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

Spanish-speaker Winston Cushman and Math Major John Garvey, Salem State College (now University) circa 1973. Photo by Golfer Steve Salvo.

Oh Say Can You Feel?

If social media has given me one pet peeve, it is comments that have nothing to do with the links to which they are added.

Often they are reactions to the photo, photo caption, headline, or an opening line that happens to be visible before the “see more” that brings a reader to the full article. In my case, that would be another 650 words for a newspaper column or anywhere from 400 to 2,000 for a blog.

Yesterday I posted a blog headlined “A Bowl of Super Consensus” about what historians call “consensus history” in the pre-game broadcast of the Super Bowl. And I connected its distorted patriotism to a half-time show that could have been titled “Dance of the Golden Calf” or “Lowest Common Denominator Stomp” or maybe “March of the Spastic Robots.”

Ya, I’m an old guy who still thinks that profanity says more about the speaker than it does the spoken about.

Debate that all you want, but I might have used a profanity when I first spotted a comment added this morning:

Missed the pre-game. Someone posted a picture of a player (not sure who) crying during the National Anthem. Others commented on how it chokes them up too. Honestly, all I can think about are the horrors and hypocrisy it represents. No tears here except for the marginalized people who have been oppressed throughout the history of this country in the name of American Exceptionalism.

I’ve always been keen to hear the anthem, likely because I’m far more attuned to the tempo and instrumental rendition, the feel of the music, than to the lyrics. A solo-saxophonist, no lyrics at all, brought me to tears in Fenway Park 40 years ago.

Friends are amused by my insistence that everyone hush during the song, but they appreciate it and later thank me. For over fifty years, many renditions–Jose Feliciano (hopeful), Jimi Hendrix (defiant), and Lyle Lovett accompanied by a solo cello (pure, penetrating) are the first that come to mind–have all been so memorably vivid that I have choked up while talking about them.

Perhaps I regard the song as a reminder of what we could be–which is why I tune out the militaristic renditions that insist on what we should be. And why I’m quick to criticize the showboats who use it rather than serve it with higher purpose. And, yes, I am aware of the racist stanzas that follow but are, thankfully, never sung.

My anger at the commenter was brief when I realized that she was actually filling in something I should never have omitted. I had made no mention of the anthem, a glaring oversight in a blog purportedly about faux-patriotism in a pregame show in which the anthem is always showcased. And so, even though I didn’t share the thrust of the comment, I gave it a “like” intended more as a thank-you for prodding me to fill in my own omission–and she is certainly correct about the damage that has been excused by the idea of “American Exceptionalism.”

The irony in this is best captured by a line from historian Howard Zinn:

The problem with historical honesty is not outright lying. It is the omission or de-emphasis of important data. The definition of “important,” of course, depends on one’s values.

For the record, I thought Chris Stapleton’s version was soulful, thoughtful. My guess is that, if we regard the music without the lyrics, conservatives would have hated it for the same reason they hated Feliciano’s version in 1968 and so many other renditions since. If my hunch is right, liberals loved it for its pure emotion.

Admittedly, that’s all generalization. Realistically, I think we can say that any American’s reaction to our National Anthem–lyrics or music–depends on one’s values. It is, after all, the only national anthem that begins with a question.

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The Houston Astros have been in so many World Series of late, I’m not sure what year this is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUC8s9ytXCg

A Bowl of Super Consensus

As heard on television, the most calculated lasting impression had nothing to do with the game or the commercials or the halftime show.

Granted, all three had flammable moments ripe for controversy:

A flimsy penalty call near the end of a tie game that left the team on defense no chance to recover, making it all too easy for the offense.

A player with the ball in the closing minute of a tie game taking a knee on the two yard line rather than scoring an easy touchdown. A strategy to do with running out the clock on the assumption that your field goal attempt will be good. (Since it was, we won’t hear of this.)

A commercial entirely about a fight between fans of Coors Light and Miller Light, complete with slogans and numerous displays of both cans, to determine which is being advertised–only to end when both are swept away and a hand places a sign before the screen saying, as does the voice-over, “This is an ad for Blue Moon.” (My cousin wonders if all three breweries chipped in for the ad.)

A commercial for chocolate-covered clams that shocked everyone and sickened many until we realized that it was M&Ms’ spoof of Fox “News'” imbecilic complaint that the cartoon spokescandies were “too Woke.” Let’s see: Teletubbies, Disney, Barbie, M&Ms… Who’s next? The Energizer Bunny? Aflac’s Duck? Limu Emu?

And at half-time, yet another Golden Calf production that began with the singer being deus ex machina-ed from the heavens to the field where she would sing with at least a hundred cloned dancers identically dressed making identical moves while she occasionally grabbed her crotch and then smelled her fingers with delight or bent over and grabbed her ass as thousands of spectators cheered and waved their arms in the air, many of them holding devices in the air to photograph or record the glaring spectacle.

And we wonder how so much of the American population has become ripe for totalitarianism.

A Golden Calf analogy may seem over the top if you don’t know that she came down from the sky with a song titled “Bitch Better Have My Money.”

Moses, of course, is nowhere to be found, nor would he or his tablets be welcome. Instead, the camera pans to a lingering shot of two of the most influential people in America today, South African Elon Musk chatting with Australian Rupert Murdoch in a luxury box. If you still think the Golden Calf comparison is too much, perhaps the Tower of Babel will do.

None of the above, however, has left the most calculated lasting impression on us.

Not long after Kansas City fans enjoy their victory parade–but long before Philadelphia fans recover from the trauma of having lost three national championships within four months–all of the above will fall well into the background of life across the United States of Amnesia and among a population not exactly known for its attention span.

For all of the broadcast’s blunt strokes, Fox Sports did place one subtle item on our nation’s conversational table, such as it is. Prior to the kickoff and prior to the National Anthem, there was a story of a mythical Stars & Stripes as old as the country itself that had flown at all of America’s most significant events, at home and abroad. In a voice that sounded much like (and may have been) John Wayne, it was a seemingly harmless tribute, and for many viewers it likely was a heartwarming patriotic statement from start to finish.

That would include flattering references to generals Robert E. Lee and P.T.G. Beauregard for their service to the US in the Mexican War with no mention of their later taking up arms against the US, and therefore the flag being praised, years later.

This is called “consensus history.” Historian Peter Charles Hoffer’s 2004 book, Past Imperfect, describes it as the presentation of history as if very little was ever wrong. And for what did go wrong and is impossible to hide–such as the Civil War–no one was to blame. Consensus history boomed in this country after 1880 when book and periodical publishers began to covet a Southern market–and when Northern politicians started asking for Southern votes, preachers for Southern congregations.

Consensus history both aided and was aided by the reassertion of white supremacy in the South with Jim Crow laws and a reign of terror, most notably by lynching, over newly-freed African Americans that saw them stripped of voting, property, and educational rights. And that often saw their neighborhoods and businesses raided, looted, and burned. Wilmington, N.C. 1898; Springfield, Ill. 1916; East St. Louis, Ill. 1917; Tulsa, Okla. 1921, being the most spectacular among many.

Along with a resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan, the most visible manifestation of this was the placement of Confederate statues and monuments in public places that have been at the center of heated controversy and occasional violence in recent years.

This includes Manatee County, Florida, where the newly elected Republican commissioners have voted to repair a statue of Lee that was broken during removal five years ago and put it back up next to the county courthouse where it had stood since the advent of consensus history.

Last night, the Superbowl’s pre-game flag story helped justify that move. The added dig at those who “disrespect” the flag with no specifics about what constitutes disrespect will justify more just like it. Clearly, Fox Sports assumes that most viewers will apply this insinuation to African-American athletes silently protesting racist and deadly police practices by not standing for the Anthem. They can bet every dollar Murdoch has that few viewers will think of the American flags superimposed with Confederate and Nazi symbols, as well as with the name and/or face of a former president, that have appeared at rallies and one attempted insurrection since 2016.

It hardly matters that Fox Sports included the singing of “Lift Every Voice,” generally considered the “Black National Anthem,” soon afterward. Like the Star Spangled Banner, the ceremonial coin-flip, the half-time show, the presentation of the trophy later on, it served as a formality–while the commercials, like the game itself, did very well to keep us wondering.

That story of the flag, however, was something else. Call it consensus history or call it patriotism, it is tailor made for those who want to keep America in one carefully choreographed line.

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

Wetting My Shirts

Gyms bill themselves as “no judgement zones,” but I have to wonder about the guy on the treadmill in front of me wearing a “Port City Sandwich” t-shirt.

Not so odd as the kid behind the counter at the fish market across the river who wears a “Waste Management” shirt while putting your cod on the scale, but still. Of course, he’s young enough to be my grandson, and if I had a physique like his, I’d be at Port City scarfing down a pastrami & Swiss smothered in Russian dressing on dark rye, not in a damned gym.

Before I left today, a second young fellow mounted another machine in front of me with a t-shirt for “Donut Jack’s.” Couldn’t read the fine print with the location, which is just as well since it prevents me from finding the place. A nice looking shirt, but I’d never dare wear it for obvious reasons.

Then again, I don’t think twice about putting on my New Bedford Whaling Museum shirt with Moby-Dick himself stretched across my chest. Considering that I have two of them, it’s more of a boast.

Today, my shirt was blank. When I ended the workout, it was also soaked, so when I dressed after a shower I put on another: “Front Street Coffeehouse,” my old haunt in Salem where I’ve wolfed down many sandwiches and pastries.

Nor do I judge the soundtrack of the place–not while on the treadmill. The gym itself is sprawling, and so the music is diffuse, hardly noticeable except for the steady beat that keeps me walking at 3.0 or 3.2, sometimes 3.4 mph. Those same sounds, however, make the locker room a torture chamber.

Under the unrelenting hate and rage of these “vocalists,” I have noticed that most of the so-called “songs,” in addition to repeating a single, short sequence of notes over and over, never changing from beginning to end, also repeat a single lyric with very little else if anything at all to accompany it.

Can’t help but laugh at some. The funniest was in a female voice: “I Got Your Money!” Twice in the song, a male briefly appeared to answer, but it was all blurred, so I couldn’t tell if he was asking for its return or giving her investment advice.

Today, while donning my FSC shirt, I was amazed to hear an actual song with discernable notes. Again, the lyrics were blurred, but the feel was conversational, quite a break from the constant rage I had come to expect. More than that, the guitar work was as precise as it was high-energy. Most surprising of all, the music actually developed, as if the musicians actually had something to say. Wow, it was so good! Like something we’d have put on a turntable back in my Salem days when we fired up joints to enhance our listening pleasure. How the hell did this get on here? was all I could think.

Finally dawned on me that the song titles and the artists are identified on a monitor above the lockers, so I looked up. ZZ Top! How the hell did they get in here?

Today marks a full month since I put myself on treadmills to solve my weight problem, and so far it seems to be going well.

That’s a lukewarm endorsement only because I have yet to step on a scale since a doctor’s appointment on Dec. 30 and was frankly horrified by the number it reached. I don’t have a scale at home. My mother tried to give me one, but I told her to give it to someone else. A few years later, I gave hers to someone else. That was almost twenty years before the pandemic when weight became an issue.

Another doctor’s appointment looms on Tuesday. Just 48 hours from right now, I will stand on a scale for the first time since the shock of Dec. 30. These two days will include the Superbowl and at least three obligatory IPAs, which I’ll offset with two more days at the gym where I am now up to 3.15 miles and 470 calories in one brisk, shirt-soaking hour.

I can report that I’m feeling more lively of late, but I have yet to see any difference. So it all depends on the number I see Tuesday morning. When the doctor tells me to stand on the scale, my curiosity won’t stop me from pointing to the front of the shirt I always wear to the doctor’s and the dentist’s:

I would prefer not to.

A couple years ago, I wore that to a job interview–and was hired!

On Tuesday, no matter what the scale says, that shirt will be soaked within an hour of leaving the doctor’s office.

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https://www.masslive.com/entertainment/2019/08/zz-top-50th-anniversary-tour-headed-to-boston-foxwoods.html

While the above photo and accompanying link are from 2019, ZZ Top has scheduled a 2023 tour from April through September. As of now, there are no New England dates, the closest being Saratoga Springs, NY: https://www.zztop.com/