A ‘Tight’ of Passage

Every few months when I take my copy of Emblem from my mailbox, I immediately turn to the class notes and find my way to “Class of 1968.”

As usual, it is blank in this new issue of Central Catholic High School’s alumni magazine except for the name of one of my classmates back in those turbulent days and his edress for the rest of us to send him any news we would like to report. Apparently, we don’t have any.

Class of 1967, however, appears quite active, and it ended with an entry that caught my eye:

Teacher Joseph Madigan of Andover, Maine, continues to enlighten us and his local newspaper with his monthly poetry lyrics.

While immediately calculating that he must be in his late-80s, I pounced on my Rand McNally to find a town I’d never heard of despite having lived in three of the four corners of that raggedly rhomboidal-shaped state. Sure enough, Andover is in the fourth corner, way up near the borders of New Hampshire and Quebec.

Joe Madigan was the first person to tell me I could write. He was my English teacher in senior year when those of us who did well took two English classes, the other called “college prep,” or something like that.

That other class was taught by the legendary Warren Hayes whom we all had in junior year and were the better for it. Hayes was strict but dynamic, a combination that made us want to surpass the standards he set. Leaving literature to Madigan, Hayes’ college prep class was much more nuts and bolts, but even that Hayes taught with what one student eulogy in 2021 called “pep, rhythm, and vitality.”

Most memorable was “Vocaball,” a game played one day each week for which the class was separated into five teams of seven to define words, with synonyms, antonyms, etymology, roots, prefixes, suffixes, all in response to rapid-fire questions. By putting us in teams, he made us not want to let each other down. No doubt many CCHS grads who watched Dead Poets Society 35 years ago wondered how Robin Williams knew of Warren Hayes.

While Hayes was the wily veteran, Madigan joined Central while I was there. A few years later he would teach at the Essex County Training School for truants with behavioral problems. My father, a social worker there known for his rapport with the kids, noticed the trait in Madigan and befriended him. For that reason, my father took him into a rough neighborhood in Lynn when a kid ran away from the school and returned home. The two arrived at a house, and Madigan went to the rear while my father went to the front door. Don’t recall how many Lynn police arrived at that moment, but my father told me that two went to the back. Very soon, they returned with Madigan between them, securing both his arms. My father, according to his account, was so stunned that he couldn’t get the words out until Madigan begged him to speak.

Not long after that, Madigan taught at the Greater Lawrence Technical School where my CCHS ’68 classmate Dave Bodenrader had a career as a guidance counselor. When I learned that the two became friends, I couldn’t help but re-imagine my father’s story. If the Lawrence police had been called to the school to stop an altercation and arrested Dave by mistake, I don’t think Joe would have stopped them. I think he’d have smiled and enjoyed the show.

Central Catholic was likely Madigan’s first teaching gig. He ranged from lively to relaxed in front of a class, as if it was second-nature to him. He had a passion for American literature–for Poe and Melville, Hemingway and Steinbeck, and many writers among and between them. That passion was contagious, catching the curiosity of teenage boys far more inclined toward girls, cars, sports, and the shiniest new object of all at the time, rock-and-roll.

Not much older than my Class of ’68, Madigan had an instinct for making inroads with his hormonal audience. Most memorable was one of his descriptions of Romantic poetry. Though far from R-rated, his calling it “making love” years before we knew what the euphemism meant had us reading more by John Keats than the assignment called for. His mischievous smile while saying it was the suggestive sound of John Lennon’s “you know what I mean” in “When I Saw Her Standing There.” A nice echo came two decades later in Dead Poets Society when the teacher played by Williams–named John Keating–tells his all-male class that the purpose of poetry is “to woo women.”

My class at Central numbered 222, a number easy for me to recall only because I graduated 22nd. Call it deuces wild, and I was wild with classes that didn’t appeal to me. A few I loved, but English was never one of them. My interest was in Math, Geometry, Physics, Geography, and History. Anything with numbers, and I guess the endless dates allowed History to qualify.

We had perhaps ten out of 222 who excelled at everything. I was in the second tier of about 20 who excelled at a few. By the time we were halfway through sophomore year, there were never any surprises at who took the top awards in each subject. At least I don’t recall any until about six weeks into senior year when Joe Madigan held a lottery to match each of us, about 25 in that class, with 25 American novels, assigning a book report to each.

My luck was to draw the longest book in the lot, Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel. I made an effort with it, but couldn’t make sense of Wolfe’s stream of conscious narration or his mountainous Carolina setting. And so, by page 50 of about 500, I got myself a copy of Cliff Notes. To be fair to myself, I did not do any plagiarizing, but I did rely on the CN analysis before returning to the book and finding passages that applied to it. That was for the sake of a few quotes from the novel that made some point with which I agreed. Maybe I’m just rationalizing, but I didn’t dodge the assignment. I just made it easier.*

I turned in my 500-word report expecting to gain my usual B- or C+ for an essay. I figured Madigan would recognize that I skimmed it but would realize that some honest effort was made on a book as long as Of Mice and Men, For Whom the Bells Toll, Red Badge of Courage, and Billy Budd combined–meaning that I was to have done as much as four classmates combined. As we say today, I expected to catch a break.

Back in class after a long weekend, not only did I catch a break, I hit the jackpot. Madigan plopped the papers on his desk, snatched the top one off and held it in the air. He stepped toward us with a wild smile and said something like, Listen to this! This is how it’s done! and then, in a line I still hear, clenching a fist I still see, “This is tight!”

Despite that excitement, my mind drifted. No doubt it was on the next Red Sox World Series game against the St. Louis Cardinals when I realized that I was hearing my own words. Seems now that I had to be elated at the time, but I recall that I froze. There were at least six kids in that class who had been the best at this for three years, and I was not one of them. Was this encroachment? Would I pay a price in the schoolyard? On the other hand, I was, like many others in that class, wondering what I might do about the military draft and bothered by American casualties in Vietnam that had started hitting close to home. That day in that class was the first indication I had that there was something I could do, and do well.

Central Catholic did assign all of us, even as incoming freshmen, a reading list of seven or so books to read by Labor Day. In the summer of 1967, our senior list included James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time (1963) and Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) set in apartheid South Africa. So you could say that my pump was primed for putting opinions in writing. Baldwin’s treatment of race was a model for my treatment of the draft, and later of the anti-war movement. But I still entered Salem State College as a math major looking forward to a lucrative career as an accountant.

That didn’t last long. By the start of second semester, I was an English major, and I had joined the staff of the student newspaper, The Log, an unlikely combination of upperclassers who couldn’t hide their amusement at my jacket and tie. Those didn’t last long either.

If Baldwin’s Fire pushed me in the direction my life took, it was Madigan’s “tight” that sent me down that road with confidence.

Twelve years later, I became a English teacher myself and spent the next 22 years channeling Madigan and Hayes, as well as Pat Gozemba–whom I still see at No Kings rallies–and the late Jay McHale at Salem State who both impressed upon me the need for critical thought, and Chuck Woodard at South Dakota State who steered me toward ironic vision. Every now and then, a student would tell me or write in an evaluation that my class recalled Dead Poets Society.

All that and I haven’t even mentioned what Joe Madigan in a poem calls “sweet music as I soon began to drift.”

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A note for those of you who live outside New England: “lewis-TUN” is Lewiston, about 50 miles southeast of Andover, and the closest city of any size.

Poem to accompany Dixfield Fuel Business Profile

Mar. 6, 2017

By Joe Madigan,
Andover, Maine

The heat had gone out
The water tank too
I called for some help
From a skeleton crew.

In snow-covered lanes
He made the long drive
Within a half hour
His van had arrived.
His fevered approach
Quickness and glee
Helped to alleviate
Worry in me.
With tool bag and light
He worked with a hum
Later he smiled and
Raised up his thumb.
I waved at his van
As he started to leave
With the heat coming on
And a propane reprieve.

On the left, Warren Hayes (1937?-2021) who retired in 2001 after 41 years of teaching. On the right, Chris Sullivan, recently retired President of CCHS and son of Mike Sullivan, one of my history teachers and manager of the school’s baseball team who did not select me for his roster.

Photos from the Central Catholic High School Class of 1968 Yearbook, courtesy of Dave Bodenrader, fellow CCHS Class of ’68.

From June, 2020, three months into the COVID shutdown:

Look Homeward, Devil

2S2BW

Day after day it is non-stop. Like a fire-hose aimed at a crowd, it horrifies most of us even seeing it on a screen, but it entertains, satisfies, and emboldens others

Last night, in the middle of a speech billed as “about the economy,” we were treated to a reprise of contempt for “shit-hole countries.” Today, one of his lapdog secretaries rationalized the deportation of veterans with no criminal records who were brought to America.

Those veterans, of course, have brown and black skin. And those countries are African, Central and South American. If that’s not enough to give the game away, an exception is made for South Africa whose white emigrants are as welcome here as those from Scandinavia, as he reminded us last night.

If the racism were any more obvious, it would blast all of us like a fire-hose, no screen needed. And some among us would revel in it like ten-year-olds at a big-city fire-hydrant on a hot summer day.

Many still ask how it is possible for anyone to support Trump after so many violations of laws, of ethics, of professional conduct, of basic human decency.

Some will specify a single infraction in memes on social media. Nine years later, the mockery of a handicapped reporter in 2016 still appears more often than any–with the convicted felon’s boastful “grab” of women a close second.

“How that was not the end of Trump right there?” Friends ask with frustration that is palpable on my screen. While the target of these memes may appear to be Trump, they point more toward his supporters, questioning their motives.

I shake my head. If the answer was any more obvious, it would delete the question as soon as my friends post it.

Anyone offended by his mockery of that reporter or boasts of his sexcapades would never have voted for Trump in the first place. So he lost nothing. To the contrary, there were many people in 2016 who had never voted in any election, convinced that it was all evil, elitist, too uppity. Their idea of freedom is, at best, to be left alone, and at length not to give a shit about other people. To them, Trump’s ridicule is liberating, allowing them to laugh at and feel superior to a journalist, a profession that they hate because it pushes them to do something they hate. It pushes them to think.

As for the “grab ’em by” quote, well, that’s a relatively mild sample of low-life vocabulary.

This connection succeeds every time he calls someone “stupid,” or “retarded,” or “vermin.” No matter how closely his recent portrayal–“garbage“–of Somalian immigrants matches those made of Jews by fascists in Europe in the 1930s; no matter how absurd and false a charge such as the one he made against Haitians in Ohio–“They’re eating their pets!“–not only does he not lose votes, he gains them every time.

While many friends choose to believe that Trump supporters are innocent of his blatant racism, his contempt for law, his indifference to public need, I say that’s precisely why they support him. While some friends post head-scratching memes, I’m reminded of Salman Rushdie’s 1990 children’s novel, Haroun and the Sea of Stories. In it, the narrator, bombarded by questions from a 14-year-old, deflects some by saying, “2C2E.” Too complicated to explain.

Time to face one unalterable fact: There is nothing complicated about this. We are wasting our time with a cult that should be filed under “2S2BW.” Too stupid to bother with.

Sounds oh, so liberal, so tolerant, so democratic to say “we must respect their intelligence” and “engage them in dialogue”–until you face the reality of what they know, what they vote for, and what they want. And they sure as Antietam do not want dialogue.

Problem with liberals is that, despite the unabated fire-hose of ridicule and hate blasted back at us, we still insist on playing by unwritten rules of civility. As a result, we look weak, something that is not an attribute that most voters ever look for.

Better to accept what you cannot change. There are plenty of others out there who remain uncommitted for whatever reason. Among them, it only stands to reason that we will find things we can change.

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https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34940861

Death of a Verb

Put aside all the political and social damage that he continues to wreak (which is, of course, impossible), and he is still guilty of destroying one of the most useful, forceful, unambiguous verbs in the English language.

Trump has trumped “trump.”

If we could imagine a deck of cards representing the 52 most glaring debasements of the English language over the past, say, twenty years, “trump” would be the highest trump in whatever game you choose.

Maybe I’m fortunate that the only card game I continue to play is cribbage, a game that has no trump, although getting skunked is reminiscent.

Other cards might come close. Those who answer cellphones in classrooms, in meetings, in theaters, and many other public places have turned “emergency” into the biggest one-word joke in the history of any language.

In Newburyport, another ace would be “accountability,” rendered absolutely meaningless in last year’s election as he who most often proclaimed it openly and successfully avoided it.

Ever taking tricks is one dating back at least to the early-80s when I first heard it o’er and o’er again in the halls of academe. That’s when we went from The Dawning of the Age of Aquarius to The Yawning of the Age of Appropriate.

Before long, “appropriate” clouded the language of business and politics as well, like an invasive species that kills off useful plants while having no use of its own other than to presume agreement. It’s the adult version of the adolescent “cool,” making conformity with our peers seem like discerning individuality.

Once upon an attention span, we readily described subjects as necessary, relevant, ethical, practical, effective, durable, flexible, reliable, useful, pleasing, timely, sufficient, and on and on. Now, we lazily rely on this all-purpose “appropriate.” Test it for yourself: Whenever you hear the word “appropriate,” stop the speaker and ask what it means. Chances are the speaker will need just a moment to give you a clear, precise, honest word.

Be prepared, however, for the question to draw a blank, suggesting that speakers are either inflating the language or do not know what they are talking about. I’m not saying that there is anything necessarily nefarious here, just that “appropriate” is dead from overuse, and has been for 40 years.

As American economist Thomas Sowell told us, “If it means everything, it means nothing.”

Just last year, we heard the debasement of a word that has always seemed harmless, at least as far as this Truman baby can recall. In fact, the man with the most undeserved name claimed to have invented it: “grocery.” Can’t recall the Truman years, but I can tell you that, in the Eisenhower years, supermarkets were still on the horizon of what we called “grocery stores.”

He also boasted that he would “make America affordable again” in his 2024 campaign, although he now calls “affordability” a made-up word, a Democratic hoax. But that’s nothing compared to his 2016 campaign when his stump speeches included pro-longed ridicule of the word “emoluments.” He also called that a hoax, having heard it repeatedly invoked during his two impeachments.

Apparently he never saw it in print. That includes the US Constitution where “emoluments” appears several times because the founders were determined to prevent future presidents from accepting riches that might influence them. The emphasis they put on emoluments is so great that, to say you read the Constitution and then not recognize it, is akin to claiming you’ve been to Yellowstone but can’t recall any geyser.

Those passages drew loud laughter from the MAGA crowds, as Trump trumped the founders with a series of weird and exaggerated pronunciations made with twisting facial expressions–“eeee-MULL-ew-mints,” “eh-mole-U-mince.” All those folks who for years dared that we liberals “Read the Constitution!” themselves do not recognize it.

It’s as if the novel 1984 has been taken and employed as a blueprint rather than as a cautionary tale. George Orwell’s “Newspeak” serves as a precursor for today’s debased English, not just in the limited vocabulary of “Doubleplusgoodspeak,” but in naming and renaming of anything in sight. “Victory Cigarettes” and “Victory Chocolate” may very well be the models for “Big Beautiful Bill” and “Gulf of America.” The brand name, “Trump,” now being stamped on public buildings follows the lead of the ubiquitous posters of Big Brother in Orwell’s “Oceania.”

Orwell’s most quoted line sums it up: “(I)f thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” We need heed the line that follows:

A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.

And so it is that Americans left and right, educated or not, have allowed our language to be debased. How bad is it? Walmart now claims to be “investing in American jobs” on signs that it places directly above self-checkout counters manufactured in China, and few notice. The fewer who object are dismissed as malcontents.

Could say that we were trumped before Trump hit the scene. But that does not mean that the game is lost. We still have the language and the ability to use it with honesty, precision, and clarity. In effect, we still have cards. And we have turns to bid.

Those turns are called elections where the highest bid calls trump. Might call it “the art of the deal” if only that phrase were not already debased.

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https://sva.design/projects/11458/1984-principles-of-newspeak/

https://www.fox5ny.com/news/trump-selling-99-virtual-trading-cards

Jiggle the Handle

Sorry if I’m flying off the handle here, but Donald Trump has turned America into a toilet that will not flush.

In it, MAGA is a bowel movement the size of Texas. At times it is Texas.

Santa Rosa reminds me of her prediction before last year’s election that, if Trump won, he would turn the country into “a two-story outhouse.” The ultra-rich upstairs and the rest of us down below–with a few holes in the floor in between. What can I say? Great minds sink alike.

Some 30 years ago, I laughed out loud while reading a student paper about a trip he took with his family through Central America. In it, he mentioned “peons” and explained they were called that because “the rich people pee on them.” Today, I’m tempted to plagiarize him.

Are these analogies too crude for you? Sorry, but we’ve just had a week in which the president of the United States referred to a woman reporter as “piggy” and called at least three others “stupid;” to members of Congress as “garbage”; to a state governor as “retarded”; and to military veterans as “traitors” while tacking on calls for their execution.

We can’t keep pretending that this is a difference between left and right or between liberal and conservative. No, it is the imposition of the crude and stupid on American day to day life.

Would you find an analogy made by, say, George Will, the “Dean of Conservative Columnists,” more “respectful” of “those on the other side”? An ardent supporter of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, Will this week called Team Trump “this sickening moral slum of an administration.” Sounds like a two-story outhouse to me.

Trump himself has made the excremental comparison with AI generated videos that show him in an airplane throwing feces down on those who dare rally against him. That video now seems like a coming attraction that he and his ridiculous Fox Noise-Maker choice to head the Dept. of Defense made for the videos they show as often as they can of boats being bombed off the coast of Venezuela.

As Lawrence O’Donnell of MS NOW suggests, they want us to view their bombing operation as a video game. They are counting on the popularity of video games with their MAGA base, the bloodier the better. The more explosive, better yet. Deadly? That’s best of all. The one showing two helpless guys in the water clinging to a floating wreck? Uh, let’s leave that one out…

Says Will, “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.” Now that’s jiggling the handle.

With the term “moral slum,” Will captures an entire cabinet of head-nodders, there only to say yes while wearing fraudulent crosses and flags around their necks and on their lapels and heaping lavish praise on an autocrat posing as a president. Hans Christian Andersen’s Emperor Has No Clothes was closer to literal truth than Sec. of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s characteristically clumsy worship:

Thank you for letting us get up every day and have a purpose.

How is this not arrant bullshit?

I know full well I’m not winning friends by comparing America’s political world to an unflushed toilet–and the whole MAGA movement to what fills it. But this is not the time for ingratiation, much less popularity contests. My first and foremost goal when writing political or social commentary is to say what needs to be said. Things like this:

A country that bills itself as “land of the free” and “home of the brave” cannot live on the knees of “go with the flow.”

As for my student and his “peons,” I’ll take the blame for having taught him that sometimes you can deduce the meaning of a word simply by sound and/or context. But I’ll also take credit for coaching him to jiggle the handle which powers-that-be have on those who simply want to be.

As Bob Dylan might have quipped, we shouldn’t need a plumber to tell us which way the water flows.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/2017/05/03/heres-what-those-golden-taka-trump-toilets-mean/101214092/

Two for the Holiday Show

If you’re considering films to see this holiday season, there are two I’m tempted to recommend with just one word each: WOW! and WOW!

Neither Sentimental Value nor Hamnet will ever be called celebrations or described as feel-good, but they leave audiences feeling good and celebrating those who persevere. What recommends both for the season can be stated in one word: Redemption.

Stories–the settings and the time as much as the plot–are so different that it’s hard to believe they have so much in common. You may, for example, wonder if they share the same screenwriter and editors. I’ll refrain from hinting at anything else for fear of spoilers, but I can name similarities that have nothing to do with plot:

Both lead actresses, Norwegian Renata Reinsve (Worst Person in the World 2021) and Irish Jessie Buckley (Wicked Little Letters 2023) deliver performances as convincing and with as much range of emotion as any I’ve ever seen on a screen.

Worth noting here that Sentimental Value Director Joachim Trier earned two Oscar nominations for Worst Person, and that Hamnet Director Chloe Zhao won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2020 for Nomadland.

Also in common: Screening Room audiences have been very slow to get out of their seats when Sentimental Value and Hamnet are over, and they let us know why on their way out. Their words, their tones, and their facial expressions are very much the same.

It is the sound and the look of redemption.

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Renata Reinsve in *Sentimental Value:* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt27714581/

Jessie Buckley in the center of the Globe Theater in *Hamnet:* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14905854/

Baby, You Can Take Your Pick

It was sixty years ago this week the Beatles released Rubber Soul, “a classic,” as an old college friend puts it, “no matter which version – the British EMI original or the U.S. Capitol release – you love.”

Reminding us of the anniversary on social media, he declared it his “all time favorite Beatles album.” Many of my friends who came of age in the Sixties say the same. Within minutes, a friend of his agreed that, yes, it is a fave, but it takes second place to Revolver.

Starting as far back as 1970 when the Beatles disbanded, this has been the debate: Rubber Soul in 1965 or Revolver in 1966?

Seems everyone I know our age picks those as their numbers one and two Beatles albums, and it’s about a 50/50 split as to which order. I recall hearing that debate in the Dakotas in the late-70s. And I recall a guitarist telling me in the late and lamented Caffe di Siena in Newburyport some 20 years ago that it is always the debate–with an occasional mention of Sgt. Pepper.

I’d put them second and third because Help! tops my list. A film soundtrack released several months before Rubber Soul, Help! layered songs such as “The Night Before” and “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” with orchestral arrangements of earlier Beatles songs such as “From Me To You” and “You Can’t Do That.” The new Beatles’ songs were the richer for it, like paintings in well-crafted frames. Even the musically pugilistic “Ticket to Ride” did right by me. I was mesmerized at first listen, and my ears were open to a world of music, and of musical possibilities, I may have previously heard but to which I never listened.

Perhaps my third-party vote should make me recuse myself from the Rubber Soul or Revolver debate. Instead, I’ll concede that, as a soundtrack, Help! can’t be strictly categorized as a Beatles’ album. The Fab Four put just seven new tracks on it; Ken Thorne and His Orchestra have five. Compare that to 14 songs, all Beatles, each on Rubber Soul and Revolver.

Anyone who recalls the Beatles in real time–they first appeared on American television a month before I turned 13–need only look at the titles on both albums to make a very strong case for either one. (And, yes, I do realize that these include a few added tracks on new issues remastered in the last 20 years.)

On Rubber Soul:

Drive My Car
Norwegian Wood
You Won’t See Me
Nowhere Man
Think For Yourself
The Word
Michelle
What Goes On
Girl
I’m Looking Through You
In My Life
Wait
If I Needed Someone
Run For Your Life

On Revolver:

Taxman
Eleanor Rigby
I’m Only Sleeping
Love You To
Here, There and Everywhere
Yellow Submarine
She Said She Said
Good Day Sunshine
And Your Bird Can Sing
For No One
Doctor Robert
I Want To Tell You
Got To Get You Into My Life
Tomorrow Never Knows

Most striking is the range of both. A baseball fan may notice how much the sequence of each has in common with a batting order. Is it possible that the same band that gave us “Drive My Car” and “Taxman” also gave us “Norwegian Wood” and “Eleanor Rigby”? Well, there they are, leading off both albums–the first hard-driving to get on base, the second more deliberate to advance the runner and take a base of its own.

We could say that “You Won’t See Me,” “Nowhere Man,” and “I’m Looking Through You” make Rubber Soul more appealing to those who most value personal awareness and relationships, while “Here, There, and Everywhere,” “Yellow Submarine,” and “Tomorrow Never Knows” favor Revolver for those more prone toward cosmic awareness and speculation.

None of that matters much to those of us more inclined to hear an album song by song and picking favorite songs on them. That includes me, and with two of my top dozen Beatles songs on each–“Wait” and “In My Life” on Rubber Soul; “And Your Bird Can Sing” and “Got to Get You into My Life” on Revolver–I’m hard pressed to choose between them.

All I can say is: Help!

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On Help! the recent remastered version includes 14 Beatles songs and no orchestral tracks. Here’s the lineup on the 1965 album:

The Beatles–	Help!	2:35
The Beatles–	The Night Before	2:33
Ken Thorne And His Orchestra–	From Me To You Fantasy	2:03
The Beatles–	You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away	2:08
The Beatles–	I Need You	2:28
Ken Thorne And His Orchestra–	In The Tyrol	2:21
The Beatles–	Another Girl	2:02
Ken Thorne And His Orchestra–	Another Hard Day’s Night	2:28
The Beatles–	Ticket To Ride	3:03
Ken Thorne And His Orchestra–	The Bitter End / You Can’t Do That	(2:20)
–	The Bitter End
–	You Can’t Do That
The Beatles–	You’re Gonna Lose That Girl	2:18
Ken Thorne And His Orchestra–	The Chase	2:24

Genre:	Rock, Stage & Screen
Style:	Soundtrack, Rock & Roll
Year:	1965

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tF6uliA6hk

Why History Repeats Itself

When I submitted a commentary on the film, Nuremberg, and the PBS series, American Revolution, to a newspaper editor as a guest column, I was careful not to include any explicit comparison of the Trump Administration to the Third Reich.

From an early draft, I deleted a line that read, “More than anything, those who still insist that ‘Nothing can be compared to Hitler and the Nazis’ need to see Nuremberg.”

After all this time of ICE acting as a Gestapo in our streets and a Dept. of Justice devoted to harassing a president’s political opponents, it’s hard to believe that anyone still thinks that, but some people live within a straitjacket of absolutes no matter how drastically times change, no matter how glaring the evidence to the contrary.

Back in the late-Sixties, I think all editors held to that standard, and in the Seventies I became one of them. In the Eighties, Nineties, and Aughts, I was a college English teacher who always steered students away from the hyperbolic–and frankly lazy–comparisons.

Godwin’s Law became the first Internet meme for good reason.

Must admit that I laughed at more than one. The comparison of dress codes in one student’s high school to “Nazi persecution” appeared in a paper I was reading in U-Mass Lowell’s cafeteria. My reaction stopped conversations five tables away as students looked up.

For me the change began in 2010 when then-Rep., now-Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) called Citizens United the worst Supreme Court decision since Dred Scott in 1857. Civil Rights groups pounced, insisting, “Nothing can be compared to slavery!”

No one noticed that lawyers for the plaintiff, Citizens United, based their case on the 13th Amendment which was prompted by Dred Scott.* Nor did anyone note that all this transpired in the first week of February, designated as “Black History Month” by the very people who failed to recognize an incomparable teaching moment and, instead, suppressed it.

If that began my distrust of the “nothing can be compared” stance, 2016 completed it with the Trump campaign’s immersion in slurs, ridicule, and implied threats of violence. Much of it was straight out of the Nazi playbook. “Lying press” was mere translation of Hitler’s Lugenpress and spat out as often. Today I wonder if all those years of being drilled to believe that “nothing can be compared” greased the skids for those who took advantage of it. It’s as if they were granted immunity before committing all their crimes.

But some among us still adhere to the standard.

If you want to see just what I submitted, simply click back to “Windows Turned Mirrors,” posted on this site last week. In it, I describe a few scenes in and quote a few lines from Nuremberg. As far as I’m concerned, it needs no added comparison, as the similarities are impossible to miss.

But the editor felt “uncomfortable running any column or letter that compares Trump to Hitler even in the slightest.”

I appealed by asking that he consider a few points:

1) Nuremberg is currently playing in cinemas across the country, and will be for some time and is likely to gain several Oscar nominations.
2) I describe two scenes in the film, which is based largely on the writings of the psychiatrist played by Malek Rami, without mention of any current events.
3) I mention the reaction of Screening Room patrons without mentioning what any said while leaving, thereby avoiding any mention of current events.
4) I mention the archival footage showing headlines from German publications in the 1930s, and juxtapose them with prominent statements made by public officials in the USA this year and in 2010. Juxtaposition is not a comparison but an invitation to allow the reader to compare.
5) Nuremberg is topical. It’s the juxtaposition of it to the present that makes it so.

In signing off, I also mentioned that a comparison is not an equation. The reply came, not from any thinking person, but from AI:

Hi John – You spent a lot of timing (sic) typing a response which i (sic) appreciate. I will not run a column which compares the current administration to the Nazi party in any shape or form.

To be fair, “John” is my formal first name, and it does appear on my email account, but I’ve been writing for that paper for about as long as that editor has been alive under the byline “Jack.”

As for the attention to the time–or the “timing”–I spent typing, it might as well be AI. There’s no more thought in it than there is in the stance that “nothing can be compared to…”

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*Two years later, in his presidential bid, Republican Mitt Romney turned the same connection into a campaign slogan: “Corporations are people!”

https://unicornriot.ninja/2025/elon-musk-gives-nazi-salute-during-his-trump-inauguration-speech/

Windows Turned Mirrors

Holidays That Try Our Souls

And now we here in New England are treated to the news of a Babson College freshman at Logan Airport awaiting a flight to Texas to surprise her family on Thanksgiving.

Sounds like a story for the holidays featuring a 19-year-old Lucia Lopez Belloza who was brought to America at the age of seven from her native Honduras. A “Dreamer” as we call children of refugees in the pursuit of happiness, this one with a stellar high school record that gained her admission to the prestigious business school–a step to turning her father’s freelance tailoring into a family enterprise.

But these are holidays that try our souls if we care at all about anyone beyond our own circles of friends and family.

Lopez Belloza was intercepted by ICE agents, detained, and then deported to Honduras. No matter that an immigration lawyer was able to secure a court order to stop the deportation. And even less matter that she was being sent to a place she hasn’t seen since she was seven.

Months ago, a Boston Globe headline declared that “Agents in Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign seem to be reveling in brutality.” By that time, “seem to be” seemed to be an attempt at a very bad joke–or yet another attempt at balance where balance no longer exists.

Of all the Trump Administration’s betrayals of democracy, ICE is the most glaring. The campaign claim was that “criminals” would be round up and deported. But most of the people who have been nabbed in cities and towns all across the country have clean records, have jobs, pay taxes, and are raising families or going to school. That so many neighborhoods, churches, civic groups, sports teams, places of employment, and classmates rally around them testifies to this.

Quite a trick it is that all ICE does is visible, and yet they all wear masks. For everyone except those who still cling to the lobotomy of a belief that “nothing can be compared to the Nazis,” ICE is the American Gestapo. What happens to those they capture and detain may never be the same, but the effect that ICE raids have on people of a targeted race who remain in our cities and towns is that of intimidation auf Deutsch circa 1932 that gradually became terror by the end of that decade.

My last attempt to tip the scales back into balance was, according to my own headline, a “Portrait of a Rodeo Clown,” posted just days ago. That would be Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristy Noem, who has turned brutality and cruelty into America’s new spectator sport. All while “inspecting” her barbed-wire-surrounded and chain-link-cage-filled detention centers in clothes tight enough to give her the name “ICE Barbie.”

The heavily Botoxed and lightly brained MAGA champion was on the front end of the MAGA movement that splashed into America soon after the Golden Calf descended the escalator in his Tower of Babel and began bleating Make America Great Again in June of 2015. To this day, she has been among Trump’s most fawning worshipers, praising him soon after his bombing of civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela with words as lavish as her numbers are preposterous:

You have saved hundreds of millions of lives with the cocaine you’ve blown up in the Caribbean.

Following my “Rodeo Clown” post, I soon had emails pointing out that I forgot her numerous flights to Mar-a-Lago in 2024 auditioning for selection as Trump’s running mate, and another for cosmetic dental work in Texas. All were at the expense of South Dakota taxpayers while she was still their governor.

Worse, I forgot that each of South Dakota’s tribes banned her from entering all nine reservations in the state. In a previous life, I visited a few of those reservations, including a week-long field trip on Pine Ridge in 1977, and I recall a rich sense of humor, from dry to slapstick to gallows, on each. Native Americans love those who make them laugh.

Therefore, I now apologize to rodeo clowns for the implied comparison I made of them to a woman who in a cabinet meeting just yesterday, addressing a man in an orange wig who appeared to be falling asleep, said this:

Sir, you made it through the hurricane season without a hurricane — you kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.

Sounds like a backdrop for a holiday story. But holidays are worthy of their diverse names only if the dialogue is honest and those who speak it care about anyone beyond their own circles of friends and family.

As long as Americans allow college students to be dragged out of airports–or construction workers off sites, nurses from hospitals, teachers from schools, waiters and cooks from restaurants, factory workers from their plants and their homes–our holidays are as fraudulent as the crosses Trump’s Barbies often wear around their necks.

Holiday celebration? Can’t speak of other religions, but my Catholic upbringing tells me that our holiday this year will be better observed as a call to action.

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https://www.msn.com/en-in/politics/government/who-is-any-lucia-l%C3%B3pez-belloza-babson-college-freshman-deported-despite-emergency-court-order/ar-AA1RoJ5u

https://www.yahoo.com/news/ice-barbie-kristi-noem-mocked-004230140.html

So Tired, Tired of Waiting

Hard to believe, but the most frequently asked question put to me before the election was not who I thought would win the mayor’s race, but how the city council’s once most progressive member devolved into a rubberstamp for Mayor Reardon:

What happened to Ed Cameron?

Pronouncing it with several exclamation points rather than as a question, readers assume that, since I write about City Hall, I am privy to secrets kept behind the closed doors of 60 Pleasant Street.

Over and again I heard it, no doubt because of my employment at the downtown cinema, as much a crossroads as any in Newburyport. With all the documentary, independent, and foreign films, it stands to reason that our demographic tends to be politically progressive, and many of them tell me they once voted for Cameron as soon as they ask the question.

Followed by an adamant “Never again!”

Perhaps they saw my favorable 2023 review of his rock-and-roll band, The Pathological Outliars, and assumed that I’m a fan boy. Here’s a taste of it, opening with a reference to one his bandmates:

Sunny Douglas and Ed Cameron alternate vocal leads, both pitch perfect for their individual selections. Cameron may not be able to find matching socks, but he harmonizes well with Douglas whether they are belting out Bowie’s defiant “Suffragette” or lifting the weight of the Kinks’ “Tired of Waiting.”

Ironically, as city council president, all Cameron knows how to do is wait, and he is not at all tired of it–even though he yawns in the face of all else. That’s why the library investigation took two full years, and why Mayor Reardon was able to retain a head-nodding city solicitor that the council had voted against. Rip Van Cameron slept through the deadline to certify the council vote.

Worth mentioning here that Cameron was one of just three votes in favor of Reardon’s choice. I’m old enough to recall an America where this was not just mere coincidence skirted by an apology, but a conflict of interest demanding a resignation.

Oh, to make America attentive again!

The activist enthusiasm of the old Ed Cameron may have made him council president, but for two years now, the new Ed Cameron is mostly concerned with having the council “stay in our lane” and treating matters only “within our purview.”

When he started doing this during a discussion of the library scandal in 2023, one councilor countered Cameron’s sleep-inducing directive with a breath-of-fresh-air blast that insisted there is no “lane.” This was Councilor Jim McCauley, insisting that what happened to the library volunteers was a city-wide issue that needed the attention of each councilor. Councilors Connie Preston and Heath Granas soon chimed in, as they would in meetings that followed.

Even Cameron opened his eyes slightly, but he still delayed the investigation, allowing half a year to pass from the council’s approval to the hiring of an investigator–and, oh by the way, allowing the mayor’s chief-of-staff, found most culpable in the investigator’s report, to find another job in western Mass.

Last November, a state agency ruled that Cameron’s lethargic neglect of timely public notices “violated” Massachusetts’ open meeting law and ordered him to attend a webinar training session. Two other councilors were also so ordered, but Cameron, in addition to being council president, chairs the General Government Committee for which those notices were not made, and bears most responsibility.

If Cameron’s band played the way he legislates, their entire setlist would be funeral dirges. Their encore would be “Taps.”

All he has going for him is all that Mayor Reardon has going: the appearance of rock-and-roll vitality which makes for great photo ops. One we keep seeing on social media has Cameron wearing all the pads of a catcher for his team in the city softball league.

As ironic as his rock-and-roll, catcher is the most demanding position in that sport–some jocks say in all of sports. If Cameron caught the way he legislates, every pitch would be a passed ball, and the opposing team would be running conga lines around the bases.

But it is a mistake to link him to Reardon in any ideological sense. This new Ed Cameron seeks nothing more than a path of least resistance.

Sorry to admit this, but why such a promising civic leader has devolved into a bureaucratic wallflower is as much a mystery to me as it is to those who voted for him only to be frustrated by all he does not do.

Only consolation here is that the council elects its president at the start of every new session. His fellow rubber stampers may want to keep him in place, but six new members should be free of obligation if they want, as they claim, to actually accomplish anything.

If they do replace him, I’d be amazed if Cameron even noticed the difference.

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Unlike his Hudson Valley ancestor (shown above), the president of the Newburyport city council is bald with a goatee he keeps well-trimmed.

Portrait of a Rodeo Clown

As I mention in these rambling musings from time to time, I lived most of eight years in the Dakotas. So long ago, Gerald Ford was president when I arrived; Ronald Reagan when I departed.

Five of those years were in South Dakota, home state of our current Secretary of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, governor of the state for eight years long after I left.

In these 43 years since my Prodigal Son return to Massachusetts, I find myself living among people who have never been to Dakota Territory, which makes me a curiosity object if it comes up in conversation.

Anyone can picture the Great Lake states, the West Coast, the South and Southwest, the Rocky Mountains and the High country on their eastern slopes, Alaska and Hawai’i, and they can imagine all these places even if they’ve never been. But the Prairies take far fewer turns on television and in films, and most people draw a blank. I might as well be an astronaut who walked on the Moon or orbited Mars. What’s it like?

Not an easy question to answer, but it’s a breeze compared to the question that has replaced it over this past year: How do I explain Kristi Noem?

Seems that the one person who never asks is Cousin Janice who has such contempt for the Trump lackey that she always refers to her as “Kristi Noem and her tits.” That’s a word I’d rather avoid, but Janice does have a point, or perhaps two. Noem does have a penchant for showing up at events, including tours of her beloved internment camps, wearing noticeably tight clothes as she parades before men locked in cages.

Moreover, she seems to have turned her face into a storage facility for dermal fillers, especially her lips. Or is it a barn-load of Botox? Or plastic surgery when there was absolutely no need for it?

She has gained the nickname “ICE Barbie” for a reason. And God only knows how the photographers keep a straight face.

You think I’m being a bit harsh? Here’s her response to a reporter asking what she thought of the NFL selecting Bad Bunny for the Superbowl’s halftime show:

Well, they suck and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.

Admittedly, I don’t know how someone so null and void of rational thought could win a statewide election by convincing anyone of anything, However, I have a hunch that she was able to model herself after the Disaster from Alaska, Sarah Palin, who became governor and the Republican VP nominee in 2008 by crafting an image of herself as a folksy, gun-totin’ hunter, waving a flag and wearing a cross while calling for a return to white picket fence America.

Just seven years younger, and bearing some resemblance, Noem crafted her image to be much the same. Palin’s hunter became Noem’s rancher, but a firearm is still there, and instead of a helicopter over the tundra loaded for bear, Noem rides a horse at a rodeo ready to lasso a calf.

Referring to Noem’s autobiography, Not My First Rodeo (2022), Helen, a South Dakota friend writes:

She likes to play the rodeo card. Probably has five of them in her deck. I wonder who actually wrote that book. It is her Art of the Deal, eh?

It will help to know that South Dakotans refer to two halves of the state: East River and West River, referring to the Missouri–too thin to plow, too thick to drink–which also bisects North Dakota. East River is farmland with endless fields of corn, alfalfa, sunflower, and amber waves of grain. West River is ranches and range where the deer and the antelope play.

Crossing the Missouri is “where The West begins,” according to John Steinbeck in his Travels with Charley (1962). Yes, he crossed the river in North Dakota, but the topography is the same. And Charley was his dog who today might be grateful for a ride through North Dakota rather than through the state that produced puppy shooting Noem.

With that in mind, let’s return to Helen who refers to towns far closer to the Minnesota border than to the Missouri River when she writes:

One of my gripes with Noem is her claim that she ‘grew up on a ranch.’ She was born in Watertown. Her family’s farm is/was near Hazel, between Watertown and De Smet. She attended high school in Hamlin. You have to go more than 50 miles west to get near ranch country.

When I told her that I wanted to turn her message into a blog, Helen suggested I run that last line by Leon, a mutual friend from Hamlin County, So. Dakota. Leon confirmed it, adding:

(Noem) tells many fibs about her history. She has no moral compass. If she is talking, she is lying.

Back to Helen’s conclusion:

The difference between a farm and a ranch may be mere semantics outside the prairies, but in East River SD, no one would call a farm a ranch, unless they had a motive, like trying to be a cowgirl instead of a farm girl. Sounds scrappier. Tougher. More Republican.

Cowgirls do get far more air time on those rugged commercials for beer and pick-up trucks, after all. And what is ICE Barbie but a serial photo-op for an administration in which shooting a pet dog looks good on your resume?

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