Blessed Are the Jokers

What do the Republican Party and the Bible have in common?

All our lives we hear that any talk of politics and religion should be avoided, which may well be why our politics is a mess and many of our churches struggle to remain relevant. By not talking about it, we are not thinking about it. We reach adulthood not knowing how politics work, and so by middle-age we dismiss the whole show as bad. Faith in God becomes a buffer against the outside world rather than a way to participate in it.

There are churches that actually call themselves “Faith Alone,” and everyone has seen the “John 3:16” signs. Strikes me as a convenient dodge of the call for good works, no matter that it immediately follows in John 3:17, something that anyone who has ever actually read the Bible knows.

It also runs counter to the idea of participatory democracy. When Roger Williams warned that “when you mix religion and politics, you get politics,” he was calling for a wall to separate church from state. He was not telling us to stay on one side and ignore the other, but insisting that we know the difference.

With the pending ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party will complete its transformation into a church, with a Golden Calf as their God, and their state-imposed religion will be our politics. What do today’s Republicans have in common with the Bible?

They are null and void of humor.

Some will object to that claim, and they’ll have no trouble finding videos and audios of Republicans laughing and cracking up audiences in their campaign appearances. Since I watch a lot of news, I’ve seen and heard plenty myself.

None of it is humor. All of it is sarcasm and ridicule, derision and dismissal, insult and smear, often belittling others to create an illusion of superiority to share with those who are in on the so-called joke, such as when the Golden Calf God contorted its face and held up a limp hand in mockery of a reporter with a disability.

That’s not humor. That is hate.

Lack of humor is a frequent comment made about the world’s all-time best selling book, and it is remarkable that any piece of writing that long would not crack a single joke. But it does lend itself to no end of humor, a vein frequently mined on A Prairie Home Companion:

How do we know that Noah’s horse was named “Toothee”? (Pause) He keeps saying “Whoa to thee!”
Where is tennis played in the Bible? (Pause) When Joseph served in Pharaoh’s court.
What about baseball? (Pause) In the big inning…

There’s a risk in telling religious jokes, just as there is in telling political jokes in front of those who cling to strict ideologies. A few years ago I liked to tell people that when Bernie Sanders became president and made me his Secretary of Transportation, I’d make CODs illegal. These were people at stores where I made deliveries who knew I was speaking of “cash on delivery,” though I call it “chaos on driver.” I gave up after several interrupted me at the mere mention of Sanders’ name. What? You’re a socialist???

It’s not that they can’t take a joke. It’s that, regarding politics, there’s no such thing as a joke.

Back when I was teaching, midway into a semester, I’d burst into a class breathless, about a minute late:

You won’t believe what just came on the news!

Nothing silenced a class and grabbed attention so successfully as that ruse. I’d gasp for breath and let the silence hang a few seconds:

The University of Minnesota has banned the Bible from its library!

In my evening classes of adult students, I’d hear at least one grumble of “political correctness” among many gasps. After a pause, I’d start talking while walking back toward the open door I just entered:

The faculty agreed that the book is discriminatory. For all the attention and space it gives to St. Paul, it never mentions Minneapolis.

Stepping out of the room just as I finished, I would hear the groans and laughter–and an occasional curse–from the hall as I prepared to return to the room and lead a discussion on the hot topic of PC. In retrospect, I’m glad that I made a lot of them laugh and that I could demonstrate–both with the joke and with the discussion that followed–that, as Salman Rushdie best put it, “laughter is thought.”

On the other hand, some took the story as proof of PC’s hold on higher education even when they knew it was not true.

Back then, as late as 2002, I dismissed their insistence as a fluke. As New England joker Robert Frost wrote of apples that fall to the ground during harvest and are consigned to the cider press rather than polished for sale on shelves, I regarded their stands “as of no worth.”

Twenty years later, we are facing the consequence: Humorless Republicans in Congress such as Marjorie Taylor Greene with her Mazel-tough space lasers, Louie Gohmert with his suggestion that the National Park Service re-tilt the planet to offset climate change, Jody Hice with his rejection of DC statehood because the city has no car dealerships, and that’s just for starters.

No one believes any of that, not even those who say it, and especially not anyone who lives or works in Washington DC with its 36 car dealerships. But for those who conform to ideology, it is accepted as gospel even though they know its not true. Blind faith is what makes today’s Republicans more of a religion, or a cult, than a political party. What they say only has to justify what they believe. Truth has nothing to do with it. No thought required, and therefore no laughter welcome. Williams’ “Wall of Separation” is gone, and his prediction proves true.

Humor, by its nature, threatens ideology.

If you are free of political ideology and religious dogma, there’s no end of laughter at the Golden Calf God’s Colonial airports, Sharpie hurricanes, cancerous windmills, medicinal Clorox, Greenland Purchase, Andrew Jackson during the Civil War, Frederick Douglass at age 200, “oranges of the Mueller Report,” waterbombs over a burning Louvre…

If only the consequences were not so dire.

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Here’s a good example of turning a single word into a joke–in this case, “intellectual.” Notice the brand name (he says as if it was possible not to notice it): https://www.etsy.com/listing/1011398496/america-needs-jesus-and-trump-flag-5×3

Good Grief

Judging from the smiles on all 52 faces that left the Screening Room opening night, The Duke, a comedy starring two royals of British cinema, Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, is already 2022’s “feel-good movie” of the year.

In the lobby as they left, I heard the phrase a few times over laughter surprisingly left over following the roars provoked by the 95-minute film.

I enjoyed it as much as they, although I try to avoid that “feel-good” label since it always implies a lack of substance. Duke reminds me of 2005’s Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont with Joan Plowright, not for the story, but for its empathy, a substantial quality in both.

With a title referring to a portrait of the Duke of Wellington by Francisco Goya, it offers plenty: About class, about family, about community, about arts and philanthropy, about life in an industrial city, about loss and reconciliation. Most of it is left unstated, but it is present in every frame. You may be able to quote Kempton Bunton’s jokes for days to come, but you will see Newcastle’s smokestacks to and beyond next year’s Oscars.

Based on a true story, Duke recounts the theft of Goya’s portrait from the National Gallery in London and the trial of Bunton in 1961. If you are over 70 and were a fan of boxing at the time, you’ll enjoy the Henry Cooper joke yet again after all these years

To put it mildly, Bunton is an eccentric 60-year-old cabbie who fashions himself as a modern-day Don Quixote tilting at the windmill of a British government that requires licenses for watching television. The elderly need TV, he reasons, to avoid loneliness and stay connected. Sounds impossible now, but this is 1961 when signals are few and cathode rays not that easy to come by. Broadbent appears to enjoy playing the role as much as we enjoy watching him; however, the authorities are not at all amused, and he does short stints in jail for stealing signals.

Nor is his long-suffering wife, Dorothy (Mirren), amused. But we sense early on with the aid of slight hints, most of them unspoken, that there’s something deeper in her discontent. And that it is not so much caused by her slap-happy husband. We see it mostly on her face as she dusts and scrubs the home of a wealthy couple, especially when she looks out the window to see their child on a bicycle.

In addition to his public–and workplace–antics, Bunton fashions himself a playwright, but gains only rejection slips. In keeping with his spirit, which is the charm of Duke, he imagines the life of Jesus had he been born a woman in a play titled “The Adventures of Susan Christ.” One rejection that he reads to his wife ends with the line, “there is no audience for grief.”

The Buntons have two sons, one of whom keeps an emotional if not physical distance, the other of whom is gradually drawn to his dad’s crusade. He watches with alarm from the balcony at the trial but cannot resist his father’s jokes:

Prosecutor: Where did you go?
Bunton: To the bucket shop.
Prosecutor: What’s a bucket shop?
Bunton: A shop that sells buckets.
Prosecutor: Where is it?
Bunton: Why? Do you need a bucket?
Judge: Mr. Bunton, you are on trial. This is not an audition for a musical.

Goya’s portrait serves this film as what Alfred Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin.” Not long into the film, without our noticing, Duke turns into a puzzle. There are scenes where you expect one thing and get quite another. In the courtroom at the end, his Laurel-and-Hardy exchange with the prosecutor turns into echoes of John Donne’s “No Man is an Island” and “For Whom the Bell Tolls.” Even the courtroom reporters who chuckled at everything else have their breath taken away. Camera cuts away to Dorothy walking outside on her way to a reconciliation of her own.

Duke is a story of grief disguised as a feel-good movie. And audiences are all for it.

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Grave New World

Six years ago, I made a fool of myself by predicting that former US Sen. James Webb (D-VA), would be elected president of the United States as a third-party candidate.

Under the headline, “It’s a Grave New World,” it appeared on the editorial page of my local paper.*

My biggest mistake was thinking that:

For all the talk of unity, Bernie’s supporters, feeling cheated, will never accept Hillary’s corporate connections.

Most of us, in fact, did.

Not any more than Cruz’s religious extremists will join Trump’s Reality TV fans…

All of them, it appears, did.

Weeks earlier, Webb withdrew his candidacy from the Democratic primaries before they began, calling the Democratic National Committee “an arm of the Clinton campaign.” But, after hinting at an independent bid, he admitted there was no financing in sight.

He certainly wasn’t getting any help from American firms that do business in a country with 1.4 billion consumers whose choices are limited to what their one-party government approves.

Since Webb was a long-shot–and frankly a sourpuss–no one noticed his short-lived effort, not even Isaac Stone Fish whose new book title caused me to thumb immediately to the index looking for “Webb, James.” Nowhere to be found even though, six years ago, the title would have suited a collection of Webb’s speeches and position papers:

America Second: How America’s Elites Are Making China Stronger.

Hard to recall now, but before the 2016 election unveiled how pervasively–and successfully–Russia meddles in American politics, we perceived China to be our number one foreign threat. Americans commonly said things like, “China has a lien on us,” as if taking it for granted, all while grumbling how purse strings always pull political strings–as if that’s a consequence of communism rather than capitalism.

America Second begins by making the distinction: While Russia sows chaos, China invests in “friends.” Visiting officials are treated lavishly, as are ex-presidents and cabinet members who become board members of and lobbyists for influential US companies, starting with Henry Kissinger who opened the Red Carpet Highway in 1972 and travelled it frequently until a newly-elected president turned the name “CHY-nah” into a slur six years ago.

Many are seduced by the flattery and accommodations and sing China’s praises as if the “Three Ts”–Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen Square–never happened, and as if repression in Hong Kong and concentration camps in the heavily Muslim-populated province of Xinjiang are not happening. That includes well-intentioned peace-keepers such as the late Madeleine Albright and Jimmy Carter who, in 2019, enthused that China “has not wasted a single penny on war” since 1979. Fish drew the curtain behind the man, writing that Carter was

… ignoring the hundreds of billions that the Party spends on internal security in places like Xinjiang and Tibet or the hundreds of billions it spends annually on its military.

As much a gut-check as a fact-check for us Carter fans, it is a necessary lesson at a time when the quote is a popular meme on social media to explain why China, in Carter’s words, is “ahead of us. In almost every way.”

Author Fish offers several examples of Chinese businesses investing in American companies, or buying them outright, then sending their American executives to their local US representatives to ask how many new jobs they would like to see in their district. Webb spoke of one that bought Nebraska-based Smithfield, America’s foremost pork processor, in 2013. By 2016, Smithfield’s lobbyists, flush with Chinese money, had rewritten Nebraska’s and Iowa’s state laws regarding food, safety, and health regulation and inspection.

Anyone think they care about clean air, fair wages, or GMO labeling?**

Fish offers examples of Chinese businesses hiring former American office holders–including Pres. George H.W. Bush–and cabinet members as consultants, all with exorbitant fees. Relatives, too, such as Neil Bush who had a young Asian woman awaiting him in his hotel room every night he was in Beijing.

But the biggest prize is Hollywood. Huge market, China. Films that show it in a bad light are either banned or heavily edited–or they don’t get made at all by American companies that do not want to forfeit “two billion eyeballs.” The Chinese people, much like us, love action-packed blockbusters, and so James Bond is a huge hit, including Tomorrow Never Dies, which, Fish tells us, “originally had a radically different plot. They had to ‘junk’ the script before shooting.”

The film company then hired Henry Kissinger as “diplomatic advisor.” As a result, Tomorrow Never Dies…

… is the first known example of a major Hollywood movie written to please Beijing… [and] moviemakers began to alter their movies to fit Beijing’s whims. It didn’t happen overnight. But by late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hollywood was allowing Beijing to dictate how China was portrayed.

In the early ’90s, Tibet briefly became a crusade for Hollywood, and the Dalai Lama a hero, when actor Richard Gere, at the height of his popularity made a pitch for them at an Oscar ceremony. Fish points out that Gere gained very few starting roles in high budget films afterward.

One of Fish’s many examples has echoes in several news items we hear today from statehouses in Texas and Florida to the Kremlin in Moscow: The 2005 film set in 1936 Shanghai, The White Countess, with the late Natasha Richardson, Vanessa Redgrave, and Ralph Fiennes, was heavily edited to avoid offending The Party. One change was the removal of the word “revolution.”

Others have nothing to do with plot or dialogue, but with visual backdrop. Following a description of Disney’s 1998 Mulan, which the New York Times called “lightly funny and a little sad with ravishing landscapes”:

The problem is in the credits… Disney has thanked four propaganda departments and a security bureau in Xinjiang, a region in northwest China that is one of the world’s worst human rights abuses happening today.

Fish adds that Disney could’ve shot it many other places, but it was a chance to ingratiate, compensation for Martin Scorsese’s Kundun, a coming-of-age film about the Dalai Lama which offended The Party five years earlier.

With the free ticket to “invest” in our elections granted by Citizens United in 2010, and with so much attention necessarily on warring Russia today, China’s influence–the Party’s lien on US–will strengthen. Fish suggests counter measures in his conclusion, but I’m just glad to know that what I wrote six years ago was not entirely foolish.

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https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/612674/america-second-by-isaac-stone-fish/

*A click of the mouse to Victor Robert Venckus of Boston College Radio for the headline for both this blog and:

https://www.newburyportnews.com/opinion/its-a-grave-new-world/article_6bc51808-4078-53c4-b7cd-a2bee51148c9.html

**This case was detailed in “The New China Syndrome,” Harper’s, Nov., 2015.

Everybody Else Does It

Last week on social media I posted a picture of of six smiling, laughing children, ages 5 to 10, giving the finger, most of them with both hands. Behind them was a grinning man, 30ish, apparently the dad of more than one, also flipping the bird.

Could be wrong, but I want to believe that, if this was all the photo showed, the condemnation would have been unanimous.

Instead, they were lined up beneath a 3’x5′ flag that read “F**K BIDEN.” As if that obscenity wasn’t enough, the “uc” in the middle of the f-bomb was represented by an American flag. And if that desecration wasn’t enough, the flag was held on either side by thong-bottomed babes with a message riding like tramp stamps atop their bouncing butts: “Let’s Go, Brandon” (rightwing code for “F— You, Biden”).

In America, 2022, the full picture gains approval from many who would condemn the smaller one. It’s not that they change their minds about children making obscene gestures, but that they agree with where the obscenity is directed. To them, the ends justify the means.

Still, that leaves them looking for ways to excuse or rationalize–or, to use their own pet word, “justify”–what more than one commenter called “child abuse.” For example:

Well… I will take this over anti social behaviors and identity politics of the left any day.

That’s called “Whataboutism,” a propaganda technique that began soon after World War II when the Soviet Union answered all criticism of life under communism by pointing to Jim Crow America. A term that you can look up, it was coined by US intelligence agents. Since the rise of the Tea Party, Republicans have taken it to ridiculous extremes, such as when Trump justified his lax response to COVID to Obama’s response to Ebola. To Trump’s followers it didn’t matter that Ebola was contained and stopped and that COVID ran rampant. It only mattered that they could say “What about?” Anything can be justified simply by saying that the other side does it, even when the other side does nothing like it, even when there is no other side. No thought required.

Rather than answering that or any of several added comments–about bad parenting or flag desecration–the apologist for the scene had this to say:

I hope you do not take offense to my response. I just don’t agree with the ‘left’s’ narrative at this point in time…. I stand %100 behind my statement.

“Statement”? The word all by itself was at once enlightening and maddening. Though I told him I took no offense but that I wouldn’t mince words, I hope my response conveys as much of the former as of the latter:

You stand behind nothing. Seriously, what you call a “statement” has no substance. You mention “the left’s narrative” as if the left is tightly unified with a single message. That is so far from true that the only thing it conveys is how little attention you pay to exactly who is doing and saying exactly what. Which makes you fall for whatever is loudest and simplest.
Of course there are bad actors who call themselves Democrats or Liberals, just as there are who call themselves anything else, and it is standard practice for Fox News and the MAGA crowd to pick the worst of us and present it as all of us. Loud and simple. Never any mention of how Democratic office holders are always quick to denounce these characters. That would necessitate calmer, reasoned, complex, cause/effect detail. No time for that.
That’s something you cannot say about Republicans regarding their bad actors. The establishment Republicans keep mum, let it slide, because they are afraid of the rabid base. Trumpers, meanwhile, not only accept but encourage and boast of scenes such as the above picture.

(That pic appears at the bottom of this post.)

You fall about halfway between the two. You say nothing about the scene, but instead excuse it. Like a five-year-old whining “Everybody else does it,” you think it’s okay to have children gleefully giving the finger in a photo op… that uses an American flag to imply an obscenity.
Using an American flag to imply an obscenity. Tell me the last time “the left” did that. Or when any of our bad actors did anything like it with tacit approval from the rest of us.

My reply went on suggest that his use of the phrase “left’s narrative” betrayed his dependence on “garbage for the gullible”–Fox News, Qanon, OAN, etc. And then I hit send before I said what I really think.

Other Whatabouters posted photos of people, some quite young, waving flags that said, “F— Trump.” It didn’t matter to them that the lettering was hand-drawn on random towels or pieces of cardboard, while the anti-Biden and pro-Trump flags, including those most prominent in the January 6 insurrection, are mass produced and sold on numerous right-wing websites.

It only mattered that they could retort, “What about?”

For a few days, something nagged at me following that exchange, as if I had missed something–until I came across another photo of a desecrated flag.

No children giving the finger this time, no f-bombs at all, and the bottom is a bit more than a thong. The woman wearing it, however, is bottoms up with a bottle of Smirnoff vodka in one hand while waving a American flag with the other. On the flag–and, therefore, defacing it–is a doctored photo of Trump, his head on what appears to be the body of Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa. Could also call it a wannabe fantasy of Trump as his famously bare-chested political ally, Vladimir Putin.

If that’s not enough, we have the name “Trump” on his own blue flag made smaller to fit in a corner of the full-size flag she waves.

We’ve all seen these flags, both the blue–or red or white–ones with his name, as well as American flags defaced with his face and campaign slogan. At times we see Confederate flags with his name. Not only do they fly at his rallies and at right-wing demonstrations, they fly from homes, pick-up trucks, boats, and motorcycles.

Call it “Cult of Personality.” His name is stamped on everything everywhere all at once. Not just his flags, but his buildings, his golf courses, his plane, his line of clothing, his steaks, his university, his magazine, many of them failures, but always more to replace them.

We keep using the word “unprecedented” to describe his successful campaign in 2015-16, his disastrous presidency, and his subversive post-presidency. And it is true that no other president or candidate ever had his name fly on flags all over the American landscape.

But there is a precedent, and it, too, advocated insurrection. In the 1920s, one weirdly charismatic opportunist had millions of people who worshipped him and hung on his every word. His speeches were mesmerizing with vocal inflections and gestures that made crowds howl with laughter as he ridiculed opponents, chant with hate as he targeted scapegoats, scream with delight when he vowed to make Deutschland great again. His biographers note that he spent hours in front of mirrors practicing and perfecting hand gestures and facial expressions, obsessed with his appearance.

Theatrics were not limited to the stage. In every venue, the walls and the balconies were draped with banners, which also hung from ceilings or rafters. Smaller versions of it were often in the audience, waved by his admirers. It didn’t have his name on it, but the symbol in its center was–and still is–known as his brand. That symbol, that brand became his party’s flag.

Trump needs no such symbol. Trump’s name is his brand. It’s on flags we see all over the national landscape today. It is now the American swastika.

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https://2020trumpmall.com/product/mayferte-donald-trump-for-president-2020-flag-keep-america-great-maga-3×5-feet-flags-double-sided-outdoor-banner-with-grommets-for-garden-house-home-decor/

Out of the Ordinary, Nonstop

He’s dead now, but I still don’t want to use his name. Nor do I want to specify anything that might enable a reader to figure out his identity. He’ll be referred to only as he, him, his, and our employer will be it, it, its.

As competent a small town newspaper editor as any, he handled my opinion pieces with care. When he needed to make adjustments, he always cleared them with me first. I told him once he needn’t take the trouble, that I’ve always trusted editors with the finished product while I focused on raw material.

Only stipulation I’ve ever made is that, if an editor needs to re-write any passage, he or she cannot use the word “appropriate” unless it is in quotes (as it is just now) and with irony or disapproval. I pride myself on sounding human, and not like some programmed, presumptuous machine. When I hear that word, I wonder if the speaker knows what he or she is talking about. It has come to mean anything, which means it means nothing. Other than that, I’ve trusted editors never to change the meaning or intent of what I write, and I know full well they have a better idea of what readers need.

When I wrote about a Jethro Tull /Procol Harem concert twelve years ago, I thought he might reject it outright. Not because it was objectionable, but as a matter of policy. Few readers know this, but as way to save shrinking budgets, none but the largest newspapers will print music or theater or book reviews. Film reviews, yes, because cineplexes advertise heavily in papers.

Anticipating that, I added a note letting him know that it wasn’t a review, but a commentary. This happened just after embarrassingly bad performances by The Who and The Rolling Stones in two consecutive Super Bowl halftime shows. There had been an avalanche of smug and sarcastic commentary that old rockers should know when to quit, and I was gung-ho to have a report on two Sixties bands still kicking ass. Also pointed out the delicious irony of a Tull album titled Too Old to Rock and Roll all the way back in 1976. Thinking I might also appeal to his artistic sensibility, I mentioned that Harum’s best known song, “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” is based on a Bach melody. All of that was in the column.

With or without my added note, he liked what he saw, and he wrote right back (itself unusual):

I like Sixties rock, and I like classical, and most other forms of music. But my favorite is Gregorian chant.

Had he told me that he had pet kangaroos that ran around in the paper’s parking lot while he wrote editorials, I’d have been less surprised. He may have been kidding, and if I was sure he was, I’d have told him I was also a fan and kept Allen Ginsberg’s “Ommmmm” at the top of my playlist. At a total loss for words, way out of character for me, I knew I had to respond. One of those occasions where, if your memory comes up empty, you make something up.

I wrote back telling him that, back in my college days, my girlfriend and I would light candles, put Gregorian chant on the turntable, and smoke bowls of hashish. Kept my fingers crossed that he’d drop it there rather than ask me to name the monastery where it was recorded.

About two years passed before he brought the subject up again–not in a note to me, but in an editorial, and not about music, but about the maintenance of a city park. It was a simple analogy at the start of the piece, saying that the landscaping of one walkway should be “as calm and steady as Gregorian chant.”

I’m so vain, I thought it was an inside joke intended for me, but I did not laugh the next day when he did it again. This time the subject was development of a shopping mall on the outskirts of town. I fully agreed with his point about such a thing going up across the street from a cemetery–five times the size of Fenway Park with graves dating back to colonial times–but did he really write that, instead of the piped-in Muzak, the new building “should fill the air with Gregorian chant”?

Next morning I awoke to a frantic phone call from a reader who has given me many leads for what I write: “Have you seen it??? What the hell is going on???”

Yes, the day’s paper had all that she mentioned. And, much like her screams at me, the word was in upper caps. His editorial congratulated the high school’s basketball team for a tournament victory by calling their play, “as smooth as GREGORIAN chant.” In the “Events” section on page four was a notice for a concert of GREGORIAN chant at a church in Winooski, Vermont, almost 200 miles away. A blurb at the bottom of the front page noted that it was “International GREGORIAN Chant Day.” And then, the kicker, my column about taking walks on the island was headlined, “As peaceful as GREGORIAN chant.”

Peaceful? I was reaching for Excedrin III when the phone rang again. A few neighbors and friends had gathered at the island’s favorite bar. They wanted a word with me.

By the time it was over, I had agreed to act as an ombudsman–a reader’s representative–to nip GC in the bud. But I had so much to drink, I couldn’t make a intelligible phone call or write a coherent email, so it had to wait until the next morning, and another issue of the paper.

My friends were not at all angry, but they were annoyed. They had nothing against GC, they just didn’t want to hear of it all the time, especially having it imposed on subjects they did want and need to hear about–health-care, education, climate, employment, recreation. Opposition, no; resentment, yes.

Next day I held my breath while picking up the morning’s issue. To my surprise and relief, the words “Gregorian chant” were nowhere to be found, not even on the editorial page. But then I noticed something else: Every article–every report, notice, editorial, even the lists–ended with a line that began, “Preferred Keys.” Editorials had C, F-sharp, B-flat. Reports had G, D-flat, A. Obituaries had G-flat, D, C-flat. Sports had F, C-sharp, E-flat. And so on.

I got on the phone.

The staff was sworn to secrecy, but writers have ways of getting people to reveal secrets. My editor’s wife and two brothers were having him committed to a state hospital some twenty miles down the road. No Nissan Versa ever flew so fast. My neighbor still marvels at the rubber left on my driveway. But my editor’s family wouldn’t let me see him or talk to his doctors. “We’ll let him call you when things calm down,” I was told. I left my number.

That night I couldn’t sleep, so it didn’t matter that my phone rang just after 1:30 am. Somehow he thought I could get him out of there if I showed the doctors our exchange of e-mails regarding candles and Gregorian chant. I told him I’d do what I could. After I hung up, I went rummaging into drawers full of stuff hoping to find some long-forgotten hashish.

The new editor included a brief, tactful “Message to Our Readers” in the next issue. After introducing herself and thanking him for his years of service, she gracefully added that, “while Gregorian chant is a time-honored, transcendental music that will enrich us until the end of time, we are not here to play it–or anything else–nonstop.”

She waited until the late afternoon to call me. His family told her I was trying to intervene, and she wanted to assure me that my arrangement with the paper would remain the same. I thanked her, and then there was a pause before she spoke again:

“What happened to him?”

“I have no idea.”

“If he had made a pitch to gather people to sing Gregorian chant, he probably would have drawn enough people to form an ensemble.”

“And no one would have objected,” I added.

“Except for the cranks who object to anything out of the ordinary.”

“Fuck them,” I yawned.

I heard her deep breath before she said, “Strange to think that, apart from the cranks, he’d have had approval. Maybe not much participation, but plenty of support. He wasn’t pissing readers off, but he was alienating them.”

“And that is so much worse,” I insisted.

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I know that this is something that might be said of the blog I just wrote, but I honestly cannot tell if the blog from which I have borrowed this image is meant to be taken literally or is a prolonged joke: https://epicpew.com/10-things-didnt-know-love-catholic-church/

Conversations in the Woods

The Bagel Mill, Peterborough, N.H.

If you’re ever looking for something to take you out of whatever level and brand of stress you must endure in your work-a-day life, take a Tuesday morning off, and drive toward Mount Monadnock.

This isn’t to suggest that you should climb it, but to let you know of a time and place that may well make you think you can, no matter your age or next deadline.

Not far over the Massachusetts border in southwest New Hampshire is the picturesque town of Peterborough, a leftwing enclave in a redneck state where you would still see signs and bumper stickers for Ralph Nader and Dennis Kucinich before “Feel the Bern” replaced them all in 2016. This was, after all, once a stomping ground for the late, great Doris Haddock, better known as “Granny D” who walked coast-to-coast at the age of 90 to call attention to campaign finance reform, and lived another eleven years to tell about it. Her picture on a poster for her book, You’re Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell (2003), still looms large high on the wall in the town’s Toadstool Bookstore.

If that’s not enough, Peterborough also served as the model for “Grover’s Corners,” the setting of Thornton Wilder’s classic 1938 play, Our Town.

The crossroads of US-202 and NH-101 are just south of the town’s center, and just south of that, tucked away on a street that angles left and appears to go nowhere, is The Bagel Mill. The large windows, facing away from the road and into the woods, will make you comfortable before you are seated, and the bagel will make you forget any discomfort you may have incurred on the drive.

A nice place to sit any day of the week, but go on Tuesdays and you’ll hear the sounds of cello, flute, and guitar as soon as you enter and fall in line to consider your order. Look around the corner, and there’s Gap Mountain–not the geographical place some 15 miles down the road, but a musical trio–barely 25 feet away in the corner of a roomful of tables. Behind them, two large windows look out toward the Contoocook River.

Gap Mountain is actually a quartet with a pianist, but she’s unavailable for the morning gig, and a piano would limit the audience which enjoyed the music as much as their lunches judging by the number of tips. The instruments needed no microphones, and so table talk around the room was as calm as the view–all of them set to several conversations between flute and cello paced by a guitar offering a variety of contexts, both subtle and excited.

Full disclosure, one of the musicians is a life-long friend, though I won’t admit which one, but that alone tells you that he is as old and decrepit as I, as are the two geezers who played with him. Fortunately, all three of them have hands and fingers as lively as the music they play, so if the sight of them proves frightening, you can still enjoy the music by looking past them and out the window into the woods.

Another full disclosure: They play many tunes by another friend, Tom Febonio of Rockport, including: “Underfoot,” named for a dog you can sense moving around your ankles; “Tundra Dance,” as if you are nimble and quick while on ice; “Munimula,” or aluminum spelled backwards (call it psychedelic folk); “Eldorado Freeway,” with pedal to the strings and locomotive breath; and “Street Piper,” written for me, and the title track of my 2003 CD, but Gap Mountain adds a welcome supporting cast.

The Bagel Mill closes at 3:00 pm, and Gap Mountain finishes at about 12:30, which would leave you time on a long summer day to drive over to Mt. Monadnock and hike to the top. Don’t be surprised if you feel up to it.

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The Gap Mountain Quartet, left to right, David Duhon on cello, Chaz Beaulieu on flute, Diane Ammons on piano, Eric Blackmer on guitar. They perform an eclectic mix of Celtic, folk, standards, neo-classical & baroque tunes.
https://www.facebook.com/NHdianeammons/?ref=page_internal

Better Free Your Mind Instead

Despite singing “hope I die before I get old” with conviction in our salad days, we Boomers are now celebrating fiftieth anniversaries year after Pepto-Bismol year.

Talkin’ ’bout those in our ge-ge-generation who attended the demonstrations and concerts, who knocked on doors and wrote letters to newspapers, who peaceably assembled and petitioned the government. Even those who now like to say that “if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there.”

To the contrary, we remember the Sixties because we are still there.

From JFK’s “Ask what you can do” inaugural in 1961 to the riots in Watts in 1965 and Detroit in 1967, there were many to observe, most notably MLK’s “Dream” speech in 1963. Yes, I noticed them all, as they were impossible to miss, but I understood little.

Still obsessed with sports, girls, and cars–not necessarily in that order–right up to when my high school graduation was postponed a few days to allow for Robert Kennedy’s funeral, hard on the heels of Martin Luther King’s funeral, I awoke in time to chant “The whole world’s watching” during the ’68 Democratic Convention.

No, I was not in Chicago, but I toasted it with friends four years ago just as much as we toasted Woodstock three years ago, and observed Kent State two years ago. Last year we celebrated and observed the Mayday action in Washington DC which saw 14,000 arrests, including at least a dozen Salem Staters, in one week, half of us on May 3.*

Glad I can say I was at one of those four, and on this May 3, the 51st anniversary, I’ll be back at Salem State for an afternoon seminar. Seems that, there at least, there’s another ge-ge-generation of activists on the rise, and they want to hear from us.

Two of my fellow SSC (now U) partners in crime at the time and I are on tap for a panel and have been sent four open-ended questions as prompts. Pardon me If I rehearse my answers:

– Looking back, what emotions did you feel?

Back then, we called it “a rush.” Exhilaration would be the closest synonym, although it was most often expressed in sheer determination, always a motivation to be persistent. As soon as The Sixties were over, it became a cliche to refer to them as the days of “peace and love.” There’s truth to that, but in a way it’s misleading because the overarching emotion, the Zeitgeist if you will, was excitement. We were far more adrenaline than aphrodisiac. The Sixties were a rush.

Of course, there were many moments all across the emotional spectrum, from joy through anger to grief. The most searing for me was when we arranged for members of the newly-formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War to speak at our campus. For a week we were circulating flyers and talking it up every chance we had. When three VVAW members arrived on that late afternoon, they sat in front of no more than twenty students. At that moment I felt both embarrassed and angry, but when the first veteran took the mic, he began by thanking us for the turnout, saying that it was the best they had.

I had to leave the room. Fifty years later I’m going to pieces trying to write about it.

– What accomplishment, looking back, are you most proud of?

Most historians credit the Antiwar Movement for hastening the end of America’s special military operations in Vietnam. I’m not choosing words to be funny here, but as a reminder that our involvement in Southeast Asia was never a declared war–which, by the way, made it unconstitutional. So, yes, we can take pride in being part of that.

For me personally, I’m glad I avoided a straight and narrow path into a white-collar, file-cabinet, time-is-money world. I entered SSU (then C) as a math major thinking I was a natural born accountant. I left wanting to engage in public life, to influence others to pay attention to issues I thought mattered, to make others want to engage as well. Writing, and later teaching, have allowed me to do that. To me, money is time to do that.

– How did the principles and values you learned through your activism shape and inform your involvement in other areas of your life — professional or civic life, parenting, etc.

Street musicians say that the trick of their (our) trade is being in the way and out of the way at the same time. For activists that translates into being willing to piss people off without targeting anyone in particular. I gave my daughter that advice when she was in high school working on a staged play about race relations that some teachers thought should be dead serious and not at all alive with slapstick satire or comic relief. She flinched at the word “piss”–way out of character for me–but she nodded and held her ground. A few years ago, twenty years later, she told me it was the best advice she had ever received.

Not to contradict that, but I did learn–and in my writing classes I always emphasized–not to inflame antagonism unnecessarily, which brings us to the fourth and last question:

– Knowing what you know now, would you go back and tell your younger self to do the same thing, to do things differently, or to avoid activism altogether?

Only behavioral change I would make could be summed up as “Watch your language.” I look at some of my writings in The Log (SSC&U’s student paper) and cringe at the gratuitous descriptive words and phrases for subjects when the facts spoke plainly for themselves. That’s the difference between offering information and analysis, or beating people over the head with it. I guess I can take credit for riling up the base, but when the base is already on your side, what’s the point?

At that age, I’d have been swept up in the tidal wave attitude that two years ago gave us “Defund the Police” as a slogan. Yes, I know the full, detailed intent behind those three words, and I’m fully on board with the movement to reallocate funds according to community needs. But the majority of people do not know details, nor do they look for them. Those three words were–and still are–a devastating setback because what the American public heard–and continues to hear–was a call for anarchy.

If I hope for today’s young activists to take just one piece of advice, I’d wrap it in a Sixties parable:

In the summer of 1968, between my high school graduation and entry into college, The Beatles released a single titled “Revolution.” The song was fast, loud, chaotic, and the lyrics flashed images of “destruction” and “Chairman Mao” with little effort to make clear what was said of either, or of anything else.

This fit the Zeitgeist of the time. What better soundtrack could there have been for the Chicago Convention?

Four months later, they released the album for which “Revolution” whet our appetites. Officially titled The Beatles, it became known as “the White Album,” a curious mix of spoofs of various bands–apparently including themselves since “Revolution” appeared in two separate tracks, one of them slowed down to an affable trot.

In the slower version, the lyrics couldn’t be clearer:

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow

“Defund the Police” was–and still is–a huge picture of Chairman Mao. We need to keep erasing it. The good news is that it is so obvious, and its intent can be conveyed without it.

The bad news is that other pictures of Chairman Mao are not so obvious. You may think that these “preferred pronouns” you insist on are courteous and inclusive in keeping with all you believe, and you are absolutely right. But outside academe, the American public sees and hears that as social engineering. This is not pissing them off. This is alienating them, which is worse. The difference can be answered by a simple question: Is it necessary?

Was the slogan necessary? Are preferred pronouns necessary? Is it necessary to make them prominent in public statements and campaigns when you need to coax people to your side? Is it necessary to have the screaming upper-case of LGBTQ+ at the beginning of everything you say and write?

What is necessary is talk of commonly shared interests such as healthcare, education, wages, occupational safety, climate, economic opportunity. Any item specific to any group who can be perceived as a minority, no matter how just, will detract from that as surely as a pic of a Chinese Communist icon.

This is not at all to say that we should drop those causes, just that we need to stop putting them in the public’s face. As Ecclesiastes tells us, “There is an appointed time for everything.” And as the Beatles proved in two distinctly appointed times, a single message can be construed to have opposite meanings.

What today’s activists need is a grasp of just which messages are necessary, and when.

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The flyer now circulated by Salem State’s Center for Civic Engagement.

*Just last year, a new book described all that happened in DC during the first week of May in 1971 with all that led up to it and its aftermath. Here’s my review of it:

Mayday 2021

On the Demerits of Voter ID

Voter ID is one of those issues where the merits of the debate depend on where you look.

Not at all like Ranked Choice Voting, a built-in runoff that would make it possible for third parties to emerge and the existing parties less vulnerable to extremists–and which would have easily elected Al Gore in 2000 while at the same time giving Ralph Nader at least three times as many votes as he pointlessly received.

And nothing like the Electoral College which is anti-democratic for reasons so obvious they tax the patience of anyone with any honest sense of fairness.

Ideally, an ID requirement would be satisfied by one item from a list of easily obtained options such as a driver’s license, a utility bill, a tax form, etc.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar and other Democrats in the forefront of federal voting rights legislation have already agreed to this.

Problem is who decides what IDs will be accepted.

Republicans oppose the existing bills, and we all know why. What they invoke, of course, is their favorite ruse, the same one now taking reproductive rights off the books in several states, and the same one that preserves insanely gerrymandered state maps to insure their own minority rule: The Tenth Amendment.

According to David Daley’s Unrigged: How Americans Are Battling Back to Save Democracy, all candidates from both parties for the US House in 2012 split the popular vote 50/50 in six states—North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Michigan—but rigged maps gave Republicans a 56-24 edge in their 80 contests.

As Barack Obama summarized it, politicians are picking voters rather than voters picking them.

If Republican state legislatures will doctor electoral maps with what a North Carolina court called “surgical precision,” what will they do with Voter ID?

For a hint of that, consider North Dakota:

In 2012, in a reliable Republican stronghold, Democrat Heidi Heitkamp narrowly won a US Senate seat largely due to a strong turnout on the state’s Indian reservations.

When her 2018 re-election campaign began, the North Dakota legislature passed a Voter ID bill requiring proof of address—knowing that, on all five reservations, most homes are spread out on nameless gravel roads. Residents pick up mail at the post office, general delivery.

On election day, poll workers had to tell people they knew all their lives that they were ineligible. No matter that many had cast votes for Robert Kennedy and ever since,

Heitkamp was ousted.

If the Voting Rights Act offers ID options as accessible to the elderly and infirm as to the young and mobile, to the residents of reservations as to those of suburbs, I’m all for it.

Until then, “States Rights” will be the claim made to justify restrictions down south and in many parts of the west, as if civil rights are of no matter.

That call and the name “Tenth Amendment” both have convincing rings to them. The first sounds so patriotic, so American, and the second is literally Constitutional.

History, however, tells us something else. In practice, both have excused slavery (also Constitutional), Jim Crow, and all lingering vestiges of segregation.

Both have given rise to the filibuster (not at all Constitutional), and are invoked to justify the obvious unfairness of the Electoral College which was put into the Constitution only as a sop to southern enslavers.

With all of the legislation in southern and western states to restrict accessibility to the polls, it is as clear as a stop sign that Republican-controlled legislatures will call for documents difficult to obtain.

One bill was blocked just last month by a federal judge in Florida who ruled that it “runs roughshod over the right to vote, unnecessarily making voting harder for all eligible Floridians, unduly burdening disabled voters, and intentionally targeting minority voters—all to improve the electoral prospects of the party in power.”

No matter to Republicans who will appeal all the way to the Supreme Court—their ally on this issue since 2013 when Chief Justice John Roberts oversaw the gutting of the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Calls for Voter IDs in pending federal legislation have merit. It’s the much louder calls on the state level that have no merit whatsoever.

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* Denotes five states where elections are conducted entirely by mail. As of 2020: https://williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/publications/

Farewell for a Renfaire Flaneur*

For a taste of King Richard’s Faire, hear ye the opening lyric of a recent musical:

There is a land where all the people are grand
And all your dreams come true: Crowntown!

To the tune of Petula Clark’s “Downtown,” the song remains perhaps. perchance, the closest expression yet that the annual fall festival down in Plymouth County’s cranberry bogs has to a keynote address–loaded with double entendres that charm the children and disarm the adults:

Crowntown! Monarchy works for us!
Crowntown! Democracy’s such a fuss!
Crowntown! King Richard’s ruling for you!

Every year’s musical combines such spoofs of popular tunes into a unified, if raucous, half-hour parody of anything from long before the Renaissance to Reality TV.

My favorites include Natural Born Kilters, a mash of MacBeth with Quentin Tarantino’s film, and The Odd-yssey with Homer’s sirens in day-glow wigs belting out, “Hey, Greek sailor! Spend a little time with me!”

In the orchestra pit from 1999 to 2008, Dennis Wrenn of Algonquin Regional High School in Northborough led the royal band on keyboard. He doubled as trumpeter who heralded and accented scenes throughout the realm during each day. A mawkish snippet of “Somewhere over the Rainbow” was his occasional sound-gag for the most pompous claims of king or jester.

More seriously, he could instruct me without a sheet when I caught an obsession for Edvard Grieg’s “In the Hall of the Mountain King.” Popular in spooky films and cartoons–and recently in Harry Potter films–it’s an unusual and difficult combination of notes that took me two weekends to play fluidly.

On his trumpet, he found the sequence by ear, then played it a note at a time and pointed to where my fingers should land on a recorder. He could have been exasperated and amused at my penchant for adding B-flats and E-flats where they had no business being. Instead, he was patient–and amused.

Call us rennies of a scale: We joined the same year, 1999, at the same age, 48, both teachers, both with daughters in college at the time, both supporters of NPR, and both fans of all four Boston sports teams.

In late afternoons, I timed my break to return during the musical. My car radio would give me the score of any Red Sox and/or Patriot game in progress. Dennis would know when the games began, giving him an idea of the inning or period. From behind the back row of the audience, I’d catch his eye. A motion to swing a bat or throw a pass would tell him which game. One thumb up for a slight lead, two for a big one, and vice versa with a thumb or two down. A closed fist meant tie game. When done, I waved, and he always nodded at good news or shook his head at bad without missing a beat.**

On one occasion, he laughed when he saw me put a hand over my head with waving fingers pointed down. Though I was improvising a sign we hadn’t agreed on, he knew it meant rain delay.

We barely spent 15 minutes together each faire day, but at 18 days a year for a decade, it adds up, always between cast call and opening. Often we were joined by harper Michael Suss who crossed paths with Dennis making musical rounds in New England in the offseason. It was a treat to hear those two trade notes, fun intended, especially on the innovative but tight choreographies of their favorite marching bands. At times, I wondered if their health insurance was paid up as they re-enacted moves such as Ohio State’s tuba player scrambling while playing–winded in more ways than one–to dot the i in Ohio.

From there I would go behind the gate where I pipe a high-pitched fast tempo set of jigs and reels for the early arrivals. Dennis, in a monk’s robe that accentuated his barrel chest, lumbered up to the balcony where he joined the royal court facing the parking lot.

Our pre-opening scene on that balcony–or, scenario in the parlance of renfaires–began with his trumpet blast. It amused Dennis that the faire’s cue to begin was also my cue to cease and desist.

And it amused me back in 2001 when, telling a college freshman class about the faire, a young woman raised a hand and asked, “Do you know Dennis Wrenn?”

I laughed: “You put up with that joker in high school only to come here and get stuck with me?”

She laughed back; “You remind me of him!”

And I was reminded of him–out of touch for all of the ten-month offseason–when I wanted the lyrics for “Crowntown” a few weeks before our Labor Day weekend opening in 2009. Days later, wondering if he had changed his e-dress, I put his name into Google’s search engine.

Such news usually comes over a phone with a consoling voice, a friend or relative to answer questions. Instead of a handset to my ears, I pressed a hand over my mouth and read the answers, a list of headlines, most of them labelled with the word obituary.

Next day in my mailbox, as if on another double-cue, was the sheet for a tune titled, “Farewell to the Renfaire Flaneurs.” As I recall, I had told friend and composer Tom Febonio that my feet might force me to quit the faire. Knowing my habits, he conjured up a devilish piece laced with sound gags and heavy with flats, B and E.

A Farewell. And a double entendre: “Flaneur” derived from the French for “idler,” also meaning “man about town.”

Dennis was no idler, but to start every faire day, he was my fellow flaneur, a grand man all about Crowntown, and so I play it in tribute…

By his leave.

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In the upper left corner against the back of the gate, you can make out a shadow. Photo by Paul Shaughnessy taken between cast-call and opening.

*This is a slightly modified version of a column that appeared in the Newburyport Daily News, September 2009, about five months after Dennis Wrenn died in Athens, Greece. About a month before that, he took a fall that left him with cracked ribs, and a doctor told him to restrict his movements–that would and should have included cancelling the trip to Greece that Dennis had arranged for his high school jazz ensemble. Not wanting to let the kids down, he went. By all accounts, the trip was a success at every stop. At the Athens airport, while awaiting the flight home, something made Dennis cough. He never recovered.

**About a month after this appeared in print, the Boston Bruins paid tribute during an intermission by putting pictures of Dennis with his student musicians on their Jumbotron with a narration of how well-known he was to teachers of music and to musical organizations throughout New England. He was a season-ticket holder and had been asking me in the last two years to join him for a game. I told him it would have to be versus the St. Louis Blues, the only pro sports team with a musical logo–who are in Boston tonight, just hours after I post this. Wish I had settled for the Anaheim Ducks. Would be interesting to see if two wind-playing geezers could root against honkers less than half our age.

Taking Time the Only Way I Can

With the exception of two or three work days each week, I’ve been diligent about my otherwise daily strolls in and out of the Plum Island wildlife reserve.

As the weather has improved, I’ve been more consistently reaching the two benches that overlook the marsh a mile and a quarter in. On a day this mild, I sit so long that I don’t know if I can take credit for a two-and-a-half-mile walk or two mile-and-a-quarters. Friends say it’s just as well, and I don’t dare ask my doctor if that’s the case.

A few years ago I began noticing that anyone else walking in my direction would pass me. At the time it was a shocking realization for someone who did most everything at a brisk pace, as if there was always something to do next that should not be kept waiting. I was called a lot of bad words in my prime and middle age, but “slow” was never one of them.

Apparently, I’ve gone down yet another gear this year. In recent weeks, there hasn’t been one walk back without a car on the way out slowing down, a window sliding down, and a driver leaning over. The line is always the same:

“Need a ride?”

At first it took me by surprise. I’d say “Thanks, but I need the walk,” or, if I was within sight of the gate, “Thanks, but I live right there.”

Once, I was offered a ride when I had already passed the gate. I thought of the Three Stooges scene where Curly thumbs a ride on a wide, busy street and tells the driver to turn around. “It’s an emergency!” After the U-ee, he has the driver stop and drop him at the other side. A ride to cross a street. Tempting, but I said no thanks.

Now I pretty much expect it. And when I leave the bench to start back, some of those old muscles have retightened and both feet resume their complaints. So when I’m still on the other side of Parking Lot Two, about halfway home, temptation is hard to resist.

That’s about where a woman who knows me from the Screening Room, the wife of a friend, found me. Even at that, it took me longer to fasten the seat-belt–for which she waited–than for her to reach my place.

Today, another Screening Room acquaintance taking me an even shorter distance did not wait, and we exchanged pleasantries to the sonorous ding-dong of the seatbelt alarm.

I figured out that most, perhaps all, of these offers come from Screening Room patrons who frequent the reserve and, as they always say, “see you in here all the time.”

But they could have said that years ago. Why weren’t they stopping then? Why now?

The answer has to be my decreasing pace and lumbering gait. Not so much “taking time the only way I know” as the old song goes, as taking time the only way I can. Coming up behind me and seeing how slow I go, they assume that I need a ride. To them their question is rhetorical, asked only out of politeness.

With that in mind, I’m grateful that the offers come only on the walk back. If made while I’m walking in, then I will start away uneasy.

That would be telling me, in effect, that I appear too old and frail to be there at all. No matter that it is the very reason that I walk in there to begin with.

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