History Sewn & Sown

Those of you outside Massachusetts may not have heard this, and I’ll bet that many of you inside may not have heard it either, but our state flag is under attack.

I’ll let the image speak for itself and welcome anyone to decide if the critics are right that it appears to be an imminent act of violence against a Native American. Or if the raised sword is a patriotic reminder of the American revolution while the arrow pointing to the ground is a symbol of the Pilgrims making peace with the Wampanoag tribe.

Is the juxtaposition purely coincidental?

Before long I’ll let you know what I think, but for now I offer a column I had in the Newburyport Daily News 35 years ago next month on the subject of state flags, prompted by my daughter, then about to turn ten, telling me that a picture of Alaska’s seven-star flag made her want to visit the state.

Of the Bay State flag, I said nothing of the offense, real or imagined, nor did I remark on the Confederate imagery on three flags of Southern states, but I still think my reason for disarming the flag–or disposing of it entirely–is more compelling than the case being made today.

Since this was written in 1988, the last lines were a comparison of the flag to the presidential campaign of Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. I have replaced those lines with something relevant today:

State flags: history that is sewn

When they were designed and first raised, they represented all the things most important to those who lived under them. Yet today, they are barely recognized–or noticed for that matter.

How many readers of this paper, for instance, can describe the figure inside the blue shield on the Massachusetts flag, or what raises what above that shield?

Of the original 13 states, only the Carolinas do not feature coats of arms or state seals, unless the palmetto tree is South Carolina’s seal.

Maryland may claim our most unusual flag. Founded by two families who wanted their rectangular coats intact, Maryland quartered, rather than halved, its flag. Each coat tyhus gained cross-corners–one an elaboratre play of black and yellow, the other a stately arrangement of red and white. The result is something you’d expect to find flying over a ski-lodge in Liechtenstien.

Few flags feature anything other than red, white, or blue as a prominent color, although three are set on attactive light shades of blue. Delaware has “colonial blue,” while South Dakota and Oklahoma have fields of “azure blue.”

Geographically relevant flags of Arizona and New Mexico feature the yellow and gold of southwest deserts. Arizona flames with sunset or sunrise, while New Mexico tenders the subtle and sparse Zia Pueblo design of the sun.

Surprisingly, there is only one green flag out of fifty. More surprisingly, it does not fly over Vermont, a name that means “Green Mountain.” Not surprisingly, it belongs to the “Evergreen State” and features a portrait of its namesake, George Washington, in its centered seal.

Washington’s eccentric neighbor has the only two-sided flag, a dark blue field with the Oregon seal on one side and a golden beaver on the other–a welcome reminder that, before the buffalo (found on Wyoming’s flag), the beaver was the most lucrative New World prize in the eyes of European fashionistas.

Only nine flags lack anything resembling an emblem in their center, although Nevada puts its “Battle Born” insignia in the upper left. And state names appear on thirty flags, including South Dakota and Idaho which name themselves twice–once on the seal and again across the bottom.

While Idaho and Maine compete for best potatoes, their flags compete for best motto. Other states carry phrases with predicable words including “liberty,” “equality,” “union,” “rights,” and in the single word under Rhode Island’s anchor, “hope.” Give me Maine’s Dirigo (“I direct”), or give me Idaho’s Esto Perpetua (“Live Forever”).

Four flags carry the slogans of our currency: Michigan, Wisconsin, and North Dakota with E pluribus unum; Florida with “In God We Trust” on St. Andrew’s crimsom cross it shares with Alabama.

Kentucky and Missouri share the historic line that became an theme song on campuses in the Sixties: “United We Stand, Divided We Fall.” In a similar spirit, New York’s colorfully meticulous shield is underscored by a single word: Excelsior (“onward and upward”).

Hawai’i’s flag is the only one to incorporate the Union Jack; only those of Georgia, Mississippi, and Arkansas have Confederate themes, although Tennessee’s three white stars in a blue circle on a red field hint at it. In fact, those stars represent the three distinct topographical divisions in that most underrated, scenically elegant land.

Ohio has the only non-rectangular flag. A swallow-tailed “burghee,” its red-white-and-blue stars-and-stripe design makes it unmistakably American nonetheless.

For a detailed description of the geography, people, animals, tools, bridges, buildings, flora and fauna shown on each, check Your State Flag in the reference room of most libraries. The book contains full-page color photos of all fifty, as do other reference books and atlases.

Daughter Rachel piqued my interest two years back when she read about Alaska’s seven-star flag in National Geographic’s World and talked me into a trip to “as close as we can get to the Big Dipper and the North Star.”

That and the lumbering bear of the “California Republic” may be her favorites, though I might pick Louisiana’s mother pelican with wings spread over three chicks looking up to her. Warm and earnest, their faces have a cartoon quality that is alive and upbeat–a true travellers’ flag.

What’s the worst flag? Well, Arkansas’ diamond design looks like a label for something that will never be sold over a counter. But there’s only one foolisly incongrous flag:

An Indian on a European shield beneath a disembodied arm weilding a sword? Can anyone imagine a child looking at that and saying, “Hey, Dad! Let’s go here!”

I didn’t think so.

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https://www.britannica.com/topic/flag-of-Massachusetts

The text on the banner: Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem (“By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty”).

Most people looking for a change want nothing more than the removal of the arm and sword. Type massachusetts state flag proposals redesign into a search engine for about two dozen proposed new flags, many of them quite attractive and acceptable to most everyone asking for change. My pick:

From designer E. Cashman:

The flower is a mayflower, which is the state flower and also the name of the vessel which carried the original Pilgrims over to Plymouth, MA. It represents the courage of the civilians of Massachusetts and honors the people who helped start the foundations of America. The cranberry red, blue and green are the State colors: Green represents the rolling hills and lush forest life, blue represents the ocean, and red represents the cranberry, which is the state berry and the state drink. The flower also has six petals to represent the fact that Massachusetts was the sixth state to ratify the US Constitution. The only reason I added the dividing lines was because each color is pretty dark, so the white fimbriation lines add contrast and make the flag more attractive to the eye.

Well, it does make a point now, doesn’t it?

https://zebratigerfish.blogspot.com/2017/11/happy-thanksgiving-newcomer.html?m=1

All at once. Some of the colors are off. South Dakota is a much lighter shade of blue, Vermont darker, and Delaware blue not green.

A Fan of Anesthesia

As the dermatologist hovered over me ready to apply a blade to my neck, he was considerate enough to ask:

“Are you a fan of country music, or is this torture?”

Had I been honest, I’d have told him that listening to it for ten minutes in the operating room awaiting his arrival was, in fact, torture. But now that I was pre-occupied, why risk offending someone who literally has a knife on your throat?

“No, I’m not a fan, but I don’t mind it.”

I waited for him to ask what I am a fan of, but instead he said, “Here’s the anesthetic.”

“Yes, I’m a fan of anesthesia.”

He laughed and began cutting, and I opened up in more ways than one. “I like their voices. I’d give anything to have Larry Gatlin’s voice, or Dan Tyminski’s. But I wish they’d sing about other things. I can’t stand all that pickup trucks and cheeetin harrrts bullshit.”

One of the perks of senior citizenry is that you can say all kinds of outrageous things and have everyone humor you. The tugging on my neck ceased as the doctor, less than half my age I dare say, chuckled, as did the even younger attendant on the other side of me.

“Might be a good idea if you didn’t make me laugh while I do this,” he offered.

“Sorry,” I said before falling silent. And as if right on cue, a song that sounded nothing like the others filled the room, a much slower tempo with a rhythym and feel much like Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young.”

“I like this one,” I started to say. “Ouch!” I blurted.

“Sorry. Did that hurt?”

“No, no pain. Just uncomfortable. All that tugging. I’ll live.”

He continued the procedure, and I was relieved that he didn’t notice the irony. It’s the doctor who’s supposed to tell the patient that he or she will live, not the other way around. Had he noticed, he might have laughed, and I might not have lived.

A few songs later, he stopped and asked the attendant to mop some blood: “So you liked that song?”

“Yes, but did you notice that the next song was about dying? The singer kept repeating a lyric that he was about to die. Here I am on an operating table, and you’re playing music about someone about to die!”

He kept a straight face, though the effort was noticeable: “Do you want me to remove the cyst or not?”

“Yes, I’m ready.”

He set back to work, but I was now in some kind of zone that did not allow me to shut up: “Couple years ago I was in a dentist’s waiting room with a few other patients when the song ‘We Gotta Get out of This Place’ came on.”

No response. I tried again: “Reminds me of a place I worked where, when you called and they put you on hold, the first song was always The Kinks’ ‘So Tired, Tired of Waiting, Tired of Waiting for You-ou-ou’.”

The procedure was halted as I sang the extended title, and the room was silent for a couple seconds until the young doctor matter-of-factly stated: “You know, Mr. Garvey, this could be ruled a suicide.”

“Well, if all that country music didn’t kill me, I don’t see how anything can.”

He and the attendant both cracked up, and then he said: “We’re almost done.”

No sooner did I resolve to remain silent than song came on with an opening line about a guy going to a karaoke bar. I held my tongue, but I was itching to tell the doctor how, whenever I hear people debate evolution vs. intelligent design, I insist that karaoke disproves both.

Only thing worse than karaoke may well be someone singing about karaoke.

The singer was smitten by a woman who took the mic, but she drove a Ford and he drove a Chevy, and I couldn’t tell which pickup they took from California to Carolina or if one chased the other, price of gas and carbon footprint be damned.

Nor did I ask the doctor. He was finished with my neck, and I wanted to make sure it stayed that way.

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https://www.pinterest.com/lifetimeskin/dermatology-humor/

Role Model History

Objections to the teaching of anything about race or racism in American history on the grounds that it will make white students uncomfortable or feel guilty have an obvious answer.

Simply emphasize the roles of white men and women who formed the Abolitionist movement, fought for Emancipation, conducted many routes of the Underground Railroad, stood up to Jim Crow, marched in the Civil Rights movement, and who have assisted and promoted minority political, religious, and business leaders whose influence is felt to this day.

Yes, there were many bad white people, but there have been many good ones all along. For every Abraham Lincoln and William Lloyd Garrison, there were hundreds of white men and women in cities and towns stretching from Boston to Cincinnati who transported, hid, and housed those who escaped slavery en route to Canada.

Even the worst events–East St. Louis in 1917, Tulsa in 1921–had at least a few white people who tried to stop what other whites did.

Fill the text books and lectures with their names and stories, and see how many white students identify with them rather than with those who promoted or accepted slavery, segregation, and discrimination because it benefitted them. See how much pride white students might take in white ancestors who were on the right side of history.

For some balance, be sure to include talk of African-Americans who sided with the plantation owners, who kept other enslaved people in line, who aided and abetted the Confederate Army. There’s a reason that the most menacing slavecatcher in the 2019 film Harriet was a Black man.

This is not to say we should emphasize white contributions over those of African-Americans. Any measure of one against the other is irrelevant. All that matters is that every student has someone they can identify with, someone they can look at with pride.

All of this occurs to me while reading biographies of such activist politicians as Thaddeus Stevens (the Pennsylvania congressman played by Tommy Lee Jones in the 2012 film Lincoln) and writers such as Maria Weston Chapman and her abolitionist sisters. How is it that those most devoted to the ideals of the Declaration of Independence go unmentioned in history texts while those who took up arms against our country have their names over–and statues of them just outside–many school doors?

Call it “Consensus History.”

In a 2008 book, Past Imperfect, Charles Peter Hoffer explains that, even before Reconstruction ended, the national mood was to forget all that happened.

Politicians and preachers, to borrow a phrase, told of very fine soldiers on both sides. “Valor” became a code word to indicate that no one was at fault. As if America fielded one huge Blue & Grey Army, every soldier and officer in it a hero for us all.

Businesses advertised products with soothing myths and servile stereotypes such as “Aunt Jemima” and Cream of Wheat’s black chef, “Rastus.”

Northern publishers vied for Southern readers. History texts started describing the enslaved as “happy,” “content,” “well cared for” and “treated like family.” Since no publisher was going to foot the bill for separate school texts, books sold in New England were the same as those that whistled Dixie—a practice that lasts to this day, and which also explains why labor history is absent from most school textbooks.

Confederate statues started appearing throughout the South, while Northern apologists for slavery–“doughfaces” as they were called for their willingness to allow the South to dictate their expressions–were rehabilitated in the North.

Here in Newburyport, for example, the Kent Street Common, a park set aside for the public in the 1830s, was renamed in 1890 for Caleb Cushing, a former mayor, US Rep., and the US Attorney General who supported the Dred Scott decision. His Southern sympathy ran so deep that he maintained correspondence with his good friend Jefferson Davis after secession, a violation of Pres. Lincoln’s wartime order–and therefore an act of treason.

Today, you cannot find more than ten people out of Newburyport’s 19,000 who realize that Cushing Park is named for a traitor.

Nor would they want to. All for the same reason that my “simple” proposal for “Role Model History” might be rejected by those who use terms such as “cancel culture” and “woke” and “critical race theory” as all-purpose excuses to ban all talk of race and racism in public schools.

Are they as worried about having their children identify with activist role models, with people motivated more by what’s best for all than by what’s-in-it-for-me?

Years before we ever heard the word “woke,” Doris “Granny D” Haddock, a white woman who at the age of 90 walked from Los Angeles to Washington DC to raise awareness for campaign finance reform, put it this way:

If we Americans are split into two meaningful camps, it is not conservative versus liberal. The two camps are the politically awake and the hypnotized.

The second camp is under a spell so strong that it can’t even recognize the contradiction of opposing what they call “cancel” while promoting anything called a “ban.” Much less than they can see or hear that “woke” is an abbreviated form of “aware.” If they did, would they want the Book of Revelations stripped from the Bible? “Revelation” does mean “made aware,” so the book is “woke” by their own imagined definition.

Hypnotized, indeed!

If there can be Consensus History, there can be Role Model History. Let’s give it a chance to break that spell.

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Opened in Weymouth, Mass., August of last year: https://www.high-profile.com/ribbon-cutting-held-for-maria-weston-chapman-middle-school/

Pubished last year: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/feb/28/thaddeus-stevens-review-the-radical-republican-america-should-remember

https://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2012/11/maria-weston-chapman.html

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/710545.Past_Imperfect

Crime Family Values

I am a liar. So is everyone who ever taught American history in an American school.

Though I quit lying in classrooms twenty years ago, I have continued to lie about American history and governance in my writings. And my former colleagues continue to lie to American youth.

All of which may be a moot point. After all, what teenager today with a IQ higher than that of a popsicle stick could possibly believe that, “in America,” as we so profoundly intone, “no man is above the law”?

Unless Attorney General Merrick Garland has come out of his coma between the time I write this and the time you read it, it’s not just “one man” above American law, but a whole crime family.

More than one, as you can see in the Oscar-nominated documentary, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which tells of how the Sackler family dodged liability for their opiod scam. All they had to do was take their billions out of Purdue Pharma’s account and put it in another, untouchable bank account. All the pesky lawsuits from the families of 500,000 people killed by the addiction? Settled for a mere $6 million.

If that strategy sounds familiar, it’s likely because you heard a year ago that most all funds were transferred from the “Trump Organization” under investigation in New York for defrauding charities. All of it went into a brand new account with the Trump name on it. All of it now untouchable.

You may also recall hearing during the 2016 presidential campaign that numerous lawsuits in at least four states had been filed against the fraud known as Trump University. All the pesky lawsuits from students holding worthless degrees? Settled for a mere $25,000 here or there, as well as contributions to the campaign coffers of at least three attorneys general.

Keep in mind, too, that in these cases the name Trump stands not just for the father, but for the sons, the daughter, and the holy rollers who worship the example they set, who do believe that tax evasion shows that someone is “smart.”

Who knew that, when Republicans talk of “family values,” they mean crime families?

Another term for this is “corporate socialism. ” As a Newburyport Daily News reader wrote after the paper ran my column on the train derailment in Ohio:

While the Republicans rail at socialism for people–Medicare, social security, etc.–they ignore, as do most Democrats, the way the so-called “free market” is socialized by corporate law, bankruptcy law, patent law, etc. Those laws have led directly to the massive inequality we have. The amount of asset shifting by those laws is enormous.*

Though he was talking about the railway industry’s grip on the Republican Party and its fingers on many Democrats, he was citing the very laws the Sacklers had used to escape penalties for knowingly pushing an addictive drug. I wrote back to tell him of the film I just saw, and to ask what more he knew of laws unfamiliar to me. He obliged:

Another “corporate socialism” issue arises in the context of patents. Although they allegedly inspire inventions, in many cases they are used by large corporations to shelve improvements that would cost them money or markets. Should someone in the “free market” not be allowed to reproduce a product, especially if they can do it cheaper? Why does the “inventor” get a seventeen-year head start. Also, many high-end labs, for example, require their employees to assign any patent rights to the lab, not just the inventor. I think that system is also a bit twisted.

His phrase “shelve improvements” lit another light-bulb. Back in the 80s, the “big three” American auto manufacturers were, with the aid of the Reagan Administration, able to suppress the development and marketing of electric cars. We can only wonder how many other products have been ditched, how much sustainable technology shunned for the sake of bottom lines.

As Granny D told us, “When elections are for sale, so is our freedom.”

On the subject of bottom lines, a neighbor chimed in with another comparison of my take on the train derailment to the pharmaceutical industry:

The one subject no one has researched is the power of pharmaceuticals in this country and the fact that more people are dying from prescriptions than street drugs. Three decades ago, you were in the minority if you needed daily meds; now, you are in the minority if you do not need medication. Cholesterol drugs have been listed as one of the top causes of ALS, and a recent publication stated the FDA is not reporting these adverse effects. –Probably because the membership has personally invested in stocks.

She didn’t name anyone, but her note is another sharp reminder that Republicans do not have an entire monopoly on crime family values. Big Pharma’s biggest hooks are in Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) whose daughter, Heather Bresch, was CEO of Mylan Inc. Mylan specializes in generic drugs and made national news in 2016 when it raised the price of a two-pack of EpiPen from $124 to $609.

Did I call myself and many other American teachers liars for parroting the ridiculous idea that no one is above the law? Or that the term “free market” is anything more than a cynical joke? I’ll do it again for promoting the myth that America is governed by the persuasion of merit, not by the influence of money.

Of course, if I’m ever charged with any crime based on what I’ve ever said, I could just use the excuse made by one of Donald Trump’s lawyers defending herself in the suit filed by Dominion Voting, a line quite similar to a defense used by lawyers representing Fox “News” against libel suits in recent years:

No reasonable person would conclude that the statements were truly statements of fact.

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*The column which drew this response is a condensed and update version of a recent blog. Here’s the column: https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/as-i-see-it-dollars-damn-us/article_fa91f15e-b4d4-11ed-afb6-036a42cb9298.html

He Would Prefer To

First thing to be said of Living is that it’s a film about idealism.

By now you’ve heard that it’s about an elderly man–a “humorless civil servant” as the promos tell us–learning that he has less than a year to live, regrets that his life has been devoted to little more than pushing papers, and decides he wants to enjoy life, “but I don’t know how.”

The bubbly, chatting, joking presence of a newcomer to the office he supervises helps steer him toward making a mark on the world. Not wanting to give too much away, let’s just say it will be a mark of joy.

By the time the credits roll, he will sing the Scottish lament, “The Rowan Tree,” a song aimed straight at the tear-duct but with the smile of nostalgia. His earlier “don’t know” becomes “I don’t have time to get angry.”

Could compare the arc of Living to Dickens’ Christmas Carol. Mr. Williams (Bill Nighy) is no Scrooge, but the diagnosis of a terminal illness is as jarring as the appearance of any number of ghosts. If ghosts terrified Scrooge to change his ways, Ms. Harris (Aimee Lou Wood) amuses Williams to do the same. Another newcomer to the office full of desks piled high with paperwork, much of which “we can keep here for a while,” is the baby-faced Mr. Wakeling (Alex Sharp) whose assistance, as devoted as Bob Cratchit to Scrooge, causes Williams to entrust him with keeping that mark alive.

Living also inverts Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener.” From “A Story of Wall Street” to a look at London’s carefully timed financial district, and from scriveners to accountants. But this time its the guy in charge who finds out that he would prefer to. Not “not to,” but to. Or, to be, rather than not be. And it’s the newcomer who serves him best and tells his story.

There could be three Oscar nominations for those roles, but Nighy has the only one for Lead Actor in a performance as subtle as Anthony Hopkins in his prime. If subtlety is power, then Living is as powerful as any entry on the Best Picture list. Despite that, it’s only other nomination is for Adapted Screenplay, adapted from Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 classic film, Ikiru.

A story that seems to end halfway in, Living is born anew with each of the four accountants Williams supervised adding a scene they witnessed as a piece of a puzzle, the full picture realized only upon completion. All of it good news adding up to a testament.

Wakeling frames the puzzle, delivering a eulogy to a young cop who had worried about failing Williams. His reassuring hand on the cop’s shoulder as he leaves may as well have been that of Williams’, a visual echo.

Wakeling also serves as our stand-in. The film begins and ends with him. If Harris was Williams’ inspiration, Wakeling is his legacy. Can he protect the mark Williams made? Part of that mark was to make Wakeling an idealist. Can he make marks of his own?

He wants to. But you’ll have to see what the film has to say about that–a film that asks us what we have to say about any idealism of our own.

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For the Love of Glamour

Always looking for new books about history, I avoid those covering years any more recent that the Sixties.

By the time LBJ abdicated and a resurrected Nixon took the White House, I was old enough to pay attention, and unlike most pot-smokers of my ge-ge-generation, however civic-minded they may be, I have a memory that recalls all of it. Not too long ago, friends called me a walking encyclopedia. Now I’m just an audio search engine.

Why re-live it? And no, the irony is not lost on me that I look for things old to find things new.

Weeks ago, when I caught sight of the title of New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman’s new book, I had to make an exception. Not because I wanted to know the inside story of what happened between June 2015 and January 2021, but because I had to know how much of a comparison Haberman makes between her title character and the con-man (or con-men as some of us English majors think) in the Herman Melville novel of the same name.

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America delivers far more than I thought. The first third of its 500+ pages serve as a history of New York City from the Sixties into the Nineties through the lens of Trump and his father’s sleazy real estate deals. Surprises abound, including early relationships forged with Rudi Giuliani, Al Sharpton, Don King, Ed Koch, Roger Stone (oh, what a story he is!), and others.

Haberman began covering Trump in the Eighties when he published his ghost-written The Art of the Deal, the months-long best-seller “that elevated a real-estate developer largely unknown outside New York into the American standard of aspirational success.” Behind that facade was fakery on every level. Fake contracts, fake estimates, fake claims, fake threats of lawsuits, and no end of contractors who were never paid. Even the publicists who called the newspapers’ gossip pages were fake. “John Miller” and “John Barron” were both Donald Trump, one becoming the namesake of his youngest son.

Confidence Man makes it clear not just that Trump regarded the office of president as that of a CEO, and the country as a company–his company with his donors as shareholders, some of them given cabinet positions to oversee the very industries and resources behind their own wealth. Though she may disagree, Haberman also makes clear that the disaster of the Trump administration is what happens when–to cite a mantra common to the Republican Party long before Trump hi-jacked it–government is run like a business.

Of course, that truth proves inconvenient to many Democrats as well. When Trump University was under investigation in several states during the 2016 campaign, Trump made campaign donations to the campaigns of at least three attorneys general. One to Florida’s Pam Bondi was widely reported but faded in the news under so many other Trump scandals. One that we never heard of went to:

California attorney general Kamala Harris… Her office ultimately took no action against Trump University even as it went after other for-profit educational entities.

Said Trump:

As a businessman and a very substantial donor to very important people, when you give, they do whatever the hell you want them to do. As a businessman, I need that.

Though Haberman never makes the accusation, her book makes the implication as clear and as deep as did the unread and unheeded Mueller Report:

Trump’s obvious affinity for Vladimir Putin–which, as Haberman documents, puzzled even his top aides–owes to his partnership with Moscow-based businessmen who took him there and interested him in building a hotel back in the Nineties. It was a business consideration that allowed Russian to warp an American election in his favor, that has led him to pander to Putin even to this day despite the invasion of Ukraine, that let him believe he could extort co-operation from Ukrainian Pres. Zelenskyy.

In a post-presidential interview, Haberman asks why he was attracted to build in Moscow for so many years. “Was it the challenge of it?”

No, I thought it would be a glamorous project. I do a lot of things for glamour. I like glamour. Do you know the word “glamour”? I love glamour.

If you want a close look at how this con-man became president and, to the tune of our National Anthem, turned the federal government into his own cash cow wrapped in both the Stars & Stripes and Stars & Bars with a crucifix as a bow on top, Confidence Man will not disappoint.

My only disappointment was that Herman Melville’s con-man (or –men) was nowhere to be found.

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To be honest, I was expecting nothing more than a mention in the preface, maybe a paragraph linking Trump to the long tradition of con-men and snake-oilers in the 19th Century, televangelists and Ponzi-schemers in the 20th and 21st. There is a single reference to P.T. Barnum. At a meeting with Republican leadership at Camp David–a place he preferred to avoid–Trump held a screening for one night’s entertainment.

Of the five films available, he chose The Greatest Showman, a bio-pic of Barnum who Haberman describes as “a promoter and entertainer who constantly craved more attention and respectability.” When it was over, Trump turned to his guests, exclaiming, “Wasn’t that great?”

Years before writing Confidence Man, Melville wrote “Authentic Anecdotes of ‘Old Zack’,” much in the knee-slapping style of Mark Twain for Yankee Doodle, a popular comic magazine, calling himself Gen. (later Pres.) Zachary Taylor’s “special correspondent at the seat of [the Mexican] war.” Barnum is spoofed in it almost as much as the title character.

BTW: We are about evenly divided, but I’m among the Melvillians who believe that it is likely more than one character who preaches philanthropy and accepts cash payments on the steamboat that floats down the Mississippi on April First of some unspecified year. They may have been in collusion, a la Roger Stone and Donald Trump. Could say that the lure of the novel is that the reader cannot tell, and that this was the author’s intention. Call Melville “Confidence Man.”

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60387898-confidence-man

Before We Bid Farewell

No matter what you ever thought of Jimmy Carter, a 2014 biography is a must-read to grasp the rise of the religious right in American politics.

Especially now with a president willing to tear down the Constitutional wall of separation between church and state to hustle his all-too-gullible base.

As introduction, author Randall Balmer draws a distinction between “evangelical” and “fundamentalist” lost on us today.

To understand the role of religion in a democracy—from Roger William’s conception to the founders’ delivery of the “wall of separation”—that loss must be redeemed.

Redeemer, the title, refers to public perception of Carter as an irresistibly ethical candidate following the debacle of Richard Nixon.

Indeed, the “outsider” status that today even insiders claim, came into vogue in 1976. Among presidents, Jackson was our first Democrat, Lincoln our first Republican, Kennedy our first Catholic, Carter our first Outsider.

But no one called Carter a “redeemer” until Balmer:

The electorate… had been complicit in Nixon’s transgressions… not once, but twice—despite the fact that ‘Tricky Dick’s’ long history of dirty dealings was hardly a secret. Casting a ballot for Carter… would expunge the voters’ sins and absolve them of complicity.

Amazingly, Balmer never mentions his title’s double-entendre:

“Redemption” was code in the defeated Confederacy for undoing the result of the Civil War—if not a return to slavery, then a caste system to keep freed slaves under the riding boots of plantation owners.

Redemption was the nullification of Reconstruction, Jim Crow its system, “States Rights” its slogan, and the Ku Klux Klan its Redeemers.

Applying that word to Jimmy Carter—of all people—may have been Balmer’s inside joke, but it has turned cruel with the rise of real Confederate redeemers Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Roy Moore, et. al.

Carter called himself “born again.” He taught Sunday school—even while president—and he was an evangelical.

America, Balmer notes, has always had two evangelical strains. A progressive strain promoted racial and gender equality and care for the less fortunate. Many of them voted for George McGovern—also a Sunday school teacher—four years before Carter appeared on the national stage.

The other, apolitical, regarded politics as ‘ungodly” until the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson fanned its fear and anger in the 1970s, not just against Carter, but Nixon and Gerald Ford—and most hatefully against Betty Ford—before him.

That flame begat the inferno of fundamentalism.

Five years before Carter, the IRS ended the tax-exempt status of segregated schools. Convincingly, Balmer details how the resulting suit, Green v. Connally in 1971, not Roe v. Wade in 1973, was the seed that sprouted the Moral Majority in 1979.

Falwell, Roberts, and others framed this as an attack on “religious liberty”—a battle cry of many Republicans, most notably VP Mike Pence and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

When Carter was president, the IRS prosecuted Bob Jones University. Not until 1983 did Bob Jones eventually lose 8-1 in the Supreme Court. Still, enough evangelicals were already fooled by the “religious liberty” ploy and galvanized against Carter in 1980.

The hostage crisis frosted what Republicans to this day deride as Carter’s “malaise” speech in July, 1979.

Never mind that Carter never used the word, or that his speech praises the resiliency of the American people and calls for less dependence on foreign oil—rather than blaming the public as Republicans still insist.*

Kudos to Balmer for including that speech—as well as a timeline:

When the position of Chief Justice opened in 1986, Ronald Reagan elevated William Rehnquist, the lone vote in favor of Bob Jones’ tax exemption.

He then chose Antonin Scalia to fill the vacancy.

So, too, Reagan undid Carter’s admirable efforts in human rights throughout Latin America, women’s rights, and energy conservation that would have avoided profound losses of blood and dollars America suffers to this day.

Carter and wife Rosalynn returned to Georgia and continued humanitarian efforts globally. In 2002 their Carter Center earned the Nobel Peace Prize.

As Balmer notes, it’s Carter’s “continuation of a life-long ministry.” If not for John Quincy Adams, I’d second another of his claims:

First president to use the White House as a stepping stone.

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*In 2017, the award-winning film 20^th Century Women reinforced the Republican misrepresentation of Carter’s 1979 address by taking an ominous 30-second clip from the opening of its 32 minutes and immediately attaching Carter’s sign off, “Thank you and good night.” Most everything in between offered solutions to the crisis, all while reminding the American public of our ability to meet challenges. Carter’s last line before the sign off: “With our common (American) faith, we cannot fail.”

A review of CNN’s film, Jimmy Carter: Rock & Roll President, which aired in January, 2021:

Jimmy, We Hardly Knew Ye

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18210748-redeemer

Overtime on the Conn

Upper Bend Cafe & Bruncheonette

MONTAGUE, Mass: Yet another needle in a haystack encounter last week out in the Upper Bend where the Connecticut River, soon after dividing Vermont from New Hampshire all the way from Quebec, takes a few twists after entering Massachusetts, giving rise to the city of Greenfield just north of my furthest delivery downriver in Deerfield.* This is the northern extent of the Bay State’s Pioneer Valley.

Opposite the city on the Conn is the hippie town of Montague, celebrated for its communes back in the Sixties. This is where Raymond Mungo wrote Famous Long Ago while other heavies of the counterculture–Marshall Bloom, Steve Diamond, Mark Vonnegut–passed through. Today you notice the “Black Lives Matter” signs in several downtown businesses. Usually I drive through, but my fave falafel and gyros place on Route 2 just over the bridge is closed for repairs, so into the Upper Bend Cafe & Bruncheonette I went for the first time ever.

Also the first time I ever saw the word “bruncheonette,” which honestly fits a menu heavy with breakfast offerings but short on sandwiches. No matter, as the place had a most comfortable feel that I did not want to leave. As a compromise, I went for the safe choice, grilled cheese, with tomato soup and coffee. When the woman at the counter announced the price, “sixteen thirty-nine,” I couldn’t resist:

“Oh, that was a good year for me! Galileo hired me as his lawyer, and I got him a reduced sentence!”

She just shook her head, her mask hiding any smile, assuming there was one. When I turned around, I was face to face with the unmasked wide smile of one of King Richard’s fiddlers from years and centuries past. She was up from the Bronx visiting her mother who lives nearby, and the two went out to lunch at Wagon Wheel only to see the same “closed” sign I saw a week earlier.**

Had I known she was in line behind me before I heard the price, it would have been easy to implicate her: “Look! Here’s Galileo’s niece! I taught her how to play her Stradivarius!”

The coincidence wasn’t just that we landed at the same place at the same time, both of us far from home from different directions in a restaurant where neither of us had ever been. It’s also that, for both of us, it was Plan B following a failure of the same Plan A.

If coincidence, as Einstein told us, is “God’s way of remaining anonymous,” then God works overtime on the Conn.

Our meeting was brief as I arrived just as they were leaving. Her mother, who could also pass for my daughter but not for Galileo’s niece, introduced herself on their way out the door, and I think I talked them into visiting Plum Island come summer. If not, at least I had the tastiest, crustiest, darkest, thickest, most satisfying grilled cheese sandwich in my four-century life. By the time I left, I was wondering if I had ever, in fact, tasted grilled cheese.

Excellent dark roast, too, at Upper Bend.

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*My knack for these encounters was the subject of a 2014 column that describes three–in Cleveland, Boulder, and on Boston’s Storrow Drive while stuck in traffic after spotting a South Dakota plate and getting the attention of the driver who turned out to be a student of mine at SDSU over twenty years earlier. It does not describe others in Denver, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Rapid City, and Portland, Maine:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/record-citizen/2014/09/22/sitting-in-haystack-full-needles/36355175007/

**A source tells me that Marta’s mom is a “great” piano teacher, a legend in her neighborhood where she once had a baby grand moved into a third-floor pad through its window.

Marta Rymer. Both photos taken on a chilly October day at King Richard’s Faire (notice the fingerless gloves) by Paul Shaughnessy.

Dollars Damn US

The irony of “thoughts and prayers” now being “sent out to” the people of East Palestine, Ohio, is that the very people quickest to offer thoughts and prayers are the ones who make environmental disasters–like mass shootings–far more likely than in any other country in the world.

By far.

As the families and friends of those lost in mass shootings know all to well, thoughts and prayers are more often an excuse not to act, to buy time, to then forget. A rug under which all unpleasantness is swept. Those making that excuse are not “the government,” but a part of it; not “congress,” but half of it; not “all of them,” but many of them.

Our inability or unwillingness to make that distinction is the foremost reason our problems not only go unsolved but keep getting worse.

As with the water crises in Flint, Mich. and Jackson, Miss., the Norfolk Southern train wreck is what happens when government is run like a business. It is the Republican Party that insists on this, and it has been Republican officials who have made the business decisions that have led to all three disasters.

Two weeks after the wreck, the toxic smoke and fumes still lingering along the Ohio-Pennsylvania border are also brought to us by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that allows corporations to buy politicians who can add to their bottom line–to them, the only line–constituents be damned.

If you doubt either claim, here are the plain, unarguable facts:

The Obama Administration imposed a rule requiring better braking systems on rail cars that carried hazardous flammable materials.
In 2016, the railroad industry poured more than $6 million into Republican political campaigns.
In 2017, the Trump administration repealed the Obama rule.

Throughout the Obama years and into Trump’s term, Norfolk Southern, according to Sen. Bernie Sanders:

… silenced whistleblowers, refused to take basic safety measures, slashed staffing to a bare minimum, denied their workers the dignity of sick days, and even authorized a $10 billion stock buyback giveaway to shareholders while neglecting to do desperately needed maintenance.

At the very time they were “neglecting to do desperately needed maintenance” on the grounds of “excessive costs,” they were dealing out $10 billion to shareholders and $6 million to Republican candidates. Could snark that the Republicans work cheap, but how can they complain when they themselves want everything run like a business?

This week, Heather Cox Richardson’s daily Letters from an American, notes that, according to the investigative journal The Lever, Norfolk Southern told regulators that new electronically controlled pneumatic brakes on high-hazard flammable trains (HHFT) would “impose tremendous costs without providing offsetting safety benefits.”

While wondering how any definition of “safety” could possibly exclude hi-tech brakes, we might consider that the railroads also lobbied to limit the definition of HFFT to cover primarily trains that carry oil, not industrial chemicals. The train that derailed in Ohio was not classified as an HHFT.

And which candidate did Ohio send to the US Senate last November?

That would be far-right Republican J. D. Vance who is blaming Biden for the accident. Seriously. He said, according to Richardson, that the administration is too focused on “environmental racism and other ridiculous things.” We are, he said, “ruled by unserious people.”

As Sanders concluded, “This train derailment is a symptom of a larger problem tearing our country apart.”

“Country”? A toxic cloud could be anywhere. Ditto an automatic weapon. How about, instead of looking at spectacular or heartwrenching photos, we looked at maps? Would it sink in that this is what America has become? Would we remember that the premise of this country was never soothing “thoughts and prayers,” but civic attention and participation?

Look at Ohio. Heart-shaped and about where the heart would be if we imagined America as a living being from the head of Maine to the foot of Florida. Demographically according to race, religion, ethnicity, occupation, economic level, and its urban/rural blend, Ohio is the most representative of the fifty states. In the sense that we were all New Yorkers following September 11, we are all Buckeyes now.

Herman Melville, depressed by the commercial failure of his later novels, complained in a letter to his friend Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Dollars damn me!”

If we fail to undo the damage of Citizens United and continue to vote for a political party dedicated to “running government like a business,” Melville’s complaint will be America’s epitaph.

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Source: https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/february-15-2023?

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/ohio-train-derailment-map-where-195624251.html;_ylt=AwrFAYuZtu5j7g070wOjzbkF;_ylu=c2VjA2ZwLWF0dHJpYgRzbGsDcnVybA-

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Measuring Our 70s

On Wednesday, a friend and fellow blogger wrung my mind from whatever it was on with an unusual headline: “a week of questions – Three.”

Did I miss or not notice or forget that his two previous daily blogs posed questions? Wednesday is the third day of the work-week, earning it a nickname ripe for double-entendre, “Hump Day.” But that was not my immediate reaction. Instead, I thought he–who first steered me toward the treats of Measure for Measure and Henry IV Part One in a previous life–was waxing Shakespearean by putting the noun before the number.

A link to his blog appears below so that you can weigh your own reaction against my anticipation of three questions–and my delight at finding one with three answers:

why I was trying to learn a conversational level of Spanish at this time… in my life.

First answer is about being a better citizen and honoring a culture. He lives in San Diego, on a border which my daughter once crossed by mistake after driving into a wrong lane just a month after getting her driver’s license. It may have been just the front tires of her Chrysler LeBaron that reached Mexico before the customs agent graciously let her turn around, but that’s another story. My friend’s third answer was simply that learning Spanish is fun–which I suppose it must be since he’s taking lessons from a friend while the two of them sit and sip coffee at a table outside a San Diego Starbucks.

His second reason was what hooked me: A new language…

will help what brains cells remain up in my noggin continue to light up. Maybe, even, shine brighter. Possibly, even, fire up a few new ones.

Lots of possibilities to keep brain cells firing. While he learns Spanish, I do math in my head, on the spot. Started doing it a few years ago as a way to stay alert while driving long distance as I often do, imagining the license plates on cars in front of me as cribbage hands and adding their scores. Before long I was dividing as much as I could, looking for common denominators, high and low. When I had a knack for that, I started testing for three- and four-digit prime numbers. No one ever believes this, but I entered Salem State College as a math major, only to have the excitement of the Sixties turn me into an English major, which at the time was merely a ruse for joining the student newspaper where another excitable boy turned me on to Measure for Measure and the wildly entertaining duo of Falstaff and Prince Hal.

After my friend offers his answers three, he adds a riff about falling awake on a new day:

this Wednesday has come to fetch me, to host me, and I am its guest. Of course, I can see it the other way too. Here I am, up again, hosting another Wednesday in this pretty long life of Wednesdays…

Well, now, that is an implied second question. To answer it, I closed my eyes and in about 15 seconds figured that he had hosted or visited Wednesday 3,853 times (+ or – 1) in his life, about 112 more than I have. The plus or minus accounts for leap-years. Yes, we can count them to 18, but only one of seven February 29s is a Wednesday. Since that does not divide evenly, we would need at least one very old calendar to be exact, and the whole point of this is to do it in your head–to light up brain cells in the noggin. Honestly, I always feel vaguely insulted when someone hands me a calculator, but that, too, is another story.

At the end of his blog, the dual role–guest and host–reminds him of a song by Aretha Franklin, “Who’s Zooming Who?” and he calls it “a worthy question.”

And just like that, I realize that there are indeed questions three–even though, while I have been writing this on Thursday morning, he has posted “a week of questions – Four.”

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a week of questions – Three