Why We Are Doing This

For those of us who never quite left The Sixties, there’s something nostalgic about so many demonstrations in so many cities from coast to coast.

Call it bittersweet as we indulge in feeling young again while protesting injustices, some of which we thought we had erased a half-century ago.

Difference is that, back then, we gathered to protest one issue at a time. On Saturday in Newburyport, signs supporting Ukraine, others for Social Security, and as many more condemning and ridiculing Elon Musk vied for the lead among other signs promoting science, education, and other human endeavors now threatened by the Republican Party and their playbook, Project 2025.

A few signs asked motorists on High St. to “Toot for Democracy,” and most drivers did. Some went by with an occasional beep-beep while others laid on the horn for as long as it took them to pass a little over 300 demonstrators who lined Newburyport’s busiest through-street. Many added thumbs-up along with hoots and howls, as would most passengers. Trump trolls were so few and far between, six at most during the two-hour event, that they drew unanimous laughter and ridicule–especially the one with the Trump cardboard cut-out leaning from the passenger side window.

If that guy happens to be reading this, I’m curious: Do you also have the blow-up doll?

The horns and cheers made for a loud two hours. For some reason, someone brought a boombox to play what was intended to be inspirational music–upbeat protest tunes such as “People Get Ready” and “Get Together,” just to name two that I’m old enough to recognize. Call me old, but in addition to being completely unnecessary, there’s something gauche about recorded music at a live event. When protesting, if we can’t say it, sing it, play it, or write it on a sign ourselves, it shouldn’t be there.

Thankfully, the warmer weather will allow any of Newburyport’s many musicians to fill that role. As for yesterday, we were bundled up in coats with warm hats pulled down over our ears. Also in gloves, which I neglected to bring, only to be bailed out by a friend who had an extra pair in his pocket.

In The Sixties, for me, they were all anti-war demonstrations, and I don’t doubt that someone reading this might say that they were all for civil-rights. True, there might have been an incident that triggered a day’s march–such as the invasion of Cambodia or the verdict in the Chicago 7 trial–but they were all pieces in the same puzzle. For us, the Vietnam War, for others Civil Rights, and soon after, Women’s Rights.

Today, each piece seems a puzzle all by itself–until we realize that they all fit tightly in the frame of Project 2025. We were encouraged to bring signs that called attention to–or ridiculed–whatever we chose. The nightly news is nightly filled with calls for chainsaw cuts to all government services with a sprinkling of attempts to re-hire those just fired. Consequences usually are unforeseen to those who refuse to look, and their unspoken motive becomes loud and clear. When a friend asked her ten-year-old son what her sign should say, he suggested directing a question to the powers that be rather than any accusation or complaint:

Why are you doing this?

The only answer they have–to eliminate fraud and waste–rings hollow now that we see the shutting down of medical services, the lay-offs of veterans, the closures of national parks, the wild increases in prices of consumer goods, and numerous other consequences of what is nothing less and nothing other than a full-scale, across the foreign and domestic board attempt to privatize the entire United States government.

All while they have not uncovered a single instance of fraud. Considering that any “waste” that isn’t fraud is a purely subjective label, then the two words are applied to anything in the way of of Project 2025‘s goal–to privatize everything.

What popular support they have owes to decades of conditioning by the Republican Party amplified by Fox News–and other peddlers of paranoia posing as news sources–that all government is bad. It really set in with Ronald Reagan’s smiling pronouncement that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” In 1994, Newt Gingrich doubled down on that by replacing the smile with a scowl.

Still, for all the cuts they proposed, neither of them advocated total erasures of programs and personnel serving veterans, the elderly, the disabled, children in poverty. Furthermore, there certainly was no talk of abandoning our role as leader of the free world and aligning ourselves with dictatorships.

Now that the nation is seeing its own devolution unfold, both at home and on the world stage, the shock is setting in. And its expression is demonstrations we now see daily in cities both large and small, as well as in town hall meetings where Republican voters are now willing to say things that their elected Republican congresspeople do not want to hear. And the Republican National Committee’s response to this sudden, wide-spread public exercise of the First Amendment’s provision for the right of petition? Don’t hold meetings.

At yesterday’s rally, a friend my age–a fellow veteran of the Mayday demonstration in DC, 1971–said he worried that so few young people were present. Maybe that is why I felt nostalgic. Back then, it was all young people because the historical cause of the Vietnam War–America’s indulgence in colonialism–was so far rooted in the past, that our parents and grandparents didn’t notice it.

You can’t say that about Project 2025. A plan to turn democracy into a facade for a mega-corporation, a president into a CEO, cities into markets, citizens into consumers–all of it something brand new. This time around, it’s seen for what it is right away, so it stands to reason that the first wave of protests are filled with old folk who keenly see and feel Project 2025‘s threat to Social Security.

By the time schools break for summer vacation, with demonstrations still ongoing, the threats to the environment, education, healthcare, and most everything else will be impossible for anyone over the age of 14 to miss.

It is, after all, their future–just as in The Sixties, it was ours.

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A 20-second pan of the the full crowd:

https://www.facebook.com/waltthompson1176/videos/665931469200146

About a fifth of the rally. Yours Unruly is in the green jacket and shades, second to the left of the telephone pole.
Photo by Walt Thompson.

A sampling of signs. Photo by Walt Thompson.

A Rite for What’s Right

A friend of mine tells of his grandson’s choice of a saint’s name for his Confirmation, a rite of passage in the Catholic Church, administered to us at age fourteen, give or take.

The boy selected Blaise, the Catholic saint who, in the early 4th Century, made the rounds in Lesser Armenia, now part of Turkey, as a physician venerated for his healing power and protection from throat diseases. He was also a bishop who would be martyred for spreading the faith.

https://in.pinterest.com/pin/355854808071728834/

Blaise is an admirable choice. Tells us that the kid hopes to do good work, be of use, contribute to the health and well-being of others. No wonder that, when he watched the news with grandpa, he made comparisons of our president’s and vice-president’s treatment of Ukraine’s president to passages in Matthew, Luke, and John describing the ambush set for Jesus by the chief priests, scribes, and elders called by the high priest, Caiaphas, to consult on how “they might take Jesus by subtlety, and kill him” (Matthew 26: 3-4).

*Jesus before Caiaphas*, Robert Leinweber (1825-1921), Bohemian-German
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-religion/4132398/posts

And did JD Vance plagiarize Luke 23: 2 or what?

And they began to accuse him, saying, We found this fellow perverting the nation, and forbidding to give tribute to Caesar…

The kid sure did his homework. Confirmation does require Bible study, and so he clearly sees the parallels today–quite unlike the Bible-thumpers who applaud cuts to cancer research, an end to the aid of surplus food to starving people across the globe, and mass deportation of immigrants seeking refuge from violence and a decent future for their children. Like the young boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes, he says it aloud even though he is too young to so much as suspect that the larger target of either story–Hans Christian Andersen’s in 1837 or Soviet America’s in 2025–is not the nakedly delusional man running the show, but the numerous cowards who support and allow him to do so.

Long lapsed Catholic though I am, I recall the sacrament bestowed on my eighth-grade class and our choice of the names of saints we accepted as role models as we approached adolescence and, hopefully, adulthood.

I chose “Oliver” figuring there had to be a saint with that name, but my chosen role model at the time was the very real race car driver Ollie Silva at the Pines Speedway in Groveland where I spent many a summer Saturday night during those years. A native of nearby Haverhill, he won more often than not, and he was hugely popular, regarded as a hero no doubt largely due to his rivalry with the detested Don MacLaren of faraway Chelmsford or a place of some such ugly name. Just the sight of them–wiry Silva always smiling with his flowing jet-black hair, dark complexion, and shades; the hulking MacLaren always scowling his lily-white face under his crew-cut–suggested the timeless battle of Good vs. Evil.

Ollie “Quick” Silva (1929-2004)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ollie_Silva

Turned out there was no St. Oliver at the time. However, one Oliver Plunkett of Ireland’s County Meath was beatified in 1920, and had his case for canonization opened in 1951. So it appears, at least in retrospect, that his sainthood in 1975 was deemed inevitable, and the kind Fathers at St. Augustine Church in Lawrence, Mass., let me claim him ten years ahead of time–even though I had no idea who he was, much less what he did.

Looking at the record now, I can take some pride in having chosen–albeit unknowingly–a 17th Century Irish martyr in the cause for Irish independence, or at least for the right of Catholics to exist. Accused in what the English called “The Popish Plot,” Oliver is believed to be the last martyr executed in London.

Amen.
https://remnantdisciplesjtm.com/2021/07/12/a-saint-for-our-time-st-oliver-plunkett/

St. Oliver spoke truth to a monarchy; I poke fun at a monomaniac. St. Oliver was murdered for talking too much; I am ignored for writing too long. Maybe I should be thankful for living in an age that is attention-span free.

Be that is it may, yes, my choice of “Oliver” as a Confirmation Name had a bit twist. And my 14-year-old self is certainly far less admirable than my friend’s grandson who not only chose an honorable name and did the research to deserve it, but who already, at his breathtakingly young age, applies it to this twisted world he now looks to untwist for his own and future generations.

But I’m not throwing myself completely under St. Blaise’s ox-cart or St. Oliver’s horse-drawn wagon. Not at all, as my obsession with race-cars was all about the battle I will fight to the day the checkered flag waves for me: Good vs. Evil.

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Every year in France, the St. Blaise Festival end of January, early February:
https://www.carnifest.com/valbonne-saint-blaise-festival-2026/

Yet Another Time-Warp Again

Days ago, a letter appeared in the local paper headlined, “Have we learned the lessons of 1938?“

No surprise given what all of us have witnessed since inauguration day. Moreover, since the rise of the Tea Party in 2010, numerous posts on social media have compared America’s political climate to that of Germany in the 1930s.

What struck me was the echo of a headline I put on a letter to the same paper in February, 2011. The editor changed it to “Another look at hate speech,” likely for the sake of internet search engines.*

Thinking I should find it and send it to last week’s writer, I made the mistake of reading it. Here I am trying to concoct commentaries on recent events–the Oval Office ambush, The Oscars, the Hate of the Union Address–and I start time-tripping between 2011 and 1939.

But I found it relevant enough to revive it now. Here it is with italicized asides and updates:

That 1939 Feeling

To the Editor:

What if “hate speech” is a decoy?

This occurs to me after hearing a woman recall childhood friends whose parents refused to let them play with a Jewish classmate. The current anger over immigration gives her “that 1939 feeling.”

Through the 30s we were divided on whether to enter the war—and polarized when isolationists found a scapegoat for both the turmoil in Europe and depression at home.

Many history texts offer Fr. Charles Coughlin, notorious for his weekly anti-Semitic broadcasts on radio, as an aberrational villain.

And what will history say of Fox News?

But he had plenty of company, including Boston’s Cardinal O’Connell who, in 1939, began insisting that those who urged stopping Hitler “cannot be real Americans, because real Americans think of their country first.”

Just this weekend, House Speaker Michael Johnson dismissed people at town halls all around the country asking inconvenient questions of Republican officials as “paid Democrats.” His boss, of course, vilifies all opposition as “evil,” and the whole lot of Republicans continue to discount the vote of 2020 as rigged. “Radical Left Lunatics” is the term he used in his “Hate of the Union” while pointing at the Democrats’ half of the hall–and while the other half stood to applaud and cheer. As in Cardinal O’Connell’s 1939, anyone who opposes or so much as questions them does not count. As far as MAGA is concerned, we may not even exist.

The 13-year-old boy is offered as a prop for beating cancer–days after the same man calling for applause canceled cancer research. Another prop in law enforcement garb smiles and waves at the cheering crowd–days after the MC pardoned J6 felons convicted of beating police officers.

Those children still fighting cancer, and those officers beaten at the Capitol four years ago, none of them count. Only those who can be used as props, and look how happy they are!

In his book, The Rascal King, Jack Beatty notes that O’Connell used coded phrases—“certain expatriates” and “loud accents”—for Jews. By the end of 1939, something new began happening “in the streets of Dorchester and Mattapan as gangs of Irish Catholic boys set upon and beat up Jewish boys.”

Notice how every mention in the Hate of the Union of immigration cited “murderers, rapists, and drug dealers.” And none of them are called “refugees,” but rather “illegal aliens.” Call it rhetorical impressionism: He describes a few, but by repetition, creates the impression that it is most, if not all.

Did O’Connell order the violence? No. Did he intend it? Probably not. If that’s as far as we consider cause/effect relationships, then O’Connell is blameless.

Apply that standard to [the mass shooting in 2011 in] Tucson, and so are politicians who call for “Second Amendment remedies” for what they see as a government bent on “taking away our liberties.”

This was written weeks after the attempted assassination of Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords in Tuscon which turned into a mass shooting, killing six and wounding another 13, including Giffords whose head injury forced her out of Congress and into years of recovery. Haven’t heard the phrase lately, but at the time, numerous Republicans were advocating “Second Amendment remedies” for political realities ordinarily decided by elections or by due process of those who have been elected.

That’s not hate. That’s paranoia, the same paranoia exploited among Boston’s working class Irish through the Depression.

Avoid the decoy of her “reload,” and Sarah Palin’s denunciation of Michelle Obama’s call for healthy diets for children—“a nanny state run amok”—will reveal far more.

As counterintuitive as it sounds, the chilling fact of death threats tells us less than the calculated fabrication of “death panels.”

Republicans’ berserk claim that Obamacare called for “death panels,” deliberately insinuating that such things would decide when elderly and infirm people should die. In truth, the reference was to how a family prepares for the death of a loved one, taking advice from medical professionals. Classic Republican “something out of nothing.”

Until we get past the decoy of hate, and start questioning the source of paranoia, America will remain in the crosshairs of 1939.

This, folks, is something out of something. We have remained in the crosshairs, and on Jan. 20, the trigger was pulled as forcefully–and with more accuracy–as it was on Jan. 6, 2021.

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*For the record, that headline was one of perhaps five or six of the 500 or so I have written that was ever changed.

*Yes, this shirt gains many compliments when I wear it behind the cinema’s concession counter,

Karma Takes a Number

While doing my taxes last weekend, I worked my way into a $790 payment while expecting about a $200 refund. Went to bed tossing and turning, but found the error the next day.

Meanwhile, I had almost forgotten a two-day stay in the hospital three weeks ago, and I knew that, despite Medicare parts A & B, and despite switching from the deny-and-drop enterprise known as UnitedHealthcare to a more reputable plan, I would take a hit. And I knew it wouldn’t be cheap.

The email arrived this morning. It wasn’t the size of the balance that knocked me back in my chair. It was the balance of the number. Is there such a thing as numerical karma?

When I viewed the itemized details adding all the way up past $13K, the amount left for me to pay out of pocket seemed fair to someone who has done a fair share of public writing calling for universal healthcare and a single-payer system such as civilized nations around the world all have. In 2008, eight years before I qualified for Medicare, it was the reason for the only time I ever busked for a political candidate, adding an Obama sign to my music stand in Portsmouth, in the swing-state of New Hampshire.

Any system that allows for anyone to profit from malignant disease is itself a malignant disease.

While writing this I learn of Jeff Bezos’ directive for the Washington Post‘s editorial pages to be limited to columns that promote “personal liberties and free markets,” which are the polite terms for the libertarianism and capitalism that he means. How strange it is to recall that, in 2009 and 2010, we were so close to universal health care, or at least expanding Medicare. Today we have our fingers crossed–though we’d do better to have our fists raised–while attempts to privatize the US Postal Service and the National Parks unfold before our eyes.

And to spite our memory–if we still have one–of history. The Postal Service, along with birthright citizenship, is written into the Constitution. And the National Parks are one of two reasons that Teddy Roosevelt is on Mount Rushmore–the other being his Big Stick crackdown on the Robber Barons and their monopolies, a legacy erased by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision in 2010.

Now here I am living in a country where we stand to lose all of that, and I thought to myself how quickly and gladly I’d write a check for $790 if only it could all be restored, if we could hit a reset button to November 4 and take the next day’s national IQ test all over again.

Then came this morning’s email. I swear I’m not flipping out at the idea of having to part with a few bills, as my friend in Wyoming used to put it. It’s just that, as we often hear, I should have been careful what I wished for.

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Market Square, Portsmouth, N.H., first weekend of November, 2008.
Photo by Terry Weddleton

A Casino in a Red-light District

Back in February, I mistakenly thought I was face to face with an unexpected expense of $790 and felt demoralized.

Yes, I used that word to describe myself and my thoroughly first-world problem. You may have noticed it in my recent vignette about doing taxes, but forgot about it when I reported my discovery of the error and delight at the end of the trouble.

Truth is, about halfway into writing that, and while keeping an eye on notifications, I learned that I now live in a country that voted NO on a UN resolution to condemn Russia for invading Ukraine.

I froze. Not sure how much time went by before I could put my fingers back on this keyboard. I’ll guess at least a minute, but I couldn’t return to my narrative before I started to click around and check the news. As many said on social media, it comes as no surprise, and yet it is still stunning.

Very much like that day last summer when the Supreme Court ruled that a president has unlimited immunity while in office. Next day I happened to be in a meeting with a former city councilor, a fellow Mayday demonstrator arrested in DC back in 1971 though I didn’t know him until 2016. Can’t recall his exact words, but I’ll never forget the shock on his face.

We agreed that we no longer lived in a country where, as we grew up believing, no one is above the law.

This might have been our response in late January, 2010, when the Supreme Court handed down the Citizens United decision. In retrospect, that was as much of a breach of America’s foundation as presidential immunity, and you could make the case that the 2010 descent toward oligarchy made the 2024 decision, effectively in favor of autocracy, possible.

We knew it was wrong, and we protested, but it didn’t have near the effect that is hitting us now, perhaps because Barack Obama was just a year into his presidency. We must have assumed that he and a Democratic Senate would find ways to offset the idea that, as Mitt Romney boasted, “corporations are people.” We should have heeded the late proponent of campaign finance reform, New Hampshire’s own Doris “Granny D” Haddock:

If money is speech, then bribery is legal.

Last month, Citizens United was in full bloom at the inauguration. Seated in the VIP seats aside the incoming president were not congressional leaders and public servants as has always been the case, but the CEOs of the largest tech-companies and donors to his campaign. In effect, America was looking at a new ruling class, a plutocracy.

This month, one of them was given the authority to fire as many federal employees as he could. Before long he was able to dismantle agencies that oversaw his own business interests. In effect, a kleptocracy.

Meanwhile, the most absurd and unqualified people were appointed to cabinet positions while highly qualified–and entirely non-partisan–career public servants were purged from all departments. In effect, a kakistocracy.

Worst hit by incompetents in the highest positions are the Defense and Justice departments, including the FBI and CIA. If they are willing to ignore Constitutional checks and balances from Congress and the courts–which appears to be the very reason they were chosen–then we have tyranny.

There’s also an attempt to privatize the National Parks and gut the IRS, two agencies that generate more revenue than they cost, both by far. But we are running out of “-ocracies” and need to start coining new names. How about “stupidocracy.”

Now add attempts to privatize the US Postal Service and end birthright citizenship, both of which are written into the US Constitution, and we might as well resign ourselves to living in a “fuckoffracy.”

From dismantled to demoralized. If today’s news is stunning because it puts an end to everything America has stood for on the world stage since FDR joined us to European allies against fascism, then the pardon of all J6 rioters did the same for what we valued at home.

Just as the immunity ruling erased one civic article of faith, the blanket pardon of 1,600 rioters–many of them convicted of assaulting police officers, and with overwhelming evidence–erased a few more. In America, as of January 20 this year: Crime does pay. Might does make right. Violence and threats of violence are acceptable political tactics. In effect, anarchy.

And just like that, America–now allied and casting votes with Russia, Belarus, Hungary, North Korea, and other anti-democratic members of the UN–has transformed itself from a “Shining City on a Hill” to a casino in a red-light district.

Far am I from being the first person to notice how America in five short weeks has transformed into so many forms of government that we have disdained ever since declaring our independence from a monarchy: oligarchy, autocracy, plutocracy, kleptocracy, kakistocracy, tyranny, anarchy.

As one friend on social media wanted to know, is there one word that combines all of these? And so I thought of one that makes a $790 loss seem laughable. Call US a demoralocracy.

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UNITED STATES – SEPTEMBER 19, 2000: Granny D meets Jan Crosby as hubby David looks on at the National Rally For Campaign Finance Reform Rally on the West Front of the Capitol. (Photo By Tom Williams/Roll Call/Getty Images)

From left, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), campaign finance reform activist Doris Haddock, known as “Granny D,” Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) leave Capitol Hill March 19, 2001 in Washington, DC as they walk to the headquarters of the Republican National Committee and the Democratic National Committee for a press conference on campaign finance reform. The Senate will begin debate on campaign finance reform on Monday. (Photo by Alex Wong/Newsmakers)

https://www.humanmedia.org/product/granny-d/

nmnmnmnmnmn

A Tax on All My Habits

Finally sat down to do my taxes the other night. Usually they are done first weekend of February, but some forms were delayed. With six sources of income, it can be tricky.

The one that kept me waiting the longest, and by far the one with the largest amount, was for Social Security. Seems rather ironic considering it’s a federal law that requires that all forms be mailed by the end of January.

Moreover, you don’t have to be a fan of Bernie Sanders–though I sure am–to feel the burn of Social Security being taxed. FDR’s New Deal made it tax-free from conception to birth, and it remained so for about fifty years until Pres. Ronald Reagan started taxing it to offset his tax-cuts for corporations.

Lately, I’ve been telling people that, had I another chance at life, I’d be a cartographer, but at times I long to have been a psychologist able to figure out how any nation of presumably free people keep electing leaders who screw them–and idolize those who screw them the most.

Ah, but here I am, a wreck of a senior enjoying four-day weekends, with two quarter-time jobs, two seasonal musical gigs, and a pittance of royalties good for a few tanks of gas in 2024. Should mention that those two seasonal gigs, unfortunately, occur in the same season, claiming ten of those four-day weekends and turning September and October into a non-stop full-court press.

However, on one of those weekends and a few other days last year, I was told to stay home due to excess smoke in the air from wildfires not far from downtown Salem. So the numbers on one form were noticeably less than last year, and I am now among those who can claim economic loss due to climate change, albeit far less than most who do.

That form happened to be the fifth to arrive, leaving me awaiting just one more. Finally, remembering how much was done on-line during the COVID shut-down for those subsidy deposits, I went to the IRS website. As always, I went through the “forgot password” and “enter code” and “reset…” rigmarole, and there I was looking at “my account.” A few more clicks, and there was the statement with a most welcome instruction across the bottom:

“Do not send this form with return.”

All I had to do was copy the numbers on it, and plug them into my 1040-SR along with those of five other forms. This, of course, calls for scrap paper and lists which have always served me well. Yes, I’m as adverse to calculators as I am to GPS and cellphones. No digital slavery for me!

Anyway, I’ve always been good with numbers, as patrons at the local cinema’s concession stand keep telling me. So laughable! That’s mere addition and counting back change, but I resist the temptation to tell them that Algebra, Geometry, and Trigonometry were my best subjects in high school, or that I entered college as a math major.

A desire to express myself during those Vietnam War-torn years turned me into an English major before the start of the second semester, but I’ll admit that my immediate placement into Calculus hastened the decision.

No need for any of that the other night. Just add or subtract, sometimes multiply or divide. All of it basic arithmetic I might have done in third grade. At times, the forms ask for nothing more complicated than picking the larger or smaller of two items.

As I do every year, I breezed right through it–only to be shocked by the result.

In recent years, I’ve always had a modest refund from the feds, around $200 or so. The other night I landed on a $790 payment. I went back through the forms, the instructions, a worksheet, and my scrap-paper, and found no error. I did it a third time. I studied applicable instructions and went looking for specific definitions of terms. Came up $790 every time. That’s about a thousand dollar swing even though nothing much changed from last year.

Ordinarily, I go immediately to the state form and complete it. But the other night, the Massachusetts’ booklet remained unopened, the form untouched, as I went to bed thoroughly demoralized.

Next morning, I resolved not to simply go over it again, but to start from scratch. A clean form and scrap-paper I had, but there was just one worksheet in my booklet already filled in with ink. I started converting those numbers onto a blank page. And there it was, as glaring as could be, I suppose, to someone who doesn’t take his own talent for granted.

For one of those “pick the smaller number” lines, I had looked up to see 1,360 above 8,066. Problem was that, 1) I did not use commas, and 2) I had carelessly aligned the 8 underneath the 3, making it appear smaller than 13. The resulting mistake was a whopping $6,706 which, when corrected, brought my payment down to but $120.

Those of you who live within a ten-mile radius may have overheard my sigh of relief. But I was already reaching for the state forms, always so much more agreeable for their inclusion of withholdings for Social Security and Medicare. Massachusetts will refund me about $350, four times what I got last year, so I’m coming out ahead and am quite satisfied.

Moreover, I can’t help but be bemused by the recent firing of 6,700 IRS employees. Very close to one for each dollar of my mistake. I trust there’s no cause/effect relationship there. If we’re to be honest, that move is to prevent the IRS from collecting billions from the rich, increasing the threat to Social Security, and not just its end-of-year forms.

If there’s no one there at IRS to cash my check, can I call it consolation?

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You could call music a form of mathematics, and you could say that the music stand behind me holds a balance sheet of sorts, and that the open case below it is a cash register, and that the cylindrical object in my hands is a calculator also of sorts. People made deposits which I would later invest, much of it in food and drink on the way home. Ironically, the IRS never heard of this, something that I rationalized by buying Megabucks tickets with the same numbers for every drawing since 1984. Many call lotteries a tax for people who are very bad at math, but I considered it a tax on busking.
Photo courtesy of Salem News, 2014.

Mapping Red, White & Blueland

Had I my life to live all over again, I’d have been a map-maker–only to be made obsolete by GPS.

That’s not entirely true. Road maps would have taken me to retirement when I could have turned my attention to state maps of congressional districts to undo the gerrymandering that clearly favors one party over the other in several of them–and which favors extremist candidates over moderates across the country. Those include Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina, a grouping that should sound familiar to anyone paying attention.

I surely would not have made any name changes called for by a president who is really a dictator, supported by a political party that is really a cult of personality, elected by citizens who are really consumers, which in this context is really a euphemism for gullible suckers.

Though we might associate it with murderous dictators such as Stalin and Mao, even the term “Cult of Personality,” understates the perversion of patriotism that we see daily with our own eyes. Never before him have we seen the name of an American politician on flags that fly alongside Old Glory from homes and pickup trucks, some flags with his name and/or face often superimposed on Old Glory–a violation of the US Flag Code that is unnoticed, tolerated, and practiced by the same people who went berserk when African-American football players knelt in silent protest during the National Anthem.

Very much akin to the display of nativity scenes of refugees in December in front of homes of those who enthusiastically voted for mass deportations in November. Their patriotism is as fraudulent as their faith.

You’ve already heard of the decree to re-name the Gulf of Mexico, a name that has been on maps since the Renaissance, something else that the Republican Party apparently wants to repeal. And Denali, a mountain in Alaska so named by a native tribe centuries before President McKinley or, for that matter, the United States of America was born.

But you may not have heard that US House Rep. Earl “Buddy” Carter (R-Ga) has introduced a bill called “The Red, White & Blueland Act of 2025” to rename–and re-color–Greenland once our “Negotiator-in-Chief,” as Rep. Carter calls him, purchases the Arctic isle.

https://www.dailydot.com/debug/red-white-and-blueland-greenland/

Denmark, however, insists that Greenland is not for sale–all while a few Danish wags with a website are hilariously proposing something that might make an American cry wishing it could come true (link in the photo caption below).

Must say, it is quite challenging to satirize things that are already 100% ridiculous on their face. And, anyway, this mouthful of a name, “Red, White & Blueland,” may be less of a cartographical concern than it is yet another expression of a kowtowing virus. Consider other bills that have been introduced:

In 2023, they moved to expunge both impeachments from the record. Last summer, likely to raise support for their own campaigns, Republican House members introduced bills to:

Rename Dulles Airport for Trump
Print $500 bills with his portrait
Name America’s coastal exclusive economic zone (known simply as “EEZ”) for him.

And since Inauguration Day to:

Put him on Mt. Rushmore
Allow him to run for a third term
Declare his birthday a national holiday

Perversely speaking, there should have been an opening for him on Mt. Rushmore since 2010 when the Supreme Court handed down Citizens United. That ruling effectively negated the reason that Theodore Roosevelt is on that monument. To leave TR there is a lie. Equal to the lie, ever since the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling last year, to say that in America, “no one is above the law.”

In light of all that, I shouldn’t be treating the current news of Greenland–or Panama, or Denali, or Canada, or the Gulf of Mexico–as geographic jokes. Certainly not the grossly inhumane suggestion to turn Gaza into “the Riviera of the Middle East.” All of these are symptomatic of a grave and possibly terminal national disease. Other symptoms include:

Appeals to public frustrations
Wild exaggerations of those frustrations
Promising a return to an imaginary era of glory
Combining government with corporate interests
Bearing false witness (“They’re eating cats and dogs!”)
Scapegoating of minorities
Demonizing political opponents
Ridicule of the press
Distortion of science
Contempt for the arts
Whitewash of history
Suppression of universities
Control of primary and secondary education
Obsession with loyalty
Treatment of disagreement as heresy
Portraying opponents as alternately weak and strong, whichever fits the issue at hand
Machismo and weaponry
Glorification of violence
Incitements and tolerance (as in pardons) of violence on the leader’s behalf
Simplified and repetitive language to limit critical thought (Orwell’s Newspeak)
Rampant cronyism and corruption
Contradictions that go unremarked
Never admitting error or loss
Taking credit for everything positive
Casting blame for anything negative
Isolationism

As they say in the self-help groups, one of the first steps to curing yourself of something is to call it by its honest name. If the above list appeared as ingredients in a cook book, the dish would be called Fascism.

Too bad I did not major in geography and have a career as a cartographer. Maps to rid us of gerrymandering might offer the beginning of a cure. And we know that there will be no GPS to help with that.

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https://www.npr.org/2025/02/12/nx-s1-5294315/greenland-trump-red-white-blueland-denmark-california?

https://andreasmoser.blog/2011/02/01/upside-down/

By Inclination If Not Practice

Many friends from my Dakota days, bless them, know that I am, as one recently put it, “an amateur cartographer by inclination if not practice.”

Perhaps those of you who have been reading this cartographically named “Mouth of the River” blog for any length of time have noticed scattered blogs over these past six years on the subject of geography. As well as many more about history that include maps as featured images.

As a graduate student at South Dakota State University, I took an undergrad cartography course at 2/3rds credit for the sake of adding my own maps to a thesis titled The Forgotten Realist about Edward Eggleston, a contemporary of Mark Twain, best known for The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a serial novel in the 1870s which still circulated in the children’s section of libraries back in the 1950s.

Maps of Indiana, the Ohio River Valley, and the Great Lakes were well-done enough to impress the English Dept., but not enough to dissuade them from adopting a new rule at semester’s end restricting grad students from taking undergrad courses. They wanted us taking nothing but their courses. Must admit that my map of the USA was so embarrassingly bad that it ought to be ripped out of every copy, though I just can’t bring myself to do it to my own.

Must admit as well that I had also taken a music class at the same 2/3rds rate, which helped tip the scales for the minor-keyed English profs who thought it flat-out heresy to be answered with sharp rebuke. I was safely back in Massachusetts by then. It was called “the Garvey Rule.”

Also got myself in some salt water twelve years ago when the North Atlantic started whacking Plum Island with serious erosion. Never occurred to me that the owners of homes that were knocked down, compromised, or left vulnerable were already planning to rebuild and reinforce right on the very spots reclaimed by the Atlantic.

My second column about it began thus:

Not long ago, I told you that Plum Island is not an island but a barrier beach.

Geography 101 will tell you as much, but my penchant for verbosity—a polite word for BS—led me to add the phrase, “glorified sandbar,” a remark that did not exactly endear me to some of my neighbors.

Where to hide from people offended by what they read?

Hello Public Library!

Rolled my sleeping bag in the history aisles where no one ever goes and started looking for something else to plagiarize when a book about the Hudson River—or so I thought—grabbed my attention.

I’ll attach a link to the full column down below, but that passage and the next offer a useful background for what has happened in recent weeks. My reaction to the book’s intro:

… I was surprised to learn that the Lower Hudson, the 150 miles from Albany through the Palisades to NYC, is technically not a river but a fjord—“a long and broad tidal estuary.”

That’s why it is so direct, with slight angular bends rather than the constant twists and curves of rivers. Salt water reaches over 70 miles inland.

All because a glacier cut it wide and deep—which made Henry Hudson think he could sail his Half Moon up there and find China.

Instead, he found Poughkeepsie.

No idea how he could tell the difference. Thought it looked a lot like Barbados myself, but maybe that’s just on account of the crowd my daughter ran with.

Headline that I submitted for that column was “Pounding PI Sand Up an NY Fjord,” but the editor softened it. And the book is titled simply The Hudson, a History, although it’s so incisive with history and ecology and so much in between, it ought to be titled, Up Yours, Albany!

This memory was refreshed by a recent day trip to the Hudson Valley on which a friend and I joked that we should have brought our state flag to wave as we declared New York State re-named “New Massachusetts.” Instead, about halfway between Albany and quaint Saugerties, we stopped at the New Baltimore Rest Area for the same coffee now selling alongside I-95 and I-495.

That, of course, hints at why my cartographic leanings have become so prominent since, oh, say, January 20 of this year. But that’s not my inclination, that’s my practice. And this is still the weekend.

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My Hudson River column, April 2013:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2013/04/24/sitting-in-off-plum-island/39785754007/

As you likely know, the standard maps that have been placed on classroom walls for years have been criticized for distorting shapes and sizes. This is a consequence of having to project a round surface on a flat paper. Try pressing the peel down on a table top next time you have an orange, and you’ll get the idea. Furthermore, because there is so much more land in the northern hemisphere than in the south, Gerardus Mercator moved his 1569 projection so that the center is north of the Equator, further exaggeration sizes to the north over the south. I’ve always preferred the 1963 Robinson Projection that lessens the distortion with curved corners and moves the Equator back down to where it should be.

In 2016, a Japanese designer offered an alternative which beats Robinson for size and shape, but at the expense of positioning. Not bad, but I think the moral of the story is, if you want the unaltered truth, get a globe.

Hajime Narukawa won Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents and oceans.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/accurate-map-authagraph

Welcome to Garvey Island

Many friends are having no land’s end of fun spoofing the ridiculous dictatorial decree to rename the body of water framed by Florida on one side and the Yucatan Peninsula down below.

The cowardly compliance of Google Maps and, more recently, of the Axios news agency, has given them more reason to ridicule the move with imaginary moves of their own.

Some are truly funny. “The Gulf of This-Won’t-Lower-The-Cost-Of-Eggs” is a yoke of a joke, peppered and scrambled with political satire. And “Gulf of Loco Gringo” is seasoned with the hilarity of possibly offending rabid Republicans not because of what it means, but because it is in Spanish and they don’t know what it means. Press one for latitude!

So many revisions of The Gulf of Mexico, to use the name “assigned at birth,” people are now renaming other bodies of water. To protect Canada against the American dictator’s brainless threats, one renamed the Great Lakes, starting with Superior as “The Gulf of Molson, Eh?” Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has called for Lake Michigan to be renamed “Lake Illinois.” And some Brits want the Atlantic to be known as “The English Ocean.”

Closer to home, a local wag called for Massachusetts Bay to be renamed the “Gulf of Newburyport.” This is one of those cases where laughing with someone turns into laughing at them. Those posting it don’t even seem to notice that Newburyport is nowhere to be found on their own map. The bay, no matter what we call it, is defined by Cape Ann on the north. It doesn’t touch Newburyport, or even Plum Island–which I think should be renamed Garvey Island, but that’s another yoke for another omelet.

Possibly this wayward cartographer meant The Gulf of Maine. Few people realize it, but this chunk of the North Atlantic that fits itself between Cape Ann to the south and Fundy Bay up north is named for the state that has most of its coastline. To rename it for Newburyport–or even for New Hampshire–would be as mathematically senseless as it is cartographically absurd.

The Bay of Fundy, by the way, separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia, soon to be renamed respectively, though without any respect from us, “North Maine” and “East Maine” (with Newfoundland soon to be Far-east Maine, Prince Edward Island to be King Donald Island, and Labrador, Boston Terrier). The bay itself will be renamed “Musk Sea.”

Oh, Canada! Ah, Canada! Look out, Canada! Let’s fill it out, shall we? From west to east: The Yukon will be USAkon; British Columbia will be American Columbia; Alberta, Northwest Montana; Saskatchewan, Northeast Montana; Manitoba, Dakota Heights; Ontario, Lakefront Properties; Quebec; American France (with a ban on the French language). Across the top, Nunavut will be Allofit, and the Hudson Bay will be renamed Trump Faucet.

Enough! No matter how inane the American dictator sounds–or appears to be enacting a Three Stooges skit, as he did in 2019 with his idiotically Sharpied map of Hurricane Dorian–we laugh at our own peril.

The edict to rename the Gulf–and also to restore the name “McKinley” to Mount Denali in Alaska–exists as an executive order. No matter what anyone does to comply or resist, that order can and will serve as a pretext for Republican governors and state legislatures to screen all history, geography, and literature textbooks used in public schools. Do you think they are going to limit their censorship to a few names on the North American map?

By the way, the word “Alaska,” in the same language that gives us “Denali” (the tall one), translates as “that which the sea breaks against.” A bit too involved for the MAGA crowd, I’d say, plus it’s a foreign word. How about changing the state’s name to “Pound,” something they can not only understand but will make them snicker?

“Restore” McKinley? Textbook manufacturers who fall in line with the cowards at Google Maps and Axios stand to make a huge haul. They will secure it by “restoring” the lie of “benevolent institution” and “very well treated by plantation owners” to abbreviated passages on slavery. Furthermore, they will paint the American labor movement as a passing fad of immigrants under the spell of Bolshevism, if they mention it at all. As the first American dictator calls it, “Patriotic Education.”

Why not? For those now willing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the word patriotism is nothing more than a euphemism for “willful ignorance.”

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A map draw by Newburyporter Lucinda Cathcart for my book, *Keep Newburyport Weird*. The nine-mile long, pencil-shaped barrier beach attached to the mainland just under the Mouth of the Merrimack is navigable at high tide, and therefore qualifies as an island. As you can see, the name Plum Island has already been removed in preparation of the new name if I can ever figure out how to superimpose text without the whole image going dark. Then again, maybe going dark is the point of this name-change idiocy.

Garvey Island

As seen on Facebook. To have the name “Boston” so prominent right next to it makes it even more absurd.

Far from Home Schooling

A long time fan of the actress Julianne Moore, I’m stunned to learn that her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned from schools run by the US Department of Defense for the children of enlisted men and women in America’s armed services.

Of course, I soon remembered that our new Commander in Chief is America’s first dictator, a reckless buffoon whose supporters are so gullible, so paranoid, so intolerant of those who don’t resemble them in appearance, thought, and action, that the idea of a mixed-colored face and day-glow hair must seem a dire threat.

Or it may have been another edict from the dictator himself, afraid that the color strawberry might upstage orange. Or one of his lackeys reacted to the name of the actress and thought that Boogie Nights, Far from Heaven, and The Big Lebowski were about to be screened for third-graders.

Maybe the lackey heard that her current role is in Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door. The Screening Room is already showing the trailer and, though I don’t know for sure, it does appear that Moore’s character is involved in, as the promos put it, “a strangely sweet situation” with the character played by Tilda Swinton. Can’t risk that, whatever that is.

To be honest, it did surprise me to learn that Moore had written a children’s book. But I myself play happy little jigs and maudlin versions of “Greensleeves” at a Renaissance faire when not calling for the heads of Newburyport’s mayor and city council president in the local paper, so it’s not that much of a stretch.

Ironically, as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, Moore graduated from the American High School in Frankfurt, Germany, run by DoD. Now, she’s left wondering why “kids like me… will not have access to a book written by someone whose life experience is so similar to their own.”

Let’s pick our way through the book’s synopsis to see if we can find clues why it has been banned by a government bound by a Constitutional right of all citizens to free speech:

If you have freckles, you can try these things:

Ah, right away we have an inducement for children to act without first consulting their parents!

1) Make them go away. Unless scrubbing doesn’t work.

And now she’s giving what amounts to medical advice! She’s not a doctor, nor has she played one in any film I’ve seen. And I’m a projectionist, mind you! Let’s get RFK Jr. to worm his way in here and make an official medical ruling!

2) Cover them up. Unless your mom yells at you for using a marker.

See! I told you! She’s anti-parent, anti-family! And if she wants kids to cover up freckles, what’s next, their genitals? This book is looking more and more like a gateway drug to transgender procedures!

3) Disappear.

And now she’s telling them to run away from home. Who the hell does she think she is? The Pied Piper? She blasphemes my ancestor! I’d never tell kids to disappear. Well, not all of them, but you know…

Um, where’d you go?

Oh, there you are.

Oh, now she wants to play dumb! Best leave that act to our new dictator. Ever notice how often he begins an answer to a thorny question with “I haven’t seen it” or “I don’t know her” or “Some people say” or some such dodge that allows him to make a point or float an idea without taking any responsibility for its veracity? He has mastered playing dumb. Moore can only act the part.

There’s one other thing you can do:

4) LIVE WITH THEM!

And now she’s yelling ALL CAPS at American children! Child abuse!

Because after all, the things that make you different also make you YOU.

And there it is! This is America where we only say that we value difference. In truth, it’s just another word for “diversity,” which leads to “equity” and “inclusion.” All the things that drove up the price of eggs, flooded North Carolina, burned Los Angeles, and are now making airplanes fall out of the sky!

No more of that! This is the “land of the free and the home of the brave”–free of strawberry, whatever she means by that, and home of blood red, pure white, and true blue!

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