In 1989, the year that Salman Rushdie went into hiding, and in the years immediately before and following, I frequently wrote columns about cross-country travels with my daughter that proved quite popular with readers of the local paper.
She was just 11 that year, four years older than Rushdie’s son, Zafar, who was suddenly and necessarily estranged from his father. To maintain some connection, the author of probing novels with deep historical, religious, and philosophical content, wrote a children’s story and engaged his son as his first-read editor.
After hearing the first draft, Zafar told his dad that it was a good story, but it needed “some jump.” Rushdie took that to mean “quicken the pace” and told Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross that Zafar liked the “jump” of the second version.
In September, 1990, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, the adventures of an irrepressibly happy young boy who finds himself living in a city so sad that it has forgotten its name, appeared in bookstores and libraries all over the world where speech is–or at least was–still free.
These were years when I spent more time downtown playing music than anywhere writing anything, and in the holiday season I would bundle up with fingerless gloves that allowed me to pipe Christmas carols along with my standard jigs and reels, bourees and minuets.
On the very day before Rushdie’s interview aired, a woman approached after I finished a song and handed me a $20 bill rather than putting it the basket. She insisted on a condition: That I would turn it into “a present for Rachel.”
‘Twas a few nights before Christmas that I had her open it. I figured it would take five or six nights of bedtime installments, but Haroun has more jump than Zafar may have bargained for. Several times I had to stop my voice from racing. Rachel loved it, only conceding to sleep when we were halfway through.
I took it to bed and read to the end before turning out the light.
When we woke up to pouring rain, we finished breakfast and rejoined Haroun and his story-telling father through pages of magical realism that she found exciting page by page–and that I found as thoughtful and satisfying as the novels of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Robertson Davies.
One recurring item in the dialogue we adopted into our own father-daughter vocabulary: The label that Haroun used whenever he could not answer the boy’s questions, 2C2E for “too complicated to explain” Sure sounded better than “I don’t know” and “Because.”
In the age before internet shorthand and texting abbreviations, both the sight and sound of it struck us as hilarious, and yet it had a weird echo of Hamlet’s 2B or not 2B that kept us guessing about subjects rather than shrugging them off.
Perhaps that’s my response this weekend to the news that Salman Rushdie is on a ventilator, likely to lose an eye if not his life: 2C2E. No matter what we might guess or learn about why it happened, we cannot shrug it off.
Buried under the news of an FBI search of Mar-an-Ego for classified documents was the report of that Ego answering questions in the New York State investigation of his fraudulent tax claims.
Make that not answering.
After his name and address, he invoked the Fifth Amendment. He named it just once. To every question that followed he responded with the same two words: Same answer.
There are many adjectives that describe Donald Trump. Reticent was never one of them. His performance in New York last week was so out-of-character that it could leave anyone dumbfounded, and for most it defies description.
At first, I wrote it off as yet another bizarre quirk in Trump’s bottomless barrel of bizarre behavior. But before long I was taking my laundry out of a dryer, folding a t-shirt I bought at gift-shop at Arrowhead, Herman Melville’s farm in the Berkshires. Though I’ve been wearing it for three years and have given identical shirts to family and friends as gifts, I froze when I held it in front if me. It reads:
I would prefer not to.
What Trump kept repeating last week was what Bartleby kept repeating in Melville’s cryptic tale of a socially comatose scrivener on Wall Street.
By itself, that’s nothing to get hung about. Not until you consider that this is a man frequently compared to two other Melville characters that are as far from Bartleby as they are from Mr. Rogers. Indeed, ever since he descended the escalator in June, 2015, Trump has often gained comparisons to both Ahab and whoever is (are) the title character(s) of The Confidence Man.
Captain Ahab, who leads his whaling ship to destruction in pursuit of his own fantasy, foreshadows Trump’s “I could shoot someone” with an equally hyperbolic declaration: “I’d strike the sun if it insulted me!”
Confidence Man (or men) employs the tricks of fast talk, repetition, deflection, projection, conflation, flattery, false claims, passive verbs, and vague attribution for scenes that could illustrate Trump’s ghost-written (speaking of con-jobs) The Art of the Deal.
For all of that, the most incisive explanation for the enthrallment of his fans goes beyond the Pequod’s crew’s lust for Ahab’s doubloon, beyond genteel riverboat travelers’ wanting to believe in Confidence Man’s altruism.
That honor goes to the seething narrator of “Benito Cereno,” Melville’s story of a slave revolt on a Spanish ship:
A man with some evil design, would he not be likely to speak well of that stupidity which was blind to his depravity, and malign that intelligence from which it might not be hidden?
As is true of the American captain who found the Spanish ship in distress, many Americans can neither comprehend what is right in front of them nor believe it when it’s spelled out. When it blows up, such as on Jan. 6, it’s something else (“a normal tourist day”) or someone else did it (Antifa), or it didn’t happen at all (crisis actors, false flags).
As I write, Republicans are claiming that the files recovered from Mar-an-Ego were declassified by Trump and that they were planted by the FBI. One has to be “blind to… depravity” to think both statements can be true–and “malign that intelligence” that states the obvious.
We keep hearing that we need to read our history to avoid repeating mistakes. Yes, I agree, but I can refer you to a writer of fiction who dramatized American history in summaries just as true today as they were when he called himself Ishmael.
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Drawing for the 24th Annual Moby-Dick Marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum in 2020, two months before the pandemic. The 2021 and 2022 readings were virtual, but they plan to return to a live reading this coming January.
While sitting on Plum Island overlooking the marsh reading Melville’s early novels, it’s easy to imagine I’m on a lush tour of the South Pacific.
A headset offering “virtual reality”? I would prefer not to.
In semi-retirement and with an insistent preference for hardcover, I’d go broke buying Typee, Omoo, Mardi, Redburn, and White Jacket—not to mention tired and blind trying to find them in bookstores.
Among many other things—civic archives and events, children’s reading programs, on-line resources and the computers to access them, not to mention technical assistance for all of the above—this is what libraries are for.
So, off to the Newburyport Public Library I went searching for Omoo (Tahitian for “rover”). Not there. The Modern Library of America’s four Melville compilations I had borrowed in the past? All gone. In fact, all I found was a single copy of Moby-Dick.
The on-line catalogue for the Merrimack Valley Library Consortium listed just one Omoo, and so I had it sent from Methuen. Next day, I spotted a friend from out-of-town who works at a library upriver photographing City Hall’s Juneteenth celebration and inquired.
He told me it’s called “weeding.” With so much on-line, many books never circulate. And then there’s MVLC.
“So, one Omoo is enough for over 30 city and town libraries?” I asked. He shrugged, I shrugged, and the mayor began to speak. That night, I sent him a message asking if weeding was a secret.
Here’s something that’s not a secret: Public libraries are as high as public education, public transportation, public everything on the Republican Party’s hit list. Are librarians now doing their dirty work for them?
While mulling that over, I received this:
It’s no secret. All libraries weed. If a book doesn’t circulate over a period of time, it’s removed. If the book is worn, meaning well read, we purchase another copy, if still in print.
Some are replaced by new trendy volumes on the same subject. You may not be able to get contemporary accounts of historical events, he cracked, but you can always get some “name-the time-or-place History for Dummies.”
If another MVLC library has the same title, removal is to avoid duplication, unless it’s a hot title:
“You can see it for yourself. Just walk through the literature and poetry sections.”
I did. As he says, “pretty anemic.” The Reference section looks empty. A bookcase on the 3rd floor with coffee table books—atlases, photography, fashion, art, etc.—is now gone, “so too the oversized books because they didn’t circulate.”
His voice rose in print:
Of course not! Too big to take home. But I witnessed many patrons read/browse/enjoy them in our library. Most people can’t afford to buy those books. The library can.
I saw many parents with children looking at atlases and photography books together and teens sharing books. We’re weeding not just books, we’re weeding people.
Given the overall demise of print, I asked, shouldn’t public libraries be increasingly vigilant safeguarding books?
Ha! A story from your own library circulated throughout MVLC that a patron wanted a second look at the two volumes of The Life and Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier. Perhaps that patron delighted to think someone else had them, but when unable to place a hold, he inquired.
Weeded.
No matter that Whittier has deep Newburyport connections and that the books, published by a relative in 1894, contain his letters, always of deep local, historical value.
How are empty spaces on shelves better than those books? Than any books? This is not the product of careful thought, but of “policy and procedure,” the very antithesis of thought that turns thinking people into badly programmed robots. At a library no less.
Oh, the irony! Just 21 years ago NPL expanded to the tune of $6.8 million for what? More books, they said back then. Maybe they think Washington, Jefferson, Lafayette, and John Quincy Adams are coming back through their door and they need bunk beds.
From my first inquiry, my librarian friend and I kept using a phrase: “with so much on-line.” Yet more irony! This dialogue began at a celebration of an American historical event as overlooked—perhaps as weeded—as Omoo all these years.
What’s on-line? I would prefer we start thinking of what’s on the line.
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The 2001 expansion is the curved structure from the left into the center as well as the entrance that links it to the old Tracy Mansion, built in 1771, into which the library moved in 1866. https://www.newburyportpl.org/
If you’re a Boston Red Sox fan, you can be excused if you think A Comedy of Errors is the title of a forthcoming book about this 2022 season. Shakespeare himself might concede a better claim.
The misplay reached a dramatic climax Sunday when our rookie center fielder, already suspect for misjudging fly balls, misplayed three of them, turning a close game into a Kansas City blowout. It’s a wonder that the number on his back isn’t E8.
Errors? Not according to the official scorer. Not at all. Those were triples.
Yet another reason to wonder why major league pitchers don’t go on strike demanding honesty in scoring rather than giving the fielder every benefit of doubt even when there is no doubt.
Red Sox were seeing a lot of this from a few other players, including a starting first-baseman who accumulated eight home runs and not quite 30 RBI in this season’s first four months. Had he done that in two months, he’d be rated an average first-baseman. His .208 batting average is worse than bad. Making it yet worse, he strikes out so often that he should be the first player in MLB to have a letter rather than a number on his back:
K, the scorer’s symbol for a strike out, and backwards to indicate a called strike.
Few notice, but the bat always stays on his shoulder when he slumps back to the dugout with a hangdog face after the ump’s call. For comic effect, the Bard himself couldn’t script it better.
Last week we traded for a new first-baseman to replace Mr. Strike-Out, but we cut our gold-glove outfielder in favor of Mr. Three-Base-Error. Worse yet, last week we traded our catcher of nine years, considered among the best in baseball, while still in contention for the playoffs. Still worse, he went to one of the two best teams in our own league.
For casual readers unaware of baseball’s intricacies: Catcher is by far the most difficult and demanding position in the game–many jocks say in all of sports. He has to know every pitch thrown by each pitcher and call each pitch thrown to each opposing batter. He has to withstand pitches that bounce up from the dirt or are tipped back at him at speeds up to 100 mph. He has to hold runners on base, and if they attempt to steal, he has to rifle a strike 120 feet to second base or 90 feet to third. He has to catch pop-ups straight overhead that return to earth with a vicious curve quite unlike the predictable arc of a ball pulled or sliced or hit straight out into the field. He has to take throws from outfielders and make sweeping tags at opponents running toward him full tilt. And he has to do all of the above while wearing more pounds of padding than most of can but look at on a hot summer day.
This is why, years ago, a pitcher for the Miami Marlins declared that the catcher is the most valuable player on every team. That overlooks some duds playing the role, but I think most fans would agree that a catcher who excels at all of the above hitting .250 is as or more valuable than any other player hitting .300. Our former catcher is now batting .277 for the Houston Astros.
Back in Boston, the front office, the coaches, and players all keep insisting that they are still in it to win. Their ability to parrot the platitude with straight faces should make all aspiring actors envious.
As with Shakespeare, everything works on more than one level. The Red Sox are an error-plagued team on the field, and if base-running blunders were scored as errors, MLB might be compelled to send the entire team back to the minors and let the Caribbean national teams take turns filling out the schedule. (Imagine the new Fenway chant: Cuba si! Yankee no!)
As Boston’s most prominent sports columnist scowled, “Boston fans are paying the highest ticket prices in the league to watch minor league players learn on the job.”
For all that, the fatal errors have been made by the front office.
In addition to the first-baseman who can’t hit, the outfielder who can’t catch, the catcher now out, and the runners who keep making outs, we had a power hitting, high on-base-percentage first-baseman when last season ended, only to let him go–to the National League where he is now among home run leaders.
How Shakespeare could put a front office on baseball’s diamond stage is anyone’s guess, but my guess is that he’d make the Red Sox represent all of MLB the way that individual characters represent good or evil in morality plays.
And he would set it at the Trade Deadline.
Who couldn’t laugh at suits intoning about “the integrity of the game” while the best and richest teams skim the best players from the “small market” teams that fall out of contention in mid-season? Or while scheduling games to start in the late afternoon when outfielders are blinded by a sun low over the horizon, all for the sake of television contracts?
With so many obvious errors scored as hits, this 21st Century Comedy of Errors is an undisputed hit.
But it is about far more than the team in Boston, and has been running far longer than this one year. While the errors we see on the field may be funny, the comedy we don’t see is very dark.
Among the many peripheral, random events held all over Newburyport during Yankee Homecoming is the block party on Dove Street before and through the fireworks.
Dove is a short, narrow, one-way affair that lands on Merrimac St. across from Leary’s parking lot, so it’s easy for the city to grant a permit to shut it down for a few evening hours. Yesterday’s gathering was the 13th or 14th annual depending on how you figure the shutdown of COVID-20.
For me it was the first. Not just at Dove but anywhere, not just this year, but in my life. And I went under the assumption that any band at a block party would be aspiring high-schoolers playing standard hits note for every familiar note.
Turns out Astral Lemon is a Boston-based group that has been together a few years. Vocalist and front man Stylianos Psarogiannis–who also plays guitar, keyboard, or something that looks like a flugelhorn–not long ago was a student at the Berklee School of Music. He has stayed in touch with his history teacher, a resident of Dove Street who plans and supports the annual event, long enough to land this gig.
The day was so hot that I pretty much inhaled a 12-oz. ale as soon as I sat down, but that had nothing to do with the sensation that Astral Lemon creates as soon as they take up their instruments and start playing.
A couple about my age felt it as well, and we went back and forth identifying the influences we were hearing. I offered the Mothers of Invention, King Crimson, and Blind Faith. They suggested Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and Pink Floyd, the last of which comes closest to a set list that includes two tracks each from The Dark Side of the Moon and Wish You Were Here.
Wish all my college friends were there to hear it with me.
All songs followed the otherworldly soundscape of some 15 minutes of three soaring guitars, rapid fire drums, and high energy keyboard. All of it had me back in 1968 before Astral Lemon was introduced and “opened” with “I Shot the Sheriff.”
Somehow I had forgotten that it was written by Bob Marley, but Astral Lemon reveled in the reggae glossed over by Eric Clapton. That may seem incongruous, but it was just right as a transition from the raw power of their warm up into the reassuring comradery of the vocals. More than that, it was the first of many offerings featuring mesmerizing guitar work that ranged from Dire Straits’ dazzling “Sultans of Swing” to the Doors’ deep and probing “Love Me Two Times” and “Riders on the Storm.”
Speaking of deep and probing, you might wonder if they play one Beatles’ song so that Psarogiannis can pause and look at lead guitarist Dinos Alvanos after the line, “He’s got hair. Down. To his knees.” But “Come Together” features bassist Filipo Goller who would do Paul McCartney proud with both his steady formidable support and his occasional playful leads.
Rhythm guitarist Oliver Ordish adds exquisite echoes of lines note for contrapunctal note in addition to joining some of Alvanos’ powerhouse leads and enhancing drummer Eduardo Hoyos’ feverish pace on the songs that call for it. No matter the pace or the intensity, Astral Lemon plays every instrument with precision that lets you hear every note.
Watch Hoyos and you can see him going through gears, zero-to-sixty in no time. On slower songs such as Floyd’s “Shine on You Crazy Diamond,” he excels with syncopation, for which his four bandmates are noticeably grateful.
Starting just after 7:00, the band took a break after playing “Jailhouse Rock”–a nice pun, intended or not–just in time for us to move to the bottom of Dove and watch the fireworks over the gray house adjacent Leary’s parking lot. Later I would learn that one resident takes neighborhood dogs “for a long car ride until the fireworks end.”
Following the fireworks, Astral Lemon’s second set was just three songs. Was the pun intentional as they played Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” while spectators filed past them on their way back up Dove? Pink Floyd’s “Have a Cigar” would have been just as much of a pun in the years before everyone quit smoking.
The set was short only because the hour was late. Ordinarily, I’d concede that fireworks are an impossible act to follow, but on Dove Street, once every year, they are part of the show.
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Astral Lemon on Dove Street last night of Newburyport’s Yankee Homecoming, L2R: Dinos Alvanos, lead guitar; Filipo Goller, bass; Eduardo Hoyos, drums; Stylianos Psarogiannis, vocals; Oliver Ordish, rhythm guitar. Photo by Patricia Peknik.
Post Script:
As I left the block party, I heard faint music coming from the tent under which Astral Lemon was packing up. Sounded vaguely familiar, as it had a flute, so I stopped. Yes, it was Jethro Tull playing “Locomotive Breath.” Already having thanked them for giving me a night back in 1968, especially with their opening soundscapes, I had to let them know: “I’ve been to at least 35 Tull concerts in the past fifty years.” Immediately, they all wanted to know if I heard Tull’s Thick as a Brick tour. “Twice,” I said, and they were in awe. Dawned on me that I could have been talking to five grandsons, but that’s another story. While driving home, something else dawned on me: Brick was one of the first rock-and-roll albums–The Who’s Tommy another–to feature soundscapes.
And a personal note:
The gray house aside Leary’s parking lot was where my “Aunt Alice” lived. Not sure of the exact relationship, but I’m fairly sure her last name, married or not, was “Creeden,” likely a cousin to my paternal grandmother–Mary Elizabeth Creeden before she became Mrs. Garvey–born and raised in Newburyport. I recall that Alice was quite old when I was brought to visit during my early grade-school years in Lawrence. I’m still sorry for the bottle of water I knocked over on her dining room table.
In Spencer, the recent biopic of Princess Diana, she tells her boys, “Here, there is only one tense. There is no future. Past and present are the same thing.”
That drew more than a chuckle from someone who just finished a review of a new book titled Another Now and whose own forthcoming book is titled Once Upon an Attention Span.
Yes, that would be me, a huge fan of the historical novels of the late Gore Vidal who had a habit of referring to us as “The United States of Amnesia.” And of early critics of television such as Marie Winn (The Plug-In Drug, 1977) and Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death, 1985) whose foremost warning was that our addiction to the tube was erasing our sense of time, of past and future–that we were trapping ourselves in Now. What would they have said of cellphones?
Now comes a book titled Trapped in the Present Tense. With a bracing, brief preface, author Colette Brooks (In the City: Random Acts of Awareness, 2003) wastes no time reinforcing the theme:
In the twenty-first century, even the most reflective among us seem to be trapped in the present, events superseded so rapidly that awareness can hardly keep up. No before or after anymore, just here and now, 24/7.
Like Zen moments without the mindfulness.
She’s referring to analog life with texting and tweeting and the immediate jolt of ringtones in which “concepts of past and future are losing their currency [and] familiar expressions fail as well: ‘one thing after another,’ ‘ask me later,’ ‘someday you’ll understand’…”
In a perpetual Now, even “the long arc of justice” makes “less and less sense, as if language itself is faltering.”
Completing a one-two punch, Brooks fashions a brief, quirky intro to chapter one with all our common expressions that derive from guns, from “stick to your guns” to “take a cheap shot,” from “dodge a bullet” to “look down the barrel.” Think of any other, and I bet it’s “in her sights,” which are never “lowered.”
The chapter is titled “Shooters,” as much a reference to cameras with emphasis on two cases where both categories converged to change how news is reported in America and, therefore, how we perceive it: The assassination of John Kennedy (followed hard by the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV) and the country’s first mass shooting at the University of Texas three years later.
The remaining chapters–Soldiers, Secrets, Statistics, Snapshots–blend national events with personal stories, statistics and photos, most of them her own family snapshots. The writing is at once punchy and panoramic, as if Hemingway took up cinematography. Something mesmerizing about the prose, more poetry, most of it in the present tense, like the title says. On a beach-day, you could read these 200 fast-paced pages in one sitting.
The people she introduces reflect her book’s subtitle, Meditations on American Memory, and the many stats she offers reinforce it in ways that may cause a nervous laugh:
The most stressful jobs in America: enlisted military personnel, firefighters, airline pilots, taxi drivers, and event coordinators, who are tied with police officers. Which means anyone on active duty who flies to a wedding and takes a cab to a venue that burns down may blame the person who planned the event in the first place. And insist on an arrest.
As heartfelt as her personal tales and serious as her perceptions of public failings are, Brooks favors us with the comic relief of wordplay and whimsy throughout Trapped in the Present Tense. That’s much needed in a book with chilling implications if we heed George Orwell:
“Who controls the past, controls the future: who controls the present, controls the past.”
Though she never says it and may very well deny it, Brooks’ book portrays an America that, having forfeited any sense of time, now lives by a Declaration of Dependence.
Not to throw a damper on your joy, but the man behind the curtain is still behind the curtain, and we better pay attention, Toto.
While the Kansas vote is cause for celebration, there’s no guarantee that it predicts what will become of reproductive rights across the nation following elections in every state this November.
Reason is quite simple: Voters in Kansas answered a referendum question that was specifically about the right to choose.
True, the state Republicans tried to finesse an anti-choice vote by putting it on a primary ballot rather than on the general ballot in November. This, they thought, would work doubly to their advantage since the only high-stakes primary contests were on the Republican side. Ordinarily, there’d be little incentive for Democrats or independents to go to the polls.
Knowing that wouldn’t be enough, Kansas Republicans then worded the question so that “Yes” would be a vote to outlaw abortion and “No” a vote to approve it. This is right out of the playbook of authoritarian regimes: Carefully crafted referenda intended only to give the outside world the illusion they respect the will of their people.*
Even that wasn’t enough in Kansas. Days before the vote, pamphlets appeared in Kansas City, Topeka, Lawrence, and other cities that trend Democratic with blaring headlines screaming, “Yes” to protecting reproductive rights, thereby deliberately distorting the word to give the impression that a “Yes” vote was how to do it.
Still, despite all that, Republicans lost. So, yes, the landslide vote in Kansas was a huge triumph on every level, and those who organized and got out the vote have earned all the toasts we can raise.
To help us all sober up, think about what’s at stake for reproductive rights in November and how the choice will appear, with or without Republican attempts to control, distort, or finesse.
For starters, the words “pro-choice” and “pro-life” will not be on any ballots. Instead, we’ll see the names of candidates, mostly in pairs, one with an R and the other with a D following his or her name. Any voter whose priority is to protect reproductive rights will need to know where each party as well as each candidate stands regarding those rights.
Sounds simple, but this is why many Republican candidates do not identify their party affiliation in their campaign ads and literature. This is especially true of challengers who accuse Democratic incumbents as being “part of the gridlock” even though it is their own party that obstructs.
And then there are many voters who like to say that they will choose the best person regardless of party. Sounds so reasonable, doesn’t it? On the surface, who can argue? Below the surface, the sheer number of party members determines which party chairs all of the congressional committees for the next two years.
Since the chair determines what comes before each committee, a Republican takeover of either the House or the Senate will kill all legislative efforts to protect reproductive rights–as well as voting, labor, and consumer rights; as well as addressing climate change and gun violence; and protecting social security and other public services. Instead, we’ll be listening to at least two years of “Benghazi!”
This is how it works in every state legislature as well as in the US Congress.
In other words, if you vote for the guy or gal who looks and sounds like someone with whom you’d like to have a beer or a cup of coffee instead of, say, a grumpy old white guy like Jerry Nadler, you could help make Jim Jordan chair of the House Judiciary Committee.
My advice?
As Glinda, the Good Witch, tells Dorothy: “You’ve always had the power my dear, you just had to learn it yourself.”
Keep the focus on reproductive rights and keep asking every candidate where he or she stands on it. Make it a yes-or-no question, and interrupt them if they begin with any other word. This is no time for Pollyanna politeness. This is time for Ruth Bader Ginsburg persistence.
Keep asking the same question until they answer. Anything short of a clear, emphatic endorsement of reproductive rights betrays a unwillingness to make Republicans “take their feet off [women’s] necks.”
Talk about it, write about it, tweet about it, text about it, insist that everyone you know knows about it. And then show up, no matter how long the Republicans’ contrived inconveniences make you stand in line.
Don’t just get mad at Republicans for your time in line, get even.
*For an illustration of how sham referenda work, there’s a 2012 film about one held by Augusto Pinochet’s regime in Chile in 1988 titled No, a story so hilariously and brilliantly told that it serves as a satire of the advertising industry as we know it today:
Whenever I hear anyone express an interest in forming a third party to solve all that ails US, I ask:
“Does the name ‘Ralph Nader’ ring a bell?”
If they are under the age of, say, 35, I suppose the answer will be “no.” But if they are well into middle-age or beyond, I wonder if they have any bells to ring.
Imagine my surprise last week when hearing that Christine Todd Whitman and Andrew Yang announced the formation of a “centrist party,” an attempt to draw independents and moderates disaffected by the existing parties.
Whitman, a former New Jersey governor, earned her moderate Republican chops as the head of the Environmental Protection Agency when she stood up to the W. Bush administration’s deregulating disregard for the environment. Yang, a most successful entrepreneur but a failed candidate for US president and NYC mayor, impressed moderates and progressives alike in the early 2020 Democratic primaries with his suggestions to revive the national economy.
Yang’s signature line, complete with cutting and sweeping motions of his right forearm, was “Not left. Not right. Forward.” No coincidence then, the name of this new venture: The Forward Party. Two years ago, he sounded so good that many liberals and progressives, including me, hoped that the newly-elected president would name Yang to his cabinet as secretary of either Treasury or Commerce.
Today, no matter how calm the sound of his voice, he screams collective suicide.
The difference can be summed up by naming one day, January 6, 2021. But that’s a deceptive understatement as we continue to learn that the afternoon riot was but a small piece of a far more comprehensive attempt to to overthrow America’s electoral process. In effect, we remain stuck in Jan. 6, as state legislatures contrive laws that will allow them, unchecked by courts or by neutral observers, to determine outcomes of elections, including the certification of electoral votes every four years regardless of the state’s popular vote. And it is one of the two existing parties that has not just joined but is conducting it while the other has mounted the only possible, plausible, practical defense.
How anyone can think that 2022 is a good time to start a third party is beyond me. And I say this as someone who, in an op-ed column just two years ago, promoted the possibility of third parties as a benefit of Ranked Choice Voting (link below).
RCV allows us to vote for the candidate we most want without fear of tilting the election to the candidate we least want, simply by having us indicate our second choice. Had RCV been in place in 2000, it stands to reason that Al Gore would have received most of Nader’s votes in Florida and in New Hampshire, either one of which would have put Gore over Bush in the Electoral College.
In effect, RCV is a built-in run-off that takes effect only when no candidate gains 50% of the vote when first counted.
Furthermore: Nader would have gained many more votes nationwide from progressives who voted for Gore for fear of electing Bush. Yes, those votes would have gone to Gore in the run-off, but they would have also registered as votes for the third-party and helped it qualify for standing and funding it future elections.
In short, RCV will make third-parties possible.
Yet more: If, in a three-way election, the third party can finish second, it will likely gain most of the last place party’s votes in a run-off–regardless of whether the run-off is RCV or held separately.
At length, RCV will make third parties probable.
Until we have it, we are faced with one party that, for all its flaws, observes and seeks to preserve democracy while the other is bent–in spite of all they claim–on establishing authoritarian rule. Nor is it anything that can honestly be called a “political party,” not after its 2020 convention platform that said not a word about a single issue but simply offered complete deference to Donald Trump, carte blanche. That’s not a political party, that’s an authoritarian cult
Any attempt to form a third party now, ostensibly for “more choice” or to improve democracy, will not attract anyone who favors authoritarian rule. Not the corporados, not the evangullibles, not the Trumbeciles, not the white nationalists. In practical terms, without RCV, any attempt to form a third party will benefit them.
Already, they are raising ample funds while polls show neck-and-neck races for the US senate in Florida, Georgia, and elsewhere. How much of the funding for this shiny new object might instead be going to candidates to get and keep Trumpers out of the senate and gain enough votes to get past Republican obstruction?
Foremost problem with the Forward Party is that its appeal is purely superficial. There’s no regard for any practical, internal workings. And, not to be flip about it, but if you can’t tell the difference between Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, you don’t need a third party. You need a neurologist.
The friend who posted the news on social media was enthusiastic:
The either-or cycle needs to be broken. The minority obstructing the majority until they become the majority and then punishing the minority has to stop. The swinging pendulum isn’t the smooth motion of a well maintained clock, it’s the cutting terror out of Poe.
As another friend immediately responded:
This is a terrible idea. The democrats aren’t great, but they’re not evil like the republican party. To split the voting block of reasonable people, when we are threatened by extremist conservatives, is a horrible mistake. Please get the hell off the “they’re all the same” bandwagon and get on the reality track. The republican party is the enemy of democracy and morality — and you can’t fight them by splitting their opposition in two.
Ah, the “all the same” assumption! So glad he brought that up. It’s a sure indication of people who pay little or no attention, if only you do the math. Here’s a sample of House votes during one week about a month back:
An allocation for baby formula: Dems, 219 – 0; Repubs, 12 – 192
To lower the cost of insulin: Dems, 220 – 0; Repubs, 12 – 193
To stop oil & gas price gouging: Dems, 217 – 4; Repubs, 0 – 203
The new advocate for the Forward Party was undaunted by the first complaint:
Will some Democrats leave? Probably. Will some Republicans leave? Probably more than you think. And there’s more than enough disengaged independents waiting for another option.
Should have asked him what the words “waiting for” say about these supposed independents. Instead, I asked what he thought of RCV, only to be told:
With all the BS about rigged elections, people are going to accept the accuracy of a ranked ballot? The damage has been done on that one.
So it all comes down to the cynicism that the authoritarians, starting with Putin, have sown and are counting on in their hi-tech versions of Divide & Conquer–the very cynicism that RCV would alleviate by making third-party bids more attractive, by making candidates and campaigns less extreme, by making coalitions more likely.
Much like the “all the same” ruse, cynicism is a convenient excuse not to think. That’s why, before I dare mention RCV, I respond to such news with that far simpler question about Ralph Nadar.
Even though I can’t help but wonder if the speaker has any bells at all.
To learn that a childhood idol has died, at least at my age, is to sense something beyond loss.
There’s an inevitability regarding your own life. While you know the world you knew is already gone, the world you now know will be, before long, without you.
But it will go on, with children choosing new heroes and role models with little regard for ours. Put another way, my generation isn’t just getting old, we’re losing relevance.
In grade school, I think we all heard, heard of, perhaps read the poem, “Ode to an Athlete Dying Young.” I might wonder if that’s still taught, but today I’m more inclined to wish for a poem called “To an Athlete Dying Old.” Would it emphasize immortality, or the disappearance of the past?
Oh, Bill Russell will be enshrined–beyond how he already is–with statues, plaques and things named for him. There’s already talk of the NBA retiring the number 6 league-wide as MLB has done with Jackie Robinson’s 42. As we are hearing in all of the tributes from former teammates, from rivals, and from hoop fans such as Barack Obama who honored Russell with America’s Medal of Freedom in 2011, it wasn’t just greatness on the court but off it.
Most of this had to do with the Civil Rights movement in the 50s and 60s when Russell was leading the Boston Celtics to 11 championships in 13 years. That came after two collegiate championships and an Olympic gold medal. At the time, we young boys thought Russell was all about defense, blocked shots, and fast breaks. We had no idea of his involvement with Martin Luther King, his ultimatums to hotels and restaurants in Southern cities where the Celtics played, his support of Muhammed Ali, his pilgrimage to Africa, or the vandalism of his home in a Boston suburb punctuated with racist graffiti.
Guess you could say what I thought was my world never existed. But the avalanche of tributes last night and today have restored that world, warts and all, as if to give my generation one last honest glimmer. Must say, though, that I can’t help but be bemused at the verbal acrobatics of so many commentators trying to honor Russell’s life and work “off the court” without saying the words “race” or “racism.”
Something completely missing from every tribute I’ve heard is any mention of what may be Russell’s last sustained public endeavor: Bill Bradley’s presidential campaign in the 2000 presidential primaries.
A Democratic US Senator from New Jersey at the time, Bradley had been a longtime star for the New York Knicks, making him Russell’s opponent. But Russell, at the age of 66, signed on to Bradley’s team for more than just an endorsement or a couple of casual appearances.
Russell spent most of the month of January making rounds all across Iowa, an early–and therefore influential–caucus state speaking in homes and auditoriums trying to convince Democrats to vote for the affable, soft-spoke, progressive Bradley rather than the sitting vice-president, Al Gore. January. In Iowa.
According to one report, Russell lived in Iowa for the entire month. I haven’t been able to verify that, but I do recall numerous clips showing him in various places during those weeks. He was easy to spot, moving head and shoulders among crowds in a part of the country where most people have blonde hair.
Don’t know when Alzheimer’s took over, but I like to think that Russell took his off-the-court work right to the end. Still a hero, he leaves an example that turns a sense of loss into hope.
What could be more relevant than that?
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Caption: In this file photo taken on February 14, 2011, US President Barack Obama awards the 2010 Medal of Freedom to NBA basketball hall of famer and human rights advocate Bill Russell. AFP https://www.24newshd.tv/01-Aug-2022/nba-mourns-celtics-great-and-civil-rights-activist-bill-russellFormer NBA great Bill Russell, left, jokes with Democratic presidential hopeful Bill Bradley 17 January 2000 in Des Moines, Iowa. Bradley is campaigning for the upcoming Iowa caucus. Photo: TANNEN MAURY/AFP via Getty Images.
Looking for a word to describe a people who complain about the price of gas while the entire nation of Ukraine suffers a war that precipitated the increase?
Call it Snivilization.
No, not mine. Found it–along with much else I’m about to report–in a brand-new dual-biography titled, Up from the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times.
Yes, it was at least 130 years ago that Herman Melville coined the word, not on a mast a la Ahab in any of his novels, but in letters to friends. And yes, he is remembered for adventures in the South Pacific, as far from civilization (with a C) as you can get. But most of them tell of uncomplicated, peaceful island natives grateful for the fruit of their earth no matter how difficult it was to obtain or prepare.
Melville couldn’t resist comparisons to back home, as he recalled the huffs and puffs often expressed at any minor inconvenience or delay in what he and his contemporaries–Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau–called a “Get Ahead World.”
It was not a compliment. And it was aimed at a ruling class impatient with a servant class; at factory foremen pressuring women and immigrant workers in overcrowded, unventilated factories; at overseers cracking the whips on men, women, and children picking cotton in hot and humid fields; at bankers manipulating numbers to milk the farmers who milked the cows before any hint of dawn.
If you ever wondered how Hawaii became a state, Melville’s early novels will convince you that America had no choice but to grant statehood after destroying the natives’ way of life under the pretext of bringing the conveniences of “civilization” and the benevolence of Christianity. All the early missionaries and military had to do was make a few islanders–usually one family–rich while the rest went to work for a pittance. Statehood finally came as an act of obligatory mercy. If Melville were alive at the time Hawaii entered the Union, he’d have been amazed that Tahiti wasn’t “admitted” with it.
And who benefitted from America’s Pacific ventures? American consumers, many of whom would complain if the price of pineapples went up, no matter that the natives climbed trees and picked them for pennies a day while their ruling class feasted with managers of the Dole Fruit Company and other “investors” by night.
In retrospect, it may either amuse or anger anyone who ever heard an English teacher or literary critic fault Melville for his tendency to “go off on tangents.” In Typee and Omoo, many tangents are screeds against colonization of Pacific Islands by the French and English while the Americans tagged along like eager teens ready to share the spoils. By the time he wrote Moby-Dick, Melville’s “tangents” tended more toward philosophy, disguised in Ishmael’s skittish, puckish, rhapsodic, whimsical narration.
His target was an American public that valued its own convenience over the consequences it had for others–much as Americans today enjoy inexpensive clothing and shoes without a thought of it being all stitched together in third-world sweat shops, or think that the price of gas is all the fault of a political party and not at all due to a war waged by a foreign power that wants nothing less than the end of democracy.
For all the lip service that we pay to sacrifices made by those deployed by our military into harm’s way, America is deaf and dumb to any need to sacrifice at home. Risk over there is nothing compared to inconvenience back here.
And pay no attention to any corporate pretext for price-gouging behind the screen. Sorry for the “tangent,” but it’s what happens when a subject has you amused (by the gullibility of those who fall for it) and angry (at the consequences) at the same time.
The word for that is bemused.
“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his disbelief,” was how Nathaniel Hawthorne described his friend after the commercial failure of Moby-Dick ten years before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Following a string of six spirited novels–the first of them, Typee, so successful it made him an international celebrity–Melville wrote dark, brooding novels that had critics (publicly) and loved ones (privately) questioning his sanity.
His fans didn’t buy them. In fact, one he titled The Isle of the Cross was declined by his publisher, as was a short story, “The Two Temples,” a biting attack on organized religion. Already absorbed in another story in his most intense way, Melville shelved and apparently forgot Isle. Unlike Billy Budd and “Temples,” the manuscript was not among papers he left behind and is presumed lost.
Imagine finding it today! It would fetch at least a million at auction, enough to put a down-payment on Beethoven’s Tenth.
Soon after the Civil War, America’s most prolific author fell silent save for a few slim volumes of poetry. He was so forgotten by 1891 that an obit in a New York paper called him “Hiram.” And he would remain forgotten until his centennial in 1919 when an enterprising young scholar named Raymond Weaver started writing magazine articles that would eventually form the first biography of the creator of Ismael, Ahab, Bartleby, and many more characters now impossible to forget: Herman Melville: Mariner and Mystic.
“Mystic”? Well, the Great War had just ended, and America was rushing headlong into the Roaring Twenties. What better time for Weaver to revive the author of Moby-Dick, a book he tells us “reads like a great opium dream”?
That assessment, though not definitive, is just as valid and useful as any other made of the book, reminding me of one calling it “clam chowder” due to Melville’s combination of various ingredients. A recent natural history titled Ahab’s Rolling Sea called it an “the first environmental manifesto,” a forerunner of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring with Ishmael as a “blue environmentalist.” During the McCarthy era, another critic called it our first “totalitarian novel,” a forerunner of Orwell’s 1984 with Ishmael as Winston Smith.
Back at South Dakota State forty years ago, I wrote a paper for a graduate seminar claiming that, if the Bible is “God talking to Man,” Moby-Dick is Man’s response. As a way to avoid the arrogance of appointing himself a spokesman for mankind, Melville’s “in the beginning” took on a life of its own, a reference to an outcast in the book of Genesis: Call me Ishmael.
The most recent assessment calls Moby-Dick “the warp and woof” of two books. One is the adventure story that the public would have bought, while the other is a manual of the whaling industry that would also have found an audience in its time. So why did Melville serve them up as one?
That is among the subjects of Aaron Sachs’ fascinating Up from the Depths, itself a “warp and woof” as it intersperses Melville’s life and work chapter by chapter with that of Lewis Mumford.
If Weaver set the table for the Melville revival in the 1920s, Mumford was the one who served the fare and poured the drinks. Born in 1895, Mumford found that Melville’s misgivings about an inattentive, carefree America in the 1850s leading to Civil War matched his own about an equally blissful nation in the 1920s. His far more incisive and insightful bio, Herman Melville, appeared right on cue in 1929, the year of the crash.
If Mumford wrote that book today, his publisher would change the title to Why Melville Matters.
Sachs points out, with numerous private letters to prove each point, that Melville was always on the mind of Mumford, who ranks high among 20th Century American historians, sociologists, literary critics, and philosophers of both urban planning and technology. To that end, a very young Mumford invoked Melville’s skepticism during the Red Scare that followed World War I; in middle-age during McCarthyism following World War II; in his senior years during the American War on Vietnam.
Hence, the last phrase of the subtitle: In Dark Times.
What better time to consider a possible descent back into Dark Ages than a year when our Supreme Court is for the first time eliminating basic rights, when state legislatures are openly restricting voting rights, when governors are dictating what can and cannot be taught in schools, and when a sizable segment of the American public is clamoring in favor of authoritarian rule?
In his conclusion, Sachs writes that he is…
…grateful to Melville and Mumford for reminding us that people have been living with the trauma of modernity for a long time… The fantasy of increasing security and comfort–the fantasy of Progress–is pernicious, because it distracts us from the unending misery of others and also inhibits our resilience, undermines our age-old adaptations to hardship.
Others may have called it everything from an opium dream to a bowl of chowder, from a political manifesto to a religious tract, but Moby-Dick is a warp that refuses to let you forget the woof. Sachs considers that to be a formula that might once again help snap us out of Snivilization.
Up from the Depths is not just a chronicle of one Rediscovery, but a bid for another.
Mouth of the River 