Spare the Thoughts & Prayers

When my book about busking, Pay the Piper! appeared in print, I gave a reading at Jabberwocky Bookshop here in Newburyport and introduced myself thus:

Hello! My name is Barbara Ehrenreich, and I’m here to talk about my new book, Nickel and Dimed.

Most in attendance knew me as a busker, or street-performer, and so they got the joke’s stereotype of playing for little more than spare change. For all I know, they may have inferred an unstated reference to the book’s subtitle: On (Not) Getting by in America.

But I went on to tell them that Piper had more in common with another Ehrenreich book, Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, that appeared six years after her 2001 classic.

At that time I was just beginning to assemble various essays I had penned about busking, and so any title with the word “Streets” was bound to command my attention. Dancing did not disappoint. as I was able to reinforce my own book with references to its final scene, where Ehrenreich and a friend ascend from a New York subway, into music on the sidewalk.

As I wrote in a chapter titled “A Call to Un-Mall,” Dancing is a call for a “vibrant public life… a must-read for any busker or renfaire performer, practicing or would-be, who may ever doubt their own sense of purpose.”

I also sent her an email to tell her that Crackerjack is a brand name with an upper-case C and no s at the end, a common mistake that could have caused her a problem if not corrected by the second edition. Of course, I used that as a way to mention my own project with scenes that illustrated the point and purpose of Dancing.

Next day, she sent thanks for the correction, offered names of a couple book agents, and wished me well.

According to The Guardian, her son accompanied the announcement “with a comment redolent of his mother’s spirit”:

She was never much for thoughts and prayers, but you can honor her memory by loving one another, and by fighting like hell.

For an idea of how completely that single line captures a woman who always went against the grain of conventional wisdom and the grind of safe conformity, here’s a sampling of what she wrote:

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.

Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

The titles of her more than 20 books–ranging from women’s rights to workers’ rights to the inequities of the American healthcare system–reveal a commitment to social justice as deep and as long as that of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and John Lewis:

Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream
This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation
Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America
Global Woman: Nannies, Maids, and Sex Workers in the New Economy
For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts’ Advice to Women
Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer

Other titles are just as enticing, but as I start to recall that email she sent me, and what I believe she was telling all of her readers, I better get back to adding titles of my own.

Barbara Alexander Ehrenreich died on September 1. She was 81.

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https://www.theguardian.com/books/2022/sep/02/barbara-ehrenreich-author-dies-nickel-and-dimed

Putting a Finger on It

A film as unusual as The Banshees of Inisherin deserves a review as unusual as a fish and finger pie, and so I should not have been surprised when one patron left the Screening Room saying she “would give it one thumb up and one thumb down if both thumbs were not flying all over the place.”

But she did stay to the end and expressed no objection to so many others praising the film–even if they did appear a bit grim while saying so.

Indeed, of all the patrons who have seen it in the eight days since it opened here, we’ve had just seven walkouts, one saying something to the effect of I don’t go to movies to be given the finger.

Audiences have been among the largest we have seen since the pandemic arrived. Anything Irish is bound to do well in Newburyport, and the film was heavily advertised on the cable stations as a “comedy.” I use quotes because the disparity of the ads with the actual product verges on bait-and-switch, in this case reminiscent of the full-page spreads with a dozen photos of Robin Williams laughing and howling in Dead Poets Society back in 1989.

Quite an ad campaign for a film about suicide.

The breakup of a friendship is far from suicide, and yes, there are a lot of laughs. As they did in Martin McDonagh’s 2008 In Bruges, Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson show flashes of Laurel and Hardy, and the sight gags nicely punctuate the film’s breathtaking cinematography of Ireland’s Aran Islands.

More akin to McDonagh’s 2017 film, Three Billboard’s Outside Ebbing, Missouri, the story is not nearly as violent, but bloody enough in two or three scenes to cover your eyes with your fingers.

There’s my fourth reference to fingers if you’re keeping score. Colm (Gleeson) is a musician, after all, an aging fiddler concerned about what he might leave to posterity. He fancies himself in the tradition of the legendary Irish bards of earlier centuries, and he envies Mozart’s place in musical history.

That bug hit before Banshees begins, and so we meet him telling Padraic (Farrell) that he no longer has time for the younger man’s interminable idle chat. When he complains of listening to on and on blather about cleaning horseshit out of a barn, Padraic corrects him: “It was donkey shit.”

Talk about not getting it! Unable and unwilling to take no for an answer, Padraic enlists the aid of his sister, as well as a troubled young man who frequents the local pub and a priest who ferries over from Galway to reconcile them.

The acting? All five performances are worthy of Oscar nominations. And the two fellows who parrot each other at the bar could start a show on Comedy Central.

Set in a small fishing village off Ireland’s west coast where “word gets around”–inish means island–the film puts the ensuing turmoil in the foreground of a descent into civil war following the Free State Act in 1922. The setting is all too real as we hear the reports of rifles across the bay, but Colm’s response to Padraic’s persistence is impossible to believe.

Unless, as one woman put it after sitting in the theater talking with others long after the credits rolled, we regard it as a fable. Why not? It’s a cautionary tale of sensational events, and in it, a donkey and a dog play roles that would both gain Oscar nominations for Best Performance by an Animal if there were such a thing.

“If it were a breakup of a man and a woman,” she reasoned, “no one would notice.” But to make it about friendship instead of love, art instead of marriage, we see the extremes to which both sides are pulled. Padraic’s counter to Colm’s fistful of points is as fiery as any Irish Republican Army response to British rule.

In contrast, Colm’s response to Padraic’s sister, Sioban (Kerry Condon), is painfully real. Awaiting word of employment on the mainland, the woman longs for a better life. When Colm tells her that she should understand his disdain for wasted time, she can’t deny it. As she turns and leaves, he pleads twice: “Can’t’cha?” No answer. “Can’t’cha?”

The title of the film doubles as the title of Colm’s fiddle tune that we hear in various drafts and when done. It is also the key to the fable. “Banshee” is an Irish word for female spirits whose wailing warns of impending death.

Female.

What Colm and Padraic do is not to be taken literally. To put a finger on what The Banshees of Inisherin is really all about, focus on Sioban.

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A Thanksgiving Toast

Getting in the mood for another turn in the Moby-Dick Marathon Reading, I picked up a copy of Redburn which Herman Melville published in 1849, two years before Ahab’s monomaniacal quest for revenge against Mother Nature.

Far from a whaler in the South Pacific, Wellingborough Redburn–no wonder he later calls himself “Ishmael”–narrates from aboard a merchant vessel that plies its trade between New York and Liverpool.

And from the nooks and crannies of Liverpool, where dire poverty is an amble away from riches from all over the world unloaded on the docks, and where he sees “very many painful sights” and hears many a “low, hopeless, endless wail” that make him ask:

“What right had anybody in the world to smile and be glad, when sights like this were to be seen?”

A question he’ll answer with another question:

Surrounded as we are by the wants and woes of our fellow-men, and yet given to follow our own pleasures, regardless of their pains, are we not like people sitting up with a corpse, and making merry in the house of the dead?

Similar conscience-rattling passages appear in Moby-Dick, for which Redburn is a worthy forerunner with generous helpings of Ishmaelish wit and whimsy and a spread of topics and musings as diverse as the Thanksgiving feasts we are about to enjoy. Who knew that a line-by-line commentary on a classified ad or a spoof of a guide book could be as funny as a monologue on late-night TV?

Still, if we are to at all attach religious sentiments to Thanksgiving–and to any of the holidays soon to follow–then it is Melville’s reminders of the human condition that are most relevant today. After watching 500 German immigrants board The Highlander in Liverpool for passage to America, risking the diseases that thrive in close quarters necessarily kept shut during long Atlantic storms, he muses:

There is something in the contemplation of the mode in which America has been settled, that, in a noble breast, should forever extinguish the prejudices of national dislikes.

He then rhapsodizes on how they will populate farms from Pennsylvania to Texas and the Dakotas, before adding:

Settled by the people of all nations, all nations may claim [America] for their own. You cannot spill a drop of American blood without spilling the blood of the whole world… We are not a narrow tribe of men… whose blood has been debased in the attempt to ennoble it by maintaining an exclusive succession among ourselves. No: our blood is as the flood of the Amazon, made up of a thousand noble currents all pouring into one. We are not a nation so much as a world…

Taken alone, that could well be a Thanksgiving toast. What, after all, was the first Thanksgiving feast at Plymouth Colony?

Taken in the context of the earlier passage, it forms as clear an expose of America’s contradiction–and I dare say of Christianity’s contradiction–as anything written on the pages of newspapers or shown on television news today.

People appearing at our southern border, or flying in from Ukraine or the Middle East, or from African, Asian, or Pacific Island nations beset by hunger, drought, or rising seas may not be “following… pleasure,” but they are certainly fleeing pain so that their children might someday live in peace.

Most of us who will fill plates with turkey, stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, green beans, corn cobbler, followed by pecan, pumpkin, and apple pies are children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren of immigrants such as Melville described. They boarded boats in Liverpool, Naples, Hamburg, Bremen, Marseille, all for the same reasons that swell the Rio Grande today.

None of them would begrudge us as we “smile and be glad,” but it’s hard to imagine that they’d approve America’s treatment of families now fleeing violence-torn dictatorships in Central and South America–to which the US government, at best, has turned a blind eye these past fifty years.

As Melville concluded 173 years ago:

Adam and Eve! If indeed you are yet alive and in heaven, may it be no part of your immortality to look down upon the world ye have left. For as all these sufferers and cripples are as much your family as young Abel, so, to you, the sight of the world’s woes would be a parental torment indeed.

More immediately, would not our own ancestors who yet look upon us from pictures we place on walls and mantles feel insulted by the slurs such as “illegal aliens” and betrayed by any American’s animosity toward and fear of immigrants today?

A rhetorical question? Maybe. But just as much as Melville’s toast, the answer defines Thanksgiving Day.

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https://www.audible.com/pd/Redburn-Audiobook/B0044UAO30

Mob Myth

So many punchlines, so little time.

A friend notes that Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley “kept blaming ‘the woke mob’ for the fact that his book didn’t sell.”

For starters, he can’t help himself. As a Trumpster, blaming others is in his DNA.

Second, his base is the MAGA crowd. For him to expect readers is like an arsonist expecting snowmen at a housewarming.

Third, with a title like The Tyranny of Big Tech, he forgets the sacred precept of the lobby his Republican Party best serves: Guns don’t kill people, people do. Hey, Josh, Big Tech doesn’t kill books, hysterically bad writing does!

Fourth, when a video of his impersonation of a jackrabbit in the Capitol emerged from the Jan. 6 investigation, the public judged his book by his run for cover.

My friend sent the note in response to my last blog regarding the word “woke” as constantly used by the Republican governor of the oversized, dual-purpose shooting range and golf course we call Florida. But I was more taken by the other word Hawley used.

The irony could not be more rich: The guy who raised his fist to the “tourists” at the Capitol in DC on Jan. 6 using the word “mob” to explain something (book sales) that did not happen.

Reminds me of people who insist that the Electoral College protects us from “mob rule,” as the framers intended. By the time the debate gets past all 18th and 19th century considerations, you realize that “mob” to them means “urban.”

Challenges aimed at Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Arizona in 2020 were more specifically attacks on Detroit, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Atlanta, and Phoenix. And who lives in cities?

The claim of “States Rights” was nothing more than a disguise for their attack on cities–just as it once was for the South to justify slavery.

Democrats need to keep this in mind in preparation for 2024. While it’s true that there is a racist motive for the voting restrictions recently passed in Republican controlled states–and that those motives should be addressed–most of those restrictions target urban populations at least as white as minority when taken as a whole.

Who lives in cities? All of us.

Let Republicans use the word “mob” all they want. Bend it with irony, and it soon becomes a joke: Ads, all set in cities, showing lines of people waiting patiently at a polling place, enjoying an outdoor concert, coming together at a public celebration, cheering at a high school game, grieving together at a funeral, making their case peacefully at civic meetings. All with the word “Mob” superimposed on the screen and heard in laughing voice-overs, followed by the word “city” voiced with point and purpose.

In short, make a mockery of claims by a political party that is itself a mockery.

Bottom line: For all our talk of “inclusion” and “diversity,” the words “race” and “racist” by definition divide us. “Urban” and “city,” meanwhile, leave no voters behind.

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https://www.newsweek.com/video-josh-hawley-running-capitol-mob-memes-1726994

Wake up to Woke

For those who missed it, Gov. Ron DeSadist’s victory speech in Florodor harped on a single word: “Woke.”

He used it at least a dozen times, most sound-bitingly when he sneered: “Florida is where woke comes to die!”

Harping on charged words and phrases has been Republican MO for over 40 years when Ronald Reagan turned “liberal” into a synonym for “socialist.” It worked well for him, but it wore thin by 1996 when Republican presidential nominee Sen. Robert Dole of Kansas thought he could unseat Pres. Bill Clinton by using the word “liberal” two or three times in every sentence. If you think I’m exaggerating, check youTube.

From then on, Republicans paired “liberal” with other buzzwords–radical liberals, liberal extremists, socialist liberals, etc.–and helped it along with a resolve to keep using “extreme” and “hardline” every time they mentioned environmentalists and feminists, as in feminist extremist and hardline environmentalist.

So it was until 2016 when Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders hit the national stage. Sanders made liberalism appear to be a humane, acceptable degree of socialism. Trump turned extremism and radicalism into the Republican brand.

No wonder that the Republicans who hope to survive Trumpism need another buzzword.

Rather than waiting twenty more years to feel another Bern for what is actually being said–and spread–Democrats should embrace the word “woke.” Do they recall that “Obamacare” was coined by Republicans as a slur before Pres. Obama himself started using it as matter-of-fact shorthand?

More to the point is Obama’s nomination of Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court in 2010. In his announcement he praised Kagan for her “empathy,” a word on which Republicans pounced as if it were a synonym for “communist.” They got some traction because it’s not a common term, and Kagan herself had to reassure them in confirmation that empathy would never override law in her decisions.

“Woke” is a slang term for “aware.” Whether it originates from politics or music, from the media or from a minority group is of no matter to Republicans. While repeating it, as DeSatan always does, in menacing tones and contrived contexts, they count on woke’s unfamiliarity for traction. In another kind of word, Republicans are making “awareness” ugly.

Like saying DeSanctimonious, DeSatan, or DeSadist for DeSantis. Or hailing King Ron the Wrong of Florodor when you want to give them a taste of their own snake oil.

Democrats, therefore, need only call the word “woke” what it is. Who can argue with anyone being aware of things?

I suppose that the Hershel Walkers and Sarah Palins of the world could argue that “woke” is a word they never heard in the Bible, or that it does not appear anywhere in the US Constitution. I’ll leave the good book to ministers and rabbis and priests to confirm the first claim, but the First Amendment’s provision for freedom of the press tells us that self-government depends on what Jefferson called “an informed citizenry.”

Woke is how democracy stays alive.

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https://www.etsy.com/listing/570572709/

From Hear to Fear

What we hear of polls worsens every day.

Friends tell me they fear a red wave from New Hampshire to Nevada in three days that will nail the coffins of reproductive rights, voting rights, and the teaching of anything but thoroughly whitewashed American history.

“Fear” is the operative word here, but we can’t get there until we hear “hear” itself.

What most folks don’t hear is how these polls are compiled. And how mainstream news sources then report them, often taking averages of many to create what, mathematically, should be a fair single picture.

And many who are aware of that much are not aware of the sources of the individual polls.

Along with Gallup and Quinnipiac pollsters, along with polls taken by newspapers and television stations, are polls taken by the campaigns of individual candidates and the political parties and PACs who support them. Yes, both Democrats and Republicans take them, and the wording of questions plus the selected demographic will tilt results in their favor.

Here’s the rub: Thanks to Citizens United, the highly-financed right-wing PACs behind Republicans take far more polls than Democrats. When added to other polls, these warp the averages that are reported in newspapers as varied as the Newburyport Daily News and the New York Times.

As a result, we actually believe there as as many voters in Georgia who will vote for Hershel Walker as for Raphael Warnock, or in Pennsylvania for Dr. Oz as for John Fetterman.

By itself, this illusion will not work. But Republican’s ulterior motive might succeed.

Their polling data, before it goes into any “objective” national average, goes to would-be donors, all of whom are more likely to give, and give more, to candidates with good chances of winning. As we have seen since the Willie Horton ads of 1988, Republicans do not hesitate to distort facts to their favor. By distorting polls, they pump up donations.

Especially with polls that emphasize inflation with no mention of record corporate profits, price gouging, or record-high employment rates. But that’s the point: Republican polls are not meant to inform, but to influence.

Unlike many of my friends, I remain optimistic. The huge numbers for early voting bodes well for Democrats, and I just cannot imagine that the Supreme Court verdict on Roe v. Wade will not compel voting by people, male and female, who would otherwise stay home.

Enter fear into the equation.

There’s no little irony in that Republicans’ money-making polls are throwing fear into Democrats, Progressives, and Independents. Judging from their ads, the fear is intended for their own base. Fox News is now a 24/7 MAGA-Republican ad that runs crime, immigration, and inflation on a loop. All of it grossly exaggerated, none of it fact-checked.

As Hillary Clinton told CNN this week, “They’re not concerned about voter safety. They just want to keep voters scared…”

Her echo of Franklin Roosevelt makes it doubly ironic. For decades, at least since the likes of Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan steered the GOP away from the moderation of the Eisenhower Administration, the Republican Party has committed itself to the dismantling of FDR’s New Deal.

You could say that FDR himself told them how to do it: We have nothing to fear but fear itself. Republicans have taken that warning as a blueprint.

But by FDR’s standard, a call to action beginning with ballots, there’s no need to fear Tuesday when no red wave will break Roevember.

After Tuesday? Never short of litigating tricks up the sleeves of judicial robes, Republicans have prepared for losses. They need only claim fraud, and then cite those very polls now showing their candidates doing so well as “proof.”

Early voting turnout has prompted them to file dozens of lawsuits already, and they have candidates across the country saying they will not accept results unless they win. One in Wisconsin vows that Republicans will never lose another election in that state if they vote him into office. Many others dodge the question. Moreover, we have already heard the threats and tasted the violence that will ensue.

The impasse bound to happen after the election will be solved only by those who do not identify with any party or ideology. To offset the fear cast by the other side, those folks need to hear from us.

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Time to Use the F-Word

My good friend Helen Highwater, who lives on a handsome pension provided by a most productive career as a writer and editor, was not pleased by my recent use of an f-word to describe one of America’s two major political parties:

Here and now, if THEY are fascists, are WE not socialists? Both terms can be justified from grains of the truth. Both fan the flames on the other side, pushing us apart.

To me, use of the word fascism seems increasingly ineffective rhetoric. Both sides use it against the other. What is fascism? My favorite definition comes from The American Heritage Dictionary.*

In my own words: The wedding of capitalism and government, under which lies and fear-mongering are business as usual.

That was a reference to my blog’s claim that lies and fear are all there is to Republican political ads, as if they turned FDR’s claim on its head and are campaigning entirely on fear itself. Helen did back off a bit:

Maybe I am lily-livered. Does sound a lot like Trump & MAGA.

Our 2 parties are both fluid enough (and corrupt enough) to reverse their principles in a relatively short time. Both sides are against it until they are for it . Both sides have their own vision of what freedom means, and it always means contradicting the other side.

Meanwhile, Bernie remains the most clear-eyed pol on the scene.

Yes, we are socialists, I answered, referring to roads and bridges, airports and railways, fire and police protection, public schools and libraries, Medicare and Medicaid, public parks and restrooms, water fountains and snowplows.

Being upfront about it–calling things what they are–is precisely what makes Bernie “the most clear-eyed pol on the scene.” That was all I said at the time, still taken back by her “both sides” remarks. I’ve never claimed the Democrats are or ever were anywhere near blameless, and I certainly have a public record of criticisms of Obama, both Clintons, Al Gore, all the way back to Michael Dukakis. And I still think Debbie Wasserman Schultz should be in jail.

But to imply that Democratic faults and missteps in any way offset attempts to overturn an election, to discredit elections before they happen, and elect candidates in swing states who vow to control the vote in 2024? Can I compare Newburyport’s Turkey Hill to Alaska’s Denali? It has snow. Sometimes.

Such talk is paralyzing at the very worst time for us to be paralyzed.

Before I made this case, Helen wrote again:

Watched the DeSantis v. Crist debate.

Moderator was from a Sinclair affiliate. Looked like a Barbie doll with extra eye make-up. BUT she handled it fairly and firmly.

Sinclair is a right-wing chain of news outlets. The “Barbie doll” look of news anchors at right-wing outlets was the subject of my recent blog, “Lashing Out.”

Like other debates this season, the format does not give the candidates more than 60-seconds for any response, with 30-second rebuttals. Brutal. Even closing statements are 60-seconds. There are no opening statements–they go right into questions, but every candidate I have seen uses their first 30-seconds for a standard thank-you opening statement.

Seems designed to elicit sound bites. Or is it “out of respect” for the short attention spans of R candidates and most of the audience?

Like Demings at Rubio, Crist was very aggressive against DeSantis. And effective in my view. DeSantis actually called him a donkey at one point. He just smiled, and said he could take the heat, then blasted DeSantis for being a bully toward women, students, and minorities.

“”Donkey”? When DeSantis was asked about Dr. Fauci, he said he wanted to “throw that elf across the Potomac.” Belittling names and thuggish insults are a hallmark of fascism, and upwards of 40% of American voters relish it.

As I’ve written before: We should not have been surprised in 2016 when Trump “got away” with his ridicule of a handicapped reporter and his “grab ‘m by” comment. Not only did he not lose votes by those remarks, he gained from them. DeSantis has learned the lesson quite well, which is why just yesterday Trump excluded him from a Florida rally where he appeared with Marco Rubio.

I noted the difference between the American Heritage definition (below) and Helen’s (above): Violence.

Can anyone name a single Democrat anywhere since George Wallace who threatened, implied, or hinted at it? Meanwhile, even lily-livered Lindsey Graham hints at it. Poll workers have quit in droves, some run out of town. Been to any town hall meetings lately?

All these years, it’s been an absolute that nothing be compared to Hitler and the Nazis. Today I wonder just how much that self-imposed mental blinder helped pave the way for 2016. Of course they call us fascists. All while swastikas appear on the banners, the bumpers, and the tattoos at their rallies.

Now we know what the lyric “look away” in “Dixie” really means.

Helen herself pointed out the tactic regarding Cheney over a decade ago: Accuse opponents of your own crimes. Hell, they go further. Biden, Hillary, Pelosi are pedophiles. Should we speak more guardedly to accommodate that?

Speaking of Pelosi, I sent that answer just hours before a thug broke into her San Francisco home and beat up her husband while yelling, “Where is Nancy?” Like the armed and masked “poll watchers” in Arizona this week, this is the ripple effect of January 6. Seems to me that if elected Republican officials can continue to call Jan. 6 a “normal tourist day,” then we should be calling it exactly what it was and still is.

Helen and I aren’t all that far apart in this debate, and I have to admit that she’s the more pragmatic. As she just responded:

I’ll practice guarded restraint to get along with various family, friends, & strangers. Still, when they are willing to talk, I am too.

Maybe I’ve been listening to too many friends in self-help programs, but I’ve come to believe you can’t solve problems until you call them by honest, accurate names.

But if you want to know how I really feel, make it two f-words.

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* Fascist (n).

1. often Fascism

a. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, a capitalist economy subject to stringent governmental controls, violent suppression of the opposition, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
b. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.

2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.

Get in the Ambulance

Seems everyone I know is freaking out that Republicans are going to gain both the US House & Senate in next month’s election.

One friend says he has suicide pills ready for Nov. 8, a joke in character for him. My plans for Nov. 8 also include going under, no joke. Not any suicide pills, but a colonoscopy. Call it metaphorical medicine.

This general demoralization has been gradual. Only recently, I’ve started thinking I was the only one left counting on the repeal of Roe v. Wade to save us. More recently, phone calls and emails from as far the redwood forests and the Gulfstream waters have me worried.

It may well be that nothing we call issues will drive this vote, not even reproductive rights. Issues may be the tires, the transmission, the brakes, the lights, the mirrors, the radiator, and of course the exhaust system. And we may take any combination of them–as in “culture wars”–and call it the engine. But where it all goes will be determined by what’s behind the wheel:

How many Americans want to replace democracy with fascism?

Too strong a word, you say? What is fascism but a combination of lies and fear? Watch any Republican TV ads. Any of them. State or national offices. Mass or NH where I am, sometimes Georgia. Lies and fear are all the Republicans have. It’s as if they’ve turned FDR’s “nothing” into everything, a blueprint to rule with “fear itself.”

If they outnumber us in the Rust Belt, our redwood forests and Gulfstream waters won’t matter any more than Black Lives at a NASCAR rally.

Then again, the Republican candidate for the US Senate in Pennsylvania may have helped us out last night with his statement in a televised debate that reproductive decisions should be made by “women, doctors, local political leaders.”

And when Texas schools are sending DNA kits to parents of K–12 students to identify their children’s bodies in the event of mass shootings–yes, that’s how thoroughly mutilated kids at Robb Elementary were last May–maybe those who always yawn “all the same” will wake up to the difference between the letters R and D on the ballot.

Would they trouble themselves to vote for candidates who might limit the access that 18-year-olds have to automatic weapons?

Or would they just as soon let it all slide? Maybe Republicans can reassure them by writing thoughts and prayers on those DNA kits.

But I snap out of these dark moods. With grandkids in elementary school–not in Texas, thank my daughter and son-in-law–pessimism is not an option.

And to be perfectly honest, some of these Republicans are hilarious: Dunces as ridiculous as Hershel Walker and Tommy Tuberville, plus all the QAnon quacks in congress. Yes, I know that the lunacy–like the lies, the fear, and the frequent hints of violence–is part of fascism’s makeup.

Still, laughter is a form of thought, and if we could treat Dr. Oz’s “women, doctors, local political leaders” prescription as a joke–the more offensive and alarming the better–we may have so many women behind the steering wheel on Nov. 8 that we realize it’s not just a car, it’s an ambulance.

Call it comic medicine.

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https://www.firetruckmall.com/AvailableTruck/13179/2005-Medtec-GMC-Ambulance

Dear Devalued Customer

For the first time in my life I have the monthly bill from VISA but cannot pay.

Not because I do not have the funds, but because Bank of America was either sold to or morphed into something called Comenity Bank.

In contempt of the common sense rule, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” Comenity issued a new card and number a full year before the one I had would expire. That unnecessary capitalist idiocy caused a bit of confusion and embarrassment at a local restaurant and the inconvenience of being short of cash when I was dispatched to western Massachusetts first thing next morning.

As if that wasn’t enough, Comenity–an idiotic corporate name that sounds more like the drugs peddled during commercial breaks during football and baseball games: Ozempic, Skyrizy, Biktarvy, Dingdonkey, etc.–also changed the website.

For a few years, it was so easy. One of those nerds who likes to pay bills immediately just so I can forget about them, I’d click into my account as soon as the notice arrived. I’d take time to scan the itemized list and satisfy myself that there were no surprises, which there never were, and I’d pay in full.

Yesterday, Comenity’s first notice came. When my password was declared “invalid,” I called Customer Service, hereafter called CS. “The site is down,” I was told, “call tomorrow.”

This morning I did, only to be told again that either my password or username were invalid. Second call: CS said it would send a new link that would work. Ten minutes go by, no email.

Third call: CS agrees to send the statement via the US Postal Service, but offers to resend the link. I laugh at the “re” in “resend,” but the link pops up on my screen so I, always a sucker, give it another try. This time I am told not that my info is invalid, but there’s a “glitch” in the system. “Try later.”

And I’m sucker enough to try later. Should pause here to note that every one of these calls begins with a few minutes of navigation through a phone menu before my “request to speak with an agent” is recognized. At that point I’m put on hold for a few more minutes–each time.

Still a glitch in the system which prompts my fourth call. When I finally get to an agent who speaks clear, unheavily-accented English, I describe my problem. Silence. Hello? Hello? Still silence. Cut off? Hung up? Who knows?

My guess is she may have hung up when I spit out the word co-MEN-i-tee as if it were toxic waste. I had to hear the word at least a dozen times on each call and can hardly begrudge her revulsion, even if she is an employee.

Call five: Following the phone menu, my request to “speak with an agent” is met with something new when I’m informed that “the transfer of (my) call requires a $9.00 service charge.” I immediately hang up.

So now I await the statement’s appearance in the box at the foot of my driveway–while wondering if I incurred a service charge for any or all of the previous four calls, though that theft will not be known until a month from now. I dare say, $36 will still fetch a decent meal and a couple of IPAs at the Grog or Port Tavern.

Payment deadline is a full three weeks away, so I’ll give it two before I make another call. Not to Comenity, but to my congressman.

No way I’m going to risk another $9 surcharge, and by that time, I’ll have already gone through the phone menu maze of Mastercard or Discover, whichever has the first ad peddling it like a drug when I tune into the World Series Friday night.

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No, “Chris Martin” is not my alias, though I often feel as though I’m valid through no time at all. Anyway, I had a card that looked just like this. If you had or still have one, you may want to look into it.

Something So Lopsided

When I first heard that Hershel Walker was running for a US Senate seat in Georgia, I went rooting through my old, faded newspaper clippings.

Long before newspapers started keeping electronic files, and in a day when I was still pecking at an Olympia typewriter, I went into the offices of the Newburyport Daily News for the first time ever with a commentary on the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.

Not to the editorial desk, but to the sports desk when I introduced myself to the late Kevin Doyle who accepted my take on Walker’s decision to join the newly-formed United States Football League rather than the long-running NFL.

Can’t recall the headline when it appeared in print, but according to my own log, the headline I submitted was “The Tragedy of Hershel Walker.”

In a writing class I taught at South Dakota State University a year earlier, a star of the Jackrabbits football team wrote of a similar decision. A far smaller scale of money or tragedy, but it was a lens for comparison that Doyle found clear and convincing.

As for Walker, it seemed shameful to me that a player who led Georgia to a national championship in 1980, and whom some jocks were calling the greatest running back ever to play in college, would turn down a chance to rival and set running records–and to play with and against the best players–for the sake of a slightly higher than already very high contract offer.

Oddly, the USFL had already pledged not to draft underclassmen when that was still a heated issue, but the owner of the New Jersey Generals, one the dozen new franchises, never cared much for rules or ethics and could not resist Walker. His name was–and still is–Donald Trump.

The league caught on briefly, and other college stars, including Boston College Heisman winner, Doug Flutie, would sign. Jocks both in print and in broadcast called the Generals the USFL’s “glamor team,” though the Philadelphia-turned-Baltimore Stars dominated the league.

Walker was the highest paid player in all of pro-football, though his team never won a playoff game. When the USFL folded in 1986, he joined the NFL for 13 seasons during which, in 1989, he was traded from the Dallas Cowboys to the Minnesota Vikings for five players and six draft picks.

The stunt failed Minnesota who thought he was all they needed. Walker was good but not that good, and those draft picks would eventually propel Dallas to three Super Bowl victories in 1993, 1994, and 1996.

As one of the network commentators for NFL games implied just this past weekend, Hershel Walker is best remembered not for his play on the field, but for being on the losing side of the most lopsided trade in the history of professional sports.

I never found it. Perhaps because it wasn’t a column for the editorial page, but a feature for the sports page, I was careless in filing it.

And in February of 1983, it was five months before the Daily News initiated its guest column feature called “As I See It”–at a time when many newspapers and magazines were following the lead set by Newsweek magazine’s “My Turn” feature open to freelancers from all walks of life, including Yours Unruly in June of 1986.

Sports Editor Doyle made sure I stopped to chat with the editorial desk to see if I’d join the team they planned to launch that summer.

Today, I’m one of just two remaining originals writing for “As I See It.” This morning I bet I looked at every one of over 400 columns I’ve had in print trying to find that forerunning commentary that led to it all.

No luck, but I still revel in the idea that, four decades later, the same guy is yet again on the wrong side of something so lopsided. Can anyone not laugh at his performance in the debate with Rev. Warnock? Following that embarrassment, he now declines to debate Warnock a second time.

Several weeks ago, Walker refused a debate because, he claimed, everybody would be watching Sunday Night Football. The debate was scheduled for a Thursday night.

What more clear and convincing lens could any writer ever find?

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