Call Me Mr. Alien

Today the two doors leading into Newburyport’s busiest supermarket were disgraced by tables nearby with the clipboard petitions of people soliciting signatures.

“Illegal aliens!”

A man at each repeated those two words as often as he could in a spiel about stopping a law that has to do with the issuance of drivers’ licenses in Massachusetts. The two men stepped toward approaching shoppers as they spoke while a woman seated at each table with more petitions, empty or full, cheered them on.

Those roles may have been reversed from time to time throughout the day for the sake of vocal chords if not feet. They were loud, and two words, repeated no less than every ten seconds, no matter the sense of the sentence, were emphatically loud:

“Illegal aliens!”

Took me by surprise. Newburyport?

The place wasn’t all that busy, and I was grateful that the few folks I saw go past them paid no attention. Me? Couldn’t resist:

“What would Jesus do?”

At first they didn’t know what to make of it, but when I kept walking with no move to sign, they must have realized that they had just “owned a lib” or “pissed off a libtard” or whatever their low-life expression is of late. And so they shared a laugh behind me.

On the way out, I was tempted to ask where they would be the next morning, a Sunday morning. Will they be at the doors of Catholic and Protestant churches filling the air before and after worship with “illegal aliens”? Are they so stupid that they’d take this crap to a synagogue? Would the contradiction even register on them? Or is there a separation of the Sermon on the Mount from their Sermon at the Mart?

No, I did not waste the time. And I left through the other door where the other couple was engaged with shoppers. One was signing. I looked over at the first table. A few shoppers there as well, one signing. A lot of talk, all of it punctuated by two words that rang aloud at both tables:

“Illegal aliens!”

Couldn’t help but note that everyone at both tables, shoppers and petitioners, was of Caucasian decent, as am I. Chances are that they all have grandparents or great-grandparents or ancestors further back, who arrived in America as immigrants, as did mine. By the definitions of their own slurs, their own ancestors were “aliens,” nor were they legally here until they had been processed through customs–a process that most everyone they call “illegal” has either been through or is going through.

But doesn’t “illegal aliens” sound so much more menacing than “undocumented immigrants awaiting naturalization”?

The sight of shoppers, mostly middle-aged, some elderly, signing those hate-sheets was demoralizing. No telling how many are well-intentioned folk fooled by the slur or how many are racists grateful for yet another excuse to express it without admitting it. Surely, none of them realize the implied denunciation of their own ancestors.

Don’t know what their deadline is to submit signatures, or if I’ll see them and hear their slurs again. But, if so, I will sign. They want a name? Oh, I’ll give them a name! Not going to give it away right now, but my initials will be IA.

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Apparently the bill has stalled for two years. This photo and story are from New Bedford, 2020:
https://www.newbedfordguide.com/massachusetts-immigrant-drivers-license-bill-stalls-in-house/2020/07/29

Convenience a la Mode

Somewhere in New Hampshire a friend wrenched his shoulder while unloading a truck. As men do, he tried to ignore the discomfort, believing it would go away.

Instead, it turned to pain. Before long, he didn’t think he could drive a car and had to ask his wife for a ride to the hospital.

Listening to this, not wanting to slow the story or inhibit the telling, I took no notes, but based on where I know they live, they went to either Portsmouth or Exeter. Whichever it was, as soon as they walked in, they saw a crowd and walked back out.

Somewhere else in Rockingham County they found one of those medical chains that have appeared everywhere in recent years. This one was Convenient MD, where they received a very nice, soothing welcome from a friendly receptionist, filled out some forms, including billing information of course, and were soon introduced to a nurse.

The nurse worked her fingers around my friend’s shoulder only to admit that there was nothing she could determine for certain without a x-ray, and that the staff’s radiologist had already gone home for the day. She referred them to a nearby medical center.

Third time’s a charm, and not long after they arrived at the center, my friend had some treatment, some pain-killers, and a sling he wore for barely a week.

All’s well that end’s well as whatshisname put it–except that the story doesn’t end there.

One month later, my friend received a bill for $15 from Convenient MD. Well, alright, the nurse did spend some time with him and gave the referral. And it is a pittance. He did raise his eyebrows at the amount, there on his bill, that Convenient MD charged Medicare–just over $200 as I recall–but, hey, if this is what America wants as a healthcare system, ain’t nothin’ we can do about it.

Except the story doesn’t end there either.

Weeks later, Convenient MD sent him another bill, this time for over $160, and the charge to Medicare was proportionally higher. My friend was soon on the phone.

After calls to both Medicare and Convenient MD, not only was he able to rip up the bill in front of him, he was told he’d be reimbursed for the bill he already paid. When he told them that he’d “have no choice but to contact Medicare” (even though he already had), he was assured that it, too, would be “fully reimbursed.” Days later, a $15 check arrived in the mail.

“Hush money!” I yelled.

“Yes!” he laughed.

“And it was your own $15!”

He laughed again, but he wasn’t hushed. He made a second call to Medicare to report what happened, giving them all they need to pursue reimbursement if Convenient MD reneged on what they told him. Put another way: The ball is in Medicare’s court.

We can only wonder about how widespread this is. In our privatized healthcare system, the elderly on Medicare must appear as low hanging fruit. They (we) are less prone to question bureaucratic details, as when my friend simply paid the first bill–even though he noticed the $200 charge to Medicare for a thirty-second shoulder massage.

The second bill was either a mistake, such as confusing him with another patient that day, or Convenient MD, for whatever reason (or haywire algorithm), thought it could bilk him for more–and in the process, Medicare for a lot more.

It’s an old trick, and on the internet it’s called phishing. Nor is it confined to the private sector.

Back in the ’90s, the city of Boston put cameras over busy intersections to photograph plates of cars at the end of those lines that cross as the light turns from yellow to red. Tickets would be sent out automatically.

This was already ruled illegal by courts across the country, but the higher-ups knew that most people would pay the fine rather than take a Tuesday afternoon off work to find their way into a downtown courtroom to contest the ticket.

Those who did show up in court had the ticket repealed. Every. Single. One.

If enough of us keep an eye on the bills we receive and are willing to drop a dime and raise a voice, Medicare’s court should work just as well.

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https://cahealthadvocates.org/have-your-new-medicare-card-beware-of-new-scams/

Ain’t Over Even When It’s Over

A friend tells me that he was recently on the phone with a relative who, while climbing a corporate ladder, was transferred to Charlestown, South Carolina.

Most memorable was a statement screamed into my friend’s ear. He wanted to convey the emotion he heard, but tried to muffle it so as not to attract the attention of other diners at Newburyport’s Park Lunch, as loud as the din in that place can be:

These people still think the war isn’t over! The Civil War! They call it the War of Northern–they say Nawthun–Aggression or War between the States! Whatever, they don’t know they lost!

Before his attempt to muffle himself expired, I tried to calm him down: “And we expect them to know that an election two years ago is over?”

“Yahhhhh!” he bellowed. That caught some attention from nearby, but it was easy to deflect in a sports bar.

“Damned Yankees!” I shouted just as loud.

The two of us then smiled and nodded in agreement with all those around us who had no idea what they were agreeing to. All of it went unquestioned likely because the Boston Red Sox just took two out of three games from the New York Yankees in a series that ended Sunday night. Had I been sitting at another table, I’d have made the assumption myself.

Reminds me of how geographically, culturally, psychologically, and politically telescopic the name “Yankee” is.

Most historians think the word evolved from Native American attempts to say “English” throughout the colonies, and was then applied to all European settlers, including the Dutch in what was first named New Amsterdam. This may be why, to this day, every American from any state is a Yankee overseas.

Come back here, and it is just us in the North and Midwest who are Yankees in the suspicious South. To Mid-Westerners, the name is not for them, but just for New Yorkers and New Englanders, maybe New Jerseyans and Eastern Penners. Up in Northern New England, they embrace the name as their own, but in Southern New England, Yankees are a detestable baseball team with deplorable fans that we would not root for if they played Al Qaeda.

Even in New York City, many residents of its five burrows place “Yankees” specifically in the Bronx, a name not to be used for anyone or anything in Queens, home of a rival team named New York Mets–and certainly not Manhattan where the Giants played or Brooklyn where the Dodgers played before both teams moved west. No word on Staten Island’s preferred proper noun.

From the sound of it, many elderly fans in Brooklyn think the Dodgers are still there, dodging trolleys that aren’t there either. Like my friend’s relative in Charlestown, they prove that Yogi Berra was wrong. It ain’t over even when it’s over.

Both cases remind me of the chasm between what Americans like to know and what we need to know. Unless you are employed by one of the 30 major league teams, baseball has no direct impact on your life. What happens at the polls in November of every even-numbered year in all fifty states does, no matter how far you want to think you are removed from it–no matter how far above you think you are from it.

As it is, Republican nominees for the US Congress and for statewide offices all over the country have won primaries by declaring that the 2020 election was stolen, and will do what they can to undo that result–state by battleground state where, if they win this November, they will be the ones to certify electoral ballots in 2024. In effect, 2020 ain’t over any more than 1860. The Confederacy did rise again, flags and all.

But that warning will be heeded only by those who seek what they need to know.

Those content with only what they like to know may want to consider, at least, what the chant, “Yankees Suck!” actually means in the real world.

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Boston? No. Massachusetts? No. New England? No. The Carolinas? No.
Caracas, Venezuela.
http://xenohistorian.faithweb.com/latinam/la01a.html

https://simple-movie.com/movie/yankee_doodle_dandy/

Of Abolition & Abortion

A new book provocatively titled The Color of Abolition offers a look at William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass that few have ever seen and that many may rather not see.

Any quick description of it would be enough for those who regard everything in absolutes to either dismiss it as “bashing” or revel in having yet two more progressive heroes brought low–no matter that no one on either side of that divide will ever read the book.

As one who has read it, I’ll offer that, while it reveals shortcomings of Garrison and Douglass, allies-turned-rivals, it does far more to highlight the work of both as vital to bringing about the Emancipation Proclamation.

As well as highlighting the mostly unknown work of one Maria Weston Chapman of Weymouth who gets equal billing in a book subtitled, How a Printer, a Poet, and a Contessa Moved a Nation. Born of the manor–and with five sisters “all single and all devoted to the movement” serving as her staff–Weston Chapman helped underwrite the Underground Railroad and raise legal fees to protect those caught in the North after escaping the South.

Here’s where the surprise regarding Garrison begins. Weston Chapman didn’t just keep The Liberator afloat. She became its de facto business manager, and often its editor, filling in for Garrison during his speaking tours and more-than-occasional medical leaves. Like Garrison, she also wrote much of the copy.

If that wasn’t enough, she arranged Douglass’ speaking tours and gave him introductions to influential patrons in both America and England–all while organizing auctions of pricey European donations held by a network of women throughout New England and New York.

This triumvirate worked well enough to force the issue of slavery onto the floors of Congress following years of a gag order imposed by the South. Among the highlights of The Color of Abolition is its treatment of the debate–still maddeningly relevant today–over whether the Constitution is a pro-slavery document.

This is where Garrison and Douglass parted ways. Garrison held that it was, and therefore there could be no political solution, only disunion. Douglass saw potential in the document for a political solution. He negotiated with Whigs, Northern Democrats, and the short-lived Liberty and Free Soil parties before befriending Abraham Lincoln who, two months before the assassination, told him that there was no one in America whose opinion he valued more.

On the surface, it was a meeting of two true Americans while the uncompromising, humorless (due to chronic ill-health?) Garrison and the intense, “privileged” Weston Chapman fade into oblivion–except that author Linda Hirshman doesn’t let us forget that it was Garrison’s (and Weston Chapman’s) Liberator that moved the earth in ways that would put Lincoln in the White House, and made it possible for Douglass to get anywhere near it.

We can also credit Hirshman for filling us in on this unknown role of women–and a leading role of one woman, not to mention her own literal sisterhood–in the Abolitionist movement. As she says in her introduction, “no social movement in American history matters more.” As the author of Reckoning: The Epic Battle against Sexual Abuse and Harassment (2019) as well as Sisters in Law: How Sandra Day O’Connor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg Changed the World (2015), she should know.

My hunch is that she undertook a history of Abolition for its parallels to what is unfolding today regarding abortion. Seemed clear to everyone with the exception of senators Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska that all three Trump appointments to the Supreme Court were intended to overturn Roe v. Wade.* Just as clear as when the Fugitive Slave Act was intended to impose Southern oppression in Northern states, no matter the South’s own claims of “states’ rights” and the euphemistic “popular sovereignty.”

Hirshman describes the anguish of Massachusetts Supreme Court Justice Lemuel Shaw in upholding the hated law. Prior to that he was legally able to rule in favor of those who escaped enslavement. She notes that Shaw was the father-in-law of Herman Melville who turned him into a model for the anguished Capt. Vere in his last novel, Billy Budd.

Today, Shaw and Vere may both serve as models for judges across the nation faced with state laws that place bounties on women who cross state lines, with severe penalties for family, friends, nurses, and doctors who assist and care for them. Hirshman’s description of the Fugitive Slave Act makes it easy, if chilling, to see how it will serve as a model for a national law to outlaw abortion should the Republicans regain control of Congress and the White House.

But Hirshman’s ultimate verdict is not entirely bleak. Speaking of her three leading characters:

Their relationship raises all the questions of whether an alliance across race, sex, and class can survive. The answer is unsurprisingly yes. And no. Their paths to abolition reflected the rise of the movement. Their alliance fueled a crucial decade. And their breakup, sending Douglass to the politicos, perversely led to its triumph.

What if the Republican breakup of Roe v. Wade sends women and men who never before voted–as well as young people who have just reached voting age–en mass to the polls?

Could it be that Trump’s three cynical appointments to the Supreme Court will perversely lead to America’s way out of today’s Dark Ages?

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

*If you wonder why I name just two Republican women when every Republican senator voted in favor of Trump’s three appointments, it’s only because the rest of them, including a few women, were–and still are–in on the scam.

2C2E

In 1989, the year that Salman Rushdie went into hiding, and in the years immediately before and following, I frequently wrote columns about cross-country travels with my daughter that proved quite popular with readers of the local paper.

She was just 11 that year, four years older than Rushdie’s son, Zafar, who was suddenly and necessarily estranged from his father. To maintain some connection, the author of probing novels with deep historical, religious, and philosophical content, wrote a children’s story and engaged his son as his first-read editor.

After hearing the first draft, Zafar told his dad that it was a good story, but it needed “some jump.” Rushdie took that to mean “quicken the pace” and told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Zafar liked the “jump” of the second version.

In September, 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the adventures of an irrepressibly happy young boy who finds himself living in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name, appeared in bookstores and libraries all over the world where speech is–or at least was–still free.

These were years when I spent more time downtown playing music than anywhere writing anything, and in the holiday season I would bundle up with fingerless gloves that allowed me to pipe Christmas carols along with my standard jigs and reels, bourees and minuets.

On the very day before Rushdie’s interview aired, a woman approached after I finished a song and handed me a $20 bill rather than putting it the basket. She insisted on a condition: That I would turn it into “a present for Rachel.”

‘Twas a few nights before Christmas that I had her open it. I figured it would take five or six nights of bedtime installments, but Haroun has more jump than Zafar may have bargained for. Several times I had to stop my voice from racing. Rachel loved it, only conceding to sleep when we were halfway through.

I took it to bed and read to the end before turning out the light.

When we woke up to pouring rain, we finished breakfast and rejoined Haroun and his story-telling father through pages of magical realism that she found exciting page by page–and that I found as thoughtful and satisfying as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies.

One recurring item in the dialogue we adopted into our own father-daughter vocabulary: The label that Haroun used whenever he could not answer the boy’s questions, 2C2E for “too complicated to explain” Sure sounded better than “I don’t know” and “Because.”

In the age before internet shorthand and texting abbreviations, both the sight and sound of it struck us as hilarious, and yet it had a weird echo of Hamlet’s 2B or not 2B that kept us guessing about subjects rather than shrugging them off.

Perhaps that’s my response this weekend to the news that Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye if not his life: 2C2E. No matter what we might guess or learn about why it happened, we cannot shrug it off.

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https://literatureessaysamples.com/haroun-and-the-sea-of-stories-salman-rushdies-use-of-allegory/

Forecast by an Outcast

Buried under the news of an FBI search of Mar-an-Ego for classified documents was the report of that Ego answering questions in the New York State investigation of his fraudulent tax claims.

Make that not answering.

After his name and address, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. He named it just once. To every question that followed he responded with the same two words: Same answer.

There are many adjectives that describe Donald Trump. Reticent was never one of them. His performance in New York last week was so out-of-character that it could leave anyone dumbfounded, and for most it defies description.

At first, I wrote it off as yet another bizarre quirk in Trump’s bottomless barrel of bizarre behavior. But before long I was taking my laundry out of a dryer, folding a t-shirt I bought at gift-shop at Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s farm in the Berkshires. Though I’ve been wearing it for three years and have given identical shirts to family and friends as gifts, I froze when I held it in front if me. It reads:

I would prefer not to.

What Trump kept repeating last week was what Bartleby kept repeating in Melville’s cryptic tale of a socially comatose scrivener on Wall Street.

By itself, that’s nothing to get hung about. Not until you consider that this is a man frequently compared to two other Melville characters that are as far from Bartleby as they are from Mr. Rogers. Indeed, ever since he descended the escalator in June, 2015, Trump has often gained comparisons to both Ahab and whoever is (are) the title character(s) of The Confidence Man.

Captain Ahab, who leads his whaling ship to destruction in pursuit of his own fantasy, foreshadows Trump’s “I could shoot someone” with an equally hyperbolic declaration: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”

Confidence Man (or men) employs the tricks of fast talk, repetition, deflection, projection, conflation, flattery, false claims, passive verbs, and vague attribution for scenes that could illustrate Trump’s ghost-written (speaking of con-jobs) The Art of the Deal.

For all of that, the most incisive explanation for the enthrallment of his fans goes beyond the Pequod’s crew’s lust for Ahab’s doubloon, beyond genteel riverboat travelers’ wanting to believe in Confidence Man’s altruism.

That honor goes to the seething narrator of “Benito Cereno,” Melville’s story of a slave revolt on a Spanish ship:

A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?

As is true of the American captain who found the Spanish ship in distress, many Americans can neither comprehend what is right in front of them nor believe it when it’s spelled out. When it blows up, such as on Jan. 6, it’s something else (“a normal tourist day”) or someone else did it (Antifa), or it didn’t happen at all (crisis actors, false flags).

As I write, Republicans are claiming that the files recovered from Mar-an-Ego were declassified by Trump and that they were planted by the FBI. One has to be “blind to… depravity” to think both statements can be true–and “malign that intelligence” that states the obvious.

We keep hearing that we need to read our history to avoid repeating mistakes. Yes, I agree, but I can refer you to a writer of fiction who dramatized American history in summaries just as true today as they were when he called himself Ishmael.

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Drawing for the 24th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 2020, two months before the pandemic. The 2021 and 2022 readings were virtual, but they plan to return to a live reading this coming January.

Why Weed What We Read?

Call me Herman.

While sitting on Plum Island overlooking the marsh reading Melville’s early novels, it’s easy to imagine I’m on a lush tour of the South Pacific.

A headset offering “virtual reality”? I would prefer not to.

In semi-retirement and with an insistent preference for hardcover, I’d go broke buying Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White Jacket—not to mention tired and blind trying to find them in bookstores.

Among many other things—civic archives and events, children’s reading programs, on-line resources and the computers to access them, not to mention technical assistance for all of the above—this is what libraries are for.

So, off to the Newburyport Public Library I went searching for Omoo (Tahitian for “rover”). Not there. The Modern Library of America’s four Melville compilations I had borrowed in the past? All gone. In fact, all I found was a single copy of Moby-Dick.

The on-line catalogue for the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium listed just one Omoo, and so I had it sent from Methuen. Next day, I spotted a friend from out-of-town who works at a library upriver photographing City Hall’s Juneteenth celebration and inquired.

He told me it’s called “weeding.” With so much on-line, many books never circulate. And then there’s MVLC.

“So, one Omoo is enough for over 30 city and town libraries?” I asked. He shrugged, I shrugged, and the mayor began to speak. That night, I sent him a message asking if weeding was a secret.

Here’s something that’s not a secret: Public libraries are as high as public education, public transportation, public everything on the Republican Party’s hit list. Are librarians now doing their dirty work for them?

While mulling that over, I received this:

It’s no secret. All libraries weed. If a book doesn’t circulate over a period of time, it’s removed. If the book is worn, meaning well read, we purchase another copy, if still in print.

Some are replaced by new trendy volumes on the same subject. You may not be able to get contemporary accounts of historical events, he cracked, but you can always get some “name-the time-or-place History for Dummies.”

If another MVLC library has the same title, removal is to avoid duplication, unless it’s a hot title:

“You can see it for yourself. Just walk through the literature and poetry sections.”

I did. As he says, “pretty anemic.” The Reference section looks empty. A bookcase on the 3rd floor with coffee table books—atlases, photography, fashion, art, etc.—is now gone, “so too the oversized books because they didn’t circulate.”

His voice rose in print:

Of course not! Too big to take home. But I witnessed many patrons read/browse/enjoy them in our library. Most people can’t afford to buy those books. The library can.

I saw many parents with children looking at atlases and photography books together and teens sharing books. We’re weeding not just books, we’re weeding people.

Given the overall demise of print, I asked, shouldn’t public libraries be increasingly vigilant safeguarding books?

Ha! A story from your own library circulated throughout MVLC that a patron wanted a second look at the two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps that patron delighted to think someone else had them, but when unable to place a hold, he inquired.

Weeded.

No matter that Whittier has deep Newburyport connections and that the books, published by a relative in 1894, contain his letters, always of deep local, historical value.

How are empty spaces on shelves better than those books? Than any books? This is not the product of careful thought, but of “policy and procedure,” the very antithesis of thought that turns thinking people into badly programmed robots. At a library no less.

Oh, the irony! Just 21 years ago NPL expanded to the tune of $6.8 million for what? More books, they said back then. Maybe they think Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, and John Quincy Adams are coming back through their door and they need bunk beds.

From my first inquiry, my librarian friend and I kept using a phrase: “with so much on-line.” Yet more irony! This dialogue began at a celebration of an American historical event as overlooked—perhaps as weeded—as Omoo all these years.

What’s on-line? I would prefer we start thinking of what’s on the line.

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The 2001 expansion is the curved structure from the left into the center as well as the entrance that links it to the old Tracy Mansion, built in 1771, into which the library moved in 1866.
https://www.newburyportpl.org/

A Comedy of Triples

If you’re a Boston Red Sox fan, you can be excused if you think A Comedy of Errors is the title of a forthcoming book about this 2022 season. Shakespeare himself might concede a better claim.

The misplay reached a dramatic climax Sunday when our rookie center fielder, already suspect for misjudging fly balls, misplayed three of them, turning a close game into a Kansas City blowout. It’s a wonder that the number on his back isn’t E8.

Errors? Not according to the official scorer. Not at all. Those were triples.

Yet another reason to wonder why major league pitchers don’t go on strike demanding honesty in scoring rather than giving the fielder every benefit of doubt even when there is no doubt.

Red Sox were seeing a lot of this from a few other players, including a starting first-baseman who accumulated eight home runs and not quite 30 RBI in this season’s first four months. Had he done that in two months, he’d be rated an average first-baseman. His .208 batting average is worse than bad. Making it yet worse, he strikes out so often that he should be the first player in MLB to have a letter rather than a number on his back:

K, the scorer’s symbol for a strike out, and backwards to indicate a called strike.

Few notice, but the bat always stays on his shoulder when he slumps back to the dugout with a hangdog face after the ump’s call. For comic effect, the Bard himself couldn’t script it better.

Last week we traded for a new first-baseman to replace Mr. Strike-Out, but we cut our gold-glove outfielder in favor of Mr. Three-Base-Error. Worse yet, last week we traded our catcher of nine years, considered among the best in baseball, while still in contention for the playoffs. Still worse, he went to one of the two best teams in our own league.

For casual readers unaware of baseball’s intricacies: Catcher is by far the most difficult and demanding position in the game–many jocks say in all of sports. He has to know every pitch thrown by each pitcher and call each pitch thrown to each opposing batter. He has to withstand pitches that bounce up from the dirt or are tipped back at him at speeds up to 100 mph. He has to hold runners on base, and if they attempt to steal, he has to rifle a strike 120 feet to second base or 90 feet to third. He has to catch pop-ups straight overhead that return to earth with a vicious curve quite unlike the predictable arc of a ball pulled or sliced or hit straight out into the field. He has to take throws from outfielders and make sweeping tags at opponents running toward him full tilt. And he has to do all of the above while wearing more pounds of padding than most of can but look at on a hot summer day.

This is why, years ago, a pitcher for the Miami Marlins declared that the catcher is the most valuable player on every team. That overlooks some duds playing the role, but I think most fans would agree that a catcher who excels at all of the above hitting .250 is as or more valuable than any other player hitting .300. Our former catcher is now batting .277 for the Houston Astros.

Back in Boston, the front office, the coaches, and players all keep insisting that they are still in it to win. Their ability to parrot the platitude with straight faces should make all aspiring actors envious.

As with Shakespeare, everything works on more than one level. The Red Sox are an error-plagued team on the field, and if base-running blunders were scored as errors, MLB might be compelled to send the entire team back to the minors and let the Caribbean national teams take turns filling out the schedule. (Imagine the new Fenway chant: Cuba si! Yankee no!)

As Boston’s most prominent sports columnist scowled, “Boston fans are paying the highest ticket prices in the league to watch minor league players learn on the job.”

For all that, the fatal errors have been made by the front office.

In addition to the first-baseman who can’t hit, the outfielder who can’t catch, the catcher now out, and the runners who keep making outs, we had a power hitting, high on-base-percentage first-baseman when last season ended, only to let him go–to the National League where he is now among home run leaders.

How Shakespeare could put a front office on baseball’s diamond stage is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that he’d make the Red Sox represent all of MLB the way that individual characters represent good or evil in morality plays.

And he would set it at the Trade Deadline.

Who couldn’t laugh at suits intoning about “the integrity of the game” while the best and richest teams skim the best players from the “small market” teams that fall out of contention in mid-season? Or while scheduling games to start in the late afternoon when outfielders are blinded by a sun low over the horizon, all for the sake of television contracts?

With so many obvious errors scored as hits, this 21st Century Comedy of Errors is an undisputed hit.

But it is about far more than the team in Boston, and has been running far longer than this one year. While the errors we see on the field may be funny, the comedy we don’t see is very dark.

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https://bosoxinjection.com/2022/08/07/red-sox-fans-against-jarren-duran-concerning-meltdown-vs-royals/

Fireworks a la Dove Street

Among the many peripheral, random events held all over Newburyport during Yankee Homecoming is the block party on Dove Street before and through the fireworks.

Dove is a short, narrow, one-way affair that lands on Merrimac St. across from Leary’s parking lot, so it’s easy for the city to grant a permit to shut it down for a few evening hours. Yesterday’s gathering was the 13th or 14th annual depending on how you figure the shutdown of COVID-20.

For me it was the first. Not just at Dove but anywhere, not just this year, but in my life. And I went under the assumption that any band at a block party would be aspiring high-schoolers playing standard hits note for every familiar note.

Turns out Astral Lemon is a Boston-based group that has been together a few years. Vocalist and front man Stylianos Psarogiannis–who also plays guitar, keyboard, or something that looks like a flugelhorn–not long ago was a student at the Berklee School of Music. He has stayed in touch with his history teacher, a resident of Dove Street who plans and supports the annual event, long enough to land this gig.

The day was so hot that I pretty much inhaled a 12-oz. ale as soon as I sat down, but that had nothing to do with the sensation that Astral Lemon creates as soon as they take up their instruments and start playing.

A couple about my age felt it as well, and we went back and forth identifying the influences we were hearing. I offered the Mothers of Invention, King Crimson, and Blind Faith. They suggested Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Pink Floyd, the last of which comes closest to a set list that includes two tracks each from The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.

Wish all my college friends were there to hear it with me.

All songs followed the otherworldly soundscape of some 15 minutes of three soaring guitars, rapid fire drums, and high energy keyboard. All of it had me back in 1968 before Astral Lemon was introduced and “opened” with “I Shot the Sheriff.”

Somehow I had forgotten that it was written by Bob Marley, but Astral Lemon reveled in the reggae glossed over by Eric Clapton. That may seem incongruous, but it was just right as a transition from the raw power of their warm up into the reassuring comradery of the vocals. More than that, it was the first of many offerings featuring mesmerizing guitar work that ranged from Dire Straits’ dazzling “Sultans of Swing” to the Doors’ deep and probing “Love Me Two Times” and “Riders on the Storm.”

Speaking of deep and probing, you might wonder if they play one Beatles’ song so that Psarogiannis can pause and look at lead guitarist Dinos Alvanos after the line, “He’s got hair. Down. To his knees.” But “Come Together” features bassist Filipo Goller who would do Paul McCartney proud with both his steady formidable support and his occasional playful leads.

Rhythm guitarist Oliver Ordish adds exquisite echoes of lines note for contrapunctal note in addition to joining some of Alvanos’ powerhouse leads and enhancing drummer Eduardo Hoyos’ feverish pace on the songs that call for it. No matter the pace or the intensity, Astral Lemon plays every instrument with precision that lets you hear every note.

Watch Hoyos and you can see him going through gears, zero-to-sixty in no time. On slower songs such as Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” he excels with syncopation, for which his four bandmates are noticeably grateful.

Starting just after 7:00, the band took a break after playing “Jailhouse Rock”–a nice pun, intended or not–just in time for us to move to the bottom of Dove and watch the fireworks over the gray house adjacent Leary’s parking lot. Later I would learn that one resident takes neighborhood dogs “for a long car ride until the fireworks end.”

Following the fireworks, Astral Lemon’s second set was just three songs. Was the pun intentional as they played Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” while spectators filed past them on their way back up Dove? Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar” would have been just as much of a pun in the years before everyone quit smoking.

The set was short only because the hour was late. Ordinarily, I’d concede that fireworks are an impossible act to follow, but on Dove Street, once every year, they are part of the show.

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Astral Lemon on Dove Street last night of Newburyport’s Yankee Homecoming, L2R: Dinos Alvanos, lead guitar; Filipo Goller, bass; Eduardo Hoyos, drums; Stylianos Psarogiannis, vocals; Oliver Ordish, rhythm guitar. Photo by Patricia Peknik.

Post Script:

As I left the block party, I heard faint music coming from the tent under which Astral Lemon was packing up. Sounded vaguely familiar, as it had a flute, so I stopped. Yes, it was Jethro Tull playing “Locomotive Breath.” Already having thanked them for giving me a night back in 1968, especially with their opening soundscapes, I had to let them know: “I’ve been to at least 35 Tull concerts in the past fifty years.” Immediately, they all wanted to know if I heard Tull’s Thick as a Brick tour. “Twice,” I said, and they were in awe. Dawned on me that I could have been talking to five grandsons, but that’s another story. While driving home, something else dawned on me: Brick was one of the first rock-and-roll albums–The Who’s Tommy another–to feature soundscapes.

And a personal note:

The gray house aside Leary’s parking lot was where my “Aunt Alice” lived. Not sure of the exact relationship, but I’m fairly sure her last name, married or not, was “Creeden,” likely a cousin to my paternal grandmother–Mary Elizabeth Creeden before she became Mrs. Garvey–born and raised in Newburyport. I recall that Alice was quite old when I was brought to visit during my early grade-school years in Lawrence. I’m still sorry for the bottle of water I knocked over on her dining room table.

When in the Course of Now

In Spencer, the recent biopic of Princess Diana, she tells her boys, “Here, there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.”

That drew more than a chuckle from someone who just finished a review of a new book titled Another Now and whose own forthcoming book is titled Once Upon an Attention Span.

Yes, that would be me, a huge fan of the historical novels of the late Gore Vidal who had a habit of referring to us as “The United States of Amnesia.” And of early critics of television such as Marie Winn (The Plug-In Drug, 1977) and Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985) whose foremost warning was that our addiction to the tube was erasing our sense of time, of past and future–that we were trapping ourselves in Now. What would they have said of cellphones?

Now comes a book titled Trapped in the Present Tense. With a bracing, brief preface, author Colette Brooks (In the City: Random Acts of Awareness, 2003) wastes no time reinforcing the theme:

In the twenty-first century, even the most reflective among us seem to be trapped in the present, events superseded so rapidly that awareness can hardly keep up. No before or after anymore, just here and now, 24/7.

Like Zen moments without the mindfulness.

She’s referring to analog life with texting and tweeting and the immediate jolt of ringtones in which “concepts of past and future are losing their currency [and] familiar expressions fail as well: ‘one thing after another,’ ‘ask me later,’ ‘someday you’ll understand’…”

In a perpetual Now, even “the long arc of justice” makes “less and less sense, as if language itself is faltering.”

Completing a one-two punch, Brooks fashions a brief, quirky intro to chapter one with all our common expressions that derive from guns, from “stick to your guns” to “take a cheap shot,” from “dodge a bullet” to “look down the barrel.” Think of any other, and I bet it’s “in her sights,” which are never “lowered.”

The chapter is titled “Shooters,” as much a reference to cameras with emphasis on two cases where both categories converged to change how news is reported in America and, therefore, how we perceive it: The assassination of John Kennedy (followed hard by the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV) and the country’s first mass shooting at the University of Texas three years later.

The remaining chapters–Soldiers, Secrets, Statistics, Snapshots–blend national events with personal stories, statistics and photos, most of them her own family snapshots. The writing is at once punchy and panoramic, as if Hemingway took up cinematography. Something mesmerizing about the prose, more poetry, most of it in the present tense, like the title says. On a beach-day, you could read these 200 fast-paced pages in one sitting.

The people she introduces reflect her book’s subtitle, Meditations on American Memory, and the many stats she offers reinforce it in ways that may cause a nervous laugh:

The most stressful jobs in America: enlisted military personnel, firefighters, airline pilots, taxi drivers, and event coordinators, who are tied with police officers. Which means anyone on active duty who flies to a wedding and takes a cab to a venue that burns down may blame the person who planned the event in the first place. And insist on an arrest.

As heartfelt as her personal tales and serious as her perceptions of public failings are, Brooks favors us with the comic relief of wordplay and whimsy throughout Trapped in the Present Tense. That’s much needed in a book with chilling implications if we heed George Orwell:

“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”

Though she never says it and may very well deny it, Brooks’ book portrays an America that, having forfeited any sense of time, now lives by a Declaration of Dependence.

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