What Made It Necessary

Not long before he was killed, Martin Luther King expressed a profound fear that America was soon heading into “Dark Ages.”

Just seven months after King was gone, Richard Nixon was elected president of the United States. Before long the country was treated to the Watergate scandal, but the anti-war movement had remained strong, and America had withdrawn from Southeast Asia. Not exactly an American Enlightenment, but not entirely dark.

Later came eight years of Reagan followed by 20 years of wanna-be Reagans, a time of rising economic disparity and cultural clashes that kept polarizing us but which never shut anyone up. Hardly a Renaissance, but a far cry from the Inquisition.

Following the economic collapse of 2007-08, the Obama years were genuinely hopeful with a modest healthcare plan and wide-ranging attempts to restore the arts. Yes, the first is a pittance compared to what any other NATO country has, and the latter a dim echo of JFK’s Camelot, but there was never a hint of, say, the Crusades.

King’s prophecy may have seemed hyperbolic over these past five-plus decades, but it is now a literal fact of American life.

This didn’t happen suddenly, not did it just start a decade ago when the Golden Calf rode a de-escalator into the lobby of his own Tower of Babel to announce an openly racist and hateful bid to become president of the United States.

Throughout the years of the Civil Rights movement right to his death in 1968, King recognized the strain of racist hate and paranoia that runs from the colonial plantation owners through the Confederacy, through the KKK, and now all the way past him to today’s MAGA movement. But it wasn’t simply race. It was the proposition that Americans must be concerned about others, rather than in it only for themselves. Hence, the ridicule and revulsion shown toward such things as Hillary’s “village” and toward Michelle’s interest in child nutrition. “Empathy” to them is a bad word that verges on a threat.

The personification of self-interest just happened to be in the right place at the right time to ride a wave propelled by the very idea of a Black man in the White House. The press called it “backlash,” with a few editors more in tune with the times calling it “whitelash.” But the wave already had the power of many Americans’ resentment of anything that attempted or suggested equal opportunity, or diversity, or inclusion. All an opportunist had to do was convince them that such efforts were always at their expense. Fox News made that quite easy.

And so here we are today, stripped of King’s dream and living his nightmare. Universities bow to authoritarian commands; news outlets censor themselves; public schools ban books; medical research is shut down; science is suspect; history is erased and concocted. Perhaps with the most gripping symbolism of all, we have the personification of self interest, the herald of the crude and stupid, the reality TV show barker putting his foul name on the Kennedy Memorial Center for the Arts–only to have artists of all kinds cancel their shows, leaving it to washed-up, discredited hacks who suck up to him.

Last week, a friend posted an anonymous poem, a tribute to Martin Luther King that began with these three lines:

You took my name and stripped it of my danger.

You took my words and drained them of their fire.

You took my dream and severed it from the nightmare that made it necessary.

The references are, of course, to so many “celebrations” of this day that cherry-pick quotes, avoiding all that have to do with economic disparities and injustice, to create “a smaller version” of the man.*

Chances are that this sanitization will never happen again. Either we wake up from the nightmare and stop it, or one year from now, the holiday will be replaced by one for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The administration has already re-written the history, and given the attacks on all things regarding diversity, equity, and inclusion–including the very words themselves–there is no way that they will allow this holiday to stand by itself. If it is not erased, it’ll be clumsily absorbed into a celebration of the MAGA crowd that stormed the Capitol.

Hey, they were all protesters, right? Just like King.

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*The full poem:

You took my name and stripped it of my danger.

You took my words and drained them of their fire.

You took my dream and severed it from the nightmare that made it necessary.

You took my hope by electing people in the White House who said civil rights did not advance us; it just hurt white people.

You did not want the King who spoke of structural sin.

You did not want the King who named capitalism as exploitation.

You did not want the King who said America was “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”

So you built yourselves a smaller version of me — a harmless King, a polite King, a silent King.

A King who only speaks once a year.

A King who never mentions prisons, or police, or poverty, or war.

A King who smiles, but never disrupts.

The Worst & the Darkest

If America’s Reign of Hate began with a TV show, maybe we can end it with one.

Face it: The combination of cruelty and crudeness of The Apprentice made him appealing to enough Americans to elect him president in 2016. And if you think that was a fluke, then you were in a coma when he won again in 2024.

He is Archie Bunker reincarnated, but with Archie’s harmless hard-headedness turned into the merciless humiliation of “You’re fired!” To those soaked in resentment constantly stirred by Fox News, those two words carried a decisive authority that made Hillary (“Stronger Together”) and Michelle (“When they go low…”) sound like wimps.

Moreover, Archie’s incidental racism is now full-blown white supremacy disguised as a law-and-order effort to control cities. To avoid the charge of racism, it is cast as suburban and rural vs. urban. If you’re still amazed that your Republican friends refuse to acknowledge that the Capitol was invaded by a mob on Jan. 6, it’s because the Republican dictionary defines “mob” as “city.”

The foremost unremarked reality of America today is that what we call Reality TV shows have nothing to do with reality, and yet enough of us are so enthralled by them that we have elected to live in one. Unreality is our new reality. George Orwell’s 1984, intended and always before read as a cautionary tale, is now an operator’s manual.

But enough of the problem we all know. To solve it, let’s start the show:

A friend suggests that we “turn The Apprentice upside down. Call it The Secretary. Instead of ending each show with ‘You’re fired,’ this would have the Chairman saying ‘You’re hired!’ to the worst candidate.”

Might take some effort to find a team of people capable of taking stage directions who are as shockingly pompous and/or ridiculous as Pete Hegseth, J.D. Vance, Steve Miller, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, RFK Jr., Karoline Leavitt, Cash Patel, and Pam Bondi. But I like the strategy of holding up a fun-house mirror to a reality already grossly distorted. There has to be some point at which even those who superimpose The Chairman’s face on the American flag can, oh say, see how anti-American they yet wave.

So, too, the title “chairman” suggesting a corporate CEO (with a subliminal echo of Chairman Mao) is more honest than “president.” But I might prefer a title to highlight the thuggish bent of someone who hints at threats of violence and who has rewarded those who have committed violence on his behalf. Call him “The Godfather.”

Also, The Secretary suggests there’s just one. We want a depraved, demented, delusional team worthy of the one now running the country. Our title should be a warped reversal of Pres. John Kennedy’s “Best and Brightest.”

Could be a variety show (remember those?), but of various TV offerings. Start with a game show. Contestants are asked basic questions such as naming the three branches of government. The one coming closest to “Mar-a-Lago, the Westminster Country Club, and Trump Tower in Manhattan” gets the points.

Then a reality segment of an ICE raid. Describe it as lawful, neighborly, and helpful, and you get points. Then a sitcom of Noem answering questions in her latest costume, hat, lip fillers, basketball-hoop ear-rings, and necklace with cross. Describe her as intelligent, coherent, and honest, and Points R U.

Maybe then a weather forecast to let the Marines know the best time to land in Greenland, or the Navy when to surround Cuba, or the Army when to ransack Seattle. Extra points if you can recommend restaurants and nightclubs where our troops can enjoy themselves.

The highlight would be a segment with Miller & Vance wielding charts to show the need for a forever domestic war. Orwell predicted “forever wars” to sustain a police state, but those were with foreign powers. We, as “Oceania” (America), would have only “Eurasia” and “Eastasia” (Russia and China) to choose from, though we could switch either from ally to enemy or vice versa at any time and insist that it had always been that way, that no change ever happened. Alternative facts beget alternative history.

With a forever domestic war, think of all the cities and states our federal government could attack and occupy where our troops would already know the language and be able to read signs to specific targets like grocery stores and elementary schools. Call this segment “Out Orwelling Orwell.”

The contestants would then be asked for the best course of action based on what they’ve seen. Those reluctant to send US troops into US cities would be gone from the show upon return from the last commercial break. And there would be no lack of ads to accommodate all the Republican donors eager for a piece of the action.

Also banished during commercial breaks will be invasion-curious contestants who have qualms about Congress (whatever that was) or the courts. Left on our screens will be those gung-ho to inflict punishment at home and abroad–though they might want to wear masks.

The last segment will be a rendition of the National Anthem as played by a marching band. Points will be determined by who can keep a straight face while singing “land of the free” and “home of the brave.” Upon those who do, The Godfather himself will bestow the blessing: “You’re hired!”

With the point made like that, Americans might ask not how our current Reign of Hate began, but ask what we can do to stop it.

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L-R, US Attorney General Pam Bondi, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem look on as US President Donald Trump speaks to the press before signing an executive order that aims to end cashless bail, in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel NGAN / AFP)
https://www.elmundo.es/internacional/2025/08/25/68acaf5ee4d4d8291a8b459e.html

Call Her ‘What If’

Whether or not the very title, Call Me Ishmaelle, makes obvious the book’s premise, let’s start by saying that author Xiaolu Guo’s re-imagination of Moby-Dick is based on historical record.

No telling how many young women successfully disguised themselves as young men for the sake of adventure and got themselves hired, mostly as cabin-boys, on merchant and whaling ships that crossed oceans in the 19th Century. Guo mentions four whose stories and memoirs have appeared in print.

Her acknowledgments also include Skip Finley’s Whaling Captains of Color: America’s First Meritocracy (2020). May not have been true in the early 19th Century when Herman Melville’s novel is set or even in 1851 when Moby-Dick was published, but Guo’s adaptation begins in 1860 by which time freed African-Americans rose through the ranks to become captains of ships.

Suffice to say that, while the critics label Ishmaelle “gender-flipped” or “a feminist re-telling,” they are not wrong. But the book is so much more, that they reduce it even as they think they praise it.

Moreover, Guo tells a very different story. While the characters are parallel, most of them play quite different roles. Unlike Ishmael who keeps his head down on the Pequod, Ishmaelle becomes very much a part of the plot. With the exception of a few musings at the end of chapters and at the end of the book, her narration stays focused on the Nimrod‘s pursuit of Moby-Dick, a far cry from Ishmael’s frenzied philosophical and historical tangents while telling us of the Pequod‘s voyage.

Captain Seneca is as close to Othello as to Ahab, with an added grievance or two that propel him. And his surprise addition to the crew, Muzi, a Taoist “monk” who advises him with the I Ching, is 180 degrees removed from Ahab’s Satanic Fedallah.

Advising Ishmaelle is Mr. Entwhistle, or “Woody” as he is inevitably known, who likes to remind her that, as he first puts it, “Everything is a task. Living is a task. There is only one thing that is not a task.” What follows is among the more revealing passages regarding her inner turmoil, the glaring difference between Guo’s narrator and Melville’s, and by implication between men and women:

‘And what is that, Woody?’

‘Death. Death is not a task.’

Well, I thought he was right. Death is not a task. But that was like saying that a carpenter is a carpenter, a fish is a fish, a boat is a boat. There was no need to interpret these things. But to be a whaler was different. A whaler had a mission to conquer, to kill. Life for a whaler was not about one task after another task. Life for them was a huge heroic mission involving killing or being killed. I was never sure if I was a real whaler. I did not have this desire to conquer or to kill. I did not have this unstoppable urge to chase. But I did have the desire to know about the world, and to discover. So I was neither a carpenter nor a whaler. I was not sure what I was. For the last several months, I had been a man called Ishmael, now I was a woman called Ishmaelle. Though to myself I was both.

While there’s no Father Mapple and no “Woe to him who seeks to please rather than to appall” sermon, the Nimrod’s crew includes a surgeon, Mr. Hawthorne, who takes Ishmaelle under wing. By the end, we’ll learn that Hawthorne discerned the disguise early on. He soon becomes a father figure to the girl-boy when he learns of her knowledge of the medicinal properties of herbs. Guo is offering an inside joke with the name: Not only was Moby-Dick dedicated to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville’s friend, but herbal medicine played a leading role in The Scarlet Letter.

Captain Seneca also took note of Ishmaelle’s way with herbs. Because of it, he spared her any punishment when she was found out. Might add that he put her attacker in irons for three days, but that’s a slap on the wrist considering just what the attack entailed. When the third mate was lost overboard, he amazed the crew–and I dare say this reader–by promoting her to the position that includes leading one of the three boats that leave the ship for the chase.

Like so many secrets in Guo’s intrigue-rich tale, Seneca’s reason will be made as clear as it is logical. When Ishmaelle denies his claim that she has some secret power over “the white devil,” Seneca explodes:

You cannot lie to me and dissemble! You witch, you have been brought to me, brought onto this cursed bark. You are the path to the whale. You have beguiled that whale, you will ensure I prevail!

A black captain vs. a white whale. A woman in the role of a man. Eastern religion guiding a Christian boat. The backdrop of an imminent Civil War before the story sets sail. A cameo appearance of witchcraft as it dives toward conclusion.

Taken in full, Call Me Ishmaelle isn’t a “gender-flipping” of Moby-Dick, nor is it a backstory such as Sena Jeter Naslund’s page-turning Ahab’s Wife (1999), or the tale told from another point of view such as James (2024), Percival Everett’s uncompromising re-telling of Huckleberry Finn.

The only category into which Guo’s novel might fit, if it exists, is the category of “What if?” It’s a category, a question, a premise in which the imagination has no limit.

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https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/book-talk-call-me-ishmaelle-xiaolu-guo

Let’s Get Horny

Well after dark, I drive down High St., squinting at the line of on-coming headlights, and, quite suddenly, there she is.

A pedestrian casually strolling across, perhaps 20 feet in front of me, looking straight ahead, as if I’m not there, as if all those headlights coming the other way are there only to light up her way.

I pump my brakes rather than slamming them and taking the driver behind me by surprise. But she is already stepping across the center line, so I would likely miss her anyway.

No idea what, if anything, the next driver coming the other way does to avoid her, as I keep my eyes on my side of the road. But I do know this: Had my car or any car hit her, Newburyport would be in yet another uproar over “careless drivers” and the need for “lower speed limits.”

No matter that she crosses where there is no crosswalk. In Newburyport, pedestrians–and bicyclists–are always blameless, and the motorist is always guilty, evil, and immediately condemnable to hell.

Last month, in nearby Ipswich, a woman was hospitalized when her horse was spooked by a bicycle on a nature trail. The horse had to be put down, and police, last I heard, were seeking the cyclist.

If that happened in Newburyport, some people would demand that they find the owner of the nearest parked car to blame and hold liable.

Over the top? Maybe. But the basic story is something I’ve heard described by friends in other cities and states. Across the country, the reality we face in 2025 may be far closer to my exaggeration than it is to what all of us over the age of, say, 40 once took for granted.

Don’t know when it ended, but once upon an attention span, pedestrians followed two “Rules of the Road”:

Make eye-contact with the driver before crossing in front of a moving vehicle;
Wear light, bright clothing after dark.

Both are matters of common sense to a Truman baby–and I’ll venture to say to Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter babies such as my daughter. The points are so obvious that they should not need making.

The woman who appeared not far before my driver’s side headlight wore black slacks and a dark gray coat and hat. She may have looked my way before I saw her and decided she would reach the center of the road before I reached her.

All I can say for sure is that she never made eye-contact. Crossing the center line, which was as far as I saw, she never broke her unhurried stride.

We hear about reckless drivers all the time. Cars that go too fast, run red lights, tailgate, cut us off, never yield, blast their horns unnecessarily. As one who drove delivery vans for 25 years, I saw more of that than most.

This was as true in the Eisenhower years as it is now. I still laugh at the memory of my uncle in Akron telling my father, “Ohio drivers may kill you accidentally, but we’ll never be rude to you.”

That, of course, countered the notorious reputation that we hear to this day of Boston drivers who “consider directional signals a sign of weakness.”

Today’s epidemic of reckless pedestrians was unheard of. Was it the “You can have it all” 1980s that started to erode the idea that we must pay attention to the world around us?

Was it the advent of the cellphone that conditioned so many to think that they live in bubbles? Or just act as though they do without having to think at all?

I’ll leave that for others to answer, and I’ll leave the problem for others to solve. All I can think of is that it might help to start scaring the intestinal content out of these oblivious fools.

Horns, after all, are a safety device when used as intended.

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Baby, you can drive my album cover! This VW ad seems to suggest that cars may use crosswalks. Did VW hire a Newburyport ad agency?
https://mx.pinterest.com/pin/18858892159148238/

On this 12th Day of Christmas

For as long and loud as its frontman’s bellow was a week before Christmas Day, Project 2025’s main point was quietly slipped in at the very end.

Two weeks before the invasion of Venezuela, there was nothing anywhere close to a national emergency for which such prime time addresses are called. Many pundits dismissed it as a campaign speech, a list of all the usual talking points, all of it false.

They are mostly correct, but they missed the last-second dog-whistle intended to rile up the MAGA base.

Before we get to that, let’s recognize that one of the claims, though exaggerated, has a grain of truth to it: The 2010 Affordable Care Act–”Unaffordable” in his phrase–was intended to benefit insurance companies.

As usual, he immediately twisted that exaggeration into a firehose of lies obvious to anyone over 30 with a memory by calling it “a Democratic scheme” because insurance companies “own the Democratic Party.”

When Democrats began crafting a plan for national health care, many pushed for universal coverage, a single-payer system such as those which exist in all other countries with high standards of living and that rank high in every poll taken to measure quality of life.

Worth noting here that, of 132 countries, the USA ranks 38th, between Hungary and Barbados in one such poll taken by World Data. Another, World Population Review, lists only the top eleven, and we are not on it. Because they make health care a priority, it’s a safe bet that we are not even close.

When Republicans screamed of socialism, Democrats hoped to compromise by expanding Medicare. Republicans did not budge, and they repeated horror stories of “government-run” medicine and hospital care.

Before long, some Americans were repeating tales of “death panels” and of women waiting eleven months to deliver babies. Nor was there any convincing them that medicine and care would still be run by hospitals and health professionals. Government involvement would be limited to coverage.

Nor would they hear that, of all the countries that have adopted universal health care, not one has repealed it. That includes Norway where it began in 1912 and other countries where it began in the aftermath of World War II. Few political candidates, even those far-right, attack it. Those who do, lose.

But America runs on scare-tactics, and Democrats retreated yet again, this time to a plan based on one devised here in Massachusetts under Republican Gov. Mitt Romney.

To the contrary of the frontman’s 18-minute shout, it was Republicans, not Democrats, who steered profits to insurance companies with the Affordable Care Act to which enough of them finally agreed.

After regaining control of the House in 2011, Republicans tried to demonize the plan as “Obamacare” and have since tried to repeal the bill dozens of times. They refer to their own polling results–never mentioning that, in southern states, 70% are in favor when the question says “Affordable care Act” while 70% are against when it says “Obamacare.”

“Repeal and Replace” became their slogan even though they offer no replacement. Excuses for this range from his laughable “concept of a plan” during the campaign last year to the insulting lunacy of Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) telling reporters last week:

“The challenge Republicans have always had is trying to unify behind a single proposal. We’ve just got too many good ideas.”

Republicans have no more plans or ideas than fish have 401Ks. All they have is a wrecking ball called Project 2025 which calls for White Christian Nationalism–the glue for all else it contains.

With 2025 coming to a close, it was perversely fitting that he sang the praises for the Project’s “accomplishments.”

Though amused, pundits were perplexed by his unrelenting loud and rapid pace, as fact-checkers hustled to show every claim as fraudulent as the crosses worn by his henchwomen like camouflage around their necks.

They thought it was over when he finally paused and took a breath. They missed, and so failed account for his last two words:

“Merry Christmas.”

We know that this wish has long been a hot-button issue, red meat for his base. They demand it be made exclusively. Hence, it now serves as a battle cry against humanitarian calls for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

With all other faiths left unacknowledged, the entire speech may well have been nothing but camouflage for the pursuit of uniformity, privilege, and exclusion.

We also know of Project 2025‘s goal to erase all traces of DEI. Oh, how the upcoming Martin Luther King Holiday must irk them!

Don’t be surprised if Republicans propose to replace it with this 12th day of Christmas to honor the MAGA movement’s attack on the capitol five years ago, blending their perverted patriotism with The Epiphany to impose Christianity on the USA.

And as names continue to change on buildings and on maps, don’t be surprised if you awaken one day to a new national slogan:

E Pluribus Conformitas.

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There’s a signature in the top left corner, apparently in Arabic, that I can’t decipher. The friend who sent it tells me it has been around some 10, 12 years at least.

More than Whaling in Mind

Running 40 minutes behind schedule, the 30th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon dives past midnight into Sunday’s wee hours. So sorry if I’m keeping you up waiting for me to breach on the livestream.

Here at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, no one appears at all bothered by it. The twenty readers following me, all the way to 3:30, are all smiles when they take to the podium and when they leave. While up there, expressions change to capture Ishmael’s excitement, Ahab’s rage, Queequeg’s resolve, Starbuck’s meditation, Stubb’s flippancy, Flask’s complacence, Pipp’s innocence.

Yes, that’s all in the present tense, as I now have a seat outside the auditorium in a room just off the lobby where coffee is here for the taking. Only chowder cups remain from which to drink it, but caffeine is caffeine. There’s a large screen with the livestream a few feet from where I sit, and the sound, frankly, is louder and more clear than in the auditorium.

Only because I glanced at the screen do I realize that viewers may have noticed an odd bit of drama when I took my seat. Indeed, when I checked messages before starting this report, I learned that a friend had patiently waited those 40 minutes before writing: “I’m here. Where are you?” And then:

There you are… what? That guy just took your book and kept it? You are such a gentleman.

Don’t know about the “gentleman” part, but I need to describe the Marathon’s format to explain what happened:

On the auditorium stage are two podiums and one chair. The dual podiums work like a relay race to keep transitions up to speed. Each has a microphone, and so the reader on deck, so to speak, is ready to start as soon as the one reading is finished. Two monitors are seated in the front row facing us, and one will say “Thank You” at the end of a paragraph nearest our allotted time. The reader who is finished leaves the stage, and the reader waiting in the seat goes to the vacant podium. Since we wear numbers on lanyards around our necks, it is very easy to see when we should leave the audience and take that vacated chair.

So it was that when 128 finished, 129 started, and 130 went from chair to podium. At that moment, I, 131, took the chair. And then it happened. Stepping back toward me, in a whisper, 130 seemed in distress and said something. I thought he had lost his place and wanted me to point it out. Already following along, I held my book up and pointed to the paragraph that 129 was then reading.

130 took the book! I was surprised, but he soon brought it back, saying he was still lost. I’m quite familiar with those ten or so chapters (that’s why I always choose the “midnight watch”), so I was able to point to it. Again, he took it to the podium, and got ready to read from it.

This time I was stunned. How could he not have his own? And they have a stack right there from which anyone can borrow. One of the monitors, perceiving what happened, and knowing that I had to be following along as 130 read, gave me one of those books, open to the page.

As if to add insult to injury, 130 got “The Dart,” the chapter I hope to get every year. For one, it’s an op-ed column written 70 years before newspapers began carrying such things, and 120 years before the term was coined. Other chapters in Moby-Dick fit the description, but, just as the best op-eds end with “kickers,” this one ends with a metaphor showing that Melville had a lot more than whaling in mind.

And then my bad luck turned to gold. They cut the book thief before the last paragraph, which I know by heart, so I was able to look up into the audience and camera, and deliver it as the kicker it is:

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

Gave it two beats to sink in before buoyantly announcing “Chapter 63, The Crotch” and putting on my glasses. Grateful that no one snickered at the name of the fixture that holds harpoons in place on the boats that give chase, I then read the chapter’s delightfully calm, organic opening line:

Out of the trunk, the branches grow; out of them, the twigs. So, in productive subjects, grow the chapters.

The audience laughed, and for the first time, despite having read Moby-Dick five times, I heard Melville’s anticipation of critics who would complain that he attempted too much. As he writes in a later chapter, “I try all things; I achieve what I can.”

Not sure if it was that realization, or kicking of “The Dart” with point and purpose, or both that took my mind off the book thief and animated me like a child on a boogie board riding the waves of a playful surf through Ishmael’s provocative prose.

Yes, I’m sorry if I kept you waiting, but not at all for what you got while you waited. Nor would I apologize for any of the 25 hours these marathons average, with or without an extra 40 minutes this year.

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No screenshots awaiting me this year, as those prone to send them sent them in previous years. This may be from two years ago, before the event was moved into the auditorium. I won’t know if my opening recitation had the desired effect until I see the video, which the museum usually posts about two weeks after the event. Judging from the message from Woonsocket, the affair of the book makes an impression. I’ll post it in a blog as soon as I can:

Home

From Calendar to Clock

Ever notice how the calendar and clock correspond?

Midnight-2 am: More dark than light, January’s weeks are the wee hours of the year, a time to sleep, or at least stay under blankets and comforters, comforted against the year’s lows.

2-4 am: Come February, and good luck avoiding people sincerely surprised that the days are getting longer and wanting to tell you about it. But feel good about the night shift seeing the days start sooner. Still so cold, however, that even the groundhog appears for but a peep.

4-6 am: Enter March and a lion may roar for a few days here and there, but on our calendar o’clock a rooster welcomes spring, the dawn of every year.

6-8 am: We keep hearing that April showers bring May flowers, but it’s really the mud that does it. April’s warmth, much like the oncoming warmth of a rising sun, melts winter’s frost. The original poem, “April mud makes May bud,” didn’t quite make it with the critics. Hence, showers and flowers.

8-10 am: May is akin to mid-morning following coffee breaks. Researchers call this the most stressful time of the workday, an odd match for what we call the most romantic month. From heart attacks to hearts broken? Maybe, but those same researchers call it the most productive time of day. And we all know what romance can produce.

Lesson: Fish off the company dock if you must, but watch what you interface.

10-noon: Dinnertime corresponds to June, the start of many annual vacations. Schools go out on recess. A time for photo-ops. Even Newburyport City Hall smiles as often as possible, always outdoors with the Chamber of Commerce. Every sentence they head-nod includes—as June only need imply—the phrase “moving forward.”

Noon-2 pm: July is the now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t month. Tourists observe Yankee Homecoming in town while locals take refuge here on Plum Island. So, too, in early afternoons do office workers kick back to the pleasantries of answering mail and making phone calls. Restaurants decelerate into low gears after so much high-speed action to refuel the rest of us. We remember the second syllable in “hello.”

2-4 pm: “Dog days of August”? What else can we say about late afternoon? Go through the motions of work, but can’t wait to go home. Helen Highwater, a most reliable Newburyport denizen, tells me of a plan to spruce up the month with “Annie Oakley Day,” an attempt to reconcile feminists and gun-enthusiasts, which, successful or not, could bring a whole new meaning to “Happy Hour.”

4-6 pm: September is the month when neighbors tend to reconvene, especially their children and teenagers in schools, much like the hours when we arrive home and sit down to evening meals. We humor the kids in the fiction that they would rather stay on vacation, just as we kid ourselves with the phrase “Indian Summer.”

6-8 pm: October is an annual sunset, as colorful as a western horizon over a salt marsh, rich in all shades of red, orange, yellow, purple. Apple pickers hit the rungs and fill the bins. At home it’s time for sweets. Downtown restaurants can stuff—in another sense of the word—their thimble-sized desserts. Give us McIntosh, or… Check, please!

8-10 pm: In Moby Dick, Ishmael refers to “a dark, drizzly November in my soul” to explain that he cannot remain in civilized society. He must go to sea—or at least to the Thirsty Whale. English tradition calls it “the blood month,” the time to store food for winter. In either case, striking out or hunkering down, November corresponds to the end of one day’s activity and preparation for the next.

Some go to bed, others to bars. Children say prayers at points on the clock that would find Thanksgiving on a calendar.

10-midnight: December, then, is a long day’s destination. Candles and fireplaces offer natural light for natural reflection, and we exchange gifts that sum up a year past and anticipate a year about to be.

Finally, on the 31st, we stay up till midnight, sincerely surprised by another chance at renewal—the only day in 365 when we realize that calendar and clock are one.

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Taken by my next door neighbor, this photo faces northwest. If you could extend the horizon about a generous inch on each side, you would see where the sun sets on the Winter and Summer solstices. Dead center would be where it sets on the Vernal and Autumnal equinoxes. For the fellow in the hat, the clock moves overhead, the calendar straight ahead. Photo by Kim O’Rourke.

If Only a Scene in a Film

A Rhode Island friend reports that Showcase Cinemas Seekonk is no more.

Her photos show it already torn down, piles of rubble behind a ten-foot-high chain-link fence. She pays tribute:

A depressing scene….that’s all that is left. If only it were just a scene in a film…but this time it’s real. My heart sunk. Goodbye forever Showcase Seekonk! I have many memories of a multitude of incredible films I once viewed up on your big screens.

Any mention of rubble inevitably invites comparisons to the photographs we see of war-torn places. While no one would ever put the decline of an industry on the same plane as the destruction of war, there is a destruction that goes beyond buildings and entertainment. There is something happening here that is exactly clear if we see it in the context of how we live, what we value, what we honestly want.

It is the battle of private vs. public interest.

True, cinemas are privately owned, but they do provide a public life. People gather and sometimes talk with each other about what they have come to see. Far more often, they will talk on the way out about what they have just seen.

As a projectionist at The Screening Room, a small arts cinema in Newburyport, Mass., I have often seen patrons outside our door after a film agree to stop in The Port Tavern next door to share thoughts and reactions. I’ll never forget the woman who, following Spike Lee’s BlackKlansman, blurted out, “I’m going to The Grog to defrag!” Several patrons still stepping out the door volunteered to join her. That may be an extreme example, but just the look on other viewers’ faces and the tones of their overheard voices gives us a sense of public participation.

Always nice to have family or friends at home with you to share reactions. But you have them with you many, perhaps most other times. Compared to the public life of a cinema, this is a self-imposed privatization. Not a privatization of a business, of a building, of a choice of entertainment, but of ourselves.

As for all of the privately-owned cinemas that I am calling vital to our public life, I can tell you that all of us view other cinemas far more as allies than as competitors. Far from the cut-throat world of streaming services, the better any of us do, the better we all do.

Any cinemas’ success means that more people are going out, that more of us have a public life away from privatized confinement. The closing of Seekonk, like that of many cinemas large and small across the country in recent years, is a trend. As a trend, it is subject to change. And it stands to reason, that an increasingly isolated public will eventually grow hungry for a public life.

Any cinema’s closing is bad news, but here’s hoping that Seekonk’s patrons keep going to cinemas nearby, keeping them strong until the trend changes.

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All for a Bird on My Roof

Sunday after Christmas: When I awake, I sense commotion out my window and across the street.

Two cars are parked, the second with two people opening doors and getting out as a third car stops behind them. With a camera the size of a bazooka, the third driver also steps out.

Counting the driver of the first car, I soon have four photographers aiming weapons of mass illustration at me. Because I live atop a slight hill, they aim upward.

Keeping away from the window, I rub my uncaffeinated eyes, and quickly throw a shirt on. It’s doubtful they can see this far through the window, especially with a glaring morning sun facing them. And if they did, it would be from just the neck up.

Without coffee, and necessarily concerned more about urination than illustration at that moment, I leave them to their own devices. In the bathroom, I resolve to stop being so specific in my Daily News columns about where I live, and my expansive view over the marsh next to this wildlife sanctuary that serves as a bi-annual pit-stop for migrating birds.

While walking in the sanctuary, I’ve seen how cars converge on a spot to photograph a red-tail hawk, a peregrine falcon, a snowy owl, an occasional bald eagle, a rare king eider. Happens on the one and only road across the marsh connecting us to the mainland, a causeway absurdly called a “turnpike.”

While walking the road in the sanctuary, I’ve chatted with them, learned something of their MO, and have been treated to their cameras’ views that can make a blue heron a half mile away look like it’s on the other side of a card table ready to take you on in a game of cribbage.

Birders–call them “bird watchers” at your own peril!–have an app on their phones which they can use to alert others of a sighting. Since most all of them frequent Plum Island with license plates from all over New England any given day, a quick gathering of three or more cars with perhaps five or seven birders is common.

Fans of Moby-Dick might be reminded of the “gam.” When two whaling ships sighted each other on the high seas, they would pause the hunt and join side-to-side to exchange information. The captain of one ship would board the other while the first mate of the other would board the first. Never occurred to me to ask birders if they have a specific word for their impromptu gatherings. And might it be possible that that word is “gam”?

Happens along the causeway. I have no idea how anyone in a passing car one day could have noticed the falcon at least fifty feet away, slightly down from the higher road, and in the tall marsh grass. But that’s why birders tend to travel at least two to a vehicle. By the time I was on my way home, five cars were in the breakdown lane, and the birders lined one side like a baseball team from home to first following introductions.

This morning, in the bathroom long enough to heat water for a full French press of a Tanzanian dark-roast, I throw on my gym shorts just in case my own personal paparazzi is still trying to capture my sorry posterior for posterity. A few sips is all it takes to see that their cameras are aimed not at my window, but up to my roof, and to the roof next door.

Do I throw on more clothes and a pair of shoes to get out and look up? Nah! It’s 16 degrees, and whatever it is or they are, I’ve seen them before and will see them again.

Better to settle here on my posterior and record the story for posterity even if it does reveal that I’m so vain, I positively thought that gam was about me.

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You can tell where the road is by the bottoms of the telephone poles. This pic was taken by a friend, or a friend of a friend, on a summertime sunset cruise. Sorry I cannot recall who that was.

A Long Scarf ’round My Neck

Christmas Day: Before driving south some 70 miles to join family for dinner and an exchange of presents, I stopped at a convenience store to pick up a gift for a friend who has spent the entire month and will likely spend another in a rehabilitation center.

No, no addiction, but Parkinson’s Disease at a stage where he can do little more than read between meals that are served on his bed-tray or in the dining room at the end of the hall where a wheelchair with someone to push it will take him.

And read he does, always asking for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, a dual habit he has sustained for as long as I’ve known him going back to the Reagan years.

WSJ does not run on holidays, so I settled for the NYT only to be startled by the large over-the front-page-fold photo. Did the Gray Lady really put a painting of the three wise men on its cover? There was no headline above to give it away. My glasses, hurriedly applied, showed that I was looking at three donkeys, not camels, and the caption described people fleeing the war in Sudan, seeking refuge in Chad.

Still, the choice of image for December 25 could not be mere coincidence. Or am I just haunted by an uncanny thread in what might seem like a seasonal scarf around my own neck? Began three weeks ago when I prepared a Christmas column for the Daily News, a feel-good story about a package delivered to the wrong address due to a wrong turn called by Siri. As a spoof of the carol, I used “App of Wonder, App of Night” as the headline.

Barely two weeks ago I joined a No Kings rally of about one hundred brave-the-cold souls on a small town green where they usually have a drum circle. Just two drummers showed up, but that was enough. Improvising to their beat, I played all the standard Christmas carols I knew except for one I just could not find, and not for lack of trying: “We Three Kings.” That kind of irony is a blog that writes itself, though the headline was its best joke: “The We Three No Kings Band.”

While I was writing that blog, a friend of Middle Eastern descent posted an editorial cartoon:

The image arrested me as emphatically as that wall halts the kings. If we were to be honest about Christmas in America, 2025, it would be available as a greeting card, and I’d have sent it. Instead, it prompted a column headlined “Merry Exclusivity!” which has yet to hit print–likely next week, after which it will become a blog, available to all.

As always, I was last-minute getting cards to send out. For at least forty years, I always picked out large cards with images of the Archangel Gabriel and his trumpet or, if unavailable, of any wind-musicians or wind-instruments. The reason for large cards is to stuff them with a newspaper column or blog or two or three I’ve written over the past 12 months I think the recipient will like.

By the time I arrived at Jabberwocky Bookshop, no Gabriels, no flutes, no piccolos, no group of carolers, no drummer boy, no brass, no chamber orchestras, no angels with harps were on the card racks to be had. But I spotted a card with the three kings which was perfect for the enclosure I had in mind, the “No Kings” blog. You’ve heard the saying, “Sometimes the jokes just write themselves”? In this case, it was the card itself.

All that came to mind in the convenience store in the brief time it took to buy that newspaper. When I handed it to my friend in the rehab center, I said nothing of it, though I awaited his reaction. At first glance, he gave a start, but right away focused on the caption. His look told me that he noticed what I had noticed.

You’ve heard the saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? In this case, it was worth a thousand to appear accommodating us with what we celebrate this day, and then a second thousand to remind us of what we actually have this day.

A Christmas card-turned-reality check. If you happen to have a copy of the Christmas Day NYT, hold onto it. You’ve heard the expression, “hiding in plain sight”? Unannounced messages in large publications tend to become collector’s items–especially when placed over the fold of a front page.

On screen, this is much brighter and clearer than in print. Try to imagine a darker look at a distance of three or four feet to approximate what I thought I saw.
The first ever screenshot I have done knowingly. According to the icons on my screen, I did one of Sinclair Lewis and Dorothy Thompson. That icon has been there for at least three years. I recall finding the photo and posting it, but I have no recollection at all of noticing the word “screenshot” while I did. Is it possible to do without knowing it?

And on the day before Christmas when I saw no newspaper:

Christmas eve, I awake at 11:00, finish breakfast at 1:00, and put off all last minute errands until Friday or even Monday. Snowflakes the size of silver dollars starting to pile here on the island. Always piles more on the mainland, so why cross the bridge? Why test Stick-It’s tires on my steep driveway on my return? There’s bound to be a gas station open between here and Boston tomorrow when I trek to the South Shore for a couple days. Nine IPAs are enough in my fridge till Saturday. And who needs cash when you have a credit card? Or those rosemary-sea salt rolls from the Italian bakery when you’re making pancakes, that great excuse to have maple syrup, for breakfast and will be having holiday feasts away from home?

I say “Merry Christmas” when I know someone shares my general background, and “Happy Holidays” when I do not, but in both cases what I really mean is “Feed Me!”

Bon Appetit to all! And to all, a good bite!

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The We Three No Kings Band