Tipping Canoe

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

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

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

Yes, there is one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer may be two.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

E Pluribus Rio

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you doubt that, just look at a map.

https://archive.org/details/hudsonhistory0000lewi_c1a7

Melville’s River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Holiday Gag Disorder

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

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

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

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

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

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

An explosion rattled my teeth:

Who’s they?

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

Who’s they?

Well, it’s a story that’s out there.

Who’s they?

Anyway, it’s not important.

Who’s they?

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

Then why did you repeat it?

After a pause:

I was just using it as an example.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a word, it’s un-American.

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

Revenge of the Kitchen

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chef: Who are you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Beware ‘Bait Leader’

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

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

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

“The ads say ‘available at‘.”

“Yes, it’s available on our website.”

“The ads say at!”

“At. On. What’s the difference?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s to the wisdom to know the difference.

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

Melville’s Time Warp Again

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Discolored Friday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awaiting Thanksgiving

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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https://www.stocksy.com/1684343/doctor-resting-alone-in-a-hospital-waiting-room

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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