Defective Dem Defects

PHOENIX (Dec.9)–Angered that the defeat of Hershel Walker guarantees that she will remain the stupidest person to ever serve in the United States Senate, Kyrsten Sinema has announced that she is leaving the Democratic Party.

Sinema has yet to say whether she will continue to caucus with Democrats–as do independents Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Angus King of Maine–or with Republicans as she awaits instructions from her corporate donors.

A chance remains that the eccentric opportunist–who often looks like she’s on her way to a flower show, perhaps hoping to revive music’s glam-rock era as a glam-gov of politics–may join the Republicans who are more inclusive of eccentrics and opportunists–a la Marjorie Toxic Greene, Gym Jordan, etc.–in their rank ranks.

As Andy Borowitz put it in his headline today:

Nation Shocked To Learn That Kyrsten Sinema Had Been a Democrat

Sinema’s drift from the Democrats became apparent just months after Joe Biden was sworn into office and called for economic reforms that required an end to the filibuster–a legal method of obstruction that the Southern states contrived well after the Constitution was written and ratified.

The filibuster’s first and foremost purpose was to protect slavery from those who wanted to end it.

Now used to stop legislation that most American’s want–such as protecting reproductive rights and gun regulation–just so a Democratic president will not get credit for it, the filibuster is dear to Sinema’s corporate donors. Hence, instead of siding with Democrats, the stylish dunce wrote an op-ed column to explain that she could not vote to end a law that is in the Constitution.

When Arizona Democrats, understandably aghast, pointed out that the filibuster is nowhere in America’s founding documents–that it is explicitly against the Constitutional principle of majority rule–Sinema held her ridiculous ground, apparently unable to tell John Adams from John Calhoun.

Maybe Arizona needs more statues?

Precedent for this appears in Donald Trump’s campaign speeches when–to the delight of his MAGA crowds–he ridiculed the word “emoluments,” not just a word mentioned, but a concept emphasized in the Constitution. And we’re surprised he’s ready to terminate the whole thing?

Amazingly, no one on Sinema’s senate staff caught the error or fact-checked it after the objections were raised. This also suggests that she has always been under complete control of her corporate donors, and her staff exists as mere dressing. But they are all so very well dressed that, as one Republican grumbled, they “seem to think the Capitol corridors are fashion runways.”

Reports from Arizona say that Sinema is leaving the Democratic Party to dodge a primary challenge. No doubt Arizona Dems feel betrayed by a former Green Party activist who joined them in 2004, immediately making her mark by lambasting another Democratic turncoat, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, for abandoning John Kerry’s presidential bid.

That was then. By 2018 Sinema’s star rose to the top of hopefuls Arizona Democrats had for unseating Republican Senator Martha McSally. Now she seems ready to join ranks with Arizona’s US Rep. Paul Gosar who retweeted Trump’s call to terminate the Constitution. So what happened?

Is she positioning herself to be Tulsi Gabbard’s running mate in 2024?

Before 2018 Sinema never heard from corporate donors. Judging from her willful ignorance regarding the filibuster, she may have never heard of corporate donors–or of the attempts of Arizona’s late Senator John McCain to regulate them, or of the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision, Citizens United, to give them free hand.

After today’s announcement, there’s a chance that Sinema’s donors may be as done with her as is the Democratic Party. Now that they’ve split Arizona voters who lean Democratic, they’ve guaranteed victory for whatever smiling, head-nodding clown the Republicans want to run.

New Jersey resident Dr. Oz is available. So is Texas resident Hershel Walker.

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Written in 2019, just four months after she joined the senate:
https://www.salon.com/2019/04/22/has-kyrsten-sinema-become-the-joe-manchin-of-the-west/

Four months ago, and more to the point of campaign finance:
https://fortune.com/2022/08/13/sinema-wall-street-money-killing-tax-investors/

Today, about to announce:
FILE PHOTO: U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) walks from her hideaway office to the Senate floor at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, U.S. August 2, 2022. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst/File Photo

Enemy of the Good

Let’s get this straight: All senate Democrats with the exception of the one from West Virginia voted in favor of the provision for paid sick leave that all railroad unions sought.

Repeat: Democrats favor paid sick leave.

And this: Only six of 50 senate Republicans, not enough to surpass the filibuster, voted for paid sick leave.

Repeat: Republicans oppose paid sick leave.

Put another way: If we put more Democrats in Congress, they can and will pass a bill calling for paid sick leave.

Also: The Biden Administration pushed for paid sick leave, and Biden himself endorsed paid sick leave. He still endorses paid sick leave.

Bottom line: If, Democrats regain the House, add enough seats in the Senate to either eliminate or overcome the filibuster, and keep the White House in 2024, the railroad workers and those who work in many other occupations across the country will have paid sick leave.

Why am I being so repetitive in stating this?

Because Biden and Democrats are now being blamed for the absence of paid sick leave in the compromise bill that passed. No matter that it was Republicans, nearly all of them, who blocked the provision. Right wing trolls are already posting memes on social media with cartoons showing Biden behind his aviator glasses and licking ice cream telling a worker, “No way, Sonny!”

For people who can read, the loudest attacks are coming from progressives who still think that a strike would be preferable to the compromise. Predictably, they say nothing of consequences that would have included mass layoffs of workers, many of them unionized, in other sectors of the economy.

Gee, I wonder who the American public would blame for that?

Chris Hedges, in an essay headlined, “Know Thine Enemy,” claims that the Democratic Party “has become a full partner in the corporate assault on workers.” David Swanson, Executive Director of World Beyond War, makes the same case applied to America’s military presence around the world. Former Ohio Rep. Nina Turner, an early and avid supporter of Bernie Sanders in 2016, simply charges “the Senate” with blocking paid sick leave.

They all make valid points, well worth considering, which is why I attach the links below. Hedges accurately describes “class warfare,” a classic inconvenient truth we must confront. Swanson’s insistence that the Democrats ignore activists and whistle-blowers at their–and our–own peril reveals a classic example of a party taking their own supporters for granted. On the other hand, Turner’s tweet is a classic example of Barack Obama’s frequent quote from Voltaire, a warning against “making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

Yes, I wish I could side with Hedges and Swanson and other progressives–including a couple of long-time college friends who have been putting those valuable if sometimes impractical voices on my screen. Wish, also, that Nina Turner was still in the House, or the Senate, or in the administration.

There’s a good chance she could be if those of us left of center, including progressives, realize that we are faced with a two-party system. This may be news to those who can’t remember Gore v. Nader in 2000, but like it or not, division on either side guarantees victory for the other.

As an aside, Ranked Choice Voting would change that, making third parties possible and viable, and campaigns more focused on issues, while also making extremists and cranks less likely to gain nominations.

Until that happens, we are stuck with a numbers game: More Democrats in office, more votes for progressive legislation such as reproductive rights, voting rights, gun safety, consumer protection, addressing climate change, and paid sick leave.

As well as what needs emphasis here, occupational safety.

There’s good reason for the outcry regarding paid sick leave, but the term by itself understates the problem. Though it is complex, Heather Cox Richardson gives it a thorough and clear summary in her most recent newsletter:

The story behind today’s crisis started in 2017 when former president Trump’s trade war hammered agriculture and manufacturing, leading railroad companies to fire workers—more than 20,000 of them in 2019 alone, dropping the number of railroad workers in the U.S. below 200,000 for the first time since the Department of Labor began to keep track of such statistics in the 1940s. By December 2020, the industry had lost 40,000 jobs, most of them among the people who actually operated the trains.

Those jobs did not come back even after the economy did, though, as railroad companies implemented a system called precision scheduled railroading, or PSR. “We fundamentally changed the way we operate over the last 2½ years,” Bryan Tucker, vice president of communications at railroad corporation CSX told Heather Long of the Washington Post in January 2020. “It’s a different way of running a railroad.”

PSR made trains longer and operated them with a skeleton crew that was held to a strict schedule. This dramatically improved on-time delivery rates but sometimes left just two people in charge of a train two to three miles long, with no back-up and no option for sick days, family emergencies, or any of the normal interruptions that life brings, because the staffing was so lean it depended on everyone being in place. Any disruption in schedules brought disciplinary action and possible job loss. Workers got an average of 3 weeks’ vacation and holidays, but the rest of their time, including weekends, was tightly controlled, while smaller crews meant more dangerous working conditions.

PSR helped the railroad corporations make record profits. In 2021, revenue for the two largest railroad corporations in the U.S., the Union Pacific and BNSF (owned by Warren Buffett), jumped 12% to $21.8 billion and 11.6% to $22.5 billion, respectively.

As another college friend, responding to Richardson, writes with sarcastic flair:

Thank you, Pres. Grump for all you have done to our country. It is not far from the truth to say the unions are the victims, and the pawns.

Uncle Joe is caught in the middle between the industry, the unions, and Congressional shenanigans. It would not have made much sense for him to veto the bill that got to his desk.

Still, Richardson reveals why we should not dismiss the objections of progressives out of hand. How closely were the reasons for those record profits considered in the debate over sick leave? Or, how quickly were those reasons dismissed, and by which senators?

Would there have been a different outcome if this had been cast to the public as an issue of occupational safety rather than paid sick leave for workers who already have three weeks paid vacation and paid holidays, as yet two more college friends point out?

My college friends–from Salem State to South Dakota State–may not believe it, but those questions can be erased in 2024 if we pay attention to numbers. As we have seen over and again, only one party supports occupational safety while the other, plus one senator from a coal-mining state, keeps opposing it.

Ditto paid sick leave, with apologies for the repetition.

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Swanson’s remarks start at about 19:30.

https://scheerpost.com/2022/12/04/chris-hedges-know-thine-enemy/

For the full text of Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter:

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/december-5-2022?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

https://newsmakerslive.com/joe-biden-is-moving-to-stop-a-rail-strike-workers-are-upset/

Tipping Canoe

Though not in the least surprising to anyone paying attention, the tweet from Mar-an-Ego this weekend was shocking in the extreme.

Broadcast, print, and social media are buzzing with a question I never thought I’d hear in my lifetime: Has any president, while in office or later, called for “terminating” the US Constitution?

For two years many of us have asked if any president, prior to January, 2020, ever attempted to reverse the result of an American election. Here’s as close to the answer–for both–as I can come:

Yes, there is one.

Our tenth president, slaveholding Virginian John Tyler was elected to the Confederacy’s House of Representatives 16 years after he left the White House. Tyler had not been elected, but became president in 1841 when our ninth president, William Henry Harrison, died of pneumonia just one month after his inauguration.

Tyler was so unpopular that neither the Democrats nor the Whigs wanted him as a candidate in 1844.

Who knows what he did in the years leading up to the Civil War and secession, but I’d say that running for the House in the CS Congress was, in effect, a call for the termination of the US Constitution.

If you are wondering why I say “running for” rather than “serving in,” it’s because Tyler died of a stroke before he showed up in Richmond to take the seat.

Had he died in 1841 instead of the newly elected Harrison, another former president, John Quincy Adams, would have called it a stroke of luck. Adams had high hopes for Harrison as a native Virginian and military hero before settling in and representing Ohio in the US Senate. Adams was confident that Harrison could guide the South out of a slave economy, and he knew that Tyler would preserve it. The only president to serve in Congress after leaving the White House, Adams fought Southern gag orders and pushed for Emancipation for 17 years before dying at 81 on the House floor in 1848.

A one-term president defeated in his bid for re-election in 1824, Adams considered the death of Harrison and the swearing-in of Tyler as the most demoralizing time of his life.

The answer may be two.

However, if we add the one I have in mind, then we may have to consider Richard Nixon and possibly Herbert Hoover as well. As unlikeable as they were, and for all the harm that both did, there’s no reason to pin either with a “call to terminate” Constitutional law. At least not an open call.

Coincidentally, the one I have in mind was also a vice-president who ascended after a president’s death and was never elected on his own. Ironically, he and Tyler always bitterly opposed each other.

Pres. Andrew Johnson, a Tennessean who was on the 1864 ticket with Lincoln to appeal to voters in the border states, may never have called for a suspension of the Constitution, but as historian Brenda Wineapple tells us, he was…

“… a man with a fear of losing ground, with a need to be recognized, with an obsession to be right, and when seeking revenge on enemies—or perceived enemies—he had to humiliate, harass, and hound them. Heedless of consequences, he baited Congress and bullied men, believing his enemies were enemies of the people. It was a convenient illusion.”

In effect, all of the humiliation, harassment, and hounding, made the “radicals” of the time–i.e. senators and representatives who had pushed for Emancipation and were then pushing for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments–fear that Johnson could subvert a premise of the US Constitution:

“But if this impeachment failed, given all the favorable circumstances, all the breaches of law, all the usurpation, the staunchest Radicals felt that no American President would ever be successfully impeached and convicted, and there would alas be no limit to presidential power.”

If what happened this weekend goes without consequence, that fear will be realized. Given all that has already gone free of consequence, perhaps it already has.

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A movie waiting to happen, with Tommy Lee Jones in the leading role:
https://search.yahoo.com/search?fr=mcafee&type=E210US1494G0&p=the+impeachers+wineapple+book

Not a movie waiting to happen, good riddance:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Tyler

William Henry Harrison as a general about 35 years before his election to the presidency. What made his reputation was a victory over the Sac & Fox tribe at a place named Tippecanoe. Hence, the campaign slogan in 1840: “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too!”
https://drloihjournal.blogspot.com/2017/10/william-henry-harrison-governor-of.html

E Pluribus Rio

Over 45 years ago, National Geographic ran a cover story on the Ohio River that began with a startling claim:

The Ohio carries more water than the Mississippi to their confluence at Cairo, Illinois.*

If that wasn’t enough, the magazine went on to remind this already pop-eyed and drop-jawed reader that Cairo is 125 miles south of St. Louis where the Missouri joins in. Therefore, the Ohio carries more water than the Mississippi and Missouri combined.

Don’t know what geography textbooks say today–at times I wonder if geography is even taught today–but in the Eisenhower-Kennedy years, their lists of the world’s longest rivers always hyphenated ours: Mississippi-Missouri.

As a kid who imagined myself as an American citizen at an early age–writing a letter to Richard Nixon while wearing a Jack Kennedy pin when I was nine–I found the hyphenation vaguely insulting. Other continents’ river names stood alone: Nile, Amazon, Yangtze, Yenisey. Ours needed help.

But there I was, a grad student taking a cartography class faced with the topographical fact that most of the water flowing through New Orleans and the Delta into the Gulf of Mexico is not on either side of the hyphen favored by record keepers, but from the uncredited Ohio.

Past 70, I learn that Herman Melville called the Mississippi bluff a century before I was born on the banks of New England’s industrial-grade Merrimack River. While setting the last novel published in his lifetime, The Confidence-Man, on a Mississippi steamboat, he observed the confluence in St. Louis. He then read a book titled A Condensed Geography and History of the Western States: or, the Mississippi Valley (1828) which confirmed what he thought he saw.

An elegiac description of it was found in his desk after he passed. Scholars believe it was intended as a prologue for Confidence-Man, but that Melville decided it was too “expansive” to suit the “restrained” tone of the novel.

Lucky for me he didn’t feed it to the fire, as I learn I was not alone in my quest for geographic truth, topographic accuracy, cartographic precision. True, Melville never mentions the Ohio, but by that same token, while telling others of my discovery 40 years ago, I’ve never mentioned the Tennessee River that joins the Ohio within 40 miles of Cairo.** And it is the Tennessee, not the Ohio, that FDR’s New Deal tapped for hydro-electric projects to help take us out of the Depression.

All that matters is that, unlike the solo performances of the Nile in Africa, the Amazon in Brazil, the Yangtze in China, ours is the effort of many, a fluid E Pluribus Unum. I’ve mentioned just four, but just look at a map and consider the stretch of the Arkansas, the Cumberland, the Red, the Canadian, the Wisconsin, the Minnesota, the Des Moines, and the Platte, North and South.

Once again, I’m indebted to Melville. This time for bringing this memory to the surface and into this installment of “Mouth of the River,” and I am attaching his description of the Mississippi-Missouri confluence below.

Must say, though, that I now wonder if Melville, who spent most of his youth in Albany and his senior years in New York City, knew that the Hudson–which connects the two with a series of straight lines joined by slight angles rather than the sweeping curves characteristic of rivers–is technically not a river, but a fjord.

If you doubt that, just look at a map.

https://archive.org/details/hudsonhistory0000lewi_c1a7

Melville’s River

As the word Abraham means father of a great multitude of men, so the word Mississippi means father of a great multitude of waters. His tribes stream in from east and west, exceeding fruitful the lands they enrich. In this granary of a continent, this basin of the Mississippi, must not the nations be greatly multiplied and blest?

Above the Falls of St. Anthony, for the most part he winds evenly on between banks of fog or through tracts of pine over marble sands in waters so clear that the deepest fish have the visible flight of the bird. Undisturbed as the lowly life in its bosom feeds the lordly life on its shores, the coroneted elk and the deer, while in the walrus form of some couched rock in the channel, furred over with moss, the furred bear on the marge seems to eye his amphibious brother. Wood and wave wed, man is remote. The unsung time, the Golden Age of the billow.

Like a larger Susquehannah, like a long-drawn bison herd, he browses on through the prairie, here and there expanding into archipelagoes cycladean in beauty, while, fissured and verdant, a long China Wall, the bluffs sweep bluely away. Glad and content, the sacred river glides on.

But at St. Louis the course of this dream is run. Down on it like a Pawnee from an ambush foams the yellow-painted Missouri. The calmness is gone, the grouped islands disappear, the shores are jagged and rent, the hue of the water is clayed, the before moderate current is rapid and vexed. The peace of the Upper River seems broken in the Lower, nor is it ever renewed.

The Missouri would seem rather a hostile element than a filial flood. Larger, stronger than the father of waters, like Jupiter he dethrones his sire and reigns in his stead. Under the benign name of Mississippi it is in truth the Missouri that now rolls to the Gulf, the Missouri that with the Timon snows from his solitudes freezes the warmth of the genial zones, the Missouri that by open assault or artful sap sweeps away forest and field, graveyard and town, the Missouri that not a tributary but an invader enters the sea, long disdaining to yield his white wave to the blue.

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The cartography class I mention was at South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD, about 60 miles north of Sioux Falls on the Sioux River, a tributary to the Missouri you can see on this map, though it is unlabeled. The Sioux is honestly more of an occasional flood plain than a recognizable river, something that can be said of many rivers in the Plains. Notice the proximity to the Des Moines and the Minnesota, tributaries to the Mississippi. As I recall, I lived within 20 miles of the divide between the two basins. https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/maps/mrtp/mrtp.htm

*Vesilind, Priit J. “The Ohio–River with a Job to Do.” National Geographic, 151, No. 2 (Feb. 1977), 245-273. (Accessible online if you have a subscription.)

**This was as far as Huck Finn and Jim wanted to go in pursuit of freedom, Cairo being the southernmost tip of Illinois, a free state, while every state south was slave. They needed to get off the Mississippi and onto the Ohio, but they missed the juncture due to heavy fog. That necessitated Huck’s decision: Either turn in the runaway Jim for his own freedom and a bounty, or aid and abet Jim, making himself a fugitive for violating Southern state laws. That scene may well be American literature’s finest moment.

Our Holiday Gag Disorder

When I arrived at the restaurant I was surprised to see my friends with two women I did not know. Fine by me. A table of six can hold a single, focused conversation as easily as one of four without crosstalk that always makes me crave Excedrin III.

The two were cousins of my friend with Alzheimer’s, allowed out for an afternoon in the custody of her brother who can be as reticent as she without any such handicap. This was her birthday, hence the family additions.

Ralph, the sixth member of the party, the one who arranged it, tends to be chatty, often effusive, with a wit that makes all he says worth it even when it is nonsense, which it often is. Yes, he and I have enough in common to be friends for 51 years and counting.

We were barely in our chairs when Ralph (not his real name) told us that we could choose between two specials: roast vampire and werewolf a la mode. I laughed at the reference to Hershel Walker’s campaign gibberish, but held to the first rule for holiday gatherings in modern day America and said nothing that could in any way be construed as political.

One of the cousins smirked, but the other asked Ralph what he was talking about, and so he told her. She nodded, but said that “the mainstream media” makes too much of things about Republicans–all while they cover up for Democrats. Her example was Nancy Pelosi’s 84-year-old husband getting beaten with a hammer while at home in San Francisco. I was still making great effort not to roll my eyes at “mainstream media” when I heard this:

They say he was having a gay affair with that guy.

An explosion rattled my teeth:

Who’s they?

Others at the table froze while she claimed that “everybody knows” that the media “censors everything,” and “there was this report but they won’t air it.” I countered that what she calls censorship is actually fact-checking and that, unlike her source, credible news sources will not circulate rumors, slurs, and fabrications that have no basis in fact. I ended by noting that she did not answer my question, so I hit–and I mean hit–repeat:

Who’s they?

Well, it’s a story that’s out there.

Who’s they?

Anyway, it’s not important.

Who’s they?

I can’t remember. I’m not saying it’s true.

Then why did you repeat it?

After a pause:

I was just using it as an example.

During the pause, I looked past her out the window and pointed: “That’s a blue heron!” Without being a shout, it was louder than my exchange with the cousin, during which, also with great effort, I kept my voice down by clenching my otherwise rattling teeth.

You could feel the sigh of relief around the table as the cousins and the brother turned their heads, and as Ralph and the sister looked up. By that time, the heron was gone, no doubt because it was actually a red herring with wings.

There or not, I rode that bird into a conversation about falcons, hawks, owls and others we see on Plum Island. Before long, the party safely landed in agreeable topics ranging from homes to family, from films to music, from hobbies to Sixties nostalgia, and from the clam chowder to the fried clams soon before us.

Next morning I was enjoying a dark roast in Kafmandu to propel me up the Maine Coast when I overheard two fellows at a nearby table talking about holiday gatherings.

At first, one seemed to agree with his friend’s plans to limit his guest list and to avoid gatherings where he knew so-and-so would be present rather than having to hold his tongue about any subjects other than family, work, hobbies, sports, and weather.

Though tempted to lean in with my approval, I waited to hear the other’s response. In a summary paraphrase:

Wish I could do that. Or keep doing it. Thing is, this has gone too far because we keep letting it slide. We’ve gone with the flow only to find that we flow in a gutter. No, it has to be confronted before we drown in a sewer.

Now I wanted to agree with both of them, but Kennebunkport beckoned. Long-distance drives well accommodate long thoughts, and what could be longer than arguing both sides of a case you just prosecuted on pure impulse the previous day?

From the McCarthy Era in which I was born, politics and religion have always been topics unfit for polite company.

Up until a few years ago, however, you could remain friendly with folks you knew were of different persuasions, even those who you knew believed you were going to burn hell forever for not accepting the sanctity of their one and only true God. There were student activists at Salem State back in the Sixties who drank and laughed with arch-conservative faculty in a nearby watering hole every Friday afternoon following arguments “hotter than a matchhead.” I was one of them until I got thrown out for being under-age.

When did it change? Some liberal commentators cite Newt Gingrich’s “Contract with America” in 1994, others the white backlash to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. Both were landmark events, and there’s no doubt Dick Cheney’s Darth Vader approach to foreign affairs and Sarah Palin’s coherence-free descriptions of “real Americans” greased the skid.

Also greasing the skid was the commonly accepted if unwritten rule that nothing can be compared to Hitler and the Nazis, or to slavery. We held to it even as swastikas and Confederate flags started flying publicly in June of 2015. Did we confuse “comparison” with “equation”? Did we forget that making comparisons is a mode of thought? With that self-imposed restriction on our ability to think, why are we now so surprised and shocked to see Nazi insignias and the Stars & Bars all over the American landscape today?

Aversion to any such talk is understandable, especially following revelations of a former president’s connections to those who advocate white supremacy and boast that they “love Hitler.” I still sympathize with the first fellow I overheard in Kafmandu, and I truly regret making three college friends and one of the cousins uncomfortable for a few minutes in the Village Inn.

But I must side with the second fellow. Just as the self-imposed ban on comparisons to what happened in a democracy in the 1930s has greased the skid toward authoritarianism in this century, so too has making politics taboo in polite conversation.

Talk about disconnection: Do we even notice that the words “politics” and “polite” are from the same root?

Kennebunkport is not that long of a drive, but it is long enough to conclude that, although no one uses the term “gag order,” this pact we impose on ourselves to avoid political talk is exactly that. Over the holidays it’s understandable, practical, perhaps necessary. But year-round it becomes a dereliction of civic duty.

In a word, it’s un-American.

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https://www.deviantart.com/barisgbo/art/family-meal-gouache-painted-353883107

Revenge of the Kitchen

If your taste in films is akin to having comfort food night after night, you can skip The Menu, and you can skip the appetizer I’m about to serve up.

No, not a review of plot or cinematography or acting–except to say that Ralph Fiennes is mesmerizing as Big Brother and Anya Taylor-Joy makes for an irresistible Winston Smith. Instead, I’ll recommend it with comparisons. Think of them as substitutions even if “Chef” is at his loudest when he insists “there are no substitutions!”

If you ever read Orwell’s 1984, you know I’ve already made the first–though Fiennes’ character is always addressed as “Chef,” and Taylor-Joy is either Margot from Grand Island, Nebraska, or Erin from Brockton, Mass., depending on which piece of the map you want to put in the puzzle.

“And what map would that be?” asks Chef with a tired smile.

Far from an update of any classic book, The Menu is a suggestion of a genre–the totalitarian genre from Brave New World to The Handmaid’s Tale, and from Melville’s fictional Ahab to the all-too-real Donald Trump. Set in a restaurant on a small island named “Hawthorne,” Menu recalls the darkest Twice Told Tales that delve into witchcraft and deals with the devil–recast with wit more laugh-out-loud than dry.

Comparisons to other films? First that occurred to me was Robert Altman’s 1994 spoof of the fashion industry, Ready to Wear. From nude runway models to empty plates, its satire is as naked as its wrath.

More immediately it plays in the same tragi-comic key as Don’t Look Up. If you laughed and marveled at how Meryl Streep so effortlessly channeled Republican politicians while playing a US President drunk in denial, you’ll appreciate the provocative twist of an Asian woman attacking a white woman with a knife while yelling, “You will not replace me!”

Another topical echo is Chef’s private screed to Margot, or Erin, or is she Alice in Wonderland? Or Dorothy in Oz?

Chef: Who are you?

Margot: I. Am. Margot. Why do you care?

Chef: Because. I need to know if you’re with us or with them.

He gives her the choice to be among “the givers or the takers,” a dichotomy that right-wing politicians have harped on since Mitt Romney let it out of the bag in 2012.

It would be easy to simply cubbyhole Menu as a take on the cult of personality. Think Jim Jones in 1978 with dinner guests in Jonestown, Guyana, or Heaven’s Gate in 1997 as a swank restaurant rather than a home in California. But we’ve seen that cult of personality is no longer so easily cubbyholed–or confined to the places where they implode.

In more ways than one, Menu explodes. If I was writing a review, I’d call it dystopian, but who has any taste for that? For the sake of this appetizer, I’ll call The Menu a horror film–in the same sense that films such as Soylent Green and The Hunger Games horrify us.

Still, the film is sauteed and served in laughs that hook the audience as completely as the gourmet servings that keep Chef’s diners savoring every mouthwatering bite no matter how gruesome or real the “theatricality” between courses. Not to mention a sommelier who chirps of “cherry and tobacco notes” as he glides from table to table. Seriously, if you can’t laugh at Chef’s description of S’mores, you need to consult a neurologist. I’m just a projectionist.

For all she endures, even Margot–or Erin, or Dorothy, or Alice when she’s ten feet tall–relishes the cheeseburger Chef made just for her.

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Beware ‘Bait Leader’

At the end–or is it the beginning?–of our annual string of shop-till-you-drop days, from Black Friday into this week, I learned of a tactic new to me, though it may be as old as Cyber Monday to you.

My cousin, who detests doing business online as much as I, was quite taken by television ads for a new toy “available at all Walmarts, Targets…” and a few other big box outlets, one of which was just around the corner from her. Billed as a toy for the six- to 36-month set, this proved irresistible to a woman who now has three great-grandchildren in that range.

Unable to find any “Star Belly Dream Lites” on her own, she asked an employee who pulled out and tapped his iPad before telling her that the soft, cutesy, colorful, battery-operated (three AAAs) dinosaurs, teddy bears, and unicorns that cast moving stars on a bedroom ceiling to help toddlers fall asleep is sold online only.

“The ads say ‘available at‘.”

“Yes, it’s available on our website.”

“The ads say at!”

“At. On. What’s the difference?”

Maybe it runs in the family, or more likely the two of us have reached the age where we know there’s no point in trying to reason with people who think language is fungible. Put another way, we accept a thing we cannot change.

In awe of a woman who has more great-grandkids than I have grand-kids, I told her she was right to turn and walk out rather than attempt an answer to his question. And since she was so enamored of the toy as a perfect gift, I agreed with her decision to go online and have Star Bellies sent to her–just as I have t-shirts from the New Bedford Whaling Museum sent to me every year in the weeks before Christmas.

Like my mother, her aunt, she gets them weeks ahead of time, and as soon as I could confess my last-minute habit, two Star Bellies and a similar doll with buttons embedded in its hands, feet, and ears were on the table in front of me. I became so engrossed in pressing those buttons for their various sounds, she said she would get one for me, whereupon I picked it up and shoved it back in the box.

Our conversation turned to and stayed on family matters until I took my leave, but something about her Walmart story seemed to be in the car with me. I killed the radio to think it through.

What’s happening here is somewhere between bait and switch and loss leader. Call it bait leader.

The toy is the bait, and it’s still available, but not where you are led to believe. Instead, they have you in the store for everything else. For the seller, it’s the best of both of those other tactics: There’s no need to switch, and there’s no loss.

Like most advertising, it’s likely well within legal bounds even if ethics are nowhere in sight. And I can’t tell who’s responsible: The toy manufacturer or the box stores? All of the above seems likely.

As I say, I’ve finally reached the age of serenity–which may be a kind word for senility–and I accept what I cannot change. So, Star Bellies need fear no class action suit from me. Nor do Walmart, Target, or any others practicing bait leader.

But I do retain the courage to do what I can, and so I thought I’d caution you about those ads. Beware those smiling faces who say “at” when they mean “on”–not on a shelf, but online.

Here’s to the wisdom to know the difference.

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https://www.mystarbelly.com/?mid=11179644

Melville’s Time Warp Again

When my friend Louis hears of a book about to be published, he goes online and puts a hold on it at his public library.

That’s a step ahead of my habit. My local library has a “New Books” display in its lobby that I veer right toward, always finding at least one appealing title.

Today, however, I went online looking for a specific edition of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade published in 1857—on April Fools’ Day to be exact.

What filled my screen was a book of the same title published just last month: Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America.

Call it inevitable: Ever since the Calf of Babel descended the golden escalator in his own tower in 2015, he has gained comparisons to characters created by Herman Melville over a century and a half ago.

A bitter and bemusing irony cannot be lost on Melville fans recalling that the author of Moby-Dick and “Bartleby the Scrivener” died in obscurity in 1891, all his books long out of print.

So estranged was he to public life that he ordered a tombstone with a blank scroll for his final resting place. A middle finger to the world? A white flag?

Not until the Roaring 20s did an admiring grad student write a biography that set off “The Melville Revival.” Not sure if this has lasted into the 21^st Century, but at the time I left teaching in 2002, several of his titles were still staples of school curricula—“Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” and Billy Budd.

Wouldn’t surprise me if college teachers, for the sake of immediate relevance, added Melville to their reading lists soon after the “American Carnage” inaugural address on Jan. 20, 2017.

Or high school teachers if they have anything that can honestly be called academic freedom, as this is the stuff that those who harp on “Woke Culture” do not want young people to hear.

Most everyone I know agrees that there was no redeeming quality to the Trump Administration. A few exceptions will cite his business deregulations, overlooking consequences to the environment, to workers, to consumers.

As I’ve started telling these folks, it’s a bit like crediting cancer as a weight-loss program.

However, for us Melvillians, maybe there is a redeeming quality if we take some consolation in a second revival for our guy.

A character who is part of American mythology and known even to those who haven’t read the book, Moby-Dick‘s Ahab was cited from the start of the MAGA campaign all the way to this month’s election.

Trump’s claim that he “could shoot someone” echoed Ahab’s “strike the sun” boast, and in reference to Trumper Kari Lake’s refusal to accept defeat, Nicole Wallace of MSNBC quipped that “Arizona is Donald Trump’s white whale.”

Between those were essays in several publications. Under the headline, “What Melville Can Teach Us about the Trump Era,” Ariel Dorfman of The Nation tells us that:

Melville could have been presciently forecasting today’s America when he imagined his country as a Mississippi steamer (ironically called the Fidèle) filled with “a flock of fools, under this captain of fools, in this ship of fools!”

So, yes, it was inevitable that a book with a Melville title would describe him. And it’s no surprise that a large chunk of the promo for Haberman’s book applies just as much to Melville’s:

The through-line… is the enduring question of what is in it for him or what he needs to say to survive short increments of time in the pursuit of his own interests. Confidence Man is also, inevitably, about the world that produced such a singular character, giving rise to his career and becoming his first stage.

As you might guess, I put a hold on the new Confidence Man and am now awaiting its arrival in any of the 36 members of the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium.

But I won’t be holding my breath. According to the MVLC website, mine is the 166^th hold on just 36 copies—one for each library—none of which have yet arrived here in the northeast corner of Massachusetts.

Meanwhile, I’ll content myself with Melville’s trip down the Mississip, grateful to him for limiting it to a single day—April Fools’ no less—while bracing myself for the seven-year-and-counting ordeal outlined by Haberman.

By that time, Louis might be able to tell me all about it.

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https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/what-herman-melville-can-teach-us-about-the-trump-era/

Woodlawn Cemetery, Bronx, New York. Photo by Michael Boer: https://www.flickr.com/people/onewe/

Discolored Friday

No, I’m not going to attach any racial meanings or connotations to the term commonly used for this day, but I am going to report that it doesn’t mean what you think it means.

Or what I thought it meant until I stumbled upon “Black Friday” while searching for something else online.

I’d say serendipitously stumbled, but that word applies only to pleasing discoveries, and what I found is no better an origin than what we’ve come to believe. Most folks would likely call it worse, much worse, but I’m among a minority who have long considered this day to be America’s annual Golden Calf, a celebration of materialism champing at the bits of family values and religious traditions.

That’s another argument for another time–and I made it publicly eight years ago with a satirical newspaper column that, if I may say so myself, becomes more literally true every year:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/dont-miss-out-on-sucker-sunday/article_cc4903bb-81d5-5aa7-8b2b-ec46d1406969.html

Though my Golden Calf metaphor still holds true, and though today has long been the day when American businesses enjoy massive sales that propel them into the black–even those which have run in the red for much of the year–the word Black has nothing to do with finance.

Instead, Philadelphia police began using “Black Friday” back in the early Sixties to describe the chaotic crowds that appeared when suburban tourists went downtown in droves to start their holiday shopping.

Philadelphia? Sometimes I wonder if the term “brotherly love” refers to Cain and Abel.

Surprising? You may be as much surprised by the word “downtown” rather than “shopping malls” in that report, especially if you are under a certain age, but malls did not begin to usurp America’s commercial life until the late-Sixties.

Notice, too, the word “suburban.” Oh, the irony! White people storm the gates, and Blacks are now to blame. That’s why, before the term shot like a pandemic out of Philadelphia, merchants regretted its negative connotation and tried to promote “Big Friday.” That gained a big yawn, and so the idea of black ink was written over the original script.

“Black Friday” thus went from police log to ledger book, but I promised no critical race theory, so please disregard that last paragraph–though it is worth noting that, like my Golden Calf theory, the original meaning of “Black Friday,” lost long ago, has re-emerged as true and becomes truer and truer every year, pandemic be damned.

Perhaps it was no mere coincidence that the whole movement toward historic preservation took hold soon after the first Black Fridays in the early Seventies when the federal government initiated the National Trust for Historic Preservation–which would soon bloom with a rebirth of street-performance.

Coincidence or not, one setting offers chaos in the pursuit of mass-produced merchandise with Muzak oozing from the walls, while the other, at its best, offers the charm of local craftsmen and -women with live music played for the season.

That’s a story that could fill a book, and it is a recurring theme throughout Pay the Piper!–most explicitly in the chapters titled, “Busking the Red, White, and Blue” and “A Call to Un-Mall.”

Call this Black Friday if you want, but I’ve always been more inclined to saunter, perhaps busk downtown on a Red, White, and Blue Friday. Today it rains, but there’s always tomorrow.

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https://buskersdelight.home.blog/pay-the-piper/

Awaiting Thanksgiving

On the morning before Thanksgiving I take one of a dozen seats that line three walls of a waiting room for a routine checkup with my dermatologist.

Four middle-aged patients sit apart from each other along two walls awaiting to be called, and I sit before the third wall, all of us facing the center of the spacious room. All four hold a mobile device before them, sometimes pecking away with thumbs more than fingers. I look around.

Two of the screens cast bright reflections onto the ceiling from seats that are set in front of a wide window. One is a tight, bright circle with a slight tail that makes it look like a comet as it darts erratically back and forth toward the center of the ceiling. The other bears an uncanny resemblance to a jet as seen from the ground just after takeoff.

Though the jet faces away from the comet as if to escape, it slides backward as much as forward and side to side. The two never collide, although I flinched at more than one close call. As well as when the jet jerked from the ceiling onto the wall behind and disappeared into the window.

The comet, for its part, at times moved onto a small stretch of wall beyond the reach of the window, shooting like a sudden bolt of lightning straight down–completely unnoticed by the woman holding the screen that cast it. And no matter that it went right through a small, red, rectangular device set in the wall labelled “Fire Alarm.”

About then I thought I heard a call for “John,” the name by which all medical and governmental agencies know me, and got up only to hear the assistant enunciate “Dawn.” So I sat back down as the woman with the jet left the room and another woman took the very seat Dawn had vacated.

She had gray hair. She had no device in hand. She looked around, and when our eyes met, we may have smiled at each other as we nodded, though we were wearing masks and I can vouch for only my own. I was tempted to comment on what the dermatologist’s sound system was offering at the time, Nancy Sinatra singing “These Boots Are Made for Walking,” but I was afraid to imply an assumption about her age.

Before I could think of anything else, a young mom entered the office hand in hand with a daughter about eight. As the mom went to the desk, the girl veered into the waiting room, went to look out the window, and kneeled on the chair next to the woman without a phone.

Said the woman to the girl: “I like your shoes.” Said the girl: “Thank you.” Sang Nancy: “That’s just what they’ll do.”

The two then fell into conversation about the characters–cartoon, I think–on the shoes. To which I would have listened in hopes of voicing a remark about Donald Duck, always my favorite, or Goofy, long-time my personal role model. Instead, I heard “John” with an unmistakable J and left the room to have my own comets, jets, and cartoon characters looked at.

Yes, it does occur to me that if I had a device of my own, I could show you pictures of this morning’s indoor air show. Question is, if I had such a device, would I have seen the show at all? And if gray hair had one, would she have noticed the girl’s colorful shoes?

My answers to those questions make me most thankful for what I do not and will never have.

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