Forbidden Fruit

There’s a moment early in the film Elvis when his manager, as the film’s narrator, looks at the young women reaching up and onto the stage and says:

Now, I don’t know nothing about music. But I could see in that girl’s eyes, he was a taste of forbidden fruit.

“Forbidden fruit” was the charge some American critics made against a Boston-born actress in the mid-19th Century, but it didn’t stick because her performances were so powerful, making her so popular–and rich–that she could flaunt convention all she wanted.

And she wanted a lot according to her recent biography, Lady Romeo: the Radical and Revolutionary Life of Charlotte Cushman, America’s First Celebrity.

Some might object to that “first” designation, having read it applied so often to Mark Twain and by some to Herman Melville. Yes, both were sensations, but a teenage Cushman had wowed audiences from New York to New Orleans a decade before Melville hit the scene in 1847, or right about when Twain was born.

Author Tana Wojczuk paints a picture of a woman obsessed with theater from girlhood, never with a thought of anything but acting. That included–or excluded–getting married. Instead, she strung relationships, all of them with women, many of them overlapping while remaining close friends with most all to the end of her life

Whispers and gossip never phased her as she threw herself into a profession in which women were assumed to be prostitutes.

She didn’t play roles. She became them, as she did Nancy in Dickens’ Oliver Twist, spending days by herself roaming the slums of New York, trading her clothes for the rags of a dying prostitute. That became her costume on stage, as did the woman’s rheumatic voice.

While making theater more respectable, she also, without trying, gave a generation of women a powerful example of what we now call an alternative lifestyle choice.

Nothing phased her as she became the first actress to seriously play leading male roles. Previously, the few women who played them were cast “to titillate the men in the audience who enjoyed seeing a pretty actress in a short tunic.” One role made her an international sensation: Romeo. Says Wojczuk, Cushman…

…acted like a man rather than a woman in tights, besting men at swordplay. Then, when her chivalric Romeo collapsed weeping in the final scene, she gave men in the audience the dangerous impression it was okay to do the same.

Cushman breathed controversy, but her prim and proper critics were drowned out by important allies. Walt Whitman, a young editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, “was awed by the ‘overpowering grandeur of her genius’.” Others raved about her “virile energy,” her “pythonic inspiration,” her “noble frenzy of eccentric genius.”

A coveted conversationalist, she kept company with Emerson, Hawthorne, Dickens, and on more than one occasion with Lincoln who probably knew Shakespeare better than any man alive, but not better than she.

She gladly shared the stage with the Royalty of American Theater, the Booths, Junius and two of his sons, Junius Jr. and Edwin–but not the third son, John Wilkes. Cushman “disliked him intensely, calling him reckless, drunken, a ‘dare-devil'” years before the assassination.

Following the assassination, the coroner who examined Booth’s shot up body was able to identify him by a scar left by a laceration on the back of his neck made years earlier by a zealous Cushman during a play.

Tana Wojczuk’s portrait of Cushman is flush with these vignettes of American public life in her lifetime, 1816 to 1875, that keep a reader turning its 179 pages. With its fair-sized print and generous spacing, its a book you could read on a long day at the beach or on a cross-country flight.

Lady Romeo is a biopic waiting to happen. Catch may be casting. There’s no actor anything like this actor. Then again, we could have said that about Elvis Presley.

If the film Elvis is fresh in your mind, the comparisons are eye-opening. Not just for celebrity status, but for sexual attraction and all other forbidden fruits that theater always implies.

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https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Lady-Romeo/Tana-Wojczuk/9781501199530

https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited/wojczuk-lady-romeo-cushman

And Onto the Blues

As if out of the blue here on Cape Ann, a duet-just-turned-trio called Out of the Blue is offering sets of songs that cover time as well as music.

From Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice” to Tori Amos’ “Cornflake Girl,” lead vocalist Jill Pallazola boasts a voice ranging from powerhouse to kitchen table, from conspiratorial to riding shotgun. She doesn’t so much cover songs as re-interpret them. Never been to an Amos concert, but anyone who ever heard Dylan live knows the satisfaction of hearing old favorites from new angles.

While Dolly Parton sensationalizes desperation in “Jolene,” Pallazola’s betrayed narrator has something else in mind. And Creedence Clearwater themselves might be surprised at how many syllables roll through “I want to kno-o-o-o-o-o-o-ow” when Pallazola persists in asking, “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?”

Guitarist Tim Neill sings lead on a few, including Tom Petty’s “Free Falling” and, “for those of you unfamiliar with the Allman Brothers, here’s a tune I wrote myself,” as he launches into “Midnight Rider.” His delivery is as faithful as his licks on instrumental passages are vibrant.

Slapping time as lively as the windshield wipers of “Me and Bobby McGee” is drummer Matt Colturi, heard now and then at O’Neill’s in Salem as one-half of Calling for Heathcliff. He’s a brand new addition to Out of the Blue as they gain gigs in coffeeshops such as Zumi’s in Topsfield and restaurants such as Decklynn’s in Gloucester where I caught them on an outdoor deck overlooking the harbor.

No idea what connects Colturi and CFH bandmate James Rogers to Wuthering Heights, but Pallazola and Neill, who have played together on and off since high school, have a combined taste rooted in the blues. Quite unlike most cover bands, Out of the Blue steeps a rock and roll playlist in blues classics such as “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone” and “Stormy Monday.”

Blues aside, the early evening was as bright–and the fish and chips as delicious–as the music this past weekend at Decklynn’s up here on the tip of Massachusetts’ other cape.

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They return to Decklynn’s Friday, July 29, 7:00 pm.

Out of the Blue, L to R: Tim Neill guitar, Matt Colturi drums, and Jillian Pallazola lead vocals & keyboard. Photo by Christine Winfrey.

Now You’re in the Way

Sitting in a downtown coffeeshop at mid-day, a time when, as any barista can tell you, such places are havens for young mothers with strollers.

Too hot in the window seat, I’ve moved barely five feet into shade, still close to the door. I see the strollers approach and can tell by the turn of their heads before they pause and make the turn if they are coming through the door.

There’s a natural tendency to get up and assist. So ingrained that even I feel it despite knowing better. Obviously, I’d get up as quickly as anyone to assist anyone having a problem getting a stroller or packages through a door, or if they asked for assistance.

Otherwise, you’re just getting in the way.

That may sound like an excuse to be lazy or inconsiderate, but to someone who has delivered boxes totaling upwards of one hundred pounds on a dolly–aka a two-wheeler, aka a hand-truck–it is a practical matter of fact, nothing less than a law of physics.

Over the twenty years that I made deliveries, how many times did I start through a door, backwards to get the wheels over a threshold or a step, only to stop because some well-intentioned soul crossed the path I needed to barge through?

Start the bidding at two hundred on that one.

Without the good, if clueless, Samaritan, I’d be through the door in a continuous motion with few quick moves: Throw the door open, back into it, pull the cart across, keep moving past the door. With ill-advised “help,” you must stop moving and lose all momentum. All you can do then is back out and roll back in saying “thank you” with a forced smile.

At times, you cannot avoid telling someone they are in your way. In some cases, as when a door opens in a corner against a side wall or other objects are left there, they will see that they can’t be of any help.

And then there are cases when someone inside says, “Let me get out of your way,” and you state what should be obvious: “You’re not in my way.” Better believe that the very next thing they will do is try to “help,” and you then have no choice but to inform them, “Now you are in my way.”

Start the bidding at one hundred on this one.

All of this is true of parents pushing strollers. Unless the baby is newborn and firstborn or the stroller just acquired, they know they must back it in over a door’s threshold. I’d bet they have the move down in a day, as I did with a dolly twenty years ago.

None of this is to imply that the rest of us should never pay courtesies to people pushing strollers or to delivery men and women. Or to folks in wheelchairs or with canes or walkers or bundles or to the elderly. Were I seated or standing on the backside of that door, I’d have gladly held it open.

All we need do is be aware of the difference.

As if! All of this is written as I overlook a three-way intersection of two one-way streets joined by a traffic light and a Walk/Don’t Walk sign. As always, cars stop on green to wave pedestrians through Don’t Walk, while other pedestrians just walk across and make cars brake.

Admittedly, any bidding for awareness and making distinctions in this 21st Century starts very, very low.

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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/299278337731759374/

An Unwitting War on Art

In a 2010 interview by the San Antonio Examiner, B.B. King put it like this:

Music is owned by the whole universe. It isn’t exclusive to the black man or the white man or any other color. It’s shared in and by our souls… I told Elvis once, and he told me he remembered I told him this, that “music is like water. Water is for every living person and every living thing.”

Should have known that Elvis, the film, would draw complaints of “cultural appropriation” against Elvis, the person, from those who, with all good intention, think that any culture somehow belongs to an ethic group and should never be adopted by anyone outside the group.

They may be right in many cases, but not this one.

Tom Hanks, who co-produced and has a role that includes the narration of the film, no doubt anticipated the charge. With or without Hanks’ prodding, director and co-writer Baz Luhrmann took great care to open the film with a young Elvis Presley growing up in a housing project with Black neighbors, playing with Black friends, eyeing Black musicians, entering a Black church.

Yes, that’s Black culture, but it was also his culture. Put another way: What other culture did he have?

Add to that his friendships with B.B. King and other up and coming Black musicians at Club Handy on Memphis’ Beale Street. Then add to that the racial barriers Elvis erased:

Radio stations that would not air “race music.”
Concert halls that were white-only or segregated into roped-off areas.
Recording contracts from northern companies that suddenly saw what would sell.

Add to that how Elvis infused rhythm and blues with country that he heard on the radio and at fairs. Was he “appropriating” that cultural scene as well? Or was he deeply, intuitively engaged in–perhaps engaged by–a creative process?

Whatever you think to be the sum of your addition would be subtracted by those who, for all their good intention, raise the cry of “cultural appropriation.”

This dates as far back as 1987 when Paul Simon recorded Graceland in South Africa with local musicians. Though ironic, it’s no coincidence that it has been aimed at successful, historically revealing films: From Dances with Wolves in 1990 to The Descendants in 2011 and Green Book in 2018, just to name the first three that come to this projectionist’s mind.

With no end of examples in sight, “cultural appropriation” is a presumptuous, self-righteous claim that lends credence to right-wing accusations regarding suppression of speech. In recent years, the right has boiled all of it down to two words: Cancel Culture.

Last but hardly least in what we call America’s “cultural divide,” if combining styles of music qualifies as creative, then the cry of “cultural appropriation” is also a call to ban art.

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https://screenrant.com/were-elvis-bb-king-friends-true-story-debate/

American Roulette

Take every dollar they have, leaving them nothing but the smile on their face.

So went Col. Tom Parker’s motto as he convinced a very young Elvis Presley to take him on as a manager who could open every door–and coached him as he glided through most of those doors and tore down walls around the rest.

The new two-hour, thirty-nine-minute film, Elvis, is a dual biography. And if you subscribe to the idea that places are often characters in films and novels, call it a triple-play.

As one who came of age when the Beatles landed at LaGuardia, the film’s coverage of “Elvis the Pelvis” at his peak in the ’50s took me by surprise. I had heard about his above-the-waist-only rendition of “Don’t Be Cruel” on the Ed Sullivan Show, but the arrests that shut down concerts were new to me.

And while I have long known that rock-and-roll was born and raised in the African-American South, and called “race music,” I never knew how openly Southern politicians condemned the “Africanization” of American culture. The film’s rapid cuts between scenes of Mississippi Sen. John Eastman holding a rally surrounded by Confederate flags and Elvis surrounded by musicians and amplifiers opening a concert just miles away reveal a divide as deep as we have today.

Elvis could cross it because he grew up in a housing project where few whites lived. He had African-American friends and was enthralled by the music in their churches, on their porches, in their joints as he peered through their windows, and on Memphis’ streets. As a white boy, he could merge it with country and take it places where it was not welcome. When he complains of resistance, his good friend, B.B. King reassures him:

They might put me in jail for walkin’ across the street, but you a famous white boy.

As Parker tells us as the camera pans an audience reaching up onto the stage trying to touch the King of Rock and Roll:

Now, I don’t know nothing about music. But I could see in that girl’s eyes, he was a taste of forbidden fruit.

Two older cousins once swooned over him, but their accounts did nothing to gain my musical tastes–although he did impress hippies and activists alike with songs such as “In the Ghetto” and “If I Can Dream,” which he sang following the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy in 1968.

In the film, actor Austin Butler as Elvis sings it at the end of a Christmas special much against the advice of Parker, played by Tom Hanks. Parker has already told Elvis that America’s turmoil “has nothing to do with us.” Presley, as he does a few times for various reasons, pressure always one of them, explodes.

Following that scene comes the film’s most mesmerizing moments of Presley sounding out the song to himself, adding chords on a piano, and walking into the NBC studio without the Christmas sweater Parker insisted he wear. As Elvis later explains:

A reverend once told me, “When things are too dangerous to say, sing.”

Mesmerizing? With fast paced split-screens, panning cameras, overlapping and morphing images, the whole film is a roulette wheel spun by Parker’s narration that shifts from dubious to undeniable and stops but for moments in Elvis’ childhood or fame, in concert or at home, in America mid-20th Century or Now.

Now? Well, you try listening to Col. Parker’s gleefully proud definition of “Snowman” without thinking of the con-job that has captivated so many of us these past seven years. In the end, we learn that Parker was never in the military, let alone a colonel. It’s as if Director Baz Luhrmann is urging us to reconsider Presley’s most lasting chorus.

Every one of Presley’s hits plays in the soundtrack, and we hear strains of a few, most notably “Fools Rush In” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love,” in the score. All of it is threaded throughout the end credits by the song that offers that chorus:

We can’t go on together
With suspicious minds (With suspicious minds)
And we can’t build our dreams
On suspicious minds

As I mentioned, this is as much a biography of “Colonel” Parker as of Elvis Presley, and it serves well as a biography, then and now, of the only nation on Earth where two such people could conceivably exist.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3704428/quotes/?ref_=tt_trv_qu

Kicking ASS

They’re from Rhode Island and make rounds just over the border, but every now and then they cross two state lines to play in my stomping grounds.

David Tessier’s All Star Stars–a name chosen for its acronym–might be categorized as classic rock, but its selections include many less-remembered tracks that, as Tessier quipped, “people tell us after the show, ‘Yes, that was my favorite song!'”

Fans of particular bands call these “chestnuts,” and when ASS launched into the Beatles’ “If I Needed Someone,” I wondered if they were playing it for me, one of the few geezers in the audience who could recall the song in real time.

The delivery was so crisp and clear that I was back in the Sixties–not my own sixties, but the 1960s. That’s as true of the band’s iconic selections such as “The Weight,” well-known standards ranging from The Doors’ “Touch Me” to the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” zingers such as Chicago’s “Make Me Smile,” and songs from the 1980s when my music memory was already filled to capacity.

All of it is high energy, and back in the Sixties we had a litmus test for that. Every rock-and-roll concert included a drum solo, and drummer Nate Goncalo had as many parents bouncing in their seats as there were children bouncing in an open space before the stage all through the show. The test is how powerfully the rest of the band re-enters the song.

ASS kicked it. They kicked all night. Tessier on lead guitar, Jon Brennan on keyboard, Paulo “Zeus” Sousa on bass, and Justin Grankewicz adding either rhythm guitar or percussion. At least four shared lead vocals, with the recently engaged Grankewicz crooning a torch song much to Tessier’s amusement. (I might say all five, but Zeus was often out of my line of sight.)

As impressive as their musicianship, their high energy, their clarity, their off-the-beaten path selections, is their stamp. Songs such as Yes’s “Owner of a Lonely Heart” and the Association’s “Along Comes Mary” are not simply served up but are laced with what Tessier and his friends each do best. Back in the late Seventies I wondered how many times I could stand hearing Manfred Mann’s “Blinded by the Light.” Last night while listening to Tessier’s riffs, I wondered if I ever heard it once.

Such were the effects of Brennan’s occasional embellishments of a few notes here and there while Tessier and Zeus engaged in probing conversations that Goncalo and Grankewicz kept moving right along.

Tessier writes his own songs, some of which may have been played after my bedtime, and which are likely more present in ASS’ shows in Rhode Island where the band has “a legit fan base,” according to the Johnston Sunrise.

With titles such as “Under the Desk,” that’s a show I’d like to see. And I’ll cross state lines to do it.

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https://johnstonsunrise.net/stories/david-tessier-all-star-stars-release-new-single-tough-face-girl,172735

E Pluribus Pluribus

Those of you under the age of fifty may be surprised to learn that, until about fifty years ago, license plates on cars were nothing more than numbers and letters of one color on a solid background of a contrasting color.

If the backdrop was light, the lettering was sure to be dark, and vice-versa.

Long-distance hitchhikers could easily identify an approaching vehicle and know how far the ride might take them. This was especially helpful to me back when I stood at the intersection of interstates in Portland, Oregon, with two signs: “San Fran” and “Chicago.” Ya, my life was like that back then. A vagabond too long, I was in a hurry to land somewhere where someone knew me.

License plates are like flags. The whole point is to make something immediately clear.

Through the 70s and into the 80s, states gradually made the transition from unadorned plates to colorful works of art. New York featured the Statue of Liberty. Illinois showed Lincoln. Colorado outlined a mountain range, and Wyoming a busting bronco. New Hampshire had the Old Man in the Mountain. Massachusetts was late to the party before it offered us the choice of having a blue whale’s fluke going under.

Today, every state has them, and some states have more than one. Pennsylvania and Florida seem to be in a contest for having the most, and both have plates on which some of the numbers blend in with a multi-colored background. You’ll have an easier time counting the teeth in the mouth of Pennsylvania’s Nittany Lion than you will reading the plate’s number on its back.

Two states with claims to the Wright Brothers show early aircraft. Ohio declares itself “Birthplace of Aviation,” while North Carolina alliterates “First in Flight.” They might yet fight!

I had–I still have–two plates involved in an unlikely controversy:

My unadorned plate on my even less adorned Ford Falcon in the late-70s. They didn’t even spell out the word *North*!

My plate in the early 80s. No doubt it won the award after judges saw one unused or as a sketch, unaware that a screw would be drilled right into Tom Jefferson’s throat.

In the mid-80s, no doubt egged-on by South Dakota’s award-winning Mt. Rushmore plates–or “tags” as they are called out West–North Dakota’s governor assembled a committee to design one. This included representatives from the state’s Chamber of Commerce, its tourism bureau, its Lakota (Sioux) and Ojibwa (Chippewa) and Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara reservations, its universities, its arts council, its newspapers, its this, its that, and so on.

As you might guess, each one wanted to depict his or her thing, and the solution they arrived at was to morph them all into about six that they “included.”

The result may have been fine for a poster on a wall or a page in a book, but for a 6″ x 12″ attachment to moving vehicles, it was so ridiculous that my friend, Randy Bradbury, a reporter for the Bismarck Tribune at the time, told me that it became a heated issue in state-wide elections and cost the governor re-election.

“So hideous, so confused, so incoherent, so bad,” he wrote, that “many people refuse to put it on their cars.” When North Dakotans kept driving with old plates after the announced expiration, the controversy was so hot that not one was stopped and ticketed. Call it a white flag of a tag.

I was visiting there in the summer of ’89, and there were very few “committee tags,” as they were ridiculed, to be seen. Most cars still had the same unadorned plates I had when I lived there in ’78 and ’79. To see what was on the new ones, you had to stand fairly close to a hodge-podge of (if memory serves): Sacagawea, a wagon train, a farmstead, the state capitol, Badlands, and Teddy Roosevelt. (Wasn’t he from New York?)

Honestly can’t tell if that’s a wagon train or the cavalry, or if it’s Sacagawea or some guy who stumbled across the border from Manitoba, a Canadian province with which North Dakota shares a large and very attractive park called the “International Peace Garden.” Also, I think I recall a tractor in there. Or was it Lawrence Welk’s accordion? If you have a magnifying glass handy, let me know.

As Bradbury noted, the largest image was that of a highway, “giving the impression that the only thing to do here is to get the hell out!”

Ah, the memories!

All of them stoked by a flag that has dotted the landscape, including in front of Newburyport City Hall, during “Pride Month.” At a glace it appears to be the Gay Pride Flag that we have seen for years.

But then we notice more: Five more colors angling in from the left in a sideways triangle atop the six primary and secondary colors of the rainbow.

https://www.verywellmind.com/what-the-colors-of-the-new-pride-flag-mean-5189173

The original Gay Pride Flag, or the Rainbow Flag was simple, straightforward (pun or not), easy to identify and identify with since we all know rainbows and the metaphor is easy to grasp. The new version is called the Progress Pride Flag, and you can find websites that explain what each of the now eleven colors represent.

One reason I hesitate to list them is that there is already a version newer than what is flying in front of City Hall. Inside the white triangle is now a yellow triangle with a purple circle. Hard not to anticipate that, before long, a counter triangle will enter from the right with yet more shades to represent the Cross, the Crescent and Star, the Star of David, Buddha, Zen, and whatever Sitting Bull held in his hand when Custer died for our sins.

At what point does the push for inclusion become confusion? Or intrusion?

Let me be clear: I fully support gay rights, marriage equality, and adoption by gay couples. If I avoid using terms such as non-binary, cis, intersectional community, aromantic, and LGBTQ (Or is it LGBTQA now, and is there a plus-sign at the end of it?), it’s for the same reason I avoid words such as appropriate, whatever, utilize, and you guys–and will never use plural pronouns for one person. To me, these are matters of language, not prejudice–what I practice, not what I prefer.

You’ve heard the phrase “tin ear”? The Progress Flag is for people with tin eyes. For the rest of us, clutter does not flutter.

The Rainbow Flag–including bumper stickers and clothing–has always been a welcome sight. Tasteful. Classy. Clear. Like a national flag, it offers a unified overview of whom and what it represents–leaving all the details for the documents it represents.

As all good flags do–and as all rainbows do–it sings E Pluribus Unum. The Progress Flag babbles E Pluribus Pluribus.

You might as well fly a printout of the Constitution in place of the Stars and Stripes. I may call it an eyesore, but, if he’s still with us, there’s a former governor of North Dakota who might like it.

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What a difference a new governor makes! As Bradbury told me, the new gov easily fulfilled a campaign promise to commission one of the state’s well-known artists to create something unified and distinctive.

Oh, what a statement Mother Nature makes!

A Deep Dive into US

At times I wondered if she was outlining a script for an American version of The Madness of King George.

But it was no joke. Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony was as convincing as it was damning.

Now that we’ve heard it, any expression of support for Donald Trump–from the bumper-stickers to the flags, and from the social media posts to the cheers at his rallies–is an admission of one of three things:

1) Willful ignorance. It’s not just that these folks don’t pay attention. It’s that they don’t want to pay attention. For many of them, ignorance is bliss. The Constitution is flawless, racism has been solved, the anthem tells us that we are free and we are brave. Let’s wave our flags, put our hands over our hearts, and have a blast this weekend!

2) Hopeless stupidity. Sounds harsh, I admit, but to me the word includes gullibility. As one wag put it, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me; fool me three times, and what am I? Susan F—ing Collins?”

3) A desire for fascism. A hallmark of authoritarians is that they satisfy a need many have to feel superior to others. Brown Shirts, Proud Boys.

While the first two categories are straightforward and easy to define, understanding this third group requires a psychological dive.

There’s some truth to the observation made by a few cable news pundits that Trump’s campaign in 2016 allowed racists, bigots, misogynists, and other cranks to be open with their fears and paranoia. Some noted this same dynamic in the candidacy of Sarah Palin eight years earlier.

Our mistake is thinking that this preference for authoritarian government that allows for a grab-all-you-can-and-to-hell-with-the-consequences economy is a recent and possibly–hopefully–passing development. That’s because most all unflattering events in American history–especially those that show business in a bad light or show racial oppression at all–are effectively banned from school texts and curricula.

If you think it began with the Tea Party in 2009, or the “Contract with (really on) America” in 1994, or Reagan’s demonization of government in 1980, here’s a quick dive in time that skims the surface of what we face Now:

From Lyndon Johnson, circa 1963:

If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

From Eleanor Roosevelt, circa 1936:

Pit race against race, religion against religion, prejudice against prejudice. Divide and conquer! We must not let that happen here.

From Herman Melville’s Omoo, 1847, referring to sailors’ “regard” for natives of South Pacific islands:

They hardly consider them human. But it is a curious fact, that the more ignorant and degraded men are, the more contemptuously they look upon those whom they deem their inferiors.

And all the way back to 1797, when the Territory of Kentucky voted on whether to enter the Union as a free or slave state, there’s the example of a very young lawyer named Henry Clay. He and his upstart friends travelled the length of the soon-to-be Bluegrass State talking with everyone they could find to convince them of the economic benefits of a free state.

As David and Jeanne Heidler describe it in their 2010 biography, everyone told Clay and his friends that they were convinced. A free state meant more opportunity for more people; slave state meant an accumulation of wealth for plantation owners while most everyone else, white or not, struggled.

After the vote made Kentucky a slave state, Clay was so stunned that he made the rounds again just to ask what happened. Over and again he was told that, yes they knew that free was better for most, but owning slaves was “a badge of honor” which they thought they might someday attain. No matter the odds against them, they did not want the chance of having that “honor” disappear.

This could serve as a description of “Joe the Plumber” who famously confronted Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. Just as accurately, it described Trump supporters five years before he rode down the escalator.

It also describes a desire for fascism, or at least a willingness to tolerate it for the sake of some perceived advantage. Following the testimony we heard today from Cassidy Hutchinson, I’d say it describes as many if not more of Trump supporters than the other two possibilities combined.

After today, there is no fourth choice.

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https://exclusivecartz.com/jan-6-commission-hears-from-surprise-witness-cassidy-hutchinson-assistant-to-trump-chief-of-staff-mark-meadows/

And I Think to Myself

Pat Bashford, who graced Newburyport for the last 20 years of her long and varied life, was remembered yesterday at the Unitarian Universalist Church downtown. Pat and her fine long-time companion Ann Kemp, who passed in 2014, were active in an assortment of community groups ranging from books to horticulture, from the Firehouse to the Unitarian Church.

Except for a few recoveries from what her son called her “penchant for breaking limbs,” Pat never stopped until her passing last November.

A video of yesterday’s memorial–from the introspective intro, “Something to Live For,” to the energetic, joyous outro of Pachelbel’s “Aria Tertia,” played by pianist/organist Justin Murphy-Mancini–will be available on-line before long, and Pat’s sons, who welcome all interest in their mother, will be glad to share the link.

The event includes reflections of Pat from friends, some who knew her reaching back to her 25 years in Reading, Mass. where she acted in and directed local plays, and from her sons, Rob and Ron, and from her daughter-in-law, Charya, who offered a Khmer Prayer. Rev. Rebecca Bryan added blessings, one of which ended with the most insightful joke of the day, the first question from Pat when Rev. Bryan first arrived in Newburyport.

I’ll leave that for the video, as I will all else, except to mention a song, about halfway in. If the video can come anywhere near the impact of a live performance, there’s a rendition of “What a Wonderful World” that may leave you shaking–as I am one day later.

It’s song we all know, at least in snippets used in TV ads, first recorded by Louis Armstrong in 1967, a time of deep turmoil and division in the USA. Accordingly, its lyrics well capture Pat’s spirit, who paid close attention to the wonderful world at large. What I wonder is if Meg Rayne–with her voice, her gestures, her expressions–knew she was channeling Pat Bashford.

We typically use the word “singer” or “vocalist,” but yesterday we saw and heard an interpreter. Comparisons? Let’s start with Roger Daltrey in the role of Tommy, Stan Rogers on board the “Mary Ellen Carter,” Linda Ronstadt longing for her “Blue Bayou.” Accompanied by pianist John Hyde and with harmonizing from Kristine Malpica of Image Studios in Amesbury, Meg brought the song to life right before our eyes

Had people who never met Pat wandered in when the song started, they might have thought Meg was channeling old Satchmo himself.

He would be a kindred spirit to the woman who was honored in Newburyport yesterday.

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*Portrait by Marilu Norden, most of whose work is of the American Southwest (which may explain the earrings):*
https://marilunorden.com/paintings/

My tribute to Pat last November:

Angel of the Boardwalk

America Unamended

We’ve been saying that abortion is now the first Constitutional right to be taken away, but it comes a full month after a Supreme Court ruling that has effectively nullified the Sixth Amendment.

Before we get to that, not everyone thinks that reproductive rights have been lost. Here, in paraphrase, is how Sean Hannity ended his show on Fox Noise on the night of the ruling:

If you meet anyone this weekend who complains that the Supreme Court “has taken away a right,” tell them, no! The court has returned that decision to the states where it belongs. It’s in the Constitution!

The station then cut to Laura Ingraham who started her show “on this triumphant night” with two words huge on the graphic behind her:

Answered Prayers.

Before I could switch the channel back to the Red Sox game, she used the phrase “unhinged left” twice while labelling protests across the country as a “night of rage.”

Next day, there were no reports of violent protests anywhere. Footage of teargas came from Arizona, sprayed at a peaceful assembly, to use the First Amendment’s phrase, but on Fox it was a menacing visual to justify the label that they had already planned to use well in advance of the decision.

Yes, it’s bad, and it’s about to get worse.

Could happen before the 4th that the Supreme Court will decide West Virginia v. The Environmental Protection Agency.

If we go by the decision that just erased Roe v. Wade, then Joe Manchin’s coal industry donors will get the EPA off their backs. As with Roe, the pretext will be states’ rights.

And just as Roe‘s demise will serve as a precedent to reverse, as Clarence Thomas wrote in his concurring opinion, the right to contraception and same-sex relationships, EPA’s demise will serve a much larger goal.

Like the first domino in a long line, it will knock down as many regulatory agencies as corporate donors require of their Republican servants. As they have been saying since the advent of Ronald Reagan, they will finish what has been a gradual erasure of FDR’s New Deal.

The decision to nullify Roe and the expected ruling on the EPA echo their 6-3 decision last month in Shinn v. Martinez Ramirez. In it, Thomas, writing for the majority, held that the federal government had no say in guaranteeing that competent counsel be provided to citizens charged with crimes. Back to the state of Arizona it went.

Of all places! Arizona was where Miranda Rights were born in 1966, the right to remain silent, a friendly amendment to the Fifth Amendment to guard against self-recrimination. In yet another decision last week, somewhere between rulings to strike down gun safety measures and reproductive rights, the Supreme Court nailed Miranda in Vega v. Tekoh, again by 6-3.

Elena Kagan offered what the ACLU called “an excellent dissent” in favor of Miranda. How could she fail? The majority’s logic could not be any more berserk: Yes, you have rights, but no, police are not obliged to state them upon arrest.

A month later, Sonia Sotomayor penned a scathing dissent in defense of reproductive rights, but the most damning counter to that majority opinion might be the Sixth Amendment all by itself:

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

Notice the last line in which James Madison, writing America’s original laws, enumerated the very right that Thomas denied had federal jurisdiction. We thought reproductive rights were first to go? The right to a fair trial was already gone.

Anyone following this with standard concepts of language and logic may be confused. If the Supreme Court is so intent on turning everything back to the states, then how did it justify striking down gun regulation in New York State last week?

One snarky answer is that the Tenth Amendment applies only to those states that send Republicans to DC and their own state capitals. Another is that the second half of the Second Amendment trumps all else, and pay no attention to that bothersome first half. Yet another is that “states’ rights,” which was a euphemism for slavery in the 19th Century, is now a euphemism for “corporate rights.”

The obvious, honest, straight answer is that Republican donors care far more about getting rid of regulation than getting rid of abortion. But the full story is far from that simple.

Before Hannity ended his show, he attributed the repeal of Roe to 10A, which reads in full:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

And then, as if it was an afterthought, he added, “And to some extent the Ninth Amendment,” also a single sentence:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Notice Hannity’s finesse: Ten addresses “powers,” Nine protects “rights.” Also, the 10th mentions states and people, while the word “states” is absent from the 9th which is entirely intended for people.

Is abortion a power or a right? Yes, a rhetorical question with an answer that puts it in the jurisdiction of 9A and nowhere near 10A.

For at least forty years, as historian Elie Mystal points out, Republicans, while always trumpeting the Tenth Amendment’s call for “rights reserved to the states,” do not want us to know of the Ninth Amendment’s “unenumerated” rights for individuals.

No afterthought. All pre-scripted. Hannity, anticipating objections based on 9A, deliberately blurs the line between the two amendments, between “powers” and “rights.” This is something like what Bill Barr did with the Mueller Report.

Barr issued his whitewash before the report, giving the absurd impression of “total exoneration.” By saying it first, any quoting of the report’s damning conclusions (plural) sounded like whining and requests for do-overs. As far as many were concerned, exoneration was in the report.

Hannity misrepresents and morphs two amendments to justify the anti-Choice position as soon as the Supreme Court ruled, giving the impression that no harm is done. Should there be any objection, Hannity was thoughtful enough to tell his viewers how to dismiss it: “It’s in the Constitution!”

In effect, the Supreme Court, now an arm of the Republican Party, aided by Fox, the voice of the Republican Party, has just erased the Ninth Amendment.

Why not? In the past five weeks, they have ditched key provisions of the Fifth and Sixth, and few of us noticed.

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