to find work a few years ago, I figured I’d silence that sound when I heard it.

And so the emails went out and a few were answered. What happened next was blogged in real time under headlines “Call Me Rip” and “I Are Not Stupid.” The first was my reaction to technological requirements that did not exist 20 years ago–the same amount of time that Rip Van Winkle took his snooze before awakening to a new world. The second my response to what are called “preferred pronouns,” in which I propose e (e, es) as a non-binary option to avoid the awkward confusion of a plural used for a singular for an otherwise identifiable individual.

Had I gone though with it and made those phone calls in January 2022, I’d have been tempted to change any requirement that I state “preferred pronouns” to “preferred adjectives.” Why not? If people can possess pronouns–as in my pronouns–why not other parts of speech?

To this day, I wish I had, as I imagine expressions on the faces of Ph Ds named Diane and Michael who felt the need (or obeyed a requirement) to add, respectively, “she, her, hers” and “he, him, his” to their names upon receiving my application with preferred adjectives: witty, erudite, articulate, charming, handsome.

Would they at least laugh before throwing it in the trash? Or is laughter “inappropriate”?

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https://pixels.com/featured/a-village-school-william-iii-bromley.html

Upriver from Laredo

Perhaps a sequel to “Robbing Heaven” should be called “Paying Hell,” but I avoid sequels, part twos, and anything that depends on what I’ve already inflicted on the world.

Any exception must also be stand-alone, and a question arrived yesterday that meets that condition, asking if the book I reviewed, Hell to Pay, has any…

… comment on immigration policies (which are in constant conflict between the “benefits” of having more eager tax-paying labor to suppress wages and the “costs” of them becoming union members and even voting citizens)?

Yes, author Michael Lind includes two chapters titled “Global Labor Arbitrage,” one on outsourcing, the other subtitled, “How Employers Exploit Immigrants to Weaken Worker Power.” A complicated case treated with clarity. Emphasis is on the “wary eye” unions have historically cast toward immigrants.

He recalls that Cesar Chavez, leader of America’s first farmworkers strike in the Sixties, “denounced illegal immigration and reported unauthorized migrants to the Border Patrol.” Reason: they reduced wages for legal immigrants already picking grapes in California.

We may not like where some of his lines are drawn, but Lind proposes that it would be better for all involved if we started with unions, higher wages, benefits, and then admitted migrants according to prospects under those conditions.

My correspondent adds that an acquaintance was sent on a work-assignment for…

… a few weeks working in Laredo, where the Rio Grande is about 25-feet wide and wadeable at this time. He says there’s no one assembled on the other side. The locals he has asked… “where are all the migrants people keep talking about?” just shrug. They don’t know.

Meanwhile, many of us do know that the footage run by Fox–and other media outlets that sell anger and rage by catering to fear and suspicion–is often played on a loop, a few scenes made to seem like many, a few places made to seem like all. At times they have used clips of scenes years old, taken in other countries, and of crowds other than immigrants. Nor is it any coincidence that their close-ups are of the darkest-skinned and angriest individuals they can find.

None of this is news. Nor will those outlets report what is news, such as the recent easement of tensions on the border. Says my correspondent:

I suspect the falling numbers of migrants (both legal and illegal) have a significant role in inflation. Not as significant as the pandemic, the war, supply chains, and fossil fuels, but still important. Maybe as significant as rare resources like lithium and computer chips. Large sectors of ag (both big and small) rely on cheap migrant labor, especially meat, fruit, veggies, and wine.

It amazes me that the political benefits apparently outweigh the economic benefits, and therefore prevent the right from proposing or supporting any policy reforms re: economic migrants.

Lind, who suggests that we treat immigration first and foremost “as a matter of labor economics,” addresses that amazement:

To argue against low-wage immigration is not to argue against immigration as such… for several generations U.S. immigration policy has been weaponized by American employers, as one of a number of instruments, along with union busting, outsourcing, anti-worker labor laws, and the offshoring of production, that are used to undermine the bargaining power of American workers…

His answer to that is a living wage for all, which would turn recipients of tax-funded services into taxpayers themselves. First step toward that would be an increase in the current minimum wage of $7.25. Today, progressives push with no success for a national minimum wage of $15/hour while regressives suggest elimination of any minimum wage at all.

Meanwhile, if adjusted for the cost of living since 1967, it would be $22/hour.

Reminds me of the name of a town about 600 miles upriver from Laredo: There’s the Truth. If you care to know the Consequences, there’s Hell to Pay.

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Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez, co-founders of La Raza, the first farmworkers union in the US. Bob Fitch photography archive, © Stanford University Libraries

From Life at the Intersection, an activist blog by Terri Lyon, author of Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism and What’s on Your Sign? How to focus your passion and change the world. This photo is featured with a superb, eye-opening sketch of Dolores Huerta, who coined the phrase in “Sí Se Puede” long before Barack Obama adopted it for his 2008 campaign. In 2011, he awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom:

https://lifeattheintersection.com/2019/03/25/who-was-cesar-chavezs-surprisingly-badass-partner/

Robbing Heaven

So new that it went to press just before passage of a bill to allow child labor in Arkansas, Hell to Pay is eye-opening, assumption-busting, both-ways cutting, and very uncomfortable.

By “both-ways cutting” I don’t mean that Michael Lind, author of several books with titles such as The New Class War and The Next American Nation, veers both left and right, but that he attacks assumptions of Democrats as much as those of Republicans.

We might object–as I did while reading–that at least Democrats are on the ethical and necessary side of voting rights, reproductive rights, environmental disputes, but Lind rivets Hell to Pay‘s focus on the single wrong at the root of all that ails us. Not one to waste time getting to his point, Lind makes it the book’s subtitle:

How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America.

Discomfort is for those on the left who comfortably emphasize what are called “culture war” issues, stuck in what Lind calls “the identity credentials arms race.” Since most all of this talk airs only in the worlds of academe and journalism, it is foreign to a working class more attentive to wages, taxes, prices, interest rates, mortgages, rents.

Lind may not be addressing Democrats directly, but who else would heed his repeated call to restore the presence and influence of unions to what they were in the 1950s and ’60s? He acknowledges that African-Americans were largely excluded from the benefits of those thriving years, but points out that there’s no reason why they or anyone else should be excluded from a renewal of the American vision laid out by Democrat FDR and protectively sustained by Republican Eisenhower.

Basically, Lind calls that bipartisan vision a “living wage/social-insurance economy” that was replaced by a “low wage/high-welfare system” installed by Ronald Reagan and sheepishly sustained by Bill Clinton. Yes, Reagan trashed welfare, but his deregulation sent American manufacturing overseas, lowered wages here, and created the need for far more public assistance.

No coincidence, then, that Reagan’s war on unions, starting with the air-traffic controllers as soon as he took office, not only precipitated America’s decline, but insured it by pitting the working class against itself. While no one begrudged the Social Security or Medicare checks for which we ourselves paid into (“social-insurance”), those barely getting by seethed at those left in need of public assistance (“high-welfare”).

Though unstated, “divide and conquer” underpinned Reaganism just as much as it blatantly announces Trumpism. When Bill Clinton famously announced “the end of welfare as we know it,” he wasn’t making any reform. He was waving a white flag.

We saw Democrats wave another white flag last week when they agreed to the work-requirements for those on welfare. As dissenters such as Elizabeth Warren objected, it forces people to accept jobs that pay poverty wages–which in turn subsidizes the largest corporations, and which illustrates a foremost point of Hell to Pay.

Some of author Michael Lind’s points are overstated–I’ve never heard feminists call for “defamilization,” although I must agree that “birthing people” for “mothers” is “curiously stilted, liturgical language.” In fact, I’d go a bit further, and I hasten to add that Lind’s overall logic regarding America’s declining birth rates is too solid to dismiss.

With a fair corporate tax rate and living wages secured by unions, both of which allowed America to thrive in the ’50s, couples would be having children earlier and communities would become tighter knit as people had more time for each other. Healthier villages could raise more children.

To explain our descent from that to stressful gun-and-drug plagued nation we have become, Hell to Pay fills in the details of how Bernie Sanders’ (and Ralph Nader’s) frequent charge that corporate America “privatizes the benefits of cheap labor and socializes the costs.” In a chapter titled “Scrooge Revisited,” Lind nails it with numbers that make the nail very, very long:

60 percent of the $7 billion in annual welfare benefits that went to low-wage workers went to the employees of only ten corporations, with McDonald’s alone responsible for $1.2 billion.

Add supplemental programs for health care, housing, and food, and The Labor Center at UC Berkeley calculates “that welfare for low-wage Americans costs taxpayers $150 billion each year.” Lind continues:

The fact that a quarter of the entire American workforce in the twenty-first century (is) so poorly paid that it need(s) to rely on one or another means-tested welfare program would have shocked mid-twentieth century Roosevelt Democrats and Eisenhower Republicans.

As Lind makes clear, the genius of corporate America has been to convince most of the American public that its own scam is a philanthropic effort by the government turned parasitic–and that the poor rather than the corporations are the parasites.

But he stops short of saying how much of the convincing has been done by corporate owned and controlled Republicans in Congress and, as is now painfully obvious, on the Supreme Court–all of them amplified on the Republican Party’s Mouthpiece, Fox News.

He rightfully reminds us that many Democrats are also in thrall to corporate sponsors. Hillary Clinton’s still-hidden speeches, after all, were not to the ACLU and the Sierra Club, but to Goldman Sachs and Monsanto, .

Few present-day politicians are named. Only Bernie Sanders and Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California gain favorable, if brief, mention for their pursuit of the “Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act” (or “BEZOS,” a play on the name of Amazon’s owner), a tax on corporations in the amount of the means-tested public assistance that all their employees received.

And on Hell to Pay‘s final page, an unavoidable reference looking to the 2024 election and the possibilty…

… that populist demogogues, some of them more effective and focused than Donald Trump, will lead ephemeral and disruptive rebellions by the marginalized and dispossessed.

Too bad Lind didn’t have the chance to see what one of those demogogues would do just two months before his book arrived in bookstores and libraries. To counter the corporate premise that “lowering the prices of goods and services by lowering the wages of workers who provide them,” Lind asks rhetorically: “Why not legalize child labor?”

Before anyone could read the question, newly-elected Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders would sign a bill to do exactly that in Arkansas. Not only that, but reports from dozens of sources tell us that similar bills are now pending in several more Republican-controlled states.

In 2024, America will either heed Hell to Pay, or it will be Hell and we will pay.

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/690656/hell-to-pay-by-michael-lind/

Fear & Loathing in Boston

If I had to describe what it is to be a Boston sports fan in 2023 with honesty as brutal as Hunter Thompson’s reports from the campaign trail or with insight as searing as Dante’s burning Hell, I could simply tell you what has happened.

For starters–pun but partial–the Red Sox are a Jekyll & Hyde operation that either manages to give up a few more runs when they score many, or score nothing when they hold the other team to very little. If their lineup is balanced, it’s because they have guys who can hit but can’t field, and others who can field but can’t hit, including a first-baseman who seems to think a bat is something to hold on his shoulder, like a prop for photo ops, while awaiting ball four.

Starters? That’s the baseball term for the rotation of pitchers, usually five, on a team who begin games and pitch five or more innings unless they are knocked out sooner. Among the Red Sox’ many problems is that their starters too often think the first two innings are for the other team’s batting practice.

For too many Fenway fans, it hardly matters who the other team is, or even how far the Sox might be behind. In the late innings they will start their knuckle-dragging, gutter-sniping, brain-damaged “Yankees suck!” chant. So embarrassing to have anything in common with them, but you could laugh all night imagining how fans of the opposing teams back home hearing it on TV must be laughing at us.

Red Sox TV broadcasters can be equally maddening. After bemoaning the passing of the witty Jerry Remy last year, we do it again over the retirement of the hilarious Dennis Eckersley this year. In their color commentary place we have Kevin Youkilis who seems to think he gets paid according to how often he inserts “right there!”–sometimes “right here!”– into everything he says, always with exclamation. For play-by-play, we have Dave O’Brien who never fails to add “in a row” after telling us that a player has a hitting streak of so many games.

Those foibles are no doubt amplified by the abrupt disappearance of the wildly entertaining Jack Edwards, play-by-play commentator for our hockey Bruins. They and our basketball Celtics rode high all season only to fall flat in the post season. After setting a new high for the best regular season won-lost record in NHL history, the Bs were no more coherent in the first playoff round than first-graders playing pin the tail on the donkey.

Not to be underdone, the Cs apparently thought that actual basketball was played only during the regular season, and that the post-season was a contest of long-distance shots. They got away with it through two nail-biting rounds, but in round three they could have changed their name to The Clang Gang.

While we Boston fans let ourselves believe that the Bruins would breeze through the East on their way to the Stanley Cup finals, we also thought the Celtics could be beaten only by the Milwaukee Bucks. When the Bucks fell in the first round, we figured one trophy was already ours, and the second within reach.

A city with two championships in one year! Rarely happens, but Boston had it in ’04 and ’18 with the Red Sox and Patriots.

What makes the dual losses doubly worse is that both were to Miami teams. And both have made it to the finals with a chance to win it all. Most of us would likely say that dual champions in Los Angeles or Philadelphia would be worse, and in New York would be worst of all.

However, considering what the two cities symbolize–Boston with its renowned universities and medical centers; Miami where books and courses of study are banned from schools, where medical care is legislated–the possibility of the Panthers and Heat as dual champions is beyond depressing.

Could call it unpatriotic.

Speaking of which, what does it tell us when the young guy showing off the razors in the TV ads for Gillette, the company that owns the New England Patriots, is the quarterback for the rival Buffalo Bills?

Hunter Thompson would have a field day with a detail like that. Dante would offer it on one of the levels in his streak of nine levels in a row right there!

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Apparently, he doesn’t use it that often.

Buying into Blindness

When someone in town asks if I “still write” for the local newspaper, I take one of those deep breaths of exasperation before saying “Yes.”

Like many folks, I am still running into acquaintances I last saw before March, 2020, when the restrictions were put in place. And so the question is fairly frequent. If people asked if I still live on Plum Island, show films at the Screening Room, perform at King Richard’s Faire, or refuse to get a cellphone, I’d answer with a smile, possibly a joke if one came to mind.

But I no longer hear this as a question. Rather, I hear them telling me that they don’t read the local paper. Tempting to ask why they then care if I still write, but it goes with the territory that, read or not, I’m still fair game for anyone who wants to say what they think.

Or am I? Raising that question is an encounter in the supermarket this week when a woman responded to my exasperated “yes” by telling me that she “stopped following the news.”

As I drew another breath of exasperation, she continued with complaints about inflation and who knows what after I tuned her out. When she seemed to pause, I started to say, “Well, good to see you again,” but then came a line that lit my fuse:

I never bought into that COVID stuff.

Most people would describe what happened next by saying that I “snapped.” I don’t deny it, but to be more precise, I took the line to mean that she thought the virus a hoax. For that, my fuse is short:

Are you saying you don’t believe it happened???!!!

No, no, no! I believe it!

Okay, then I don’t know what you mean by “buy into” it.

I don’t believe we should have shut down everything and not let anyone go anywhere.

Were you aware of the nightly death tolls? Did you see the footage of overcrowded hospitals? The 18-wheelers outside hospitals being used as refrigerated morgues?

Yes, but look what it did to the economy!

Luckily, we were in a corner of the store where no one else happened to be at that moment. This next quote omits at least two expletives:

Who do you think you are??? Did you hear the interviews with nurses coming to pieces describing what it was like to hold the hands of people–young, middle-age, elderly, terrified–as they die with no relative or friend with them? And then having to walk down a corridor and into another room to tell the family? Who are you? What are you?

In her attempt to stop me, I heard the word “inflation.” I glanced into her basket:

What??? The price of your cottage cheese is worth more than four-thousand dead in O-hi-o? Maybe you can lower the price of your fettuccini by putting the keep-it-running-no-matter-the-cost crowd back in the White House.

Her silence allowed me to catch myself, and I paused for another deep breath. I lowered my voice, and I’m sure my blood pressure:

Oh, by the way, are you aware that we right now have the lowest unemployment rate that we seen since the 1960s? Record setting job growth? Record business investments across the country? Oh, wait, you don’t “follow” the news, so how could you know any of that? How could you know anything?

Abruptly, I walked away, pushing my cart. Amazingly, she called out a friendly sounding, “We’ll see ya!” Taking another breath of exasperation, I thought, “I hope not!” Honestly, I didn’t mean to say it aloud.

Later that day, under the calming influence of a Riverwalk IPA and a Plum Island sunset, I considered what might happen should we cross paths again. Newburyport is a small town, so it seems inevitable.

I’ll be sure to offer a cheery “hello” and address her by name. If she wants to talk about places she’s been, things she’s done, films she’s seen, I’ll be glad to listen, answer questions, and trade notes.

If she ignores me, that’s as much her right as it is to ignore news–and as it is my right not to listen to those who ignore news express opinions about what is in the news. No more fair game for foul calls.

And no more breaths of exasperation. If you wear blinders, I’ve no time for what you think you see.

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https://fineartamerica.com/featured/the-blind-leading-the-blind-pieter-brueghel-the-younger.html

Reform on a Dime

Today was my first delivery in at least a year to a place on which I dropped a dime following my last visit.

Since the plague put me in semi-retirement, another driver usually covers this route, but I have noticed that this customer has been steady, telling me that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, as promised, kept me and my employer anonymous, just as I am keeping the offending company anonymous.

Whether or not the supervisor who heard me vent a year ago made any connection between me and OSHA’s visit soon after is now a moot point.

As it was, large trucks were able to back into a platform about five feet high, but those of us driving cargo vans and the smaller Ford Transits such as I drive had a walkway barely four-feet wide and about five off the ground.

What made this dangerous was the lack of a railing.

Compounding that danger was a door that opened toward rather than away from us, forcing a contorted maneuver of up to 140 lbs. on a two-wheeler maybe two-and-a-half feet wide past a wide, heavy door we had to simultaneously hold open.

You might say that the lack of a railing was a hazard while the wrong-way door was merely inconvenience. But when the walkway is just four-feet wide, the door lights up that hazard like a bumper on a pinball machine.

Such was the case I made a year ago to the Boston office of the federal agency. OSHA’s agent told me they would pay a visit, and did I want to be informed of their finding? Yes, I said.

Barely three weeks passed before he called back. Yes, they were ordered to install a railing. I thanked him, and then he thanked me for calling in. He said nothing about the door, and I didn’t want to press the matter. With a railing, I figured, the wrong-way door would remain an annoyance, but no longer a hazard.

Today I took satisfaction in seeing that railing for the first time, still looking brand new. I put the two-wheeler on the platform and stacked it before climbing a few steps to roll it down the now non-threatening walkway. I stopped a distance from the door, allowing for its width, and made my way around the stack to reach for the bell.

Catching my eye were door hinges that appeared brand new. More than that, they were on the side of the door away from me. Then I noticed the door handle, also new on a door which, new or not, was now right-way.

Though seemingly simple and isolated, restricted to a small and hardly noticed segment of the American population, this is a story I expect to be telling in the weeks and months to come. Anyone who tells me that businesses should run free of regulation, or that government agencies never accomplish anything that does us any good will hear it.

In person if possible, but if necessary, I’m willing to drop more dimes.

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