A Time of War, a Time of Peace

Nice to see George McGovern making the rounds on social media. He who proclaimed:

I’m fed up to the ears with old men dreaming up wars for young men to die in!

I add an exclamation point to the line as quoted in the meme which, given the timing, appears to be a call for America to stay out of war no matter what borders Putin chooses to cross. Exclamation? Well, he said it during an interview in Gonzo, the 2008 documentary film about journalist Hunter Thompson. A genial, soft-spoken man with a perpetual smile, McGovern was comparing American military involvement in the Middle East at the time to Southeast Asia in the Sixties when he suddenly interrupted himself, raised his voice, and threw up his hands.

Each night, the Screening Room audience cheered the moment, and I never heard what he said in the next few seconds as he calmly resumed his answer to a question.

To a New England audience, it may have seemed like a show of momentary frustration despite the gravity of the words. Yes, I’m a native Massachusetts boy, but I did live seven years in the Dakotas. What my friends here likely don’t know is that, for a South Dakotan, a raised voice and two hands flying upward constitute a full-blown temper tantrum.

McGovern was, of course, the antiwar presidential candidate in 1972. A Democrat who was Robert Kennedy’s closest friend in the Senate and could claim his mantle, McGovern was also a decorated veteran would not allow his staff to publicize his wartime heroism.

He piloted a B-24 Liberator for 35 combat missions in Italy during World War II and received numerous combat awards. Apparently he thought that America would rather vote for a president based on an ability to govern rather than a knack for flying planes or hitting targets.

Be that miscalculation as it may, McGovern knew the difference between a war of choice and a war of necessity, between initiating war and having to stop those who do initiate it. As the son of a Methodist minister and himself a Sunday school teacher, he was as well-versed as Pete Seeger in the Book of Ecclesiastes: “a time of war, and a time of peace.”

Although the Nixon campaign painted him as an extremist, McGovern frequently co-authored legislation with his close friend and fellow WWII veteran, Republican Bob Dole of Kansas, one of the Senate’s leading hawks. In 2007, he delivered one of the five eulogies at a memorial for yet another WWII vet, Kurt Vonnegut, whose novel, Slaughterhouse Five, was a touchstone of the antiwar movement back in the day.

Anyone who voted for him–as I did in ’72 and again in ’80 for re-election to the US Senate in South Dakota–appreciated that inclusiveness and was willing to make those distinctions.

Unfortunately, he, or more precisely his quote, is being floated today by people who make no distinctions. And they are both left and right. Some on the left preach peace, which is admirable, but at all costs, which is not. Do we let Putin take Ukraine? Do we overlook that he has already threatened Finland and Sweden? What if the year was 1939? Do we stand with Churchill or do we cheer for Chamberlain?

On the right it’s complicated. Half the Republicans are condemning Putin, and condemning Biden for not stopping him. The other half is siding with Putin and insisting that Biden stay out of any European involvement. That first half will join the second in a heartbeat if American troops defending the borders of NATO nations are engaged.

Contradiction? Fox News was pro-Putin up to Friday the 25th, slamming Biden for drumming support for Ukraine. As of Saturday the 26th, head cheerleader Tucker Carlson and the rest are now condemning the invasion, ridiculing Biden for not doing enough for Ukraine. At a conservative convention this weekend, Trump and others criticize Putin but save their condemnation for Biden. Some seem to think that Biden has already sent American troops into combat. This is among several glaring falsehoods spelled out in social media chatter prompted by the McGovern quote. Typical claims sound like these:

Biden has caused this war to deflect attention from the stolen election.
It would not be happening if Trump was still in the White House.

No mention of Trump’s praise of Putin’s invasion–and no memory that it was the Ukrainian president that Trump tried to shake down for his own political gain. As for Trump’s parroting of Putin’s claim of “peacekeeping,” they may well believe it. Could be the reason that the conservative conference crowd in Orlando broke into an approving chant: Putin, Putin, Putin…

Fox and the Republicans can afford such contradiction and confusion because both play to an audience that has no memory, no attention span, and no ability to make distinctions between things such as a war of necessity and a war of choice, between the war that McGovern fought and the wars he later opposed.

So, while it’s heartening to see his picture and name making appearances on my screen, it’s depressing, though not at all surprising, to see that the American public still has nothing more than a superficial idea of who George McGovern was and all he stood for.

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Here he is circa 2004 with my good friends, Dan and Karen Anderson, and their daughter Sarah at an art fair in Rapid City, So. Dakota, where McGovern was helping out the Pennington County Democrats at their tent. Photo taken by an aide.
In October, 2012, George Stanley McGovern passed away in Sioux Falls, So. Dakota. He was 90.

A Paler Shade of White

Any window with a long view over a flat horizon might hint at it.

Truth is that this small room has glass wrapped around three sides, and I wonder if anyone else can imagine, while sitting comfortably, sipping coffee, the effect of seeing a full-blown, hard-blown blizzard raging on all around you after it has already covered everything in sight.

In white.

If there were trees in view, we’d call it a “winter wonderland,” an expression used so often that it takes an effort not to yawn on the third syllable.

Football fans might be inclined to call the marsh as it appears right now a “frozen tundra” no matter how many times others have told them that “tundra” all by itself means “frozen land,” and so the term is… Oh, forget it!

At times I can discern the gray vertical lines that represent two telephone poles nearest me, and several thinner, horizontal lines connecting them that wave themselves into my attention, but for the most part I’m looking at a solid wall of white that dissolves into nothing but more white between here and the low hills some four miles directly east to the mainland and about eight miles to the north and south of this glorified sandbar called an island.

Yes, we hear descriptions of “White-Outs” every winter. We all recall breathless stories of “blinding storms” from motorists who have been caught in them, meteorologists who tried to warn those motorists of them, and reporters who’ve been sent out into them to tell us of the motorists who ignored the meteorologists’ warnings. Can any Bay Stater my age ever forget Shelby Scott holding a microphone before her with one hand while clinging to a flagpole with the other, seeming at times to fly horizontally while telling us how bad it is in Southie?

And we read them in our literature. From Jack London’s Alaska gold rush to Willa Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy, we hear winter at its whitest described. With all due respect to Dr. Zhivago, the most gripping descriptions of winter storms may be found in Giants in the Earth–one of America’s finest novels, but it goes unrecognized because it was written by a Norwegian immigrant in his native tongue.

Apparently, even white people can be whited-out.

Still, all those examples, from Shelby Scott to Ole Edvart Rølvaag, are from people in the storm. Here I am in the comfort and warmth of my home, and yet I’m surrounded by storm. And not any manifestation of it on land or trees or cars or on anything. Just the color white. As if there isn’t anything on which or anywhere for it to land.

Closest description I can think of has not to do with a storm, but a whale. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael describes “the whiteness of the whale” in a chapter so named. As with me in my modest room, he on the expansive Pacific is both appalled and calmed by the enveloping lack of color. Oddly, it’s in another of Melville’s stories where views from windows are walled off by buildings next door. Like a pun that wrote itself, it’s set on Wall Street, and the character who tries to look out those windows is famous for repeating a single line: “I would prefer not to.”

Maybe because I’m a film projectionist, I would prefer to see things end by turning black. Whether it’s a sudden turn-out-the-lights or a “fade to black,” it seems the natural order of things. We talk of death as darkness, but how would we know? A person dies, we may or may not read the obituary; a film ends, we read or skip the credits.

Lately I’m haunted by the memory of one exception, a film that ended with a fade to white. As stark a finish as I’ve ever seen, though that may be due to surprise, the exact opposite of expectation. Released in 1999, it was one of those films that frustrates viewers because it leaves them wondering how things turn out. Many of them then accost the projectionist on the way out, demanding answers. Do they think that we see a different film? That we cut the final scenes to keep the outcome to ourselves?

A full white screen seemed just right for an ending with no certain outcome, lighting up dozens of perplexed people wondering if the man (played by Kris Kristofferson) flying the rescue plane wanted to save or kill the main characters. It was certainly perfect for a film titled Limbo–“a condition of unknowable outcome” according to its tagline.

What I find so appalling and appealing about the whiteness of raging winter storms may be the same thing I find compelling and urgent about writing these slice-of-life vignettes and stab-with-purpose commentaries. Though I know the storms will end but never know how far my next rant-and-rave will go, both are snow-jobs.

And you could say both are done in blindness.

Just as I close, as white darkens into gray while an unseen sun reaches an obscured horizon, a northern cardinal alights on my neighbor’s bird feeder, a streak of red before my eyes.

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From the Shoe Box facing southwest. This pic and the one below taken by next door neighbor, Kim O’Rourke, after a storm ten or twelve years ago.

Facing northwest, toward Newburyport. On a clear day you can see the wind-turbine lined up right behind the water tower in the industrial park. Looks like a giant egg with a propeller. You can also see Seabrook Station. Photo taken by a non-photographer from inside the Shoebox, not following any snowstorm but during the combination of full moon and high tide following snow melt in the spring. What I call “the Lake Erie Effect.”

Photo by Kim O’Rourke during the Snowpocalypse of 2015.

Before I thought to put a hook-and-eye lock on the door, the snow just came in. The presence of a bicycle tells me that this photo was taken in the early-90s. View out this window is to the northeast.

This blog is for Gary Brooker, vocalist, keyboardist, frontman for Procol Harum, who passed away early this week–and who wrote “A Whiter Shade of Pale” among other memorable songs. There he is, just a few years ago, in the center of a great band that was still touring. Rest in Rhythm, Conquistador!

And That’s the Way It Was

Most often they do it with a photo of Walter Cronkite. Whether with photo or just by invoking his name, they’ll pose the question as a rhetorical lament:

Remember when reporters just read the news without telling us what to think?

One friend assessed the problem in more detail:

With the news being so sensationalized, I acknowledge the history and then turn it off and don’t actively follow it— I’ll pick up news throughout the day without searching for it: radio, friends, online etc…. I try not to delve down the news hole [because] nowadays nothing is news, it’s all biased commentary[.]

Please know that this is a conscientious, intelligent fellow, a music instructor who has given this semi-literate hack a few tips regarding sharps and flats, and who years ago effortlessly helped me craft my only musical composition, “Walking under the Influence.”

I’ll guess that when he says “acknowledge the history,” he means that he keeps himself aware of national and global events, which to me is the most important step. After all, if you don’t turn the ignition, Ford or Ferrari don’t matter, it ain’t going anywhere.

After that, we part company. Ample news is reported in print and on radio and television. Reported as news. Many people share my friend’s impression because they make no distinction between news reports and programs that did not exist in Cronkite’s day: Analysis that delves into history, traces cause/effect, suggests motivations, predicts things to come. Much of that is then subject to opinion which at times is nothing better than biased commentary.

NBC is news; MSNBC is analysis; PBS & CNN are both. I’ll leave the rest for others to “decide.” Newspapers label their editorial pages and their features, much like they do sports and arts sections, while reports fill other pages, starting with the front.*

Today’s confusion may be due to social media which mixes it all as one.

I’ve been practicing some degree of journalism for over 50 years, and what I’ve seen is a gradual tendency of the public to overlook the distinctions between news and editorial. Many consider it all editorial. Overlooking the distinctions between analysis and advocacy, they consider all of it biased.

This is why so many people today think that a comparison is an equation, and that an explanation is an excuse–both of which tendencies have prevented many of us from realizing just how fascistic the rise of the MAGA crowd has been.

The problem is both right and left. Just this week in the Newburyport Daily News, a reader implied that the editors endorsed a letter from a Trumper just by printing it. She went on to insist that letters be labelled as not representing the views of the editors. Maybe it’s my age, but I find it staggering that anyone could graduate from an American high school and not know the primary function of a newspaper’s letter-to-the-editor section.

For all of the misconceptions and all of the rhetorical laments that they raise, there is one common denominator. Call it lowest or highest or anywhere in between, I’d rather compare it–and may as well equate it–to all faulty ignitions, Ford or Ferrari. Two words:

Informed citizenry.

Jefferson used the term more than once: It was “at the heart of a dynamic democracy” as well as “the best defense against tyranny.” Madison cited it when he wrote “freedom of press” into our First Amendment. Ever since, with a few obvious, low-point exceptions, most presidents have respected and encouraged a free press.

When Lyndon Johnson told his aides after watching a live report from Vietnam, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America,” he wasn’t castigating the press, he was recognizing the role of the press in the design of self-government.

That’s the way was, and that’s the way it still is. No way around it: Not to pay attention, not to be informed, is to forfeit democracy.

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The moment that Walter Cronkite removed his glasses following his announcement of the death of John Kennedy is often cited as his only show of emotion during a newscast. A few years later, his reporting from Vietnam was among the reasons that Lyndon Johnson did not run for re-election in 1968.

*About front pages: If there was ever a journalistic equivalent of “sacred space,” it was the front page. Advertisements were a cardinal sin, and editorials appeared there only on very special occasions. Only exception I know of to the latter rule was the Manchester (NH) Union Leader, which daily ran hard-right editorials on its cover as early as Kennedy vs. Nixon if not before. For it, the paper had a national reputation as either “cranky and belligerent” or “eccentric and arch-conservative” depending on whom you were talking to. Gradually, ads began to appear around the edges of front pages, and now they are commonplace.

I Laugh, Therefore I Think

“Welcome to World War Three!”

Chaz always has a wisecrack greeting when we get together or when he calls. When some earth-shattering event takes place, I don’t need caller ID when my phone rings.

Some will complain that joking about a military invasion takes humor too far. Apparently they know nothing of the role that Charlie Chaplin played in turning American public opinion against Hitler. As Salman Rushdie would put it 50 years later, “laughter is thought.”

This is why Slaughterhouse Five and Catch-22 are always on lists of banned books. The military-industrial complex and the politicians it owns do not want us questioning warfare. They want us supporting, if not signing up for it. If they were honest, the slogan would be, “Support our contracts,” but that’s not very inspiring now, is it? “Support our troops!” has so much more appeal.

And then there’s those who will object to calling warfare between two bordering countries a “World War.” Ah, yes, the “Nothing-can-be-compared-to-the-Nazis” crowd! Even liberals fail to notice that recent laws in Texas and Florida–and pending in other states–offering bounties to anyone who “reports” a woman ending a pregnancy or a teacher assigning To Kill a Mockingbird are right out of 1930s Germany.

If you know any unemployed former KGB or Stasi agents back in the old Eastern Bloc, tell them they have ample job opportunities with career growth deep in the heart of Dixie.

As it’s being reported, yes, all of the shooting and bombing and bleeding and dying is contained within the borders of one nation, Ukraine. However, Putin claims that it never was a nation but historically was and should again be part of Russia–something he could as easily say about Alaska.

By this logic, Mexico could conduct a “special military operation” in Texas, which might not be a bad idea.

To this end, Russia declared two sections of Ukraine to be independent “people’s republics,” the exact tactic and term used by he-to-whom-no-one-can-ever-be-compared in 1939 before rolling into Poland and Czechoslovakia.

We like to forget–or not know to begin with–that Hitler had his supporters in America. Many of them. With swastikas draped from its balconies, Madison Square Garden hosted a “Pro-America Rally” supporting the Nazis on February 20, 1939, and white-supremacists appeared to have a chance to defeat FDR in 1936. That, too, is repeating itself in the form of a former president now cheering Putin on, calling his pretext of “peacekeeping” to protect the newly “independent” territories a stroke of “genius.”

Reports accurately describe the invasion now underway. It is all within the borders of one or three countries depending on whom you chose to believe–the press and officials of democratic governments on one hand; or authoritarian rulers, their state run media, and their cheerleaders such as Trump and Fox News here in the free world.

What the reports miss is that the primary target of Putin’s Ukraine gambit is on the other side of the world. Knowing that American is deeply divided between the reality of our own diversity and the MAGA impulse to fend for yourself and let the world be damned, Putin does not need to win a war. He just needs to create a mess. No matter what Biden does or how well he does it, Trump’s Republican Party will harp on the very existence of Putin’s mess as if Biden created it and sustains it.

Even as Trump continues to cheer Putin on, openly envying his dictatorial “savvy,” Republicans will tell us that all would be peaceful if they were in charge. And there very well could be enough voters who fall for this in their carefully gerrymandered states to put them in charge.

While Chaz may be joking with his cheery “Welcome,” calling what began this week a “World War” is no exaggeration.

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A Russian newscaster can hardly believe it. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1026592348048957441

As Driveway Leads on to Parkway

When I reach the bench overlooking the marsh a little over a mile from home, I make it a point to sit on one end.

The idea is that anyone else out for a walk or bike ride can feel free to sit down without having to ask.

Of course they always do. Or did. While this worked well before Covid, it has been a moot point these last two years. Share a bench with a stranger? We are now crossing the road to avoid walking near each other while passing in opposite directions.

On a warm February day following so many cold ones, I’m eager to resume my suspended routine, if just for the day. Before I reach the gate to the Reserve, less than a football field away, aching muscles and general soreness from the waist down tell me to turn around, try again tomorrow.

But I learned long ago that it wears off, not entirely but enough to reach my reward, the bench–and, if lucky, a random conversation.

Bad news. Two people on the bench. Yes, this is a national holiday, and I’m not surprised. Moreover, there’s a second bench another tenth of a mile down the road. Let me compensate for some of my idle time.

Before I get there, a car pulls over, people get out, the bench is claimed. Shouldn’t there be a rule against people in cars using the benches? I turn back, hoping that the first bench might be vacated by the time I return. I try not to hold it against them that they have been there so long, having spotted them when I rounded a bend at least a tenth of a mile before I passed the first time. True, I sit there for far longer times, but I leave room.

They stay put, so I take a seat on a grassy knoll across the road, perhaps 100 feet before I’m across from them. They see me. Good.

One calls out: “Are you okay?”

“Yes,” I call back. Now offer me a seat, I think to myself.

“Do you have water?”

“Yes,” I hold up my bottle. When are you leaving? I refrain from asking.

“Would you like to sit down?”

“Yes, thank you!” Why am I such a jerk? I ask under my breath as I labor myself onto my feet.

Conversations in the Reserve always begin with birds, but this time I announce while still walking toward them that I’m fully vaxxed and boosted. They laugh, say the same, and ask if I want to see their cards. “Oh, I never bring a wallet in here. I want no reminders of anything in it.”

Then comes the question that has led every chance encounter here for months: “Have you seen any snowy owls?” Their car has New Hampshire plates, so, playing the role of host, I let them ask before giving them a rundown. Nothing today, I tell them, but snowy owls and an assortment of hawks–cooper’s, red-tailed, harrier, sharp-shinned–and bald eagles have made occasional appearances this winter.

“My friend took a photo here of a peregrin, a peregreen, a– How do you say it?”

“Peregrine falcon.”

“Yes.”

“I recall one here a few years ago, but not since. Also a king eider duck, right out there (pointing a short distance in front of us). They rarely come south of the Arctic Circle, I think because everyone laughs at them. They look like clowns! Too bad the swans aren’t here today. They often are. Right in front of us.”

“A lot of them by the bridge,” said the older one, about middle age.

“Those were geese!” said the younger women, maybe my daughter’s age.

“Canada geese. No lack of those noise-makers.”

The women laugh. One asks where I parked my car.

“In my driveway.”

“Ya, I thought you must live here.”

The younger one laughs, “Driveway! That reminds me.” She gives me a quizzical look: “Why do we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway?”

She’s surprised that I keep a straight face at the riddle. I relish her confusion before I reply, “There is an answer for that.”

“There is???”

“When cities first started designing their public parks, they included paths, called parkways, for the horse-drawn carts to drive through them. So there’s half the answer. I suppose that when cars came along, people didn’t want to park on roads overnight, so they had spaces next to their homes, called driveways, where you could drive off the road to park your car.”

Both women react as if they’ve found the Oracle of Delphi or maybe Paul’s Burning Bush, and we chat for a half hour about the view here and at other national parks, about greenhead flies, about the arch in St. Louis, about their governor (whom none of us like), about the Patriots’ Super Bowl appearances.

The younger woman is wearing one of the 56 SB hats that she has, one for each game, back to 1966. I tell them that I was 15 years old then. They are too polite to comment.

We talk mostly about places we’ve been, about families and where we grew up, but most memorable was their question about the plaque on the bench, a memorial dedication to one Lois Cooper:

“No, I did not know her,” I told them.

“We noticed the pussy willow slung on the side behind you.”

“Yes, something is often there. I sit on this bench so often that I suppose I should pay rent, so I wasn’t at all surprised to see that when you called me over. This bench was put here just about four years ago, and it was still new on a December day when I saw a bough of holly there. It was an overcast day but so unseasonably warm that I sat longer than I should have, and didn’t get up until feeling hints of rain.”

I pointed up the road: “I barely reached that tree when it started coming down, but within a minute, a small white car pulled alongside me, the window buzzed down, the driver leaned over and offered a ride.”

“Well,” said the older woman, “probably someone who saw you dozens of times.”

“Probably. After thanking him, I told him about the new bench, the plaque, and the holly, and how it all impressed me that someone would add the holly–” I started laughing.

“What’s funny about that?” the younger one.

“Oh, no, not that. Something just now hit me: Was I using that as an excuse for why I didn’t have sense enough to avoid the rain?”

“What did he say?” both of them.

“He had this glow on his face as he let me talk. After I stopped, he let a few swipes of the windshield wiper go by before telling me that he put the holly there, that he had the bench put there, that Lois Cooper was his wife.”

Whether I was their Oracle of Delphi or just some chatty old man who happened to be in the right place at the right time, the two women both took long looks at the bench, the plaque, the pussy willow, and seemed to regard all of it anew. When they got up to leave, it was with an air of reverence. I thanked them for their hospitality.

“Want a ride back?”

“Oh no, I need the exercise, and I’ve been lax too long.”

“Well, hope to see you again here sometime.”

“If it clouds up and starts raining before you’re off the island, you could turn around and come back for me.”

“Will do!” they laughed. What they don’t know is that, if rain did start falling, one of the first cars leaving would stop for me, and I’d be taken care of. That’s the way it is over here.

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Keep in mind that this map is set with north-to-south going left-to-right with east at the top in place of north as maps most always are. The benches I describe are at the Salt Pannes Wildlife Observation Area marked between (Parking Lots) 2 & 3. Go a little over a mile north, just out the gate, and you might find me at home as I am right now, just over the “ve” in Sunset Drive, where I also overlook the marsh. Pics of that and other shots of the island at:
https://thelittleblogofmagic.com/2020/11/23/chasing-the-sun-at-parker-river-national-wildlife-refuge-plum-island/

A click of the mouse to “The Little Blog of Magic” for this map. Click around on the site, starting with posts titled “Autumnal Transformations” and “Salt Seasons” for gorgeous photos of the marsh between Plum Island and Newbury/Rowley:

https://thelittleblogofmagic.com/

Barding Around

Last winter, a friend in Portland sent me an ad for something called the “Screw Shoe,” a bizarre piece of Yankee ingenuity which she figured would allow me to continue my much-needed daily exercise.

Helpfully, she added: “Made for running on ice but walking will suffice.”

I credited her for the clever reference to one of Robert Frost’s most enigmatic poems, but she was surprised by the “happy coincidence,” claiming that she takes “no credit for anything, only cash.”

A day later, the title of that very poem appeared on my screen:

Coincidence? I took it as a command from above. Staged as dinner theater at the Clay Hill Farm just south of Ogunquit, Maine, it conveniently plays about halfway between here and the home of my Maniac friend, and so we converged to catch it.

For me, maybe it was a command from above. Every fall, Kirk Simpson plays the title role of the Renaissance Faire where I am a loyal subject. Before the performance of Fire and Ice, I made the mistake of introducing him as King Richard, a no-no when an actor is in another character, but Kirk’s admonition was mild. My friend was both stunned and amused by the act of shaking hands with royalty.

Next moment it was all Robert Frost who took the center of the dining room, and we were alternately moved and amused by what we learned of personal triumphs and tragedies that shaped Frost’s poems in ways we never knew.

Though a it’s a one-man show, Simpson establishes Frost’s wife, Elinor, as a palpable character offstage behind a closed door that she and her doctor prefer he not enter. She suffered depression and died of breast cancer and heart disease in 1938, 25 years before he passed at the age of 88. Throughout the play, Frost interrupts his reminiscences and poems to knock on the door and holler a few inquiries through it. As we learn more of family tragedies, we increasingly wonder if Elinor would not (rather than could not) respond to him.

Among the poems delivered in Fire and Ice is “The Lockless Door,” a poem rarely, if ever, included in school texts. As Frost’s commentary on the dueling nature of opportunity vs. fear, it takes on new meaning before the door to bed-ridden Elinor’s room:

It went many years,
But at last came a knock,
And I thought of the door
With no lock to lock.

I blew out the light,
I tip-toed the floor,
And raised both hands
In prayer to the door.

But the knock came again
My window was wide;
I climbed on the sill
And descended outside.

Back over the sill
I bade a “Come in”
To whoever the knock
At the door may have been.

So at a knock
I emptied my cage
To hide in the world
And alter with age.

Echoes of Edgar Allen Poe and a forecast of Maya Angelou aside, Frost had good reasons to “hide in the world” that were achingly recounted in the narrative we heard. In addition to Elinor’s were the deaths of four of their six children, one just days after birth, another at age eight, another at 29 from a “perpetual fever after childbirth,” and the fourth of suicide at 38.

Another lesser known Frost poem, “‘Out, Out–‘,” describes the death of a child so hauntingly yet so dispassionately–a difficult mix well made by Simpson–that you might wonder if the poetry was an expression of what Frost felt or a shield against it. Following the accidental cut of a chain-saw into a boy’s hand:

The doctor put him in the dark of ether.
He lay and puffed his lips out with his breath.
And then—the watcher at his pulse took fright.
No one believed. They listened at his heart.
Little—less—nothing!—and that ended it.
No more to build on there. And they, since they
Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.

In Clay Hill’s dining room, no fork or spoon stirred as Simpson served those lines, one of several passages where you would have heard a pin fall through the air before the drop. Poems so acquainted with the night are offset by the rhyme and whimsy for which Frost is best known, characteristics that lace author June August’s text, summed up by Frost’s description of public appearances and readings as “barding around.”

Frost’s triumphs such as “The Road Not Taken,” “Swinging on Birches,” and “Mending Wall” are nicely blended with hidden chestnuts the way rock-and-roll bands in concert mix their greatest hits with obscure, quirky cuts from their albums. The effect is rewarding whether you’re a devout fan or a casual listener.

Those in the latter category are surprised to learn that he didn’t gain recognition until he left America to live ten years in England. My friend noted that it happened “without any connections or friends or sponsors. Just on merit–which is something we Americans think we coined.”

Like me, she wondered about the effect of the regional accent, the difference that a soft rather than a hard R makes in lines such as “My little horse must think it queer/ To stop without a farmhouse near.” As a narrator, Frost debunks this issue, reminding us that he lived the first ten years of his life in San Francisco. But in his recitation of “Stopping by Woods,” the last words in both lines sounded musical with two syllables.

Another highlight was Simpson’s reenactment of Frost’s appearance at John Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. Most descriptions tell us simply that he could not read the poem he wrote for the occasion due to the glare of the sun, that he put it aside and recited, instead, his 1941 classic, “The Gift Outright.” What we saw were the attempts to read the intended poem, and we heard the opening lines interspersed with wisecracks at his own inability to read them:

Summoning artists to participate
In the august occasions of the state
Seems something artists ought to celebrate.
Today is for my cause a day of days.

Frost was the first poet to read at an inauguration, news to my friend who was reminded of Amanda Gordon. That’s no mere coincidence. Soon into Gordon’s “The Hill We Climb” is a passage:

And yet the dawn is ours
before we knew it,
somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken
but simply unfinished.

What my friend heard was an echo of that as soon as Simpson began “The Gift Outright”: The land was ours before we were the land’s

But that’s as far as either of us wanted to go with making comparisons to today and politics. As she put it, “It was nice just to be immersed in something of another time, when the poetry, like the world, was a lot simpler.”

No doubt, that’s why Frost’s poetry endures. And we can thank the Yankee ingenuity produced at Clay Hill Farm for helping to keep it that way.

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Kirk Simpson as Robert Frost, or King Richard XI disguised as Robert Frost, looking right at us. Photo by Carla Valentine.
https://www.clayhillfarm.com/

An inability to read, met with wise cracks. Even a vice-president trying to be helpful can’t help but smirk. And, yes, that is Harry Truman grinning over LBJ’s shoulder.

My own “re-enactments” of Robert Frost range from a New Hampshire apple orchard to a South Dakota classroom as far back as the early-80s. Here’s what I had to say in September, 2015:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/record-citizen/2015/09/05/100-years-swinging-on-birches/33582443007/

Through Thick and Thin

Newick’s Seafood Restaurant, Dover, N.H.

When my cousins from Ohio or my friends from west of the Mississippi land in New England they always ask for clam chowder, for lobster rolls, for fried clams.

Those who ever tasted them want them again, and those who never tasted them have had their curiosity whet. What they don’t know is that we New Englanders argue among ourselves about which version of each is the real one.

Lobster rolls with butter or mayo? I hear that the former is preferred in Connecticut and the latter in Maine, which may be why this ever-so-diplomatic Massachusetts boy will order one without asking which it is. They never disappoint.

Clams with bellies or strips? Anything without the bellies will disappoint, although I can understand how that mystery mush makes some folks queasy. In that case, stay with the chowder.

Concerning chowders, this has nothing to do with the choice between Manhattan and New England. The former is tomato-based, the result of a drunken cook spilling a bloody Mary into a vat of chowder in Delmonico’s kitchen upon hearing news of the ill-fated Titanic. Being New Yorkers, the staff refused to admit a mistake. And, being New Yorkers, the customers noticed no difference and rather enjoyed the new color. Once in a great while you’ll see Manhattan clam chowder on a specials board in an N.E. restaurant, but that’s only when they have an excess of tomatoes they need to get rid of.

Here in New England, the debate is between thick or thin broth. As a fan of both, I’m always amazed by those who are adamant advocates of either one. What they need is a trip to Newick’s in Dover, New Hampshire, just off Exit 4 on the Spaulding Turnpike. Lucky for me that it is ideally suited for strategic lunch breaks when the Marrakesh Express returns from a run to Lake Winnipesaukee, as happened today.

As always I am shown to a table with a view over the Piscataqua River. As always I tell the waitress before I sit down that I’ll have a bowl of chowder and specify the broth. No need for a menu. Last time I had thick, so today it is thin, next time thick. I’ll bring visitors here with a couple of paper cups in my pocket and order both. With the extra cups, each of us has both. No one has ever complained.

Years ago, when I found this place, I told the waitress that they could sell the thin broth on its own, as a drink. She laughed back then, and she laughs today, but here I am once again with a cup filled with sliced clams and potatoes after having gone bottoms up with the broth. Still delicious, but if they sold broth as a drink, I’d have the chowder as intended.

The waitresses always laugh at me from the moment I walk in. After they ask how I am, I say “Hungry.” Why is that funny? It’s why I’m there. After I give the order, they ask if there’s anything else. I say, “I hope not.” Why is that funny? Isn’t one meal enough?

This isn’t to complain. Newick’s staff is very friendly and attentive. And considerate. Before getting in the van after leaving today, I realized that my shades were not in my pocket, and went back in. Looked at my table, then went to the waitress and asked. “No, sorry.” Checked the men’s room. Nothing on the counter, but the mirror showed them on my head. Makes me wonder if she didn’t notice, or if she pretended not to notice to avoid embarrassing me.

Another advantage Newick’s offers to anything calling itself an express is quick service. That makes up for the lack of public WiFi–as does the view out the window with or without heavy clouds brewing heavy weather lightly reflected on the surface of the water.

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A Gospel According to Chris

Once or twice a month I am dispatched way up into New Hampshire, past Lake Winnipesaukee, just enough distance to catch all of Gov. Chris Sununu’s State of the State Address on NHPR.

The long-winded spiel seemed right for the white-knuckled drive through the crosswinds of I-93, and my long look at Manchester-on-the-Merrimack–the launching pad for presidential bids in this “first-in-the-nation” primary state–reinforced the teasing prophecy sounding from the van’s dashboard.

For those who missed it, Sununu was the choice of Mitch McConnell and the Republican National Committee to run against incumbent US Senator Maggie Hassen this fall, the best chance they figured they had to flip a Democratic seat. Days after the November election, he gave them a polite no–as did Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan just last week–saying that he would rather run for a fourth term as governor of the Granite State.

His speech today suggests he has something else in mind.

As with all “State of” speeches, Sununu’s boasted of New Hampshire’s high economic rankings. In a state where the two largest cities combined equal that of Akron, Ohio’s fifth largest city, such non-urban numbers are bound to be higher. Moreover, a very high percentage of NH residents live within a daily commute to Massachusetts where they earn incomes that pump the economy that Sununu wants us to believe is unique to his state.

One item that he omits is minimum wage. In New Hampshire’s three neighbors, here’s what that is: Massachusetts, $14.25; Vermont, $12.55; Maine, $12.75. No wonder he didn’t want to admit to $7.25.

Nor did he ever mention reproductive rights. His bill is among the most extreme now on the national table. No exemptions for fetal diagnoses, rape, or incest. Fines of $100,000 and jail terms for medical providers with no regard for medical need.

But why let context get in the way of the Gospel according to Chris? We here in New England already know the context, so he can ignore us, and most of his own constituents are quite fond of his pep-talks, so he’s a shoo-in for yet another term. That’s why McConnell hoped he’d replace Hassen.

As I heard it, his speech had another audience. A national audience. An audience that will be voting in presidential primaries just two years from now.

Though no one beyond the range of New Hampshire Public Radio will hear this speech or any speech he gives this year or next, voters from coast to coast will begin hearing of him. “One of the few Republicans standing up to Trump and Trumpism” will be the line used over and again to describe Chris Sununu.

That’s why he ended it with a thumping condemnation of “extremism on both sides.” No mention of Jan. 6, of claims of a rigged election, of swastikas and Confederate flags at right-wing rallies. Just “both sides,” though he leaves out the “very fine people.”

Today’s speech will be honed from here to 2024 with independent voters foremost in mind. That’s why he never used the words “Republican” or “Democratic,” instead using the name “Washington” as if there are no distinct parties but just a single obstacle to all things good.

Another convenient punching bag was the neighboring state where budgets are “out of control” because Massachusetts “says yes to everything.” No mention of our surplus, and even less of our far larger population and economy from which so many of his own constituents draw incomes.

Just as he will cash in on Massachusetts’ reputation as the “bluest state,” he will cash in on Republicans’ exhaustion with what McConnell just this week condemned as “goofballs” (i.e. Qanon) in his own party.

Sununu is positioning himself for a presidential bid. As a governor, he can claim the always attractive label of outsider. Two years from now, at the age of 49, he will look and sound like a breath of fresh air. Think Jimmy Carter in 1976, put aside all ideology, and you can’t miss the logic.

Or think John Kasich in 2016. Sununu’s hope is that, in 2024, enough Republicans will be done with Trump, done with “goofballs,” done with extremism, and be ready for someone who at least appears reasonable, good-natured, and calm.

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https://www.necn.com/news/national-international/gov-sununu-to-provide-update-on-coronavirus-in-nh-11/2375744/

Salem’s Scarlet Stamp

In the lobby of the Newburyport Public Library, I always look at the display of “New Releases.”

Would never look for a title such as Deliberate Evil, but a red cover will catch anyone’s eye, and a photo of a home you’ve walked past a few hundred times will keep it.

Add to that the subtitle, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Daniel Webster, and the 1830 Murder of a Salem Slave Trader, and I skimmed the 207-page account of America’s first nationally-sensational murder trial.

Stopping to look at the dozen or so photos taken in 1900, my jaw dropped for one of a house in which I once lived. And so I took the book to where I now live.

Never heard of the murder or trial during my extended time at the state college (now university) back in the Nixon-Ford years or during the 25 years I busked the Essex Street Mall, but Salem scandalized the states in 1830 as thoroughly as it did the colonies in 1692.

Indeed, the city, already beginning its decline as the largest port in the New World, took great pains to bury its witch trials in the past. But there was something more immediate that Salem wanted out of sight and mind.

Salem’s prominence on the world stage peaked in 1800. Its wealth was spectacular, as anyone who walks around the Salem Common or down Lafayette, Chestnut, and Federal streets today can deduce. And what made all that money?

Thanks to America’s sanitized history as taught in schools, we tend to think that slavery was entirely in the South. Lately we are reminded in the nightly news how unwelcome the truth is, North or South. Enslaved people were in the North, and in some states their freedom waited for Lincoln’s proclamation. In Massachusetts it happened sooner thanks to the Abolitionist movement, which was a sore point in Salem.

For two decades after the slave trade stopped in 1808, Salem had an easy time keeping the lid on the source of its wealth. Its richest trader, Capt. Joseph White, had already retired from the high seas, turning his business interests to inland forests and factories. In 1830, he was well into his 80s.

His murderers had only White’s will in mind, but while leaving a treasure chest under the bed intact, they sure ripped open Salem’s deep closet. What made Nathaniel Hawthorne’s head spin was that the victim was more of an embarrassment to the city than the perpetrators of the crime.

Author Edward J. Renehan Jr. suggests that this was what prompted White’s son to hire Daniel Webster, already a giant in the US Senate, to lead the prosecution. Some historians claim that Mark Twain was America’s first celebrity creating a buzz and drawing crowds as he toured the country for scheduled readings. However, at the age of 48, over three decades before Twain hit the scene:

…rock star Daniel Webster had his groupies. During a time when women were not regular attendees of criminal trials, especially gruesome murder trials, the Knapp-Crowninshield affair became an exception to the rule, for the great Webster drew crowds of all stripes and all sexes.

He also drew newspapers from Boston and New York, one of which reported that the courtroom was:

…thronged by the fair auditors; they were crowded in solid masses in various parts of the hall as well as in the gallery–and some were perched upon the mantlepieces, the windows seats, etc.

Renehan notes that more women gathered in the streets, under the courthouse windows:

…eager to catch “even now and then a sentence, which the commanding voice and distinct pronunciation [would enable] them to do.”

The trial made an impression on Hawthorne that would be evident twenty years later in his novels, The House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter. For the latter, Webster’s summation speeches–both of which appear in Deliberate Evil–“greatly influenced Hawthorne’s sculpting of… Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale, the secret lover of the shunned outcast Hester Prynne.”

Hawthorne, 26 at the time, was acquainted with the families on both sides of the trial and followed the proceedings with skepticism that would turn to cynicism when the verdict came in: “Sin is but a name,” was his dissent.

Families involved were all of the upper crust, and their names are all over the city and nearby towns to this day: Derby, Story, Crowninshield, Knapp, Manning, Phillips, Treadwell, Prescott, Proctor, and more. After one hung jury, Salem’s Committee of Vigilance realized that a second jury should be free of Salem connections, giving Deliberate Evil a list of names from all over Essex County from Beverly to Haverhill and Newburyport: Rantoul, Choate, Chase, Caldwell, Appleton, Abbott, Ladd, and still more.

The cast includes numerous US Representatives and Senators, cabinet secretaries, justices, at least one governor, and the founder of Vanity Fair. With all the intermarriages, especially in a chapter titled “Ghosts” which serves as a sequel, Deliberate Evil is as much a goldmine for genealogists as for historians of 19th Century America.

And for students of American literature. When Renehan describes House of Seven Gables‘ “broad themes of ancestral malfeasance, inherited guilt, and the timelessness of sin,” he could have been describing his own book.

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https://www.chicagoreviewpress.com/deliberate-evil-products-9781641603386.php

From Pools to Schools

If you think that recent attacks on public education have only to do with the teaching of history, think again.

If you are surprised by the intensity of attacks, including death threats against school board members across the USA, you have either forgotten history or your classes ended at World War Two.

If you are shocked that the Republican Party has allied itself with the movement and made it a priority in elections both local and statewide, you stopped paying attention when Newt Gingrich contrived his “Contract for America” in 1994.

And, yes, “Contract on America” would be the honest title for a fire hose aimed at privatizing all that is public.

True, this backlash–or whitelash as it would be more accurately termed–was triggered by the 1619 Project published by the New York Times to mark the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in the American colonies. The idea was to set the record straight.

Whitelash was inevitable from those who don’t want it set straight. No amount of research or documentation mattered. Nor was the report read by those who want to cling to the myth that slavery was, for the most part, a benevolent arrangement. Instead, it was scanned for buzzwords that would act like a naked flame to the gasoline of ingrained prejudice:

“Critical race theory.” Bingo!

The word “critical” sounds menacing all by itself, and how dare anyone suggest that America to any degree is or ever was a racist country. “Theory”? Can’t get any more elitist than that. Works like an angry charm. Groups with names like “Concerned Citizens for Responsible Education” have convinced parents in every state that any attempt to address racism in schools is the educational equivalent of cancer. As such, it was the only issue for their successful candidate for governor in Virginia last year.

Get ready to hear Republicans harp on it as they campaign in every state this year.

But don’t be fooled. The parents disrupting school board meetings may think its all about curricula and text books, but for Republican officials and candidates the subject of history is a Trojan Horse. Their real intent is getting people to take kids out of public schools and enroll them in private schools.

Republicans have wanted to defund and eventually erase public schools for years. This is why they promote charter schools every chance they get–and why a billionaire whose wealth is drawn from exorbitant interest rates from student loans served herself and her cronies playing the role of Trump’s Secretary of Education. Reducing enrollments at public schools will justify slashing public budgets even further than the bare bones level most have been operating on for years.

This dynamic played out in the 1950s. When whites saw blacks at the newly integrated public swimming pools, the manufacturers of home pools saw business skyrocket. Public pools then went without maintenance and most of them disappeared. This unintended consequence of integration would form an opening chapter of a book published just months after Trump’s election titled Fortress America: How America Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy.

From pools to schools, it’s in the Republican playbook.

Unfortunately, many of those who support public education play right into their hands. Consider this meme making the rounds on social media:

Not sure where this “parents-should-control-what-is-taught-in-schools-because-they-are-our-kids” is originating, but they do have the option to send their kids to a hand-selected private school at their own expense.

Yes, that’s what Republican politicos want their voters to do. As enrollments sink, so will budgets. If the private schools put gag orders on history and literature teachers and restrict their curricula and libraries to white-washed texts, that’s just vanilla frosting on the angel cake.

The meme’s picture is of the carved-in-granite inscription above the entrance to a public school:

THE PUBLIC SCHOOL IS THE BEST DEFENSE OF A DEMOCRATIC NATION

As far as I can tell, this is an adaptation of a line from Thomas Jefferson’s rationale for the First Amendment:

The best defense of a democracy is an informed electorate.

While contradicting the misguided first line of the meme, it also serves as rationale for the second and final line:

The purpose of public education is not to teach kids only what their parents want them to be taught, but to teach what society needs them to know. The client of the public school is not the parent, but the entire community, the public.

Do we want them to be schools or nursing homes? Those who believe that education should never make their children “uncomfortable” are unavoidably at odds with schools whose purpose is to educate them as citizens.

Dive below the surface, and put your goggles on. This is not so much about history as it is about privatization.

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