Maine on My Mind

Today I spotted the new Maine license plate for the first time:

Quite attractive without being bright, and elegant in its simplicity, the one I saw was a vanity plate hard to figure: “VE2EAT.”

Since the car was parked and I had just parked behind it, I sat for a couple of minutes trying to make sense of the VE: Veteran connoisseur? Venison for all the deer hunting there? Venetian for Italian cuisine? Maybe “vet” as a verb and “w’eat” as an object in a message to insure good grain?

Not until I got out and took a closer look did I see the “L” atop or behind the left side of the tree: “LVE2EAT.”

Does that owner want us to run through the possibilities of Veteran, Venison, Venetian, and Vet, as I had done? May sound far-fetched–and may well be–but not if you have ever spent time in America’s eastern most state. Jokes abound and often stretch into tall-tales that would gain an appreciative audience if compiled for a weekly radio show called Coastal Home Companion. With settings such as Passamaquoddy Bay, Bar Harbor, Mt. Katahdin, the St. John Valley, the Allegash, endless potato fields of Aroostook County, Madawaska’s view of New Brunswick, Wiscasset’s view of the Atlantic, Ogunquit Playhouse, The Nubble Lighthouse, Railroad Square Cinema, Cape Neddick, Flo’s Diner, Cabbage island, a restaurant called “Bitter End,” Clam Shack This, Lobster Pound That, and brew pubs everywhere with names like “Liquid Riot,” “Liberal Cup,” “Lucky Pigeon,” and “Funky Bow,” you can hear Garrison Keillor’s voice. Mainers call them yarns, and some of us down here call them Mainiacs for telling them.

Politics in Maine are unpredictable. They elected a MAGA governor before the thing we call our president announced a campaign with that slogan. But that was only due to a five-way race in which the reality-based vote was divided, and 37% put the extremist in office. He’d win re-election with 48% in a three-way race in which two moderate liberals split what would have been a majority. Those fiascoes soon led to Maine’s adoption of Ranked Choice Voting where, as expected, it has since worked quite well.

Still, the state’s electorate can seem mercurial. Consider Maine’s two US Senators: Angus King, an Independent, one of the most incisive interrogators in Senate hearings, often willing to take positions to which Democrats pay only lip service. And then there’s Susan Collins, easily the most gullible senator in US history as evidenced by her kid-glove treatment of Brett Kavanaugh and her chuckling Oh, I think he’s learned his lesson to rationalize her vote not to impeach.

Well, even deep-blue Massachusetts elected magazine-model, airhead Scott Brown to the senate. Maine is the state that gave us Sen. Margaret Chase Smith who turned the tide against McCarthyism with her “Declaration of Conscience” in 1950. Today it gives us Gov. Janet Mills who confronted this 21st Century McCarthy with refusals to accommodate his goonsquads and his attacks on civil rights.

Speaking of idiosyncracies, most telling of all is Mainers’ reference to their spectacular coast as “Downeast.” Did they ever hear of Rand McNally? Are they geographically challenged? To go east along that coast means you also go slightly north, which on any map I’ve ever seen is not “down,” but up–save for the “Upside Down World Map” sketched by some lunatic from Australia years ago to put “Down Under” Up Over.

Truth is: Maine Tourism turns geography into an art form:

But I digress by more miles than has The Equator. Yes, I survived Mainerisms, though I may have caught some of it and still show symptoms. Look at one of those computer generated maps that turns all borders into straight lines, and Maine becomes a triangle. I lived about four months in each of the three corners: Fort Kent at the very top, Kittery at the very bottom, and Machias near the eastern tip.

Things may have changed since the 1980s, but back then when others starting insisting that satire be labeled with warnings, Mainers expected it. Ay-uh, they reveled in it. I may be naive thinking this could still be so, but the state’s signs at the border suggest that it is:

Welcome to Maine – The Way Life Should Be

Massachusetts has an odd history with the Pine Tree State. All of it was part of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony, though divided by another colony called “New Somersetshire.” That mouthful would later be spit out in favor of “New Hampshire,” although the more accurate, honest name would be “Guns-R-Us.”

In his eyebrow-raising and delightful 2004 history of the state, The Lobster Coast, Colin Woodard makes a convincing case that Maine–or “The North,” as the rich honchos in Boston called it–was effectively a “colony of a colony.” At the time, no one called it that, or apparently gave it any thought, but the economic relationship between the two–lumber, game, seafood sent south; tools, guns, supplies sent north–was undeniable.

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/291260/the-lobster-coast-by-colin-woodard/

Woodard, in characteristic Maine fashion, dryly points out that there never has been any other example of “colony of a colony” anywhere in the world. Not knowing that may be why John Hancock and a few other very wealthy merchants from Boston were able to sign a militant anti-colonial declaration in Philadelphia in 1776. Or perhaps this was just an early case of “plausible deniability” before the disease was diagnosed two hundred years later.

By the turn of that century, a generation born in Maine began organizing for self-rule. In 1820, they gained statehood, but even that was overshadowed by the compromise, as all national attention turned west toward the simultaneous admission of Missouri as a slave state.

Admittedly, I find it impossible to prove that this act–which became notorious only after the Southern states sought to renege on it years later–is why so many Mainers moved west and became abolitionists long before the Civil War commenced.

Yes, their population was exploding along a rocky, crowded coast, and they had to go somewhere. But they were also as far from the Mason-Dixon Line as Americans could be at the time, and more than one historian has noted that they were prominent in the Underground Railroad and in establishing anti-slavery publications in places stretching from Ohio to Iowa.

Suffice to say that Maine is state that has lived up to it’s motto, Dirigo (I lead). I’ve lived in states just as relaxed (Oregon and Colorado), just as neighborly (the Dakotas), and where a sense of humor can be a way of life (right here in good old Mass), but Maine tops the list in all three categories.

For example, while its ads for tourists are filled with shots of quaint coastal towns, you’ll see one of Lenny, a 1,700-pound chocolate moose on view in a candy store–and another of a desert created by an early settler who refused to believe in crop rotation. If I were with Maine Tourism, I might pitch the Desert of Maine as a convention center for anti-vaxxers.

As much as it’s character, its geography has more in common with the Canadian Maritimes than with the American states. Inland from its rugged coast, Maine is 86% forest, the most of any American state, more than Montana or Idaho as most might guess.

The difference is made more stark by its only US border with the ten-thousand square-mile loony bin known as New Hampshire.

Perhaps I’m mislead by the contrast to the excuse for a state that sits between us, separating my home from Kittery by barely twenty miles of coast. Perhaps I therefore exaggerate Maine’s attractions. Perhaps it’s inevitable that someone from a state with a name that sounds like a sneeze would be enthralled by the only state named with a single syllable.

I had a delivery route that took me up the Maine coast, sometimes past Portland to Freeport just down the road from LL Bean and conveniently close to Gritty McDuff’s Brew Pub, every Friday. Semi-retired now, I’m called on in a pinch to go north, and at times I rendezvous with a friend to hike along the coast or in a forest, but it’s been nearly two months. Back then they were already bracing for a tourist season without Canadians, and now they face the consequences of President Netanyahu’s ordering American bombardment of a country that can and mostly likely will spike the price of gasoline.

Of course, if I just moved there, I could enjoy the way life should be without much concern for the price at the pump. Plus, I could have that oh-so attractive new plate on my car.

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Len Libby Candies, Scarborough, Maine. Photo by Carla Valentine.

No Bout Adoubt It

A recent headline in the Boston Globe warns that “New England voters say US is on wrong track.”

In other news, the contest for the “Understatement of the Year Award” is now closed to nominations.

Even if I think it can’t be topped, or bottomed, why close it? After an entire spring season of three blogs & columns per week, almost all of them on national or local issues, I suddenly have no feel for politics. Yes, I’m interested, and I cannot help but care. But what more can be said?

Waste, fraud, and abuse are all in plain sight, nationally and locally, each of them taking turns on roller coasters of corruption and tilt-a-whirls of incompetence. Even the in-our-face parade squeaked through DC to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son,” a Sixties anti-war song that takes a vicious dig a rich kids who bought deferments to dodge the military draft.

(One wonders, did it take them all of 40 years to realize that “Born in the USA” was not what they thought, or did Bruce Springsteen finally file a cease and desist?)

Bonespur’s humiliation has sent me into retreat. I was already experiencing bouts of schadenfreude* every time I heard or read yet another story of an avid Trump supporter victimized by their guy’s slashing and burning of government services, or by his goon squads’ arrests and deportations of their friends, neighbors, co-workers, employees.

Honestly, I am not proud of this–which is why I refer to them as “bouts”–but I began laughing at these people, some of them in tears, some hugging someone else in tears. At times, I find myself pointing at the screen as if putting my finger right in their face, wishing that we were face to face so that I could laugh right in their face.

Not sure if this would be of use in a self-help program, but I can identify exactly when this started. Remember the hurricane that ripped into the Appalachians and flooded the western reach of North Carolina? Residents were begging for help. Put another way: people who consistently vote for Republicans who deny climate change were asking the rest of us to bail them out of a result of climate change. And, if that wasn’t enough, southern Republicans started claiming that “Democrats control the weather” and that North Carolina was targeted.

Fox News then started howling that it was a Biden plot to seize their land. So not only did many of them not evacuate, but right-wing militias started blocking the roads, not allowing federal relief workers to reach those in need. And sure enough, they started complaining that Biden was doing nothing for them. And look at Bonespur speaking up for them!

Now I could have reacted with the anger and rage that would have produced an indignant column in real time. Instead, I laughed at the self-inflicted idiocy. I imagined myself offering to send a nickel to North Carolina, but they’d have to send me six pennies in change first. Then, I’d send the nickel. COD.

As I say, I’m not at all proud of that, but I can at least say that I never went through with any of it, not even to express it. Until now.

To be fair to myself, it was obvious to anyone paying attention long before the election that the Republican candidate for president was a frontman for Project 2025, and that the Republican Party, which has not offered its own platform in over 30 years, has adopted it as a Catechism. E Pluribus Unum may still be the official motto, but Survival of the Slickest is now the unwritten law of this land.**

Before and after the election, I often referred to veterans and farmers along with the more obvious targets of low-income people, the disabled, the elderly, those in need of medical care, and minorities, as in the cross-hairs of Project 2025. Now I’m horrified to find myself laughing at veterans and farmers breaking down while telling us they have nowhere to turn.

Must say that there was one that I didn’t feel at all bad about. In fact, I’m laughing now while writing about a young woman who serenaded Bonespur with a patriotic song at a campaign rally. Last week one of his goon squads handcuffed and shipped off her boyfriend to some detention camp. I hear she’s now rehearsing a cover of Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You.”

Sorry! That is so unbecoming of me. But this may be another of those 21st Century illnesses that requires and perhaps deserves understanding and, yes, tolerance, so that I may eventually be coaxed back into political commentary.

Perhaps even satire. After all, a subject as ripe as “understatement of the year” deserves full treatment. And by sheer definition, should cover all twelve months.

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*Schadenfreude: A loanword from German, a compound of the nouns Schaden, meaning (damage) and Freude (joy), the experience of pleasure, joy, or self-satisfaction that comes from learning of or witnessing the troubles, failures, pain, suffering, or humiliation of another.

**Survival of the Slickest: A term coined by Martin Luther King to describe the USA in 1968, the year he died, and the year when he warned that America could return to the Dark Ages.

*Taming the Donkey*, EduardoZamacois y Zabala 1868
https://populartimelines.com/timeline/Schadenfreude/full

Twixt Twixt and Twizzlers

My one goal in life has always been to amuse myself.

But I get caught up in causes. Keeps me up so late at night that I don’t know what mornings are. Breakfast for me is at noon.

Night owl that I am, I often tune into sports as a way to decelerate from the heat of what I read and write into the slow cruise of watching games.

On the west coast, Boston teams play late into the night, and most other fans complain. I wish all their games were played there.

Works very well for me. If the game is dull or lopsided, it will lull me to sleep. Not one to live or die on the outcome, I can click it off anytime.

And then there are the ads, oh, the ads, yes, the ads, um, the ads! In recent years, there’s been a constant late-night pitch for drugs to cure this, ease that, remove something unwanted, restore something lost, smooth the skin, soothe an inflammation, stop an infection, enhance memory, strengthen… Well, you know…

Some require prescriptions, in some cases quite expensive, and not entirely covered by insurance. Others are over-the-counter, advertised like another candy bar you might find in a counter twixt Twixt and Twizzlers.

The names are always contrived and mostly in three clashing syllables so they sound like a list of entrees on a menu in a restaurant that serves robots:

Ozempic, Farxiga, Bimzelx, Eliquis, Latuda, Humira, Qunol, Dupixent, Ponvory, Mounjaro, Skyrizi, Biktarvi, Jarvgackey, Zamboni, Bonspuri, Trumbecile, Foxstacy, Magaron, and on and on. If your insurance covers just two syllables, there’s Rinvoq; if you’re a Republican donor and can splurge on four with your fat tax break, have an Iberogast while you laugh at suckers and losers who cannot afford medical care.

With its spectacular dance numbers, Jardiance would be the special served at an AI dinner theatre.

And for fast food, there’s Viagra, Cialis, and Bentcarrot.

Not one of them ever caught my interest. And I purposefully made that point to my doctor before asking for her opinion of the idiotic names. She laughed at the question, but changed the subject:

What about the disclaimers?

Should have expected a doctor to be more alert to possible harm than to comic coating. Knowing that I write for a newspaper, she urged me to heed instead the endless possibilities to which manufacturers admit—all while showing wonderful scenes of hiking, sailing, surfing, dancing, camping, playing games, rock-climbing, horse-riding, scuba-diving, sky-diving, feasting with family, entertaining friends, patting dogs, cuddling with… Well, you know…

We watch all those smiles and laughs while an accelerated tape admits that what they are selling may cause migraine headaches, diarrhea, vomiting, slurring speech, tingling in the extremities, stiffness in the joints, dizziness, despair, delusion, delirium, dementia, depravity, disorientation, memory loss, suicidal thoughts, and stupidity as profound as voting for politicians looking to cut Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, cancer research, medical accessibility, occupational safety, farm assistance, weather tracking, emergency response, food and drug inspections, clean air and water, and on and on.

She’s right, of course. Risking people’s health and sanity is a bit more of a crime against humanity than ridiculous, formularized robot names. But, dammit, why can’t I just laugh at them?

Answer to that appears answered by a new ad. Another cutesy three-syllable name sounds like yet another drug, but the woman on the screen quickly tells us that Homeaglow is a professional service that cleans your home—not just another pill for perpetual happiness while at home, as I first thought.

Then she boasts: “We were able to fire our house cleaner!”

Young, attractive, blonde, and willing to say “fire” with a mindless smile, she needs only a cross around her neck to qualify for Trump’s head-nodding staff.

Talk about saying the quiet part out loud! Then again, in America 2025, nothing is quiet. We now live in a reality TV show where putting someone out of work is a selling point.

Considering how many public servants have been axed these past five months, “You’re fired!” may as well be the motto of Trump’s administration, just as it was of his “Apprentice.”

Question now is whether Homeaglow’s ad is a precursor.

Is the contamination of cruelty and cynicism about to spread from the Trump administration throughout the world of advertising? If so, then where else?

And will we find it amusing when we’re ten feet tall?

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https://drmichaelwayne.com/blog/drug-ads-on-tv-a-brief-history/

https://funhouseradio.com/2022/07/04/white-rabbit/

Celebrations of Democracy

Friend Nancy quipped that if you wanted to run into anyone you knew in Wareham on Saturday, you would probably have found them outside of Town Hall.

So it was in Newburyport and, based on all reports, at most of the 2,000 or so No Kings rallies held from coast to coast. In our largest cities, it would have taken some effort sifting through crowds such as the one in San Francisco:

Courtesy of a Facebook page called “Some Amazing Facts.”

If any of those good folks needed a place to sit and stretch their legs, they should have gone to the one and only dud of a gathering which bombed badly in Washington DC:

https://themindshield.com/white-house-calls-no-kings-protests-an-utter-failure-with-minuscule-attendance-claims-250k-attended-trumps-military-parade/

Yes, the White House called the No Kings gatherings “an utter failure” while claiming that a quarter of a million people saw and heard the tanks squeak down Pennsylvania Ave. If Hans Christian Andersen were alive today, the title might be, The Emperor Needs New Glasses.

I needed no hearing aid when friend Kurt reported a sign saying “US Out of LA” in Belmont, Mass., for an echo of the Sixties’ anti-war demonstrations. Back then it was “US Out of Southeast Asia”–and when we learned of the Nixon Administration’s domestic surveillance, we added “US Out of North America.”

If I were Canadian, I might bring that one back, but our neighbors to the north might rather I not. While it would appeal to their robust sense of humor, I’m sure they’d prefer that–while we keep visiting them–we only keep our want to control on this side of the line.

When I last wrote of these rallies, following one in nearby Ipswich, Mass., I mentioned my Cousin Janice who always sends me her sign of the week a day or two ahead of rallies she attends in Newtown, Conn. My recent blog, “Good Day & Better Luck,” includes her parody of the Statue of Liberty reworded to suit the land of the gullible and the home of the intolerant. This past Saturday, for a change of scenery, she stayed in Bethel, Conn. and snapped this:

Bethel, Connecticut. Photo by Janice Garvey.

No idea who that young woman is, but in just eleven words she nails both problem and solution. Forget about the MAGA crowd who want authoritarian rule because it frees them from thought–and who enjoy any expression of cruelty and ridicule because it makes them feel superior. MAGA is way outnumbered–and though I hate to say it, so are we–by those who pay no attention. As I heard a rabbi say years ago, the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.

In a futile attempt to channel Hamlet, I thought of a sign saying simply, “Be Engaged or Be Estranged,” but the young Connecticut woman’s version is far more, well, engaging. Not just by being more user-friendly, but by implying the need to pay attention with the word “love” and equating that love–that attention–with patriotism.

And if you still complain about the lack of young people, you are not paying attention. In Newburyport, I was able to join a jam session with two young drummers and an as-young flag bearer who marched among the throngs on High Street. Went with them twice for about five minutes at a time. Any more than that, and I’d have been taken out of there in an ambulance:

Thanks to Walt Thompson for the photo, although the timing is odd. One drummer has his back to the camera, so you can’t see the drum, while the second drummer has paused drumming to take a pic on his mobile device. What would that painting, *The Spirit of ’76,* look like had those damned things been around?

When not piping, I was, as Nancy suggested regarding Wareham, exchanging greetings with most every Newburyporter I knew, including at least two I haven’t seen in twenty years. Of course, I also met many for the first time, including TITO the Giraffe who made his way along the line, delighting children and many elderly folk for whom he stopped to poke noses.

With my pocket-sized notebook out where he could see it, I interviewed him briefly:

Photo by Richard Lodge who quips, “It must have been a tough interview.” Um, do I look like I’m having a hard time?

Not wanting to take him away from his rounds, I had just two questions. Name? “TITO,” which is all caps because it stands for Theater in the Open, a long running summer troupe that performs in Maudsley Woods, an outdoor park along the Merrimack. Pretty sure my daughter was in a production of theirs, Ondine, some 30+ years ago.

Second question was also out of Journalism 101: Why are you here today? For a good 10-seconds, TITO paused as he chomped on the stick holding his American flag. Made me wonder if he was trying to pick one of the many reasons that filled town squares, flooded city streets, lined main thoroughfares, and shut down the Golden Gate Bridge. Finally:

I’m here to celebrate American democracy.

Yes, TITO, there are enough of us here and everywhere else to list the details of wrongs, and there are signs such as that in Bethel to show how to right them. So, thank you for reminding us, in times like these, just what patriotism is.

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Loophole for a Lie

On the morning of their meeting last Tuesday, Newburyport city councilors received a 300-word document from one of the volunteers expelled from the library’s Archival Center.

That evening, they would once again discuss the two-year simmering and now-boiling controversy nearing either resolution or, more likely, being swept under Mayor Sean Reardon’s increasingly lumpy rug.

Under consideration was a strongly-worded resolution, drafted by councilors Connie Preston and Ben Harman, calling for six “corrective actions,” including apologies from the mayor and his top officials at the time, as well as:

… disciplinary action for the librarian who authored and coordinated the letter dated June 6, 2023 for creating a work environment that is inconsistent with the Newburyport Employee Handbook.

After four citizens spoke for the resolution specifically—or for the volunteers generally—Reardon sought to soften the blow by claiming, among other things, that “upon learning” of the 950-word statement charging the then-volunteers with bullying and verbal abuse, “I immediately had it removed” from the NPL website.

This is the same June 6 document to which the Preston-Harman resolution refers. Published in the Daily News on June 14, 2023, it is—in its transition from a draft aimed at “a single private citizen” to its release aimed at “a small contingent of citizens”—at the heart of the independent investigator’s report.

I do not know when it first appeared on the NPL site, but I first noticed it the night of Monday, June 28. I assumed that airing dirty laundry in public had to be a violation of city policy, and that it was put there by a senior staff librarian acting on her or his own.

At noon the next day, I went to City Hall thinking that I only had to inform someone in the administration of the infraction. A secretary arraigned a meeting for me with then-Chief of Staff Andrew Levine two hours later.

Upon my return, the mayor walked out the door calling back to me: “Quite a letter you had in the paper!” My letter had been in defense of the vols, but submitted days before I saw the document on the NPL site.

My meeting with Levine lasted about 15 minutes, but it could have ended in 15 seconds. Not only did he not see anything wrong with the post, but he approved of it. Incredulous, I kept reframing the question in terms of dirty laundry, the fact of it being a city-sponsored site, and a line saying that the vols “accepted money” from patrons that turned out to be nothing more than coins for a photocopier—something left out of investigator’s report. In return, I got blank stares.

The document, including the charge regarding “money”—with its implicit insinuation that the vols were exploiting their roles for profit—remained on the NPL site for at least three more weeks.

Said Levine, flatly: “There’s no insinuation.”

All of this raises questions about the mayor’s claim on Tuesday. Is it plausible that a chief-of-staff would not brief a mayor on such a meeting? The mayor knew that the meeting took place, and he knew that I was writing in the Daily News about the library issue.

Put another way, is it plausible that the mayor would not ask his chief-of-staff to tell him what the meeting was about? If the answer to either question is yes, then the only other conclusion to be drawn is that the mayor is using the office of chief-of-staff for plausible deniability.

Anyone my age will recall that Orwellian term from the Nixon years: “Plausible deniability,” a loophole for a lie.

Meanwhile, the vol who sent the council that 300-page statement was in attendance. One might wonder if the councilors, while hearing Reardon emphasize the facade of “no winners or losers here,” recalled the testimony she gave them earlier that day:

[Reardon’s] statement that there are no winners or losers here is not true: Then, and still now, the city administration and the instigator of the original letter, who is now the director of the much-altered archives, are the winners. Because he does not accept the findings of the investigation, the volunteers and the former archivist are the losers.

But more: What must they have thought of the mayor’s claim the he was “obliged to investigate” while, right behind him, they saw the face of a woman who had just written this:

The statement that he met with both sides is deceptive: Six weeks after he shut down the archive volunteers’ program, [two of the volunteers] were finally successful in getting a meeting for all the volunteers with him… At the meeting the volunteers had one request: Ask the 14 librarians why they would sign such a hateful, untrue letter. He refused, saying he had to believe 14 librarians and would not question them.

That last line may seem like old news, but that’s the point: Anyone following this story knows that Reardon never began an investigation, much less held one. But now he calls an investigation that never happened an “obligation” while he “disagrees with” the investigation that did.

Just when we might ask if it could get any worse, Reardon finished reading his formal statement, and “to piggyback on it,” added this:

I did meet with my good friend, Liz Walsh—and she is my friend—last week, and I really appreciate her coming in…

Not a word about what was said at that week-old meeting was added, just the impression created by the repetition of “friend,” as he turned to the seats behind him hoping for a nod of approval from the woman he named.

Poor guy! He had no way of knowing of the 300-word document she gave the councilors that very morning.

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Looks like its from *The* *New Yorker*, and may well be, but I found it in the Antarctica Journal, the tagline for which is : “Light and Heat for a Frozen World.” If I were 30 or more years younger, I swear I’d apply for a job:
https://www.antarcticajournal.com/cartoon-plausible-deniability/

Good Day & Better Luck

Not sure if it was called “Hands Off” or “No Kings” or maybe had another handle–or if these rallies are now an all-of-the-above movement trying to keep up with accumulating attempts to turn our democracy into a billionairocracy.

Many signs were specific, such as Courts not Camps, and Remember Polio? I do. Thanks Research & Science!

Many, general: Silence is Consent and True Patriots Protect & Defend the Rule of Law.

And comic: Resist Bigly and Looney Tunes are Running the USA.

One, perhaps unwittingly, conveyed very different, though compatible messages when viewed front or back. Its carrier had walked past me before I saw what appeared to be a replica of the tablets that delivered the Ten Commandments. Quite a bullseye on a target that steals, bears false witness, and creates craven images by the hour. But I had to see the front, so I hurried past Moses for a look.

In fact, what I thought a sacred text was actually two tombstones with separate inscriptions: GOP – Dead to Decency and Donald Trump – Traitor – 1946-

Rather than joke about any desire to fill in the missing date, I hasten to say that my favorite was very simple, and perhaps the most comprehensive of all despite its brevity:

Here we have a reminder that America is founded upon immigration, is by nature and by Constitution, inclusive, diverse, and equitable–with just three short words to state our resolve to rise to Ben Franklin’s challenge and keep it that way.

In three other words: E Pluribus Unum.

Cousin Janice, who has been attending these rallies each week in Newtown, Connecticut, no doubt had this in mind when she prepared her latest sign:

Haven’t yet made it to Newtown, but I have made a point of going to different locales. What I just described was in Ipswich where I’ll be tempted to return because it includes a drum circle. That would give this aging flautist a chance to relive the jam sessions of King Richard’s Faire–and prepare for it this fall. Ten minutes at a time, and at best two or three times. I’ll be taken out of there in an ambulance if I attempt any more than that.

All of them have been re-invigorating, encouraging–Ipswich, Rowley, Newburyport, Newbury (on US-1), and Peterborough, N.H.–but yesterday was topped off by CNN’s presentation of Good Night & Good Luck, the story of legendary journalist Edward R. Murrow’s exposure and defeat of Sen. Joe McCarthy in 1954.

As an introduction and as an epilogue, actor George Clooney had only to recite Murrow’s exact words to drive home the point that we are now living in a time all too much like that of the Red Scare. The archival tape of McCarthy calling any dissenter names such as pinko, commie, and scum may have been black and white, but it glowed MAGA orange.

The play itself–re-imagined from the superb 2006 film with musical interludes and a healthy dose of comic relief perhaps to offset the constant smoke of cigarettes–offers a model for how a country under such an internal threat might save itself.

Murrow warned about the news we consumed, moreso about the frivolous entertainment we consumed as a buffer from any news. He could not have sounded any more urgent than if he had known of Fox News and reality television.

All credible polls are showing that our weekly rallies are waking up those who slept through last year’s election and galvanizing even many low-income folks who voted for the fraud only to be hammered by the cruel reality of this second-coming of Joe McCarthy.

Murrow’s words reminded me of the biblical call to put away childish things. A perfect nightcap for our protests’ constant, implicit reminders to take up adult things.

Perhaps my next sign, wherever I go, will read: Be Engaged, or Be Estranged.

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https://www.pinterest.com/pin/im-with-her-the-statue-of-liberty-a-protestresistance-postcard-medium-size-5×7–269653096419860199/

Microcosm of the Macrospasm

Before the City Council issued its “executive summary” of the investigator’s report on the public library, I worried that the full report might be “Bill Barred.”

All Trump’s former Attorney General needed was two pages made public before the report to make enough Americans think that The Mueller Report was “complete exoneration.”

And how convenient it was to think we need not slog through over 400 pages of legalese after the reassuring clarity of Barr’s two nothing-to-see-here pages.

Those of us who read the report—or at least its clear and damning conclusions regarding the all-too-real connection between the Kremlin and Trump’s 2016 campaign—wondered just how much deeper into authoritarian lawlessness America could plunge.

We still wonder.

Here in Newburyport, the City Council preceded its own summary by releasing a two-paragraph conclusion directly from the NPL report that may have dispelled my fear.

Problem is that this came on May 2 while the report is dated March 19. Last year, the investigation itself was delayed six months which gave the City Hall official most responsible for all the harm done time to find a new job way beyond the circulation of this paper.

Why the seven-week delay?

Ten days later came the “executive summary.” Not exactly a Bill Barr preemption, but lacking the details which led the investigator to her conclusions.

Sure enough, some were quick to treat the summary as if it was the full report, dismissing it as unfounded and one-sided. Such is the nature of a summary.

Following the mayor’s lead, they objected to the absence of testimony from the library head who resigned. Without reading the full report, they were unaware that she was asked to be interviewed but declined.

That a mayor, knowing this, would use that as grounds for discrediting the report is as damning as anything that led to the report’s conclusion.

Apparently, his apologists have been blinded by a conclusion so heavily in favor of the vols that they miss the closing line which includes the librarians, not as perpetrators of defamation, but as victims of the mayor’s “action and inaction.”

And so it is that, to some degree, the report has been “Bill Barred.”

Someone anticipated this and sent me the full, unredacted report, apparently hoping that I would preempt any attempt by City Hall to sanitize it before public consumption.

As one of the petitioners to the City Council for an investigation, I felt obliged to let the Council have its say.

However, since the issue is public defamation, the remedy, by definition, must be public. And it must be enough. Nor is there any fair, honest reason to conceal the roles of those who committed or accommodated the defamation.

While the Council’s summary, including the full two-paragraph conclusion of the report, were full vindication of the vols and an indictment of the mayor, his (then) chief of staff, and the director of Human Resources, it included few details.

Worse, it gave the impression of being skewed in favor of the vols, a perception that the mayor cynically cultivates by citing “methodology.”

To the contrary, the full, unredacted document includes accounts from librarians as comprehensive as those of vols. It cites interviews and exchanges of emails with as many if not more City Hall and NPL employees as those of vols.

Because the summary is absent even those basic details, the report’s conclusion has been taken by some to be a mere matter of opinion.

When questioned by the Daily News, the mayor—unable or unwilling to issue a simple apology, much less be held accountable—hid behind vague technicalities:

“I strongly disagree with the use of certain terms in the conclusion and underlying methodology.”

The only way to answer that is to reveal the details that led to the conclusion and prove the strength of the investigator’s methodology.

City Council thinks its summary is enough. City Hall would have withheld even that. Who needs Bill Barr if the whole thing is kept out of sight?

Where to turn?

No need to turn. Just click on what comes next:

NPL: The Murray Report

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https://faculty.lsu.edu/fakenews/protect_yourself/russiaandmuellerreport.php

Roadtrip for a Clippership

First conversation I ever had with Jack was just a few weeks before the ride. We have been acquainted maybe ten years, and have had exchanges via emails regarding Newburyport history. Got to know him a few years ago during a back-and-forth with emails about one of the annual William Lloyd Garrison Lectures which he organizes.

A few years earlier, he answered my call on social media for a CD by The Who. I’m a projectionist at the Screening Room, Newburyport’s small, downtown, arts cinema, and we had booked Lambert & Stamp, a 2014 documentary on the legendary rock-and-roll band. We wanted The Who in our sound system before the show. His was the first disc to drop in our mailbag. It had been a blank CD onto which a single song was burned, the title written with a black Sharpie: “Happy Jack.”

I’m so vain, I always thought that song was about me, so I laughed at the thought that someone was joking with—or at—me. Then I saw the note with the name, “Jack Santos.” I laughed again. Is he so vain he thinks the song is about him?

In mid-February, he put out a call on social media. He was making a day-trip out to Saugerties, N.Y., to pick up a framed print, and was looking for conversation and company. I jumped at the chance to see the Hudson Valley for the first time since my daughter graduated from Vassar in Poughkeepsie in 2000.

So, off we went for what was close to a non-stop 11-hour conversation counting a lunch break at a diner before we began the trip back. Trips we’ve taken, places we’ve lived, schools we’ve attended, books, films, music, food, mutual friends, and all things Newburyport and nearby. Most fascinating for me was Jack’s reason for the trip we were on: He bought a framed nautical print of John Stobart’s Dreadnaught for just $30–only to find that it would cost a few hundred to ship it.

Our opinions about politics were close enough that we gave it little time. But we did take this ride while the imbecilic change of name—from Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America”—was still prominent in the news. We hadn’t even reached Worcester before we were talking about planting a flag as soon as we crossed the state line and declaring that New York would henceforth be named “New Massachusetts.”

That we would be passing through the state capital might have added to the drama—“New Boston” sounds so much better than “Albany”—but we barely skirted the place before turning due south along the Hudson to Saugerties. Before long we came to a service plaza along the NY Thruway with its name on an enormous sign facing the highway: “New Baltimore.”

May have been the only time on the 450-mile round-trip we were both speechless. Someone beat us to it!

About two hours later, after the pick-up and lunch, we pulled in to New Baltimore for coffee to go. To exit the place, we were on this narrow road between the parking lot and the plaza. A bus facing us was parked on the right-hand side, and I spotted a pedestrian about to walk behind it. Jack was in mid-story, and I knew his sight-line was blocked. Not wanting to interrupt, I put my hand up over the dashboard, my palm facing him. He pumped the brakes, and the pedestrian crossed no more than two car-lengths in front of us.

But the story did not stop, nor did our conversation. Not unless you count an exchange we had somewhere between Worcester and Lowell nearly three hours later. We were talking about the habits of motorists and bicyclists and the rules of the road in Newburyport.

Me: “By the way, remember back at New Baltimore after we got coffee? Did you notice that the guy who crossed in front of us never looked our way?”

Jack, eyes wide: “Oh! I’ve been meaning to thank you for that! I had no idea he was there. But, yes, I did notice. He never looked.”

And I noticed that, though he wouldn’t interrupt our conversation with it for three hours, he offered thanks before answering the question when asked. That’s someone you want as company for a long drive, someone who knows that the journey is at least as important as its destination.

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*Dreadnaught* (1978), by John Stobart. Photo by Jack Santos over whose mantel it appears.

Deconstructing Disclaimers

If you’ve ever received documents, letters or emails from public officials, you may have noticed a “disclaimer” at the bottom of them.

I say “may” because much of the correspondence is generic or harmless formality. And for all I know, there may be more states and cities and towns that don’t bother with them than those that do.

Lately I’ve been trying to make sense out of the workings of Newburyport City Hall, which is a bit like trying to make sense out of Donald Trump’s discursive tangents on windmills, wild fires, the wetness of water, magnets, Elton John, kickbacks, cheerios, bird cemeteries, Hannibal Lecter, sharks and batteries, Bruce Springsteen’s skin, Gary Player’s size, trophy wives, and whatever else pops into his tilt-a-whirl mind. You may have noticed results of my efforts in recent blogs, and there may be more to come. So, be warned!

But there I discurse again on a tangent of my own. Back to the real purpose of this blog: To call your attention to disclaimers in hopes that you will check any that may come your way.

If you’re lucky, they either will not be there, or they will clearly state your right to share the information. So it is with this confirmation of the First Amendment:

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts considers most electronic communications to and from public employees to be public records and disclosable under the Massachusetts Public Records Law and its implementing regulations.

If you’re unlucky, you’ll feel the chill intended by this:

This communication from the City of Newburyport is intended only for the individual or entity to which it is addressed. If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you received this e-mail in error, please notify the sender immediately and destroy this e-mail and all copies of it. Thank you.

Gotta admit: “Thank you” is a nice touch!

Some say yes, some say no, I say go-go-go. At least in this case for the simple reason that state laws always supersede those of cities and towns. Seems, too, that the First Amendment supersedes a any state restrictions, but it is easy to imagine exceptions that would qualify as classified or privileged, which would be recognized ahead of time by both sides. Unless the sender and recipient(s) have already agreed to a restriction, the only lesson here is quite simple:

Don’t fall for the implied, empty threats of “hereby notified” and “strictly prohibited.”

Others may wonder about the contradiction. I’ll admit it gave me pause as I sat there scrolling through emails sent to a friend from office holders in City Hall, and one internal email from the mayor to a member of his staff. I made a few phone calls, including one to a friendly acquaintance I have left in City Hall.

The consensus was that the Newburyport entry was there only to frighten those who might believe it, that it had no teeth. Eventually, an official in the town next door sent a friend who inquired on my behalf a state document:

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The Secretary of State’s office has determined that most emails to and from municipal offices are public records. Consequently, confidentiality should not be expected.

I went ahead with an expose using direct quotes from and timestamps on the emails. But, as always in this quaint, seaside, tourist town, there’s a twist: On the very day I heard (indirectly) from Massachusetts’ Secretary of State, the local paper reports that the mayor has sent a memo to all city employees that tells them not to talk about City Hall business with city councilors. Quite a stroke in a public building with a front door directly across the street from a statue of William Lloyd Garrison–editor of the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator–who proclaimed, “I will be heard!”

Tempting to send the mayor a letter of thanks for proving my point before I make it. But now, when I do make it, it will seem like an understatement. Back to the drawing board I go.

Such are the workings of Newburyport City Hall. And I’ve already told you what it is like to try to make sense of it.

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Much Ado About 22 Pages

The city council’s “Executive Summary” of the investigative report on the Newburyport Public Library, has drawn quick reactions both in print and in conversation around town.

A few folks seem determined to discredit the report with claims that are plainly false or which verge on a condition akin to Catch-22.

For example, they object that the NPL director who resigned after less than a year in office was ignored, a complaint made by Mayor Sean Reardon as soon as the summary was released.

Fact: She was invited but declined to be interviewed or to answer questions via phone or email. Does anyone honestly think that by refusing to answer questions, someone at the center of a controversy can render any investigation of it “invalid” or “inconclusive”?

Also, that the report included just eleven interviews, and that it is skewed because the volunteers dominated the interviews.

Fact: The mayor’s replacement for the director who resigned and the long-time director who preceded her were among the eleven interviewees. As were the mayor and two of his staff, plus two ranking members of the NPL staff and one “Labor Counsel,” as she is labeled in the report.

That’s eight of the eleven who either sided with staffers or were, at best, neutral, leaving the archivist who was forced out, a historian who frequented the Archival Center, and exactly one (1) volunteer.

Furthermore, the investigator exchanged emails with numerous staffers and volunteers. When she asked the staffers for evidence, they submitted emails they received from vols that merely asked questions or requested information. Then, according to the report, they called the requests repetitive, leaving out the fact that they didn’t answer the initial questions or requests—hence, the repetition.

Critics also object that the vols were “eager” to talk and had a lot to say while the staffers were reticent. Well, yes, it was the vols who sought the investigation to clear their names while the mayor and his top officers called it unnecessary.

Something topsy-turvy about this last objection: Where I come from, a willingness to answer questions indicates people who want to reveal the truth. Reluctance to do so is indicative of those who would rather it stay hidden.

Some, including the mayor, object to the $12,000 allocated for the investigation of defamation of character by city employees. There’s no bottom-line answer for a question that begs a counter-question:

Just what is the price tag you put on your reputation?

Some staffers sent the investigator links of letters to the editor and op-ed columns that supported the vols and the Archival Center without any criticism of NPL staff. In a long paragraph soon after the timeline, you can almost hear the investigator’s amazement at having to explain that praise of someone does not constitute disrespect of someone else.

To be fair to those quick to discredit the report—and in at least one case to turn it into a finding against the volunteers—they haven’t seen the full document. Without such a foundation, any house is a house of cards.

Moreover, their complaints suggest that the report ignores what actually transpired that led to the vols being dismissed. Not only is that not true, but it distorts the original intent of the investigation.

An outside, independent investigator was assigned to determine how the dispute in the library was handled by City Hall. The 20+ page, small-font report—especially items 30 to 49 in the timeline—makes very clear reasons for the blame placed on the mayor, his former chief-of-staff, and the director of human resources.

Most comprehensively, it illustrates how City Hall’s “failure,” as it says in the conclusion, has allowed this “to drag out, in the arena of public opinion, at the expense of all involved, including the library staff…”

That last phrase may be surprising. May sound impossible. But if you cannot believe that the staffers themselves were harmed by the “action and inaction” of City Hall, you may want to go directly to item 34 in the timeline.

To do that, you need the full report. And given the lesson of discussing the report with those who have read just a summary, here it is with a preface and a note on the text:

NPL: The Murray Report

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