All Things Reconsidered

We’ve all had our share of conversations, meetings, classes, interviews, transactions, negotiations, arguments, and, yes, first dates followed by a night, a day, a week, and I dare say longer when we think of things we should have said.

You may think there’s no such thing as a do-over, but I have a blog.

On the night of Martin Luther King Day, I got a call from a fellow who wanted to talk about a column I had in the local paper under the headline, “Where is MLK when we need him?”

He does a podcast called Race Matters which he tried to get me on a little over a year ago when I reviewed his William Lloyd Garrison lecture, the 2nd annual here in WLG’s hometown (link below). I dodged it until he forgot it, although I enjoyed a few drinks with him in The Grog a month or so later.

When he named Newburyport’s Senior Center as a place to meet, I only figured that he had others in mind for a conversation. Many events happen there, large and small, so I walked in unsuspecting, only to find myself seated in a recording studio in front of a microphone and camera, all of which I assumed he kept at The Governor’s Academy well south of Newburyport where he is the Dean of Multicultural Education and teaches history.

Links appear below to my column (updated and adapted from a blog headlined, “Calling Dr. King”) and Edward Carson’s podcast, both of which can speak for themselves. However, if I had it to do over again, here’s what you would hear.

Regarding his memory of having George Wallace as governor while growing up in Montgomery, Alabama:

Edward, you’re not old enough to remember George Wallace, though I’m sure you heard plenty about him at an early age. Did you also hear of Lester Maddox?

He’d have likely said yes, but I still wouldn’t believe he could have anything near my real-time memory of the Georgia governor. Though, to be fair, he did quote Wallace’s mantra, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” so why wouldn’t he remember Maddox wielding an axe handle in defense of his Jim Crow restaurant against integration? I’d have taken another tack:

All these anti-woke pronouncements we are hearing from governors DeSantis and Abbott, gag orders on talk of race in Florida, bounties on those seeking reproductive rights in Texas, transport of immigrants under false pretenses to Northern cities–in one case an island–are a replay of Wallace and Maddox sixty years ago.

Not sure what he would have said to that, but no matter what it was, I’d have continued:

Wallace and Maddox were in a competition. Which one could prove himself the most worthy front man for white supremacy? The Republican idea of a Southern Strategy existed long before Nixon brought it into the open. Democrats and Republicans were vying for Southern votes to tip an otherwise balanced scale. Who would they deal with? Both Wallace and Maddox wanted that role.

I’d pause here, but not for long:

DeSantis and Abbott are doing the same, only this time the stakes are higher, not to help pick the king, but to be the king. Or to replace a king whose base is base in both senses of the word. Which one can be the nastiest, the most cynical, the most malignant, the most likely to ridicule a handicapped man, insult a woman who asks direct questions with lines like “She had blood coming out her wherever,” and dismiss developing nations as “shit-hole countries”? DeSantis and Abbott are vying for that role.

I’d pause again to let it sink in, but quickly add:

Regarding race, their task will be to find more Kanye Wests and Hershel Walkers to stand with them in photo-ops, smiling and nodding their heads to every hateful thing they have to say–which is all they have to say. Neither DeSantis nor Abbott needs P.T. Barnum to tell them how to play to the lowest common denominator–not anymore than they need Tom Hanks to tell them that every lead role needs supporting roles.

I have a hunch Edward would interrupt me here to add something. And I think I know what he’d add. If not, I would say it:

And both have had Trump show them that all supporting roles must be filled with yes-men.

One other item late in the interview: In the column, I had quoted King’s prediction shortly before his death that America was heading back into the Dark Ages. In the interview, Edward asks if I think that has come true, and I offer my opinion that it is.

Now I realize that I didn’t need to offer an opinion. I have proof. For starters, former Republican Congresswoman Michele Bachmann of Minnesota ran in the Republican primaries in 2012 with a stump speech all about the Enlightment and Renaissance being where western civilization turned away from God, and all went wrong. Four years later, that became a key part of the MAGA creed.

But I can do better than that. Whatever I say in the video, strike it from the record, and replace it with this:

Edward, you may not know this, but I am a strolling minstrel in a Renaissance faire, King Richard’s down in the cranberry bogs way south of Boston every fall. Been in it since 1999. Part of my routine is to be at the gate as people leave at the end of the day. I banter with them as much as I play, and a few years ago, before the pandemic, I came up with a great laugh-line: “Come back next year! We’re going to put Galileo on trial.”

Edward has a rich and easy sense of humor, even with serious subjects, so I’d laugh with him, but only for a bit before continuing:

Don’t laugh too hard. Just weeks ago, Republicans took control of the House, and they now call the shots for every House committee. One committee has already slated as its first order of business calling in Dr. Fauci and grilling him over the handling of the pandemic.

Second chances, take backs, mulligans, and do-overs are all well and good if you can manage them. But when jokes like that start coming true, there’s a much larger do-over that needs to be re-done.

-30-

The Martin Luther King Day column:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/columns/as-i-see-it-where-is-mlk-when-we-need-him/article_d1c5752a-9053-11ed-857d-d782d2eb8b5f.html

The William Lloyd Garrison Lecture blog:

What It Looks Like in Public

As American as Cherry Pie

What if the real reason that Ron DeSantis and other Republican officials want to place gag orders on the teaching of African-American history has less to do with race than with labor?

The question would be inescapable to anyone reading of what contemporary historian Gunnar Myrdal called the “mass lynching” of African-Americans by whites in East St. Louis, Ill., on July 2, 1917.

Before there was racial conflict, the white laborers in the factories and stockyards along the Mississippi were starting to unionize, as were workers from coast to coast. In immigrant cities such as Lawrence, Mass., in 1912 and Paterson, N.J., in 1913, and in mining communities such as Ludlow, Colo., in 1914 and Matewan, W. Va., in 1920, the magnates called on law enforcement to keep unions at bay. In East St. Louis, the Aluminum Ore Co., Armour Meat Packing, and others sent agents across the rural deep South to recruit black men with guarantees of steady jobs and high wages.

None of it was true. As the blacks soon learned, they were there for white workers to see and fear as replacements.

All of this is documented in Never Been a Time: The 1917 Race Riot that Sparked the Civil Rights Movement, a book published in 2008, a decade before the 1619 Project drew the ire of those who want to bury America’s past under a security blanket of nothing-to-see-here–and before the history of Tulsa’s “Black Wall Street” forced itself into the national consciousness.

Author Harper Barnes points out that East St. Louis was the deadliest race riot in America until the aftermath of Rodney King’s beating by LA police in 1992, but he warns against comparison. In 1992–as in the 1960s in Watts, Detroit, and Newark, and ever since–the violence was all in the streets. In East St. Louis–as in numerous similar cases from Wilmington, N.C., in 1898 to Tulsa in 1921–white mobs raided Black neighborhhoods pulling men, women, and children out of their burning homes, sometimes throwing them, dead or alive, back into the flames.

The sight of newly arrived blacks disembarking trains may have inflamed white workers over an immediate concern for their jobs, but it became a pretext for running cars through black neighborhoods with a shooter firing a rifle out of every window at the middle-class homes of families that had been there for generations. As in Tulsa, it wasn’t that blacks were lazy and prone to crime that motivated white backlash, but that blacks were industrious and successful.

And the North was not the safe haven that we might like to believe. Says Barnes:

Race riots, as black militant H. Rap Brown suggested in the incendiary 1960s, are “as American as cherry pie.” Long before the black riots of the sixties, whites rioted against blacks in cities across the country. Decades before the Civil War, in such Northern bastions of abolition such as Cincinnati, Boston, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and New York, and in smaller cities and towns throughout the North, blacks were attacked in the streets by gangs of whites, and their neighborhoods were invaded and sacked. African-Americans were severely beaten and killed, and black homes and institutions–including schools, churches, and even orphanages–were destroyed by white mobs long before the end of slavery.

That would be enough for DeSantis and his ilk with their fabricated objections to “critical race theory” to want America’s inconvenient history suppressed. But Barnes offers more, including an observation by Sherwood Anderson a century ago calling East St. Louis “the most perfect example, at least in America, of what happens under absentee ownership.”

Or, as cartoonist Aaron McGruder (The Boondocks) quipped, “the inner city without an outer city.”

Both quotes, like much of Never Been a Time, reveal as much about America’s economic reality as its racial divide. At the start of Black History Month, which is now effectively banned in America’s fourth most populous state, DeSantis can celebrate a suppression of labor history as much as of racial history.

The rest of us would do well to re-connect the two.

-30-

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/harper-barnes/never-been-a-time/

Hope for the Unknown

I’m always amused by those who think that, because I’m the projectionist, I know why things do or do not happen in a film, or that I know what happens to the characters after the credits roll.

Do they think I see an annotated version of it? Or that I’m privy to all that landed on the cutting room floor?

Before I saw Women Talking, I was in the lobby following three showings as audiences left. Each time there were women charging right at me, demanding more than asking:

“Where are the men?”

At first I thought they meant the lack of males in the audience, and the very title of the film dares one to joke: “Maybe they hear enough at home?” Held my tongue on that one, though I couldn’t resist the crack that it may be the most redundant title I’ve ever heard.

So when I did see it, I was already looking for the answer, only to find a cast of women already looking for their answer. Rather than an accumulation of evidence, Women Talking goes right to the verdict. Or, the vote: Do nothing, fight, or leave.

Director Sarah Polley’s adaptation of Miriam Toews’ 2018 novel of the same name is as terse as film gets. It doesn’t matter where the men are, though it heightens tension and hints at a backstory when “attackers” return to the colony–unnamed and unlocated–in the dead of night, both in flashback and within the 12-hour span of the story.

That terseness allows Women Talking to stand for all human rights conflicts whether within nations or families. How many Native American tribes took that same vote in the 18th and 19th centuries? How many individual women, married or single, make that choice today? And what about parents in violence-torn Central America? Or parents in Flint, Michigan, or Jackson, Mississippi?

We might think that the film is set in the 19th Century if not for a car with loudspeakers blaring “Daydream Believer” cruising down the colony’s dirt roads to take the 2010 census. Two preteen girls chat with the driver whose face is just one of two adult males we see–if only in his rearview mirror.

We see a dozen women of three generations make the final choice for about a hundred who were evenly split between fight or leave. One wonders if the “do nothing” option was there only to remind us that a few still take it, as does Frances McDormand’s character, Scarface Janz, whose case must be compelling to those who stand knee-deep in the cement of religious dogma.

The rest must act. They debate. After so much worry for what might await them in the outside world, Ona, played by Rooney Mara, muses:

Hope for the unknown is good. It is better than hatred of the familiar.

Says the young narrator:

It was all waiting to happen before it happened. And it happened effortlessly.

Oh, it’s a serious film verging on a graduate seminar covering the nature of evil, free will, forgiveness, and faith. In a time when Roe v. Wade is revoked and a political party condemns what is “woke,” we could call this film the 21st Century version of Thelma & Louise.

But Women Talking comes up for air at just the right times when one of the two grandmothers, Greta played by Canadian actress Sheila McCarthy, asks to tell a story about Ruth and Cheryl.

These are the two horses who draw her wagon. If there’s an obstacle in the road, they don’t quibble over it, they go around. Later we learn that, if she has trouble steering them where they are, she need only look down the road as far as it goes–a remark also indicative of the film’s hypnotic cinematography and soundtrack.

Women Talking offers an equally subtle, humane touch in Austin, played by Ben Whishaw, the colony’s boys-only school teacher who the women recruit to “take the minutes” of their meeting. His relationship with them, both in backstory and in the moment, is memorable enough for a review of its own–which is to say, better left to the film.

That, by the way, is the answer to the question I went in with, “Where are all the men?”

I’ll leave it to the film’s narrator. Yes, pay close attention to the narrator–and don’t be late.

-30-

Manifest Identity

Among American history’s most misquoted lines is, “The British are coming!”

On his horse over a year before independence was declared, Paul Revere was himself British as were all the townspeople and farmers along his route. Using that word would have been nonsensical. Since the troops stationed in Boston were commonly called “Regulars” by the colonists, it is likely he used that term. Of course, by the time the first talking film was made, the word “Regular” fell flat and “British” seemed more to the point.

To this day we forget that the revolution did not begin with one united population seeking independence, but with a confederation of 13. And even after Thomas Paine coined the galvanizing name, United States of America, people still thought of themselves according to colony or region, Pennsylvanians and Virginians, or Carolinians and New Englanders.

A new book, Indivisible: Daniel Webster and the Birth of American Nationalism, traces the evolution of how we perceived ourselves from our break with England to our break with each other. Gradually, our identity was defined less by state than by region, North and South, with the slave economy as the wedge between all attempts by John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster and others to make E Pluribus Unum come true.

Others, most notably John Calhoun, were determined to maintain the South’s distinct identity of white supremacy and slave economy, and a skewed Constitution enabled the South to do exactly that: The wildly disproportionate Electoral College, the equally disproportionate composition of the Senate, and the 3/5ths clause which counted enslaved people as 60% of a person for the sake of a census upon which representation in the House and the Electoral College was based–while not allowing those enslaved people themselves to vote.

Today, the 3/5ths rule is long gone, but a disproportionate Electoral College and Senate remain in a document that many Americans–especially Southerners for much the same reason they did two centuries ago–consider sancrosanct.

Enter a third region into the mix, the West, and the countdown to Civil War begins. According to author Joel Richard Paul, the South wanted to counter the spread of Northern industry into the Great Lakes region with a spread of their own slave economy into Mexico (and Cuba). At the time, Mexico stretched north all the way into northern California and what is now Wyoming. The South wanted more slave states, and with Tennesseans flooding into Texas–and with Southern presidents such as Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, and John Tyler calling the shots–a fabricated war that would result in at least one new state was inevitable.

Polk’s rallying cry of “American blood on American soil,” was as false as the absurd retroactive claim that Texas was part of Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase, but the imagination of the nation was captured by the idea of a unified and enlarged identity. Writers at the time responded to a call from Ralph Waldo Emerson for a national literature, especially Herman Melville who set that identity on ships that sailed the world, and Walt Whitman whose “Song of Myself” was sung with America as his persona. As if to galvanize the whole “Young America” movement, a New York newspaper editor coined the phrase “Manifest Destiny.”

Ulysses Grant, a young officer of low rank when we attacked Mexico, would later call it “a wicked war” in his post-presidential memoirs, and there is a reason that the Mexican War is the only war with no plaque or monument anywhere in Washington, DC.

Still, as we learn in Indivisible, the Mexican War began our turn from regional identities toward a national one even as the standoff between North and South spiralled toward secession. War can do that. This where Daniel Webster played what may be called the lead role in the tragic drama.

There were others. John Quincy Adams, the only former president to later serve in Congress, was a leading voice of abolition in the House for 17 years, spending much of that time fighting Southern gag orders on the subject of slavery. Henry Clay worked as long and as tirelessly for compromises that, while not challenging slavery where it existed, would prevent its spread westward. Andrew Jackson’s military victories–some by way of his deceit of Native American tribes that trusted American treaties–made him a popular hero who advocated a strong union despite his uneasy alliance with the rabid Carolinian Calhoun necessitated by Old Hickory’s support of slavery. And then there was Martin Van Buren “whose obsequiousness and flattery were unmatched” but who “never drank his own poison.”

Above them all, Webster was the orator who drew the crowds, with a charisma that often made his opponents a bit more accomodating. His “Second Reply to Hayne” in 1830, a 30,000-word blaming the South’s economic problems on slavery while “arguing that the prosperity of the North and West was due to their reliance on free labor,” became required reading for decades in public schools. To this day, historians regard it as “the greatest extemporaneous oration ever delivered before Congress.”

Indivisible is generous with quotes of pointed passages Webster aimed at South Carolina’s quest for nullification, of rhetorical flourishes describing the cooperative country to be passed on to future generations, and barbs that made the chamber roar:

If we were to allow twenty-four states each independently to decide what laws were valid, he joked, “it should not be denominated a Constitution. It should be called, rather, a collection of topics for everlasting controversy.”

Paul does not shy away from one of the most controversial disputes of American history: Did Webster betray his Northern constituents and his own humanitarian principles when he endorsed the Compromise of 1850 with its abhorrent Fugitive Slave Law?

The short answer, clearly, is yes. Less clear is that the South would have split in 1850 without it, and so Webster, at the behest of Clay who appeared at his Washington door with a hacking cough on a stormy January night, reconsidered his firm, long-time stand that gave abolitionists hope. Webster’s mantra, “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” was about to separate the man himself. For the sake of Union, Webster caved and sacrificed a liberty that Northerners held dear.

Other historians have vascillated on the truth and consequence of this move of a man who, from an early age, had his sights set on a presidential bid. Was Webster calculating that political gain in the border states and the South would more than compensate for losses in New England? Or was he sacrificing himself for the sake of avoiding a Civil War?

According to Paul, Webster was buying time. In 1850, industry in the North was not developed enough to prevent secession. Ten years later, that changed. Paul suggests that secession would have been successful had it happened a decade sooner. Given the amount of cotton and tobacco traded to England, Europe, and–as a result of a treaty engineered by Pres. Tyler in 1844–China, the South likely would have had allies that would not import manufactured goods from the North at that scale for at least another five years.

Indivisible ends with the death of Webster in October, 1852. Just months earlier he was vying with incumbent Millard Fillmore for the Whig nomination for president. Fillmore was the second Whig vice-president to ascend to the presidency after the death of a military hero within months of their inaugurations. Back then vice-presidents tended to be hacks chosen for their appeal in a region opposite the presidential candidate. Remarks Paul:

It would not be the last time a polarizing president from New York relied on southern and nativist support for his reelection.

That coincides with descriptions of Andrew Jackson that, if you remove the military references, echo descriptions we hear today. If you ever wondered why Jackson’s portrait was so often a backdrop for White House pronouncements from 2017 through 2020, and why the plan to replace him on the $20 bill with Harriet Tubman was scrapped, consider this one:

Jackson… regarded the federal bureaucracy with suspicion. He feared that civil servants formed a shadow government or deep state that would impede him. The president set to work to “clean out” the embedded elite… He vaguely alluded to “widespread corruption” in government and insisted on firing civil servants… Jackson did not claim that these men were incompetent or corrupt. He simply wanted to replace them with civil servants who would be beholden to him.

Other presidents fare much worse in Paul’s estimation. When Whig stalwarts Webster and Clay vied for the presidential nomination in 1848, the party opted instead for Gen. Zachary Taylor, well-known to the public as “Old Rough and Ready” despite his dubious conduct of the Mexican War. Says Paul, “once more, inexperience and ignorance proved to be a winning combination in presidential politics.”

Many other passages in Indivisible you could file under, “History repeats itself,” or “Doomed to repeat,” or “The Past is not Dead.” As well as two blurbs on the back cover, not for what they say, but for who wrote them: Jamie Raskin and Anita Hill.

During a month when the governor of Florida signs a bill forbidding the teaching of African-American history in the state’s public schools on the grounds that it has “no educational value,” we might wonder if we are repeating the decade leading to the Civil War.

We may no longer think of ourselves according to our native states or geographic regions, but it is clear that, our nationalism notwithstanding, we have yet to think of ourselves as “American” in any honest sense of the word.

-30-

https://www.harvard.com/book/indivisible/

Fittingly Unfitting

There’s an adage attributed to everyone from Elie Wiesel to Pope Francis, from John Le Carre to Leviticus:

The opposite of love is not hate, but indifference.

With a title that describes Charlie, an obese English teacher hoping to reconcile with Ellie, his estranged and beyond troubled daughter, The Whale illustrates that point as well as any of those writers or clerics could have.

The title also refers to a most unusual plot device, a high-schooler’s essay on Moby-Dick, although the film bears more resemblence to a later Herman Melville novel, The Confidence-Man, than to the one which was originally published in England under the title, The Whale. For that reason, any detailed account of what the five characters do would be as much of a spoiler alert as a review. Suffice to say it is well acted, and Brendan Fraser is now picking up the awards to prove it. Hong Chau’s Liz is as memorable as her Elsa in The Menu, and Samantha Morton’s Mary is as riveting as her brief role as a victim being interviewed in She Said.

Fittingly–and, in this case, equally unfittingly–the English teacher keeps his video off during his Zoomed classes, a blank, black square in the middle of 14 youthful faces. Later on, that will change in one of several scenes in The Whale that plays like a horror film.

With unrelenting intensity, even the sight of a bird feeding outside Charlie’s window feels ominous.

In a story of deception that would do Almodovar proud, assumptions are easy to make about characters when we meet them–Liz is a care-giver, Thomas an evangelical–only to take us by surprise when we hear their backstories. But The Whale is as much about the great divides of modern life: Despite his morbid condition, Charlie’s optimism is as boundless as his belly, contradicting Ellie’s cynicism even as she throws it in his face. If Charlie is a shadow of Uncle Vanya, Ellie is his anti-Sonya.

Nevertheless, he persists. In a tone that begs for affirmation, he asks Liz:

Do you ever get the feeling that people are incapable of not caring?

Whether to grant that affirmation is left to the audience when the film ends. Does he break through Ellie’s indifference? Is that indifference a defense mechanism? Or is it pure hate? Her own mother calls her “evil” after all. Rather than answers, the screen turns white and the credits roll.

We’ve seen this before. In 1999, Limbo, a film set in Alaska, ended with a stranded family awaiting the arrival of a plane. Two possibilities have been set: Rescue? Or execution? Neither. The screen went white and we were left to debate which was likely. The very title of the film should have warned us: “Limbo (n): A condition of unknowable outcome.”

As a title, The Whale may not hint at an inconclusive ending any more that it does at the characters’ layered identities, but the essay that Charlie keeps reading and having read to him, and sometimes reciting does. Like a typical high school paper, it’s filled with simple observations: Ishmael and Queequeg share a room. Pure filler: … written by a famous author named Herman Melville. Absurd misnomers: In a seaside town. And errors: A pirate named Ahab. But it has one line that might raise the eyebrows of scholars who still debate whether Melville wrote one unified book or combined an adventure story with an industry manual:

I think Ishmael wrote the boring parts to give us some pause from his own sad story.

As with the film’s characters, the identity of the essayist is unknown at first and then later unravelled more than revealed. That may be the best reason to see The Whale. It invites assumptions to give us pause from assumptions.

No matter what the daughter thought of the bird feeding off the full plate Charlie leaves outside his window, this film is the opposite of indifference.

-30-

Post Script: With an evangelical character, The Whale was bound to contain the line, “Everything happens for a reason.” A Bible-adhering friend back in my South Dakota days took that a few steps further when he insisted every chance he got, “There’s no such thing as coincidence.” Today, it occurs to me that readers of my most recent blogs are wondering about the coincidence of this one.

For those just tuning in: Two weeks ago I was among the 211 readers in the annual Moby-Dick Marathon in New Bedford, Mass. While there, I attended two of the three side-sessions called “Chat with the Scholars.” Also while there, I was unnerved by the sight of myself in a full-length mirror while walking out of a men’s room and into a corridor filled with paintings of whales. Days later I began daily workouts at a gym after months, actually years, of procrastination. Days after that, the Screening Room opens The Whale.

Let me hasten to say that, by comparison, Charlie makes me look anorexic, nor do I need any reminder to keep walking three miles a day. I’m already feeling better, and I have some nice shirts I’d like to button once again. Still, I waver between the idea that this is coincidence or that it has played out with purpose.

If the former, it’s a joke on me that I can laugh at. If the later? One year will be a painful amount of time to wait before I can ask those scholars what they think of the “pause from (Ishmael’s) own sad story” theory.

Workout by the Numbers

Made my first trip to a gym yesterday.

Signed in six weeks ago at the urging of more than one friend. Knowing that my admission and membership would be fully covered by my insurance, I had run out of excuses not to.

Still, New England’s fairly tolerable weather through December and into January kept me walking in the wildlife sanctuary just outside my door on most days. On others, windchills turned me around after barely half a mile, at times at the end of my driveway where I achieved nothing more than retrieving my mail.

Yesterday was raw, rainy, so in I went. I thought about leaving as soon as I stepped into the locker room. Not because of guys walking around wrapped in towels, or having to change in front of others–I’ve been a Renaissance faire performer for 22 years for God’s sake. No, it was the pounding disco or hip-hop or whatever the mindless thump-thump we hear out of speakers everywhere is called these days. Off those tiles it was so loud, I still wonder if its purpose is to prevent loitering.

Instead, I changed quickly and was in the vast gym looking for a basic treadmill. In retrospect, I was too quick, forgetting my water bottle in my “gym bag,” actually a touristy canvas tote-bag my mother used back in the 90s with names of California and Nevada cities and towns all over it, a motel chain it appears.

Before long I stepped onto a treadmill and asked the first person who happened by to show me how it started. He set it at 1.5 mph and showed me how to increase and decrease the speed. Presto! I was off. What I realized right away was that by leaning on those two handles in front of me, I was taking a fair chunk of weight off my feet, and I liked how it felt. I gradually notched up the speed and had it at 3.0 mph for the last 20 minutes.

My mistake was not bringing the water bottle, and I feared that I would not return if I took a break for water–as I do on the bench in the reserve where I have no choice but to walk back, save for a few days when I couldn’t resist the offer of a ride. So I plowed on until I reached 2.1 miles (about the round-trip distance of my walks on Plum Island) in 47 minutes, and had worked up a sweat that doesn’t happen in the reserve at this time of year.

Machine said 188 calories, and when I mentioned this to a couple guys in the locker room, I could tell that they both resisted laughing. Instead, they assured me with wide smiles that it’ll go up when I keep at it. Yes, they said “when” not “if.” One said it was likely wrong and that I must have burned more. Both said that the only important thing was that I got there and did it. That’s what those friends wrote in response to the bragging emails I sent them last night. A variation on the old Woody Allen line, just showing up is victory.

None of them mentioned the “no criticism” or “judgement free zone” of which Planet Fitness and other gyms boast to encourage new members no matter how out of shape we may be. Both phrases are all over the walls, but neither mattered much to me, as I enjoy self-deprecating humor. When anyone moves to the side of an isle of the supermarket or anywhere else as I approach, I can’t resist: “Oh, I’m wide, but I’m not that wide.” Yesterday, I made a point of wearing the t-shirt I just bought at the New Bedford Whaling Museum with a white whale on it, as if I was inviting ridicule.

That was my second trip to the annual marathon reading of Moby-Dick. Before the first one three years ago, the Newburyport Daily News interviewed me for a story, and when asked about my interest, I didn’t hesitate: “Call me Ishmael! Everything about him is true of me.” That was then. Now, I’d be more accurately cast in the title role.

Never an athletic specimen, I was always in fair shape thanks to busking and the Renaissance faire, always on my feet keeping a beat, sometimes dancing. Then I quit cigarettes in January, 2007, and by April of that year, I had gained 35 pounds I never shed. Three years ago the pandemic shut me down, and I indulged my appetites. Potato pancakes with sour cream every morning; hamburgers laced with molasses every evening with India Pale Ale to wash them down. Before long it was another 35 pounds, and only now am I intent on bringing those numbers down.

So it makes sense to have numbers in front of me–and numbers that I want to go up.

Today I made sure to have the water bottle with me. Those machines have cup holders on both sides of a screen with all kinds of controls that I’ll ignore for at least a month. There are also machines that do other things, such as de-escalators that people climb. No thank you. And a weight room. No way. Television monitors showing all kinds of stations line a wall in front of rows of various machines. I think of stories to fit the pictures; weather maps I imagine as military campaigns–which, thanks to climate change, they often may as well be. The brainless thump-thump is broadcast, but the place is so huge that the sound dissolves long before it bangs your eardrum.

Today’s numbers were 2.45 miles, 51 minutes, 206 calories, and I had the speed up to 3.0 mph within five minutes of starting and kept it there. As of today, I have set two goals: 1) to have all three numbers at least match the previous workout; 2) to shower and get dressed in noticeably less time than I workout. The first seems relatively easy, but the second? Even the obnoxious thump-thump has failed to hasten my departure.

That’s why this is strictly a winter habit, though it will also serve as a rainy-day option year-round. When the weather is tolerable, I’ll be back on the Refuge Road. I’ll miss the handles to lean on and numbers to increase, but I’ll take the sights and sounds of the marsh over so many indoor distractions, no matter how enticing some of them may be.

More than anything, I’ll welcome once again ending my workouts right here at home where I can fall on a bed for as long as I want before having to shower and get dressed.

All in blissful silence.

-30-

Harpooneers of this World

More than anything, I wanted Chapter 62, “The Dart,” a more common word by which whalers called a harpoon. To get it, I asked for a ten-minute slot on the ungodly midnight watch.

That’s how the Moby-Dick Annual Marathon is divvied up. Each of the 25 hours it needs is a watch, all of which starts at noon Saturday and concludes at about 1:00 pm Sunday. Since 62 falls midway in the 135 chapters, I put in for 12:30-12:40 am and got it.

Three years ago, I guessed too late and read 69 and 70, “The Funeral” and “The Sphynx,” both strong stuff, as is every chapter in a long book that frequently bounds from comic to ponderous, from whimsical to confrontational, at times all at once. In 2020, I was mesmerized all the way to dawn’s invasion of the 3rd-floor windows of the New Bedford Whaling Museum’s reading room, inhaling as much as hearing every word.

True, I twice sat in the adjacent coffee room, conversing with a young couple who drove up from Maryland, and then with the owner of a boat shop who flew in from Chicago. He told me that there were readers from California and Europe. I don’t think there was as much of that this year, as there were noticeably fewer people listening in the wee hours, and far fewer sleeping bags in the wide corridor to the elevator. But, as Ishmael doesn’t hesitate to sometimes admit, I could be wrong.

Following the Sunday morning “Chat with Scholars,” one of several sideshows held during the main event, I had a memorable conversation with a recent graduate of College of the Atlantic up on the Maine coast. A Texas native, she’s now working for the National Parks Service in New Bedford, and may be the only person who has ever noticed that Ishmael describes an object that “fell to Ahab’s feet,” and remembered that Ahab had just one foot.

If only the world would pay a fraction of that attention to detail.

Details draw me to “The Dart.” The first of two compelling reasons is something that no one writing newspaper columns, as I’ve been doing for 40 years, can resist: Decades, perhaps a century before the term was coined, Herman Melville wrote an op-ed column.

In the persistent voice of Ishmael, one who challenges conventional wisdom every chance he gets, it opens with a description of how the whale boats were manned as they leave the ship in pursuit of a whale. He then finds fault: The harpooneers participate in the rowing, leaving them exhausted when it’s time to throw a 25-lb. spear. He offers proof: Low success rates. A solution: Leave them idle. Followed by a litany of reasons–“no wonder…”–that states a need. Followed by a concession of what will be compromised: The speed of the whaleboat. Countered by a claim of why the loss is negligible compared to how much more will be gained: Accuracy and efficiency.

In the best op-ed style, he ends the chapter with a “kicker” to drive the point home:

To ensure the greatest efficiency in the dart, the harpooneers of this world must start to their feet from out of idleness, and not from out of toil.

Coming at the end of about 650 words–standard op-ed length–that line by itself is the second reason I wanted “The Dart.” I memorized it long ago, a metaphor that applies to anyone if you replace the two nouns, “dart” and “harpooneers” with others that share the relationship of an object and the people who use it. To ensure the greatest efficiency of art, the artists of this world… To ensure the success of any attempt to influence a distracted public, the activists of this world… Call it an echo of Hamlet’s “the readiness is all.” At the reading, I was able to look up from the book and scan the audience. Most had their eyes down, reading along. Those looking at me sat bolt upright.

Not bad for people who had been up some 17 hours and counting. I was lucky that a friend from King Richard’s Faire read not long after, Chapter 66, “The Shark Massacre,” describing what happened to a whale’s carcass after it is stripped of blubber and oil and dropped back into the sea. Vinny, the tour de force of Toe Jam Puppet Band wildly popular with children in southeastern Massachusetts, might have been typecast for it:

[A]ny man unaccustomed to such sights, to have looked over her side that night, would have almost thought that the whole round sea was one huge cheese, and those sharks the maggots in it.

We broke for the coffee room after he was done. Much of our conversation was about how Ishmael’s jokes, his whimsy and mischief, are much more prominent when heard aloud. And, oh, how they make Ishmael’s portentous and profound passages more palatable. He stayed until past 4:00 am when another friend of his read.

Another mutual friend was with Culture*Park Theater performing “Midnight on the Forecastle” (Chap. 40) on the museum’s auditorium stage, the only chapter performed rather than read, and with song and dance. Elizabeth, formerly of King Richard’s Gypsy Dancers, played Tashtego, one of the harpooneers, as she did three years ago.

But there was a new cabin boy. This year’s Pip, a New Bedford fourth-grader named Josiah Bodden, gained a fan club in the former whaling capital of the world when he faced the audience, jolted forward, fell to his knees, slid toward the front of the stage, threw his head back, shut his eyes, clasped his hands over his head, and closed the chapter with a prayer:

Oh, thou big white God aloft there somewhere in yon darkness, have mercy on this small black boy down here; preserve him from all men who have no bowels to feel fear!

An hour or so later, the co-founder of the Newburyport Melville Society read “The Chart” (Chap. 44) which describes Ahab, alone in his cabin, studying maps rolled onto with their corners pinned into the wooden table. My bare description may make it seem like dry stuff, but Patricia, like so many of the 211 readers, made Ishmael’s mystical narration so vivid that the chapter’s kicker landed with the full force and relevance of any pronouncement today:

God help thee, old man, thy thoughts have created a creature in thee; and he whose intense thinking thus makes him a Prometheus; a vulture feeds upon that heart forever; that vulture the very creature he creates.

Not long after that, the Newburyport Melville Society convened across the street in the Moby Dick Brewery for clam chowder and pints of Ishm-Ale. That, plus the unlimited coffee supplied by the museum overnight, the presence of Vinny, and especially the extra rush of adrenaline after delivering “The Dart” made it easy to stay awake past dawn.

Had planned to start home at sunrise, as I did last time, but couldn’t resist a Portuguese omelet at Tia Maria’s European Cafe, also across the street. Refreshed, I went back in for another scholarly session and a chat with my Newburyport friends before starting home well after 11:00.

Halfway home, I had to stop at Starbuck’s in Braintree, just off the highway, and sat for half an hour with a tall, black, dark roast before finishing the trip. How’s that for poetic karma? Starbuck helped guide me home from my pursuit of the White Whale.

-30-

Screenshot by Richard K. Lodge, cropped by Lenovo.

Vinny Lovegrove, Photo by another reader, Cora Peirce of the Pocasset Wampanoag Tribe of Massachusetts & Rhode Island.

A Child on Refuge Road

Sometimes you just have to laugh.

I’d go crazy if I didn’t, unless I’ve already gone crazy without noticing. Or I’d quit, as many folks, including a few good friends, think I should.

Some of the laughter takes effort, but I’m so used to it that I can make it look and sound natural–like the Irish fiddlers who pride themselves on appearing as relaxed as professional gamblers while playing the most acrobatic jigs and reels at breakneck speed.

Those laughs are my way of deflecting the implied criticism of those who tell me they like my writing except when I write about politics. You know who you are, and you have me outnumbered. Way outnumbered. My laughter says “Fine, skip it. Enjoy the rest.”

My vignettes of Plum Island and Newburyport gain laughs I can share outright. Maybe that’s why I thought I’d experiment with a recent blog about the walk I took into Plum Island’s wildlife reserve on New Year’s Day.

An unseasonably mild day set the mood for an amble to a bench where I would sit and watch clouds eclipse the sun, and duck glide upon the marsh. Genesis 1:2–…and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.

All very easy-going, whimsical, and light-hearted, with a photo of two black duck as a cover, but I did headline it “A Powerful Transfer of Peace,” and so there was bound to be some kind of civic or political content.

It begins with the mild transition the weather has made from 2022 to 2023 here on the Massachusetts coast. The plot thickens when I muse about being stuck on column that I was writing for the local paper, an anticipation of the anniversary of Jan. 6. I look out the window. A view of a convertible with the top down snaps me out of my chair. I go for a walk and write with my feet. While sitting on the bench, I find–I see–what the column needs: contrast.

“Of, by and for the Empty Seats” ran in the Daily News the next day, the “holiday observed” as we call those Mondays nearest the real deal, a very busy day at the Screening Room where several patrons let me know they approved it.* It also drew five emails, as many as I ever get for a newspaper column. Four expressed approval, each of them signed, one from a neighbor I haven’t yet met who took the implied point of “empty seats”:

I am at fault as I did not attend the meeting at City Hall with [US Rep. Seth] Moulton. I will try and attend the next time. If for no other reason than to balance off the QAnon folks who believe that, if they scream louder and wave their flags higher, they must be the voice of America.

Catch you on Refuge Road.

The fourth email was anonymous, sent under the name “Newburyport Guy” with the subject line, “Your childish drivel”:

It’s clear you have a child’s understanding of the world.

It is unpleasant to begin the year with your Democunt (sic & sick) observations.

With the Bible in one hand and the Constitution in the other[,] we Republican patriots are invincible. We own the Court and the House. In 2024 we will own the Senate and the White House. It is God’s will.

I suggest you utilize your time and energy investigating and reporting why our so-called “public library” hires only women. How is this legal? Why is the library director always female? Where are the male librarians at 94 State Street? I thought you Democunts were all about equity, diversity and inclusion. Investigate and report on this scandal.

I hope 2023 is a year of learning and maturity for you. Write about something important.

God is life!! Abortion is the holocaust of our time.

For all our talk about the separation of church and state, we are up against the union of church and hate. Anonymity? That, as one friend calls it, “is the KKK of speech.”

For the record, there is at least one male employed at the Newburyport Public Library, and no one needs a sociologist or optometrist to tell them that far more women go into that profession than men. But there are far more pressing issues in this email than the gender distribution of librarians.

Rather than sorting through Newburyport Guy’s agenda, I’d rather return to the first email from a neighbor vowing to get involved in civic life. That describes not only my last column, but my next to coincide with the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday prompted by a quote of his to rattle my I-don’t-want-to-hear-about-politics friends:

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

My response to Newburyport Guy? Well, I’m relieved he didn’t say anything about catching me on Refuge Road, but honestly, I just laugh.

Still, he may be right that I have a “child’s understanding of the world.” I have grandchildren. Other grandparents and parents may prefer not to connect the indelible dots of the present to the inevitable blot they spell for the future. By contrast, I have no choice but to call attention to the world that the young, the innocent, the meek are about to inherit.

That’s why all that deflective laughter takes more effort than I care to admit.

-30-

Martin Luther King (Photo via history.com)

*The column: https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/as-i-see-it-of-by-and-for-the-empty-seats/article_34bc2fe6-8877-11ed-a05c-4b3eb2603ae1.html

A Powerful Transfer of Peace

A Powerful Transfer of Peace

A string of mild days has both ended 2022 and commenced 2023 here on New England’s coast.

Sitting here with a view of the entrance to the sand dunes and marsh of a wildlife refuge out my window, I’ve spent New Year’s Weekend watching lines of cars, mostly SUVs, roll by as they do on a late spring day.

For a couple weeks before this front moved in, Plum Islanders were bundled up and hunkered down against unabated Arctic blasts over the marsh that turned freezing temps into single digits with minus signs on the shortest days of the retiring year. With plenty to write while sitting at my laptop, more to read while lying in bed, and no end of college and pro football on the tube, I was content to remain indoors.

As I was Friday morning when I noticed several cars heading toward the gate. That was enough to tell me that I could tolerate my daily two-mile walk on the refuge road–something that I had suspended for longer than I care to admit, using Christmas gatherings as much as the weather as an excuse.

But I had an idea for a Daily News column that demanded to be written, and a deadline coming up, albeit self-imposed. And that Kenyan coffee that arrived in the mail tasted so good! So I kept writing and sipping until, stuck for a precise adjective or a clever analogy, I looked up from my keyboard and out the window to see a convertible drive by–top down.

Well, I wasted no time closing tabs, logging out, shutting down, getting dressed, filling my water bottle, turning the heat down, and getting out the door.

Yesterday was damp and overcast, and today had a slight wind-chill, but I made it to my mile-marker bench that overlooks the marsh each day and was able to sit awhile watching a few black duck float on a salt panne, so still they could have been sleeping.

Maybe it was their complete lack of effort–no flapping wings, no plunging beaks–that made something clear to me on this first morning of a new year: Our weather has given us a peaceful transition of years.

The thought reminded me of the November day following Ronald Reagan’s re-election in 1984. We all knew he was going to win, but the fact of it was devastating for anyone who cared about the environment, about the accessibility of health care and higher education, about workers’ rights and occupational safety. For anyone who cared as much for line-items as for bottom lines, it was a day of mourning.

Until you opened the Boston Globe or any other paper that carried a syndicated column that day penned by Eugene McCarthy. A former Minnesota senator and a presidential candidate in 1968 most attractive to college students and faculty with his “Clean for Gene” campaign, McCarthy seemed the perfect choice to write the post-mortem for the doomed campaign of his fellow Minnesotan, Walter Mondale.

And then I read it. Not a word about the election, nor about government or politics in any form. As I recall, he mentioned no person nor any place to be found on a map. Instead, he described a place I’ll never forget: his garden. Yes, he seemed to be saying, life goes on, so let’s make the best of it, plant these seeds, train that vine, pull these weeds, water that thyme.

This, from the guy who single-handedly forced Lyndon Johnson to abdicate his bid for re-election.

I thought of the draft column I had waiting for my return home. It’s subject is the peaceful transfer of power, or rather America’s loss of that hallmark of a free and self-governing people two years ago this week. By the time I left the bench, I was thinking: Maybe the precise adjective is “powerful,” and the precise noun “peace.”

Look to the duck on the marsh, if not to the gathering clouds that threaten rain. Or to the tomatoes in your garden, if not to the rabbits who run through it. Consider the lillies of the field, if not the developer who builds on it.

Nature offers analogies, both clever and precise, for all we do.

-30-

*Black Duck pair, photo by Michael J. Parr* https://abcbirds.org/bird/american-black-duck/

By a Marsh on a Rainy Day

On the year’s shortest day, Robert Frost famously watches a villager’s woods fill up with snow. On the second, I hear a menacing forecast. On the third, I awake to see a saltmarsh fill up with water.

Frost’s horse thinks it queer to stop without a farmhouse near, but I’m still at home upon a hill in bed before a window watching grasses disappear.

My windows rattle in gusts of storm, odd echoes of harness bells that shake the old man back awake. But this old man watches, making no mistake, pausing nothing but breakfast.

Nor is there a house in sight from my island to the mainland where Frost’s woods stretch toward a frozen lake. My marsh, now lake, keeps moving north, whitecapped in surging tide.

Frost’s darkest evening becomes my gray day, all grasses now submerged in a shade matching sky, as well as the two-lane road, leaving but a utility pole and the top half of a fire hydrant as reminders of just where I am.

No, that’s not at all Frost, but for the old man who stopped on Plum Island four decades ago, it’s a first.

Frost’s downy flake is my driving rain; his easy wind my gas heat, an easy, welcome warmth up from my floor.

Mouth of a river? Atlantic salt marsh? Arrival of winter? Sea-level rise? Encroaching climate change? A cacophony, perhaps a symphony of ocean, moon, storm, and melting glaciers?

My estuary may be lovely, but it is neither dark nor deep. To tell of its contrary charms, I’ll leave for another day, for there’s an omelet I must eat.

Does way ever lead onto way? All I know is that the tide will turn and the grasses reappear on these darkest days of every year. And I will sip coffee.

And that makes all the difference.

All the difference is what that makes.

-30-