Following Thursday night’s loss in the NBA Finals and the end of their Jekyll & Hyde season, the Boston Celtics have announced that they will change their name before the opening of the 2022-23 season this fall.
Fans will have a say, although the team may narrow the choice to two names that most represent their style of play before asking for a Boston Globe poll:
The Boston Bricklayers — For no end of clanking three-point attempts.
The Boston Bakers — For no end of turnovers.
Team President Layon Mortar says that they are awaiting their own poll from around the region to consider possibilities such as Mass Bay Masons, New England No-Looks, and Atlantic Air-Balls, but the decision will need to be made by the end of this month to allow time for designs of a new logo, uniforms, stationary, and PR material.
The road uniforms will remain green, as will the trim on the home unis, the paint on the Garden floor, point guard Marcus Smart’s hair, and all printed or posted backdrops for signage and advertisements.
“We thought about taking the media’s nickname for us, ‘Gang Green,'” admits Mortar, “but the smell of the double-entendre was much too strong in our last two games.”
“A brick or a turnover logo will be easy to draw,” says Public Relations Director Pat Isserie, “and turnovers will offer a variety of colors with apple, apricot, raspberry.”
Logos will not appear on the team uniforms. “We’re confident our players will put enough bricks and turnovers onto the court without having to wear them,” Mortar says.
Isserie adds that, if they go with “Bakers,” artificial scents of pastry “like right out of the oven” will be put into the Garden’s ventilation system for all home games. Asked if that was legal, Isserie said the suggestion came from the owner of a chain of cineplexes that do this with the smell of popcorn–none of which is popped in chain theaters, in case you didn’t know.
Protests against the move are already being organized in South Boston and in Irish-American enclaves across the state.
“We won’t stand for this political correctness!” declared Harpo McLoud, a self-described life-long fan and a regular at watch parties held in the parking lot of Patty O’Furniture in the Seaport.
Asked what the change had to do with politics, McLoud yelled, “They’re taking away our fun!” Asked who “they” are, McLoud shook his fist, “Them!”
But elsewhere the change appears welcome, including by other NBA team owners and the league office.
“That leprechaun has to be the ugliest logo in all of sports,” sighed NBA Commissioner Buzz R. Beater. “If we can get the rest of the team to dye their hair green, no one will miss it.”
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Boston – May 15: Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart (36) howls as his three pointer gave the Celtics a 97-75 lead during the fourth quarter. The Boston Celtics host the Milwaukee Bucks in Game 7 of the Eastern Conference semi-finals between the Celtics and Bucks on May 15, 2022 at TD Garden in Boston. (Photo by Barry Chin/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
Is it a miracle of language or a finesse of politics that a single statement can be both true and false at the same time?
That it can simultaneously be both hopeful and cynical? Hilarious and deadly?
Congress is about to pass gun safety legislation.
“Bipartisan,” both Democrats and Republicans boast, and even the self-styled Grim Reaper, Mitch McConnell, who prides himself on killing bills passed by Democrats in the US House–over 400 as he once bragged to reporters–has expressed support.
Why shouldn’t he? The bill does not include raising the age for the purchase of a gun from 18 to 21, nor does it ban military assault rifles. The bill is so watered-down from what gun-safety activists have been seeking that, if it was a bourbon-sour, a ten-year-old could wolf down three and still drive home unimpaired.
Democrats admit that it falls far short of what is needed, but call it a “first step.” Oh, it’s a first step all right. Right into a hole where the Republicans will keep them from here to November. While barely making a dent in the gun-fetish climate Republican donors pay to preserve, the bill will allow all Republicans to claim, “Look, we did something about gun violence, we compromised, we’re bipartisan.”
In political parlance, this bill will take mass shootings “off the table” for the mid-term elections. Even the Republicans who vote against it will take credit for it, just as they did for Obamacare a decade ago, and for the relief packages at the start of the pandemic.
Some liberal pundits add that, if–or when–we have mass shootings after this passes, it will enable Republicans to revert to the argument that gun-safety measures do not work. At first, I thought that claim so transparently absurd that no one could possibly fall for it. Then, as so often happens, come repeated slaps in the face: Reminders of so many Americans falling for no end of nonsense and lies since the Golden Calf rode down the escalator into a paid and orchestrated audience.
No wonder Sen. McConnell has endorsed the bill. The reason that he has killed so many Democratic House bills is not because he thinks they will not work, but because he fears they will work and become popular and then impossible to overturn. That’s why Obamacare was so watered down and why attempts to reform campaign financing go nowhere. It’s also why McConnell robbed Obama of a Supreme Court appointment and hustled one for Trump.
He figures that the pending gun bill cannot work in any meaningful way. More than that, it denies measures that would work. If the public pays only surface attention to headlines, slogans, photo-ops, and memes, he will be right. Thanks to that same surface attention, gun violence will disappear as an issue as Republicans run out the electoral clock with repeated charges regarding inflation and the price of gas. No matter that those problems are caused by price-gouging of oil companies under cover of Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Democrats are caught not so much between a rock and a hard place as in the middle of an optical illusion. If they vote for the bill, they play right into Republican hands and risk losing any chance of passing anything meaningful in the foreseeable future. If they vote against, they risk alienating many of their own supporters who, like the MAGA crowd, see only headlines, slogans, photo-ops, and memes.
Sometimes I think we need a modern day Paul Revere to charge across the American landscape and wake people up. And no, it is not lost on me that when he took that ride in 1775, he awakened a few along his route to Lexington who then fired rifles into the air. Those reports spread the alarm far beyond his voice, awakening others who mounted horses and rode off in all directions. All of it planned and mapped out ahead of time–an early example of the “well-regulated” militias that would be codified into law by the Second Amendment in 1791.
Is it a miracle of language or a finesse of politics that a law intended for regulation is now used to deny all attempts at regulation?
Be that as it may, if Revere rode today, the Republicans would yell “fake news,” and the Democrats would tell him to return to Boston and gain bipartisan support before re-crossing the Charles.
If you just laughed, then you know how all of this can be hilarious and deadly at the same time.
Laundry day. Always a Monday or Tuesday after breakfast, which for me is often just before noon.
The timing is to put me in the newly named Plum Island Coffee, right next to the formerly named Village Washtub, during the dry-cycle so I can forget about personal enemy number one, Time, and write. Maybe another installment of my haphazard memoirs, or yet another rant and rave against a world gone wild, or a slaphappy observation of human foibles. If the coffee is strong enough, possibly all three at once.
You may wonder: What about the wash cycle?
That’s so much shorter that I don’t mind the half-hour delay of my post-breakfast coffee. In bad weather, I’ll sit in the Tub where I can see the toss and tumble of my clothes, towels, and bedding. As I have for years, I can sometimes see why washing machines so delighted Zippy the Pinhead Clown. Cartoonist Bill Griffith was onto something–or at least onto me. I’d have never admitted that during all the years I followed Zippy, but now that I’m past 70, I’ll say anything.
On days like this, I cross the street and stroll about the length of a football field–American, without the end-zones–to Newburyport’s boardwalk along the Merrimack River, nicely lined with benches, most of them under the shade of trees.
Most were occupied when I arrived, except for a line of seven that were curiously empty. I turned right toward the first one, took a seat, and as soon as I looked up toward the river, I saw why:
Docked right there was a sparkling white 125-foot luxury yacht, a Westport Rennegade (sic). Before I could laugh at my bad luck, an elderly couple started to take a seat at the next bench. He was still on his feet before she got back up and said, “No, not here, there’s no view.”
Eventually, three women, 50ish, took a bench on one side of me, and when the bench on the other side was vacated, three more 50/60ish women took it. I was beginning to like my odds, but I settled for the enjoyment of hearing them talk: Both conversations were about the former president claiming fraud to raise a quarter of a million dollars for a legal-defense fund that never existed. Like the proverbial cherry on top, a 30/40ish woman walking by told her friend of her admiration for Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) who spelled out the scam for a national audience. Finally, something that sticks!
Sitting across from the boat’s back end, I looked out toward the mouth of the river–until movement on the yacht caught my eye. Something like a crane atop the vessel was lowering into the water a speedboat that had been packed away somewhere. The crane moved slowly but steadily, silently, and few people held ropes to keep the back of the smaller boat from hitting the dock.
Did I say smaller? It could carry at least six people. And did I say (sic)? A teenager might call it sick. The yacht “sleeps ten overnight.” According to the website, these babies can be had for a mere $118,000. Not for sale, but for lease. Not for a year or a season, but for a single week. Well, it does come with a crew of four, and there is that sports boat if you get bored with cruising at 22 knots, or just about the legal speed limit in residential neighborhoods. I couldn’t find a sale price, but I bet it would require more than one extra N.
Many people of all ages walked by, half of them with dogs, some stopping to admire the boat, as many paying no attention, and a few grumbling about “conspicuous consumption,” as one overheard phrase put it. As if on cue, two people carrying bags brimming with groceries emerged from the parking lot nearby and brought them to the dock into waiting arms that carried them into the boat’s cabin. They went back to the lot and returned with four more, this time handing off to boaters or crew who came up onto the walk, who then brought them to the dock where more sets of hands picked them up to finish the trek. Meanwhile, four more bags came from the lot and were put into this bag brigade.
Never occurred to me to count, but at least 30 full-sized bags, all marked “Market Basket,” went on board, followed by several bunches of flowers and about six black bags that I’m fairly certain are used by New England Wine & Spirits. Since the local Market Basket sells no beer or wine, seems likely that it is liquor, and anyway, my guess is that the people on this boat are not holding an AA convention.
A gray-haired woman probably wasn’t referring to food and booze when she asked me if I was going to hitchhike a ride. I did so much hitchhiking in my twenties that, if you put it all together, I probably walked backwards the length of Nebraska–where a lot of that walking happened. I told her what every hitchhiker knew back then: It’s relatively easy for a couple. She laughed out loud and kept walking. When she came back the other way, as most all do on the boardwalk, I spoke first: “You changed your mind!” She laughed again.
Writing this account in PIC, fueled by a Costa Rican light roast, I’m on a seat lined up with a space between two buildings across the street with a narrow view of, yes, Rennegade out of Fort Lauderdale–though I suppose those leasing it could be from anywhere, even Nebraska considering that a crew does all the navigating.
Hearing a familiar voice behind me, I yell “Hello Bruce!” over my shoulder and wait for him to take a chair. I need not offer it since he owns the place and it is his chair. Hell, the chair I’m in is his chair. He asks what I’m up to. Pretty sure he misses the days, from about 2013 to 2017, when I kept throwing bricks through windows of City Hall, even though he was in City Hall at the time and still is.
Motioning to my screen and then out the window, I tell him about the boat and the opposing views: In this case, a $700-at-least tab at the local supermarket and who knows how much else pumped into the local economy, especially restaurants, versus seven park benches with blocked views.
He looks out, smiles, and says something to the effect of how we need to consider these things with balance. I promise to do the best I can.
And so, as I tell him, I report about local revenues and blocked views. About conspicuous consumption and a price of gas that makes a normal sized motorboat spend upwards of $70 to circumnavigate Plum Island thanks to price-gouging corporations while a president takes the blame.
I do not tell him that I eavesdropped the news today, oh boy!
Aside from the high stakes for America’s immediate and long-term future, I’m tuning into the hearings for an entirely self-indulgent reason:
Fond memories of the Watergate hearings in my youth.
Whether we call it the Committee to Investigate January 6th or the Committee to Investigate a Normal Tourist Day, I’m resolved to see all the footage, hear all the witnesses, and consider all conclusions drawn by members of the committee and by media pundits.
Well, yes, there are some I will rule out: anyone who buys the “normal tourist day” or “minor dust-up” or “legitimate political discourse” explanations; anyone who believes the guy who says his supporters went to the Capitol “filled with love,” and anyone who says the Capitol Police “waved the crowd in.”
Don’t know what makes that “logic” possible. Did America experience a surge in lobotomies these past six years?
Back in the Seventies, there were no hair-brained rationalizations for Watergate. No one suggested that the “plumbers,” as the burglars were called, were really locksmiths there to fix a deadbolt and keep Democratic Party records safe.
Or that the 18-minute gap in the White House tape was made when “Alice’s Restaurant” had to be erased to avoid copyright infringement–though that didn’t stop Arlo Guthrie, prompted by Chip Carter, Jimmy’s son, from using that yarn to introduce the song in future concerts.
There was, however, an artistic preview of this month’s hearings. And we must acknowledge that climate change has a much closer connection to an assault on democracy than did Thanksgiving Day trash thrown onto a bank of the Housatonic River.
Last year a film titled Don’t Look Up was a national sensation. Did the filmmakers know that a national political party this year would adopt “Don’t Watch It” as a defiant slogan?
Cast as a US president, Meryl Streep rallied her supporters with “Keep your head down and look straight ahead!” That could well be the programming order for Fox Noise to run Tucker Carlson without commercials while every real news outlet airs the hearings.
Fox is afraid that curious viewers might channel surf and get caught in the prime-time wave. Curiosity is not something I would attribute to a Fox viewer, but I guess they were taking no chances.
Willful ignorance is a recurring theme in American history. Not long after independence, Southern congressmen in both the US House and Senate imposed gag orders to prevent any discussion of slavery. By the 1850s, white supremacists added Catholic and Jewish immigrants to their targets, giving rise to the Know Nothings, a nickname they embraced.
To this day, many still refuse to believe that Ronald Reagan was involved in the Iran-Contra guns-for-hostages exchange despite all evidence to the contrary. Or that he dismantled a healthy middle class economy with sweeping deregulation that sent most US manufacturing overseas.
Since the pandemic, the resistance to vaccines, mask-mandates, and closures has turned town and city hall meetings across the country into angry shouting matches with threats of violence. The man whose refusal to act cost hundreds of thousands of lives is still hailed as a hero while Dr. Anthony Fauci is compared to Adolph Hitler. Maybe they should drink Clorox.
As American writer and biochemist Isaac Asimov observed in 1980:
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
In Don’t Look Up, we get a long look at a man in Streep’s rally who turns around and, gasp!, looks up. In that moment, American history went from “the British are coming” to that man’s “the comet is coming!”
Are there any curious folks in the MAGA crowd who might turn around and start yelling, “The facts are coming”? If all of this goes nowhere, if the findings are ignored and a gullible public favors Republicans in November, will anyone be willing to call it what it is and warn us, “Fascism is coming”?
Or are we still clinging to the belief that nothing today can be compared to the 1930s? That–despite Jan.6, despite Charlottesville, despite Helsinki, despite the Russian connections outlined in the Mueller Report, despite the “perfect phone call,” despite the upside-down Bible, despite “alternative facts,” despite a convention of Republican officials and Fox News hosts held in the dictatorship of Hungary, despite so much else–it can’t happen here?
In the summer of ’73, I was lucky to work with a landscaping crew whose boss scheduled us around the hearings. Not only that, but the four of us went to his place and enjoyed the show with roast beef sandwiches, potato salad, Panama Red, and a beer we called “the green death.”
We didn’t miss a minute–even though there was no video of any ordinary tourists wearing horns, or people “filled with love” setting up a scaffold, or “patriots” who were called “very special” after chanting “Hang Gerald Ford!”
That boss passed a couple years ago, as did the guy who brought the Panama Red. The other fellow lives in California on a Keto diet and has sworn off all beer. Hard to imagine him putting up with a lush like me even if he lived across the street.
So I watch alone and imagine what they’d say. At times I remember their reactions, especially one from Panama Red who, following testimony as clearly damning as, say, that of the Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on opening night last week, would yell, not so much at the television as at viewers who were still not convinced:
There’s a saying in basketball that, if you want to understand how a team’s offense works, don’t watch the player who brings the ball up the court. Watch instead where and how his teammates move.
That may be an overwrought way of saying that something needing attention is “off” or “under the radar,” but it does imply that things are still visible, if only we look.
And that they are done in concert with the things that dominate the radar and keep our attention. Those four players go where they can receive a pass, set a screen, create an open lane, or grab a rebound.
For instance, we all heard of–and most of us heard and saw–actor Matthew McConaughey’s passionate call for gun control legislation days after the school shooting in his native Uvalde, Texas.
Few, however, heard what happened when he finished and started to leave the press conference. And those who did hear it likely thought it was a fluke when a reporter for Newsmax, a Trumpian Fox-wannabe, yelled out a question:
“Sir, are you grandstanding?”
Reports from actual news sources and postings from social media rarely mention this, and none that I have found include McConaughey’s reaction. He may not have heard it, though my saying so may be just wishful thinking.
On another team, that reporter was a player without the ball, but his question was very much on the court. No fluke, it always has been and will continue to be crucial to the right-wing game-plan.
With the ball are those who had already dismissed Sandy Hook and Parkland as false flags and the survivors as “crisis actors.” Anyone calling for common sense remedies–from Democratic senators to basketball coaches to columnists in small town newspapers–will be accused of “playing politics” or “grandstanding.”
For an Oscar-winning actor (Dallas Buyers Club, 2013), it goes deeper. As Dan Rather, another Texan, quipped:
I love how the people dismissing Matthew McConaughey as a “celebrity” fawn over the man who presided over Celebrity Apprentice and hail Ted Nugent as, well, a celebrity.
No one believes it. Not even those who say it on Fox or Newsmax or OAN or on hate-radio. That’s why neither irony nor contradiction register with them. I doubt that their audiences believe it. No rational person could possibly take the accusation literally.
Instead, such claims serve as anesthesia. That’s why there are so many, and why they are constantly repeated. Dismissing McConaughey allows them to dismiss Uvalde, every shooting that preceded it, and every one sure to follow.
The Newsmax reporter didn’t have the ball when he positioned himself to incite the actor in hopes of drawing a foul. But he figured that with all eyes on McConaughey, his real intent would go unnoticed.
His use of “sir” was a nice, if cynical, touch. Bob Cousy might have called it “finesse.” Larry Bird would have called it “bait.”
That’s what a team does when it has no offense other than forcing mistakes, cashing in on mistakes, and running out the clock till the next election until which it hopes it has kept enough people fooled enough of the time.
You want background checks, waiting periods, bans on automatic weapons capable of slaughtering a fourth-grade class before a proverbial “good guy” has a chance to respond?
Step One: Stop blaming “Congress” and “elected officials” for “not doing anything” and be more specific when assigning blame for inaction.
Step Two: Stop agreeing with or remaining silent when you hear or read anyone else blame “Congress” or “elected officials.” Ask them to name exactly who is to blame.
This may come as a surprise to those who make the blanket accusation, but Congress is not monolithic.
There’s a Senate with one hundred members, two from each state, and a House of Representatives with 435 distributed to states according to their population. Moreover, each is a combination of two political parties.
Once upon an attention span, I’d have thought that standard stuff in a fourth-grade history text, but judging from social media, I’m not sure that most Americans know the difference between federal and state government, let alone the twists and turns of a bi-cameral legislature and a two-party system.
With this in mind, let’s get back to gun-control:
It is not all of “Congress” that is failing us. For starters, the House of Representatives has been passing the legislation we want for years, most recently this week. According to CNBC:
The Democratic-held chamber approved the legislation in a 223-204 vote. It passed in a mostly party line vote: Five Republicans supported the measure, while two Democrats opposed it.
Let’s spell this out for those who keep damning “Congress” and “elected officials”: Democrats voted for gun control, 218 to 2; Republicans against it, 5 to 202.
Here’s a sampling of other House votes these past two weeks:
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
If any of those issues–or issues such as climate change and appointments to the Supreme Court–are important to you, take a look at those numbers before you condemn “Congress” or “elected officials”–and before you make another call for term limits.
At least one half of the House is on our side.
Same is true of the Senate. However, all of these and other bills have passed the House and now go to the Senate where they will be blocked, not by majority votes, but thanks to an arcane rule called the filibuster. Though the rhetoric of the Republican Party has succeeded in making many if not most Americans think that the filibuster is in the Constitution and, therefore, sacrosanct, it is not. Concocted by senators from the Southern states to suppress any discussion of slavery in the Senate before the Civil War, it now serves the political party that wants to block gun control, veterans benefits, lower costs for insulin, and all else.
For at least 14 years now, we have seen the Democrats bending over backwards for the sake of bi-partisanship, all while Republicans have done nothing other than obstruct.
By carelessly blaming the entire Congress for inaction, we reinforce a superficial view that leads nowhere but to despair, cynicism, and disengagement. That’s why, come the elections, it is only logical that the party which says government can be a force for good appears naive, out of touch, and simple-minded–while the party that makes government fail is then rewarded for calling it a failure.
We need to start specifying exactly who is doing exactly what. Not everyone who happens to be at the scene of a fire is an arsonist. Many are firefighters, and they would be far more effective if we’d just start making the distinction.
Until then, we might as well be supplying cans of fuel to those now intent on burning democracy down. Or, to put it literally, rounds of ammo to those who don’t mind seeing dozens of us shot up every few days.
When I spotted Republic of Detours in the “New Release” display in the library lobby, I assumed it had to be about current events.
In fact, I was immediately envious at not having thought of the metaphor myself. For all the talk about “road maps” to describe the Democrats’ attempts at legislation, what could convey the fate of a watered-down Obamacare, voting rights, reproductive rights, measures to counter climate change and gun violence better than detours around the never-ending roadblocks to which the Republican Party keeps turning itself into?
As soon as I picked it up, I saw that it was American history, all about the Federal Writers Project (FWP) and the American Guides it produced for every state in the late 1930s. Author Scott Borchert’s subtitle puts it best: How the New Deal Paid Broke Writers to Rediscover America.
Fascinating stuff, and with references to other agencies–WPA, CWA, FERA, PWA, TVA, SEC, FDIC, CCC, ETC–you understand that the term “alphabet soup,” while later used to ridicule government bureaucracy, may well have been positive in real time, like a team motto for FDR’s New Deal.
Still, the story of the right-wing, red-scare moves to shut down the FWP is all too familiar. Many quotes echo Republicans today regarding what they call “culture wars.” One Dixiecrat called it “a splendid vehicle for the dissemination of class hatreds,” which is not far from the Texas state senator who blamed Critical Race Theory for the shooting in Uvalde “because it dominates what’s taught in our schools.”
Like the Guides, Republic of Detours is divided into tours putting us in the company of the editors and writers who had most to do with the project’s success–Vardis Fisher, Nelson Algren, Zora Neale Hurston (who had already written Their Eyes Were Watching God), Richard Wright (who would go on to write Native Son and Black Boy), Henry Alsberg–as well as with those who defended them, including Eleanor Roosevelt, and those who eventually tore them down, especially Texas Rep. Martin Dies, whose investigating committee was a forerunner of McCarthyism.
In the background of all six tours through 48 states looms, of course, FDR himself whose mind one historian describes as:
… a spacious, cluttered warehouse, a teeming curiosity shop continuously stocked with randomly acquired intellectual oddments.
Adds Borchert:
… which, as far as it goes, is not a bad description of the American Guides.
While the foremost mission of the FWP was to employ out-of-work writers during the Depression, those who led it hoped to create a product as useful as the roads and bridges built by the Civil Works Administration. Much of the material told the reader what could be found in each state and where to find it, what grew and when it was in season, what you could do and how to arrange it.
But there was more. The local music and poetry, outdoor and indoor games, legends and myths, churches and taverns, jokes and yarns. Between essays on a state’s Indian reservations and its public schools, you would find local recipes and weather almanacs. The idea, as one editor put it, was to “introduce America to Americans.”
Tempting to say that anything and everything went, but there were compromises. The Southern Guides, for instance, were ordered to use the term “War between the States” rather than “Civil War.” And the Massachusetts Guide offended Bay Staters who didn’t want the world reminded of the infamous Sacco & Vanzetti trial in 1921.
While Borchert admits in his prologue that they are “rich, weird, and frustrating,” his epilogue offers an unqualified endorsement. Reminding us that he was drawn to the subject by an eccentric uncle who collected the Guides, he compares them to “a conventional genealogy” by saying that they add much more, such as “a philosophy of history… a sense of possibility in how we might relate to the past and how we might sort through the things we’ve inherited from it…”
Conventional genealogy, however:
… can trace only a route of heredity and law, one that is sharply exclusive. It can’t be otherwise, of course, and such things are fascinating and worth knowing… But the philosophy that resides in this approach, at its very worst, is blood and soil, the fascist ideal. If the American Guides offer an opposing genealogy, it’s one that is open and inclusive, public, multitudinous. It doesn’t plug you into a hierarchy and affirm your place in the grand scheme of things; rather, it shows you different routes forking off in many directions and, like the old joke, simply says: take it. They all belong to you.
May have been a 300-page detour, but I knew all along it was about current events.
While kissing my children and gently pushing them toward the school bus door this morning, I was overcome with a sense of fear that I might not see them again. That this might be goodbye.
So began my daughter’s post on social media the day after. She continued:
My spouse asked if I was okay once the bus left, and of course I cheerly said “yes” because how do I say those words to him in that moment?
She may have said yes because she is “okay” in the sense that rest of us are okay. Except for the friends and families of those who were in that school–or supermarket, or church, or synagogue, or nightclub, or casino, or shopping mall, or cinema, or medical center–we carry on, we have no choice, our work must be done, we need our pastimes. Still, as she adds:
While nothing compared to the grief families in Uvalde and so many other towns whose names are now forever seared in our minds, parents are experiencing a shared trauma, grief, fear.
Despite being “okay,” Americans everywhere genuinely, deeply feel the pain of those in–let’s say their names–Uvalde, Buffalo, Newtown, Columbine, Parkland, El Paso, Dayton, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Charlestown, Blacksburg, Knoxville, Collierville, Orlando, Oakland, Oxford, Las Vegas, Santa Fe, Atlanta, Aurora, San Bernardino, and, as my daughter says, “so many” others.
“Okay” might as well be code for “grin and bear it” if the comment added by one of my daughter’s friends speaks for parents from coast to coast:
I had the same feeling waving to my daughter this morning at drop off. It should not be this terrifying. Nor should we have to act like we’re ok.
My daughter wasn’t done:
At the same time, we are also feeling a sense of hopelessness: we know based on what this country has done (NOT DONE) in the past, that nothing will happen this time, either.
Based on the recent past, her conclusion is undeniably true: Nothing will happen. In turn, that explains the hopelessness that most everyone I know has expressed this week, this year, this past decade or two. She does use one word there that I question, and she will use it again, with emphasis:
Except more of the in-class shooter drills that my kids began to do as early as 18 months while in daycare….
Our country doesn’t value life. It values control. Full stop.
My daughter was half the age of her own first-grader when the film Absence of Malice seared itself into the memory of every American journalist, veteran or upcoming. Especially its very last line when a newspaper reporter played by Sally Field was asked to verify a rumor and answered: “Yes, it’s true, but it’s not accurate.”
What my daughter and so many others are saying is accurate, but it’s not precise. And it is that imprecision that paralyzes us with feelings of hopelessness expressed in a comment added by another of her friends:
Yes, the horror of it keeps piling up deeper and deeper. When will we wake up as a nation and make real laws to control the ownership of guns like we do the ownership of cars like we do with so many other things?
It is not “the country” that “doesn’t value life.” Nor is it “a nation” that refuses to “make real laws.” Nor is it “Congress” or “elected officials” that “refuse to act” as so many others say with varying degrees of disgust and despair.
It is very specifically the Republican Party that has blocked federal gun legislation that has already passed the House–measures that have the support of near 80% of the American public–and gutted regulations in states they control.
All of which is just as true of reproductive rights, climate change, and voting rights. All of them blocked, not by “Congress,” but by half of it. Not by “elected officials,” but by half of them.
Until we make that distinction, until we are precise, and until we apply what is right in front of us to November elections, nothing will change. Full Stop.
Two days after it happened, I was consumed with the idea of targeting.
Perhaps what made Buffalo register for me more than other mass shootings was that I had just finished a blog about a bus being stopped in Georgia for a “traffic violation.” To compare bullets to traffic tickets may sound like apples and otters, but the bus was targeted just as the neighborhood and supermarket in Buffalo were targeted. The first by state police as an excuse to search the luggage of a predominantly Black women’s lacrosse team; the second by a shooter who drove past Syracuse and Rochester for the sake of a higher Black population density.*
Just as police who turn traffic stops into gunshots from coast to coast–Kenosha and Minneapolis being only those we hear of due to video sent to the press–most lone gunman are picky about their prey: An African-American church in Charlestown, a synagogue in Pittsburgh, a gay night club in Orlando, another several hundred-mile-trip to a Hispanic shopping center in El Paso, and so on.
Whether done by law enforcement or crazed individuals, the racial profiling is obvious. It’s the targeting that needs more attention.
Targeting isn’t done just with guns. Nor does it stop with racial profiling. Consider the laws that have been passed in Republican-controlled states since the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013. Most of them targeted at cities, enough of them at reservations. And who lives in cities and on reservations?
How about the laws those same states are now passing to restrict reproductive rights? Does anyone think they’ll stop women who are financially secure or well-connected from obtaining access to services? Those laws are targeted. And we know who the targets are.
All kinds of targets, including individuals. Numerous members of schoolboards, educators, and poll workers across the nation–of all races, ethnicities, and creeds–have been hounded out of office and at times out of their towns since the MAGA crowd contrived the idea of a stolen election. Prior to the 2020 election, a far-right militia plot to kidnap the governor of Michigan was foiled.
The Republican Party’s embrace of the MAGA crowd and of right-wing extremist groups such as QAnon has, in the parlance of the day, “normalized” this. Normalized is a euphemism. Endorsed would be the honest term. The MAGA crowd has endorsed bullying, harassment, intimidation, threats, and violence as political tools, and made them all acceptable. The Republican Party has seconded that endorsement.
If you think my inclusion of “violence” goes too far, you missed the calls of Republican office holders from Minnesota to Arizona for “Second Amendment remedies.” You didn’t see the heavily armed, family-photo Christmas cards sent by Republicans in Nevada, Colorado, and Kentucky. You thought Sarah Palin was just kidding with those crosshairs. News flash: Jokes don’t tell jokes.
Commonplace now, this has roots in the 1970s when an antigovernment survivalist group called Posse Comitatus emerged in the western states. In 1984, a Denver radio host was gunned down by an avowed neo-Nazi, someone who would have been deemed “very fine people” by a Republican president in 2017. As well as by his supporters–or at least neo-Nazis are accepted by his supporters. Since they are among his supporters, they have to be.
A year before Alan Berg’s assassination, I started writing columns for the Newburyport paper. Whether I fear for my safety as a result of voicing a view of American life that ranges between those of Bernie Sanders and The Chambers Brothers was an FAQ in the first few years–and again between about 2008 and 2013 when the paper allowed anonymous comments on-line.
Seems to me that anonymity is not to be feared, but ridiculed. However, I soon stopped taunting the trolls because it only made my friends and family even more nervous. Though I’ve had a lot of nasty stuff thrown at me, I’ve never been threatened. Nor have I worried. Or given it thought.
Until now. Now that hate has been so widely endorsed, what if a reader of the local paper decided he–they are all he–wanted in on the action, to serve the cause, to possibly become a MAGA hero or martyr, maybe have the police who make the inevitable arrest treat him to a shake and a burger before taking him to jail?
He wouldn’t need a Google search of “local targets” to find me.
A thumbnail photo of my face appears with every column I have in print, about every three-weeks. Working downtown and having written often about Plum Island, I’m easy to find. Walking and sitting in the refuge, I’m impossible to miss, and on weekdays there are very few people to bear witness.
Over the years, I recall just one occasion downtown, after dark, locking a door behind me with the pub next door nearly empty and no one else on the street, when two or three young men walked past and fell silent, though I always say hello. One shouted back, “Are you Garvey?” and he and his buddies started laughing. I learned long ago that you never answer a question–any question–asked by anyone who is walking away from you, but I did stop, stand still, and face them as they disappeared. While it is unnerving to hear your name used like that to the tune of unmistakably derisive laughter, it is invigorating to stand up to it.
On a Monday, two days after Buffalo, I was pondering this on a bench in the refuge when I heard a car approach. I laughed at the idea, but stiffened when I heard the car slow. I never turned around, not even when the car stopped directly behind me. For a fleeting moment I considered throwing myself straight ahead down a slight incline into the marsh, thinking the bench would shield me. No. I’d rather go out with dignity. And, anyway, I’m past 70. I’ve had a good run. I sat my bench.
Long enough to think I might yell, “C’mon, get it over with!” Instead, I turned around and looked directly into a Canon. In truth, I don’t know what make the camera was, but the pun is irresistibly fitting. From behind it emerged the smiling face of a young fellow who cheerily called out: “Don’t mind me!”
After what I thought he was about to do, how could I mind him lining me and the bench up to serve as a lower-corner frame in his foreground? Had I been thinking ahead, I’d have asked for a copy of that photo to post with this blog. When he drove off, I noticed the New York plates on his car, so there’s little chance I’ll see it on a local social media page.
So it is for a straight white guy. An obsession with being targeted dissolves into a sigh of relief, a nervous laugh, a blush of embarrassment, a tinge of disappointment at not having the photograph I want.
Easy for me to say.
Blacks are now permanent targets, and they don’t have to live in Buffalo to feel it. Nor do Jews have to live in Pittsburgh, or Hispanics in El Paso, or gays in Orlando. No sighs of relief. No blushes nor tinges, no cheery Don’t-mind-mes, no insolent keep-walkings. What about “thoughts and prayers”? The Washington Post asked a Buffalo resident if he thought the devil inspired the shooter. He was having none of it, nor should he, nor should we:
That’s not the devil. That’s America. They made him, they brought him up, they put him there.**
Urgent and necessary for an African-American to say.
There’s a term for this disparity that most white folks refuse to hear. Ironically, that very refusal is white privilege.
A few months ago, my editor sent me an email telling me that, though she liked the satirical column I had just submitted, she didn’t want to run it with a word I used three times: Moron.
Having learned long ago to trust editors in such cases, I simply made the changes: For George W. Bush I put “frat-boy.” For Donald Trump, “grifter.” For both of them, “disasters.”
No question that the substance of the column was improved by three more precise, descriptive nouns–although “moron” better suited the manic narrative voice ranting against “an insane asylum posing as a state.” In fact, had I not been writing for a newspaper, I’d have put an f-bomb with an “ing” in front of all three, and in a few other places in front of “Florida.”
Yesterday morning, the town sent a couple trucks and a steamroller to the island to re-pave the last street attached to Sunset Blvd. before it enters the wildlife reserve and runs the length of the island. This is the intersection where I live, and because I’m up on a hill, I was able to look over the vehicles toward a distant horizon while having breakfast. Actually it was just one they left there while they went to work down the street, starting at the ocean side. The remaining truck was pulled in enough to let two cars pass in opposite directions on Sunset, though it was tight on that two-lane road.
Just as I dug in to my once-over eggs and rye toast, I watched a Subaru hatchback pull up directly across from the truck. When the driver got out, I assumed she was delivering something to the crew. Instead, she went to the back of her car, opened the hatch, pulled out a tripod, set it up roadside, put a camera the size of my leg on it, and started taking pictures of birds in the marsh.
For me to forget about food is as abnormal as a bank forgetting about a loan, but this birder could’ve snapped a hundred shots before my appetite snapped my lower jaw back into gear. She had nearly half a mile of Sunset Blvd. between here and the intersection to the causeway, and perhaps more than that going north toward the river. Past the parked truck, maybe another football field, Canadian no less, before the reserve. In the reserve, another 6.5 miles, though that would have required admission, or a pass. The birder had well over seven miles of road to pick, and she picked the one and only spot where she created a bottleneck.
I considered calling the police, but figured she’d be gone by the time they arrived. And it was a weekday, before Memorial Day, so traffic was minimal. She was there about 20 minutes, during which I noticed just two occasions when cars had to stop. I finished my eggs and toast wondering what descriptive noun my editor would allow for someone who sure takes “birdbrain” to a whole new level.
After breakfast, I took my walk on that road, a mile-and-a-quarter into the reserve where there are two benches facing the marsh.
Spend so much time sitting on them that I once wondered aloud to my doctor if I was negating the good of the exercise. He assured me that two 1.25s were just as beneficial as one 2.5 and that I could sit as long as I pleased. And so I do, and now I wonder if I should pay the reserve rent.
While the walks began as a weight-loss program, I’ve come to think of them as part of my “writing process,” though that’s a term I haven’t used since I last taught writing twenty years ago. My parole officer, Helen Highwater, calls this “writing with your feet,” and I’m glad to think that my walks are productive in that sense because, no matter how many walks I take, most of the weight remains.
Works like this: I always set out with an idea that I mull over to the bench, on the bench, and from the bench, and if it has grown at all into something I want to put my name on and send out into the world, I’m on this laptop immediately upon return.
Yesterday it was a most unusual project, a newspaper column about a (descriptive noun deleted) headlined “Descriptive Noun Deleted.” I’ll let you know what my editor says, but you are welcome to fill in the blanks until I do.
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The view out my front window facing northwest with Sunset Blvd. in the lower left for an idea of how high I am over the road, if not an idea of how high I am otherwise. Jackson Way is out of view to the left, and the photo was taken in 2006, sixteen years before the (descriptive noun deleted) put her Subaru just halfway off the asphalt you can see. Thanks yet again to Michael Boer who snapped it on his last visit here for his flickr collection.
Mouth of the River 