Word Back: Let’s Make America Again Again

Again.

Make America Great Again

I’ve been exploring this phrase as it has taken over conversations, rallies, bots, blather, mind games, etc.

It’s a work of genius, really. It gets everyone on the same page. It does, if you are a true believer in Trumpism. That’s what 70-some million people voted for, right? America is no longer great so we needed to fix it. And we will put in place a supervisor who really has never done anything I could call great. But let’s pretend he has and see what magic time in our recent history he wants to return to, revisit, make great again.

So many T voters were elderly as am I. They remember a time when a middle-class suburban lifestyle ruled lives and airwaves. Our Southwest Denver neighborhood was mostly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant or WASP. Not the kind of WASP who grew up in suburban New York City or Chicago. Our Dads made less money than yours. I say Dads because that’s who left the house to work.

Mom was a housewife or householder – she held the place together. Dad was a contract something-or-other for the Martin Company in Lakewood. I never really know what Dad did for a living. Martin eventually merged with American-Marietta and then Lockheed to become part of aerospace and defense work. Martin got his start building airplanes and so did Lockheed. Martin ranked 14^th among defense contractors and built the B-26 Marauder bomber and the B-29 Superfortress that dropped The Big Ones on Japan. Lockheed was most famous for building the P-38 Lightning, the twin-tailed warplane that all of us kids bought in model kits.

We knew our warplanes in the fifties. We were fed by movies, TV,  and comic books. We heard some stories from our fathers but nothing of great import because that’s the way it was. Dad was an infantryman, a Signal Corps radioman who marched through Europe with the rest of the grunts. His unit was lost in the Ardennes during the Bulge but eventually made it back to American lines. I wondered what it was like, being lost in a war zone, but he never elaborated on it. I saw the fellow vets huddled around the patio bar at or the grill during parties and knew they were telling war stories but we were never invited in. So we had to read about them in books or imagine them.

Most of the neighbor men were soldiers and sailors. No fighter pilots on our street and we would have known if there were any. The dad of the kid next door was a plumber. The kid’s name was John and last name Lennon. He went on to become famous as one of the Beatles. Just kidding. I don’t know what happened to him. On our other side lived an older childless couple. They were nice enough. What I wonder about is what they thought about living next to us, one of the largest families on the street. We were a rowdy bunch. Loud. They complained when Dad installed a set of monkey bars in the backyard. It was perilously close to the older neighbors’ fence and it apparently gave them nightmares about one of us swinging wildly on the bars and breaking our backs on their fence. Looking back, we think it hilarious but, older now, we have our own nightmares about injured children and grandchildren.

The man who lived behind us was an army mess sergeant. An FBI agent lived down the street. Across from, him was the only Hispanic family on the block and Catholics like us. One of the boys was the age of me and my brother and we rode bikes together. He took a spill and was impaled by his handlebars. They rushed him to the hospital. When he reappeared, he showed us his stitches and said his spleen was removed. A spleen? Who knew we had one?

We rode our bikes to Bear Creek and played war. Firecracker wars! No danger there. The creek tumbled from the high peaks but was tame by the time it reached the flatlands. Our father once pole-vaulted across the creek and we thought it amazing. Dad showed us how to skip rocks. We rode our bikes down steep hills and crashed in a cloud of dust and rocks. We explored the mall digs, daring each other to ride down into the holes.

We walked to school four blocks away. It was rare, even when it snowed, to see Moms bundle the kids into station wagons and shuttle them to school. I drive past my local elementary school at the end of the day and there is a traffic jam of SUVs idling on the street. Maybe that’s what MAGA people want? Make schools close enough to walk to! Well, that would mean more schools and more taxes to pay for them and the school library might have a book about two dads or a boy who wants to be a girl and all hell would break loose at PTA meetings.

Why can’t we go back to the days of PTA meetings where the only squabble was how many cakes to bake for the Halloween Walk? You remember that, right? Kind of like musical chairs but if you win you get to take a cake home and hope you are there early enough, dressed in your Popeye costume, to win a chocolate one and not one of those yucky coconut ones. A coconut cake! That mom must be a commie!

Ah, those good ol’ days.

Note to my son: Thank you for sending me the book “Dad, I Want to Hear Your Story: A Father’s Guided Journal to Share His Life and Love.” I will fill out some of the pages but most memories can be found on these pages which I’ve been keeping for 20 years. Most stories are true, although I have been known to take liberties. If I still covered high school sports for A Major Metropolitan Newspaper, I would be much more careful in my reporting. I would take time for better fact-checking and less snark. Enjoy!

All the propaganda I am falling for

 

Courtesy the Denver Public Library by way of a librarian/propagandist/writer
 from Wyoming. The downtown DPL was the first library my parents took me to
in the 1950s. Falling for propaganda even in kindergarten.

Word Back: Trump reached his goal: Make America Grate Again

Make America GREAT Again

Great as in...The Greatest Generation.

As he wrote his famous book on his Montana ranch, Tom Brokaw gave a lot of thought to the GREAT-est Generation. He gets credit for popularizing the term although its first documented use is by U.S. Army General James Van Fleet ("our greatest General" Pres. Truman called him) during the Korean War. Brokaw might cover it in the book but, well, you see, I never read it. As offspring of that generation, I already knew how great they were. 

It took some time to realize it. 

My parents, two Denver natives, born 1923 and 1925, who found themselves growing up in The Great Wall Street Collapse of 1929, the Great Depression, The Great War Part Deux, and America's post-war boom which, as far as I know, does not have "great" attached to it. Great Caesar's Ghost! That was a term The Daily Planet Editor Perry White in "The Adventures of Superman" made famous, first in 1946 on the radio show and then on TV in the 1950s. We Boomer kids loved Perry White's apoplectic outbursts. We loved cub reporter Jimmy Olsen getting blasted by White: "And don't call me chief!" And his outbursts at Clark Kent, "mild-mannered reporter for a great metropolitan daily." "Great Caesar's Ghost, Kent!" Kent just took the abuse as underneath all the mild manners and big eye glasses was a super man from another planet who "could leap tall buildings in a single bound" and round up passels of bad guys before breakfast. 

We loved Superman. Our parents were not so sure about this hero worship. But our first heroes were our World War II fathers. We sort of knew their good deeds. We played with his medals and shoulder patches and uniforms. He had a helmet and machine guns, booty from the war. We played war, having no idea what it was preparing us for. But our parents' generation accomplished great things and we knew it.

Vietnam and assassinations and Watergate almost banished the greatness. Today marks the 81st anniversary of the D-Day landings. The end of the war was in sight. Our fathers were still in great danger and we wouldn't know the stories first-hand had they been killed on that day and the others that followed in 1944-45. Death on all fronts. Our Denver neighborhoods swarmed with our fathers' memories and the ghosts of those who made it home or made it home and died later or were not quite right. You'd think all of that would be enough to lift a nation, cause it to avoid pointless wars and entanglements. You would think it would be enough to stop a charlatan and his goons from taking over our great country. 

Researching this post, I came across all kinds of references to great. I watched the first season of "The Great," a satiric retelling of the Greats of Russia: Peter and Katherine Very funny. Educational too.  

I came across this reference: "Literae humaniores, nicknamed Greats, is an undergraduate course focused on the classics (Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, Latin, ancient Greek, and philosophy) at the University of Oxford in England and some other universities."

Make America THE GREATS Again!

Finally, the Online Dictionary writes this: "great is sometimes confused with grate."

We can certainly see that Grate is a far better term for what America has become. Make America Grate Again. Yes, MAGA is grating, it grates the nerves. It's prime spokesperson, POTUS, may be the most grating person on the planet. His online rants are beyond grating, they get on my last serve.  Not so great.

Word Back: In America, We're All Bozos on This Red-White-And-Blue Bus

Part 2 of Word Back: America

I explore word choice in "Make America Great Again."

What was America like in my youth? Was it all fun and games?

Yes and no. 

The Wayback Machine takes us back to my collegiate years, 1969-1976. Yes, I was on the seven-year B.A. Plan. 

I remember the legendary Firesign "I Think We're All Bozos on this Bus" Theater perform at the UF Gator Growl in 1975? And wasn’t I there physically although my mind was wandering due to cannabis? I looked it up. Yes, Firesign Theater performed at the ’75 Growl. As I looked up the event's history at the HardyVision Institute of Pop Culture, I found this header: “Frequently Asked Questions: Gator Growl’s Stand-up Comedian History.”

Wow. That was my question. Thanks, WWW. Sometimes hummingbirdminds are glorious. I scrolled down to this:

When did Gator Growl start hiring big-name stand-up comedians?

In 1970, UF alumnus Buddy Ebsen (of “Beverly Hillbillies” fame) was invited to be the Gator Growl emcee. Of course, he’s not a stand-up comedian, but he did show up and lent a celebrity flair as he told showbiz stories and talked about how nice it was to be back.

In 1974, the musician Jim Stafford was the emcee. The Independent Florida Alligator reports that the Winter Haven native opened the show with his song “Wildwood Weed” blaring over the loudspeakers, and later in the show “he sang his big hit – ‘Spiders and Snakes,’ accompanied by six dancing girls.” 

In 1975, the show was emceed by the comedy duo of Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman of the Firesign Theater.

But it was Bob Hope in 1976 who was Gator Growl’s first nationally known stand-up comedian headliner. He would return to headline Gator Growl in 1979 and in 1983 at age 80.

I was right about Firesign! Jed Clampett was a UF grad – who knew? And Bob Hope hosted three times, once when I was allegedly in the crowd in ’76?

Instead of continuing my research into Firesign, which was the day’s assignment, I scrolled down to a video: “The Bob Hope Collection at the University of Florida.” Really? The Smathers Library has a huge Hope collection willed it by the Bob and Dolores Hope Foundation, most of it previously displayed at the World Golf Hall of Fame Museum at World Golf Village off I-95 west of Ponte Vedra Beach where they do a lot of golfing. The new World of Golf Museum is now in Pinehurst, N.C., near swanky Pinehurst C.C. Its largest display is a women’s locker room with more than 160 lockers of famous women golfers.

So comedian golfer Bob Hope’s collectibles are now at the UF Library? That is something. This is the same library where I spent hundreds of hours learning how to be a writer. I read through the reading list former radical Nelson Algren handed out in my creative writing class. I read Harry Crews' Esquire column because I couldn't afford my own subscription. I read it all. I wrote thousands of words in my journal. I wrote and wrote. 

And now I remember. In my youth, Bob Hope was my favorite comedian. And I wasn’t alone. As quoted in the 16-minute library video, Time Magazine’s Richard Schickel said he admired Hope’s “rapid-fire patter” and “as a kid growing up, I thought he was terribly funny as did most of the nation.” Me too. He and Bing Crosby were hilarious in their “Road” pictures. I loved how they broke the “fourth wall” to comment right at the camera, right at me sitting in suburbia. He had his own TV show. He traveled the world entertaining our troops fighting fascists and commies or just confused about why they were so far from home. He cracked me up. At one point, he was a starving artist in Vaudeville. The photo of that hopeful kid is in the UF collection.

I became a know-it-all college kid and Hope was out. He was part of the establishment. He was buds with Nixon and supported our foray into Southeast Asia. He was going to get us killed. He wasn’t funny anymore. I threw Bob Hope under the bus (the Bozo bus) because he was too establishment. 

Bob Hope tear-gassed me. Not him but him and his pals at Honor America Day on the National Mall on July 4, 1970. I return now to the American I was that day, a 19-year-old confused U.S. Navy midshipman on leave. I told the story in a 2019 blog post:

There were lots of fireworks at the July 4, 1970, event, not all of it in the sky. American Nazis attended to protest Vietnam War protesters and the Yippies staging a smoke-in at the Washington Monument. Police tried to maintain a DMZ between the protesters and Silent Majority picnickers. When that failed, park police fired tear gas at the rowdy hippies and gas clouds drifted over the multitudes. This led, as one reporter wrote, to a "mad stampede of weeping hippies and Middle Americans away from the fumes." At the same time, the U.S. Navy Band played the Star-Spangled Banner from the Lincoln Memorial stage.

I was in that mad stampede. I picnicked with my buddy Pat's family. When the fumes reached us, Pat and I scrambled to lead his grandmother and younger sisters to safety. Pat and I had been tear-gassed several times that spring at the University of South Carolina during protests of the Kent State killings. It was no fun for young people but could be dangerous for the elderly. We made it out of the gas cloud and, when the hubbub died down, we returned to our picnic. Later, we listened to Honor America Day jokes from Bob Hope and Jeannie C. Riley's version of Merle Haggard's "The Fightin' Side of Me." Then, despite the chaos or maybe because of it, we admired the bitchin' fireworks display. 

So this is America, all of it, all of us, me and Bob Hope and you. We're All Bozos on This Bus.

Word Back: America, Part 1: More a circus than a country

I began to write this Word Back column as Memorial Day weekend began. I was making fun of what America has become in 2025 but forgot about what America has been in my lifetime. I kept hearing the voices of all of those departed family members who served their country. They are gone but not silent. Their voices still ring out in the bardo.

If I attached no value to my lifetime on Earth, 1950-present, how could I value the present or maybe what the present should be? If I let the Trump years define my view of my country, well, then I will be stuck with that the rest of my days. That may be the source of so much anger among my Boomer friends. We remember a different country.

Really, though, what is the America I am mourning? Some of that is one forged by the family, the church, the Boy Scouts, and Catholic school. I can bore anyone of the younger generation with tales of the ‘burbs. “I remember when…” Not a conversation starter at a holiday gathering. MEGO! It’s just a part of our transitions along life’s timeline. We are forgettable and boring. Not to all. There is always one person who is curious about times gone by. I can see it in their eyes. The crowd will thin out and there’s one little person left, high school or college kid. I mention something that makes him/her think. A book, a film, an event. Maybe it’s my life as a writer, my career as an arts worker. It sounds more exotic than it really is but it’s my life, my truth. It is being destroyed daily which really give it a nostalgic feel.

What to make of America? Strangely enough, it may be Bob Hope. He was America’s comedian, a stand-up before stand-up was in the dictionary. I was looking for a list of performers at University of Florida’s Gator Growl, a homecoming ritual at Florida Field. I had been looking for a comedy skit that featured a chorus of “God Bless Vespucciland,” a satiric take on “God Bless America” substituting Vespucciland for America or Americus Vespucci, namesake of Americans North and South.

I thought: that sounds like something Firesign Theater would do. Remember them? Of course you don’t. They were part of a wave of satiric performers who emerged in the late-60s and early-70s as part of the counterculture. They were the stage-version of National Lampoon, a less druggy Cheech and Chong, a more buttoned-down version of Saturday Night Live and Second City. Firesign’s skits were edgy and brainy.

To appreciate “God Bless Vesapucciland,” you have to know America’s origins which you knew from school, home, and Scouts. You might ask here: what version of American history are you referring to? Is it Lynne Cheney and Newt Gingrich version or is it Howard Zinn’s? Is it the Christian Nationalist version wherein Jesus rode his dinosaur to an all-White private school? Or a world that’s millions and billions of years old and The Big Bang gave us the building blocks of homo sapiens with a few hiccups along the way?

Read Part 2 Friday

We take a Word Back: What to make of make?

In my 5/21 post, I brought up a term: word back. Used in a sentence: "I want my word back." Words in my English language have been stolen by corrupt people with no clue about the word's origins and what it really means. This is a travesty in my book, and I have a really big book on my side: The Oxford English Dictionary or, as we English majors call it, the O.E.D. Many of our public libraries used to have the book splayed open on a stand. Oddball students such as myself could peruse at their leisure, or make a beeline to it during a heated argument over the origin of a word or phrase. Yes, heated arguments about words. How I miss those. And the main reason I went dateless most of my college career.

Today's word is "make." And yes, it's the first word in the acronym MAGA. Those are the four words I will tackle during the next couple weeks. They are real words, not just initials on a red ballcap. 

What are we to make of make? Let the O.E.D. be our guide.

I hate to begin with a downer but, to save time, I must. Make can be a noun. In fact, it is a variant for maggot. Here's an example from Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” circa 1604: “Your worme is your onely Emperour for dyet, we fat all creatures els to fat vs, and wee fat our selues for maggots.”

In more modern terms, we have this line by Mae West in 1930's "Constant Sinner:" "The double-crossin' heel! The garbage-can maggot!"

You don't see "make" in there. But, it is a variant which means it's rarely used except by historical fiction writers and time travelers. But the reference comes alive in 2025 because critics poke fun at MAGA followers by calling them MAGATS or MAGHATS or just MAGGOTS. We don't use the term as it's below our station to do so even though it's hilarious. 

Make is usually used as a verb that means to produce. Let's let Merriam-Webster have a crack at this: Make (transitive verb): to bring into being by forming, shaping, or altering material; to lay out and construct, to compose or write.

Back to the O.E.D.: The earliest known use of the word is in the Old English Period pre-1150. It has Germanic roots. It's use in Old English includes references in literature, music, and religion. 

Does the O.E.D. have anything to say about sexual references in popular culture? I didn’t look. But I have some examples. Let's make out (kiss, etc.). “Making Whoopee” (song about kissing etc.), "I want to Make It With You," a popular 1970s song by Bread which is really about sex as in "Love the One You're With" or so says Stephen Stills. Let's make a baby is a line used by married couples in rom-coms. "Wanna make sex?" is not a common term although it has been used in dingy bars at closing time.

"To make" is a very positive act. A maker is one who makes. A Makerspace is a place dedicated to making things usually artwork. My artist daughter visits a local Makerspace. Many public libraries have makerspaces in their children's/teens sections. Many of these libraries are under attack by Trump & Company and local right-wing kooks. Many makerspaces are funded by government grants which are being eliminated by the GOP-controlled Congress.

Makers, themselves, are under attack for being too woke and not appreciating all the MAGA Goodness spread like fairy dust by Donnie and Elon. Arts workers jobs are being eliminated along with budgets for state and local arts agencies as well as the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services. To tell an artist he or she can't make any more is absurd. That's like telling us not to breathe. But it will hurt all of us, this pilfering of money for the arts and humanities. 

Merriam-Webster lists these antonyms (opposites): Dismantle, destroy, eradicate, abolish, take apart, etc., etc.

To Make. Think about it.

Word Back like you really, really mean it

Words are sacred.

Most writers agree with that. We use words to convey our deepest feelings. We also entertain and communicate with words, even persuade, or try to.

When threatened, we use them as weapons.

Under Trump and MAGA, creative people are under attack. Writers, artists, musicians, dancers, etcetera etcetera. The Bully-In-Chief employs bullying terms to attack. When Bruce Springsteen slammed Trump from the stage in Manchester, England, May 19, he said the following:

“In my home, the America I love, the America I’ve written about … is currently in the hands of a corrupt, incompetent and treasonous administration.”

Straight and to the point. I’m sure the crowd cheered as our English cousins love straight talk and sneer at bullies. They do more than sneer, as we saw during the Battle of Britain in WW2. They have also written cogent opinion pieces on Trump’s bullying ways.

This from "Journal of a Grumpy Old Man" column April 2020, when Trump was running against Joe Biden:

Trump lacks certain qualities which the British traditionally esteem. For instance, he has no class, no charm, no coolness, no credibility, no compassion, no wit, no warmth, no wisdom, no subtlety, no sensitivity, no self-awareness, no humility, no honour and no grace – all qualities, funnily enough, with which his predecessor Mr. Obama was generously blessed. So for us, the stark contrast does rather throw Trump’s limitations into embarrassingly sharp relief.

Trump fired back from his Bully Pulpit (sorry, Teddy, but Trump has bastardized your favorite word). As columnist Bill Goodykoontz put it in the Arizona Republic:

In a Truth Social post he [Trump] called Springsteen “Highly Overrated” and said, among other things, “This dried out ‘prune’ of a rocker (his skin is all atrophied!) ought to KEEP HIS MOUTH SHUT until he gets back into the Country, that’s just “standard fare.’ Then we’ll all see how it goes for him!”

Monday’s post was different in that it actually calls for retribution in the form of an investigation against Springsteen and Beyoncé, as well as Oprah Winfrey and U2 singer Bono. Here’s a taste: “I am going to call for a major investigation into this matter. Candidates aren’t allowed to pay for ENDORSEMENTS, which is what Kamala did, under the guise of paying for entertainment. In addition, this was a very expensive and desperate effort to artificially build up her sparse crowds. IT’S NOT LEGAL!”

All nonsense, of course, typical Trump chum for the MAGA swarm. Still, you can see the difference. Springsteen his usually cogent self and Trump just the opposite. Makes you wonder about the 70-some-million people who voted for him.

As a May 20 Rolling Stone article wrote under the header “Revenge:” "The president has long wanted to weaponize campaign-finance laws against an array of celebs and Democrats.”

Revenge. He so wants to be part of the crew but doesn’t have a creative bone in his body. Rockers can’t wait to sue him for using their songs without permission which he will do anyway. I still get a kick out of MAGA GOPers using “Born in the USA” as a campaign song. They've never listened to the lyrics. I guess MAGA crowds never tire of Kid Rock and Ted Nugent.

Trump took over the Kennedy Center, fired the board, installed his flunkies, and called for a June performance of Les Miserables and 10 cast members said no thanks and Trumpers had a fit. The new director of the Center threatened to black list the actors so they never perform again. Where have we heard “Black List” used before?

At a May 20 Kennedy Center board meeting Trump said the following: "And then they rigged the election, and then I said, 'You know what I'll do? I'll run again and shove it up their ass.' "

Our creative Bloviator in Chief.

Our mission is to word back. Not grammatically correct but it’s a quick and easy way to remember the mission. When Trump and his minions serve up their tangled words, we must word back. All dumb Trump utterances deserve a response. Blog, podcast, write op-eds to your local paper. Send postcards, lots and lots of postcards filled with words put to constructive use. I have a stack of creative postcards sitting by my desk. I do two a day. I’m using those cool new USPS stamps that show a waving flag and “Equality Forever” and “Justice Forever.” A postcard blitz is set for June 1. Get busy. Don’t just sit there, word back! Like you really mean it.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis fulfills General Jack D. Ripper’s deepest delusion

"Have you ever heard of a thing called fluoridation, fluoridation of water? Do you realize that fluoridation is the most monstrously conceived and dangerous communist plot we have ever had to face?

"I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids." 

No, that's not health czar Kennedy speaking. He's busy swimming with his family in D.C.'s free-flowing and polluted Rock Creek. It's not Trump himself, as he is pals with at least one batch of communists (Putin's gang) and is trying to strangle other communists in a place that rhyme's with whina, as in "Whina isn't China bowing to my precious tariffs?" It's not even Florida's Glorious Leader Ron DeSantis who, yesterday, signed a bill in Trump-like fashion to ban fluoride in Florida's water.

No, the lead-in quotes belong to the fictional General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb." Gen. Ripper unleashed Armageddon due to 1950s-style paranoia about the addition of fluoride to America's drinking water. 

This was a fear pushed by the conservative John Birch Society who saw a commie behind every tree, within every Liberal, even in Republican POTUS Dwight D. Eisenhower. The Birchers stoked the Red Scare and opposed the Earl Warren's Supreme Court's effort to integrate public schools. Their "Impeach Earl Warren" signs adorned highways all over the U.S. but especially in the unreconstructed South. Birchers even hated Mr. Rogers for his niceness and inclusivity. We once called them Right-Wing Nuts, then shortened it to Wingnuts, and, now, MAGA.

Project 2025 is the place where the John Birch Society meets Christian Nationalism. Their goal to remake America in their paranoid vision would be ridiculous if it weren't so frightening. They have been fomenting this hatred for generations and now it has come to pass. We are the fools who believed that America was at heart a good and strong and generous country, a place for everybody, while these nutcases were plotting their takeover. Sure, we still have humor, but there is a good portion of Americans who "don't get it." They have no sense of humor so Gen. Ripper's quotes fall on deaf ears. Trump has no wit and no humor; all he has is his greed and egomania. And his reins on a world superpower -- us, the U.S., America the formerly beautiful.

Love in the Ruins is not just Another Roadside Attraction

I awoke thinking of Walker Percy's "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World." I finished the 1971 novel late last night. It has a satisfying ending which I won't divulge. It's set five years after the main action of the novel. It wraps things up but I was still left with this thought: This is a satirical sci-fi novel about loss and grief. 

It struck me in the same way as the movie "Arrival." I had to watch the film a second time to understand the ending as well as the beginning and middle. I felt a bit dim that I didn't get it the first time around. The second time I wanted to cry. 

They gave Dr. Louise Banks the same gift the Tralfamadorians gave Billy Pilgrim in "Slaughterhouse Five." She became unstuck in time, gift from the Space Octopoids who came to warn Earth and seek our help for a future calamity. Dr. Banks saw her future tragedy but lived it anyway, a brave thing. 

In "Love in the Ruins," set in some future time, the 45-year-old Dr. Thomas More has already experienced tragedy in the cancer death of his young daughter followed by his wife leaving him. Oh yeah -- he also faces the end of the world. He does his best to assuage his grief and fear with scientific inventions, sex, and gin fizzes. Nothing works. "To be or not to be?" What does he decide?

Percy was the son and grandson of suicides. After a bout with TB during the World War 2 years, he became a doctor and then a mental patient at the same hospital. Percy suffered from Depression and PTSD just as war veteran Binx Bolling does in Percy's 1961 novel "The Moviegoer." 

He is well-known as the writer who helped publish John Kennedy Toole's "The Confederacy of Dunces," another award-winning New Orleans-set novel about an unhinged character. Toole, of course, committed suicide allegedly despondent when nobody would publish his novel. Suicide, I'm told, is more than a passing sorrow. It figures heavily in literature, especially Southern lit.

I almost quit reading this novel. Several times. It's wordy and Percy does a lot of showing off with language. In places, his humor is more Keystone Kops than dark satire. I did laugh out loud in spots. Dr. More keeps getting into messes he causes himself. A Buster-Keaton-kind of hero. 

I first read this novel when I was 23. I am now 74. In 1973, I saw it as a romp, the prof's great example of the dark humor of the ages. We also read Tom Robbins' 1971 kaleidoscopic novel "Another Roadside Attraction." That too was a romp with deep undercurrents and portents. Robbins was born in North Carolina and grew up there and in Virginia. He referred to himself as a hillbilly and his editor called him "a real Southern Gentleman." Both his grandfathers were Southern Baptist preachers. Later on, he discovered Washington state where he wrote his books. 

I should reread Robbins' novel and see how I react 52 years on. It may mean something different to me in 2025. 

Sad days for poets, writers, and historians in Washington, D.C.

A. Friend (not a real name) told me that she and her husband are traveling to Washington, D.C., this week to see the National Museum of African-American History. They want to visit it before the Trump people purge the exhibits and dismantle the building. A. Friend is not a Trump voter, not even a person undergoing what MAGA calls Trump Derangement Syndrome or TDS. She and her husband are just regular folks who visit museums and art galleries and historic sites during their travels. Over the years, she has sent me postcards from sites I never knew existed and I am the richer for it. 

Trump's Nitwits have already purged some of the exhibits from this museum. They have never met a museum they didn't suspect of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion or DIE which is an ironic acronym on its face. MAGA terms it DEI because, well IED was taken (Boom!) and IDE was too close to "Beware the Ides of March" which sounds too Shakespearean which might remind Idiocrats of a college English class they were forced to take in 1997. 

I wish A. Friend and her husband Godspeed and good luck. Make sure to take your REAL ID with you just in case there is an ICE sweep on the National Mall.

More bad news from D.C.: Trump's goons have eliminated the National Endowment for the Arts Literary Program and canned its staff including Director Amy Stolls whom I have worked with. The administration had already rescinded grants to literary magazines and presses whose only crime was admitting to DIE. 

I am going to list them here because I have read some of their books and they might not have existed with the writer's non-profit publisher, often hanging on by a shoestring. Here are the names:   Alice James Books, Aunt Lute Books, BOA Editions, the Center for the Art of Translation, Deep Vellum, Four Way Books, Hub City Writers Project, Open Letter Books, Milkweed Editions, Nightboat Books, Red Hen Press, and Transit Books as well as such literary magazines Electric Literature, McSweeney’s, n+1, the Paris Review, and Zyzzyva.

I have read books from many of these presses. I will mention one. Brian Turner's first book of poetry was published by Alice James Books. Poet, essayist, and professor Turner won the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award for his debut collection, Here, Bullet, the first of many awards and honors received for this collection of poems about his experience as a soldier in the Iraq War. His honors since include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, and the Amy Lowell Poetry Travelling Scholarship. His second collection, shortlisted for the 2010 T.S. Eliot Prize, is Phantom Noise, also published by Alice James Books on New Gloucester, Maine, a teeming metropolis filled with radical outfits such as the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Community, Pineland Farms, and the New Gloucester Fair. And one publisher. 

Brian's bio a pretty standard description of a contemporary American poet. But what's that part about the Iraq War? Oh yeah, Turner is a U.S. Army veteran, and was an infantry team leader for a year in the Iraq War beginning November 2003, with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. In 1999 and 2000 he was with the historic 10th Mountain Division, deployed in Bosnia and Herzegovina. 

"Here, Bullet" knocked me out. The title poem will tell you more about war's realities than any non-fiction book. Go to the Alice James web site and buy the book. Better yet, buy all of his books and e-books which include individual poems. 

During my time as literature program specialist at the Wyoming Arts Council, I brought Brian to our fall 2012 writing conference in Casper to read from his work and congratulate the writers he had chosen for the WAC's literary fellowships. Later, he joined two other veteran writers on a panel to discuss the role of soldier/poet in "Active Duty, Active Voices," featured Iraq War veterans and writers Brian Turner and Luis Carlos Montalván. The panel was moderated by Casper College professor and military veteran Patrick Amelotte. Montalvan suffered from severe PTSD and wrote the wonderful memoir "Until Tuesday: A Wounded Warrior and the Golden Retriever Who Saved Him." He brought Tuesday with him to Casper that October weekend. I worked with the state's military coordinator to bring other service dogs and their handlers to the conference to demonstrate what they do. 

I wish I could just end this blog with another Liberal's complaint about our current situation. But I have a sad story to tell. In December 2016, the 43-year-old Montalvan was found dead in an El Paso hotel room. He had left his dog Tuesday with a friend. He killed himself and was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery. Delivering the eulogy was Democratic Sen. Al Franken. Montalvan had persuaded Franken to sponsor legislation expanding the military dog program which passed a different Congress during different times. 

During his time in Casper, Montalvan said his favorite poem growing up conservative Cuban in South Florida was "Invictus." You know the one. It celebrates bravery. William Ernest Hanley wrote it and it's always been a favorite to memorize because it rhymes and is in iambic tetrameter. Montalvan memorized it. It ends this way: "I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul."

Rest in peace, Captain.

A good time to ponder "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World"

I am rereading "Love in the Ruins or The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World" by Walker Percy. He will always be a favorite of mine for his mournful yet witty 1961 novel of depression "The Moviegoer," winner of the National Book Award and considered a classic. It's well known that Percy assisted John Kennedy Toole's mother get "A Confederacy of Dunces" published. Toole left the manuscript behind when he committed suicide. Percy had many suicides in his family: his  grandfather, father, and (probably) mother. As a teen, he and his two brothers were taken in by his uncle, a poet in Mississippi. The die was cast.

"Love in the Ruins" is set in a future Paradise, Louisiana. Percy, a trained physician and one-time mental patient, spent much of his life in New Orleans, the setting of many of his novels. 

Love in the Ruins" (Open Road Media 2011 version on Kindle) was introduced to me via a reading list for a contemporary literature class taught by Phil Drimmel at Daytona Beach Community College in 1973-74 At the time, I was returning to college after two years as a college dropout and survivor of the 1969 Selective Service Draft Lottery (#128). A 1969 high school grad, I had failures  behind me as a biology major and as a Navy midshipman. I traveled some and lived in an educated northern city where I thought I might be a nursing student like my girlfriend but decided to break with the girlfriend and return to Florida and pursue the lucrative career as a fiction writer. The joke was on me, of course, but along the way I read plenty of good books. 

Percy's dark humor was a good match for the time as I also was entranced with the books of Vonnegut, Heller, and Kesey. I read Rolling Stone mainly for its gonzo journalism and National Lampoon for its wicked humor. And, like Percy's character, I was also a bad Catholic, renouncing the title of Mr. Catholic conferred on me by the Knights of Columbus in Daytona Beach at our Catholic high school graduation awards ceremony. A 50-dollar U.S. Savings Bond came with it, a little something to help with my education or writing career or maybe even some bad choices.

"Love in the Ruins" 1973 was a different read that "Love in the Ruins" 2025. I didn't really get it when I was 22. I liked the satire of this imagined future and psychiatrist Dr. Tom More's journey. I was entranced by his Qualitative Quantitative Ontological Lapsometer which reads the state of a person's soul and later is fine-tuned to read a person's mental imbalances. I was a bit creeped out by More's middle-ager's sex drive, my prudish Mr. Catholic eclipsing my own yearning for community college women. 

So I didn't get it all then. But now, I decided to pay attention to "another person's voice." That's what Borges told his students when they asked why they should read the books of others. 

This Bad Catholic is still reading this 1971 novel about an imagined Bad Catholic. I've been thinking a lot about this subject especially since Pope Francis's death. Just what is a Bad Catholic these days? Is it someone who religiously obeys every tenet of Catholic doctrine? Or all those questioners like Tom More, all those I knew from the 10:30 Catholic Community in Denver. Dutiful questioners all. 

Percy needs my attention, especially now. I am a bad Catholic living near the end of the world. A pope with the heart of St. Francis has died. The Antichrist is in the White House. Books from my past speak to me.

The book's July 3 section recounts a day in The Pit, the slang for the hospital's weekly Q&A among physicians and students. Dr. More speaks of his lapsometer. Meanwhile, a rival has arrived and hands out copies of the doctor's new lapsometer which disturbs its creator. 

As Dr. More says: "This device is not a toy. It could produce the most serious psychic disturbances... If it were focused over certain frontal areas or region of the pineal body, which is the seat of selfhood, it could lead to severe Angelism, an abstraction of the self from itself, and what I call the Lucifer Syndrome: that is, envy of the incarnate condition and a resulting caricature of the bodily appetites."

All hell breaks loose in The Pit. Male and female students glom on to each other. A professor admires the beauty in a male student's face. Fistfights break out. 

Human appetites are unleashed with the predictable results. As one of the doctors tells More: "Your device has triggered a mass hysteria. Like the St. Vitus's Dance in the Middle Ages. These are strange times." 

Indeed. Maybe it takes a Bad Catholic to write about strange times.

I am at the 71% mark on Kindle. I will finish this book. 

As it turns out, Everything is Tuberculosis

I saw John Green on CBS Mornings a few weeks ago. He spoke about his non-fiction book “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.” Green, I thought, is that guy who writes teen books with quirky titles such as “The Fault is in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down?” What would this guy know about a deadly bacterium? A lot, it turns out, and he’s written a short and engaging book about it.

We experienced TB on the Irish immigrant side of our family, with Great Aunt Molly dying from TB in the 1920s. The other side of the family fled the Potato Famine and I assume some carried TB with them as some died young. I had asthma as a kid as did my sister Molly who would turn blue before my mother the nurse could give her an injection. She’s fine now, getting along in years which is what we all expect to do. I remember asthma attacks before inhalers and miracle drugs. Panic sets in when you can’t breathe and that just adds to the problem. People die from severe asthma attacks. It’s always called an attack, whether from alliteration or from sudden onset. You don’t hear much about Pneumonia Attacks or even TB Attacks.

The thing about TB that I didn’t know is that it is a slow killer. Untreated, it consumes patients from the inside, thus “Consumption.” That’s part of the problem. TB bacteria sneak in and it can be far along before diagnosed. Even when diagnosed, drug treatments are expensive and often unavailable in developing countries. So USAID was (must use past-tense now that we dwell in Trumpistan) an important agency for TB patients in Sierra Leone and other West African nations.

That’s where Green takes us, into the life of Henry Reider, a kid so riven with TB that Green thought he was 8 years old and not 13. I explore Green’s book along with some literary history (John Keats and “Bright Star”) and how the Rocky Mountain West became the country’s TB treatment zone. Read on.

Drive-by photos of a closed Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home

 

Photos of the Flannery O'Connor Childhood Home Museum in Savannah (building in center). It was closed to visitors on the day we were there. Built like a brick fort, sturdy and tall. Savannah's early residents built tall so they could fire down on their enemies, whoever they might be: warriors from local tribes, the King of England's soldiers, Yankees, The Misfit, or any rabble who might storm the gates. This makes it almost impossible for this fallen-away Catholic to access the place in my e-scooter. The backyard garden might be accessible but it was closed tight on Wednesday but open Friday-Sunday. It's the meeting place for the Peacock Guild writing group. Members are critiquing and polishing their work for a June reading. As the story goes, the young O'Connor taught her chicken to walk backward in the garden. Read my 2023 blog: "In Flannery O'Connor's Garden of Life, chickens walk backward"

How the Great TB Sanatorium Craze came to the Rocky Mountain West

Part 2 of my review of John Green's "Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection." Read Part 1 here.

There was a rush in the early part of the 20^th century to isolate humans with TB, an incredibly virulent bacterium. Call it the TB Sanatorium Craze. Colorado jumped on the bandwagon early. So did New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

While I am a Colorado native, I spent 33 years living and working north of the border in Wyoming. The Wyoming State Legislature approved a TB hospital in Basin and it opened in 1927 . This probably was due to the Legislature’s tendency to parcel out important government functions: Cheyenne gets the capitol, Laramie gets the university, Basin gets the patients of a worldwide plague. It was only fair. As the years progressed, TB patients sought out famous hot springs in Saratoga and Thermopolis. The steam, heat, and sunlight were viewed as crucial TB treatments.

The Wyoming Legislature discussed a TB sanatorium as far back as 1909. During that same time, the National Tuberculosis Association sponsored a well-attended “Tuberculosis Exhibit” in Cheyenne and Laramie. The NTA traces its roots to 1904 when concerned citizens formed the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis. This was their advice during the Wyoming tour, as outlined in the 1910 edition of The Journal of the Outdoor Life from the University of Michigan:

“The cure consists of plenty of good, simple food, constant fresh air during the night as well as during the day, constant rest in the fresh air until there is no fever , and then carefully and gradually increased short walks, proper care and washing of your body, and proper clothing  and, finally, a determination to get well and to be cheerful in spite of everything, and only to look on the bright side of things, however hard your circumstances may be.”

Sanatoria offered all of these things with the predictable results: The Wyoming State Archives in Cheyenne shows that in 1910-1912, when most counties in Wyoming had between one and 20 cases of TB per year. Albany, Park, and Carbon counties were on the low end with one to three cases per year (Converse County had zero!) and Sheridan, Sweetwater, and Laramie counties were on the high side with Laramie County showing 18 cases in 1911.

At the beginning of the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl in September 1930, patient census at the Basin Sanatorium in September 1930 showed 15 women and 37 men. When effective TB treatments such as streptomycin emerged in the 1940s, the heady days of sanatoria came to a close. Old Archives photos show the building in Basin where patients struggled to breathe. Sad, isn’t it, that some settlers came West for breathing room but died for lack of breath?

Why is Green’s book important to us in the 21^st century? The U.S. has a 99-percent TB cure rate and about 10,000 patients yearly although that’s going up. Green takes pains to tell the story of Americans with TB and the tough time they had before modern meds. The Rocky Mountain West, especially, was home to a number of sanatoria for TB patients. The Wyoming State Archives has documents tracing the origins of the lone state TB sanitorium in Basin.

Construction began in Basin in 1926 and the Sanitarium was opened in May of 1927. By 1969 all references to tuberculosis were removed at the Wyoming Sanatorium due to the significant decrease in the incidence of tuberculosis in the state. It was replaced by the Wyoming Retirement Center which provides nursing care to residents with mental health, dementia and other medical needs.

Colorado boasted plenty of facilities. Green writes that some cities in the West were founded by TB. Colorado Springs is one of them. National Jewish Hospital in Denver had a treatment center for consumptives. It’s still known as one of the best pulmonary hospitals in the country. Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora opened in 1918 at the tail end of World War One and its specialty was treating men with TB and those whose lungs were damaged by gas attacks.

The U.S. Army sent my unhorsed cavalry officer grandfather to Fitzsimons as he struggled with a bad case of pneumonia aggravated by chemical weapons used in the war. My grandmother, an army nurse and veteran of a M.A.S.H-style unit in France, treated him there. They married in 1922. Their eldest was my U.S. Army Signals Corps veteran father who in 1950 married a U.S. Navy-trained nurse and here I am.

Lung ailments have figured heavily in my family. My brothers, sisters, and I struggled with asthma in our youth. I almost died after a bad reaction to horses at a Weld County ranch. This pretty much demolished my dreams of replacing The Lone Ranger.  

Movie westerns have featured tubercular characters. In “Tombstone,” Val Kilmer’s Doc Holliday gambles, drinks, shoots people, coughs and sweats, not necessarily in that order. A gambler calls him a “dirty lunger” and pays the price. Gunfighter Johnny Ringo calls him a “lunger” and also pays the price. The message is clear. ”I’m your huckleberry,” Doc says, before or after shooting someone. Not bad for a lunger or consumptive patient. Doc succumbed to consumption in 1887 in Glenwood Springs, Colo. He went there in 1886 when told that the hot springs had curative powers. He apparently was misinformed. Visit his grave at the Doc Holliday Grave and Hiking Trail. Flatlanders beware: it’s located more than a mile high and it’s all uphill. Healthy lungs required.

One of our U.S. presidents, sought out the West’s fresh air and healthy lifestyle in North Dakota. Theodore Roosevelt thrived, returned to politics, declared Wyoming’s Yellowstone a national park and Devils Tower a national monument, and the rest is history and myth-making.

North Dakota’s San Haven Sanatorium in the Turtle Mountains treated TB patients from 1909 until the 1940s. As final plans were made for a 1911 opening, Superintendent of Public Health Dr. J.L. Grassick referred to TB as “The Great White Plague” because physicians marked TB-infected lungs with white arrows and healthy ones with black arrows. and assessed the illness as more a lifestyle choice than a microscopic rod-shaped bacillus with plans of its own.

“Wherever man builds his habitation, depresses his vitality by overwork or by debilitating excesses, lowers his powers of life by using insufficient or improper food, surrounds himself with the expectoration of his fellows and deprives himself of the blessings of God’s free air, there you will find it.”

Sanatoriums such as San Haven offered a higher altitude than the surrounding prairie, plenty of God’s free air, proper food, and all the available treatments. One of the more gruesome ones was puncturing and deflating one sick lung to nurture the other. During its time, more than 50 percent of the patients died.

And then came bacteria-battling antibiotics. San Haven closed. The abandoned building is billed on N.D. tourism sites as a good place for ghost-hunting. No mention of how the ghosts of The Great White Plague feel about this.

To John Green’s credit, the book includes blasts at the healthcare industry (especially – surprise! -- major drugmakers) and global policymakers. He does this surprisingly quickly in 208 pages (hardcover) and 256 in paperback. I read it on my Kindle. He requires more pages to describe faulty stars and why those turtles go all the way down, but fiction is one thing and non-fiction is another.

The story that holds “Everything is Tuberculosis” together is one 13-year-old’s journey. Green is a fine storyteller and the one he tells about Henry keeps the reader hanging on to the end.

Postscript: A big thank you to my son Kevin, a writer and tech guy in Cheyenne, for hands-on research at the Wyoming State Archives. As always, the Archives staff went out of their way to help a researcher.

John Green tells us why "Everything is Tuberculosis"

Did you ever wake up with a nagging cough and wonder “Is this the day I get tuberculosis?” Not bloody likely if you live in England or Germany or Denmark or any other place with an advanced healthcare system (even the U.S., despite its flaws).

If you live in Africa’s Sierra Leone, it might be another story.

That’s the one author John Green tells in his new book, “Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection.” You may know Green from his coming-of-age novels “The Fault is in Our Stars” and “Turtles All the Way Down.” These books for young readers have been made into movie versions you can see in the streaming world.

TB has not been one of Green’s main themes – until now. It grew out of a visit to West Africa with a health organization. There he discovered that poor countries struggle with the affordability and availability of TB medications. Just one of the reasons that 1.25 million people still die annually from the world’s most infectious disease.

Historically, TB patients were described as victims of consumption or labeled “consumptives.” It may sound like a less scary term than Mycobacterium tuberculosis, phthisis, pulmonalis, or the great white plague. But consumption is a quick description of what TB does to the body: it consumes it. When it advances unchecked, it dissolves your lungs, renders you breathless, and then you die.

Readers of classic literature recall poets with consumption such as John Keats and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Keats is sentimentalized because he wrote his gorgeous poems while being consumed by ravenous but slow-growing TB bacilli. Its slow pace makes it a particular tough disease to treat. It also, alas, gives writers lots of time to chronicle it.

This was captured in Jane Campion’s film “Bright Star” about the infirm Keats and the true love he found during his dying days. This sentimentalization, according to Green, painted male Romantic-era poets as heroic sufferers and stricken white women as pale and beautiful as marble statues. American poet John Ciardi may have said it best in “A Trenta-Sei of the Pleasure We Take in the Early Death of Keats” from his collection "Echoes: Poems Left Behind:"

The species-truth of the matter is we are glad (of what?)/to have a death to munch on. Truth to tell (which truth is what?)/we are also glad to pretend it makes us sad./When it comes to dying, Keats did it so well (how well?)/we thrill to the performance…

The romance of TB faded as it kept killing people in new and ingenious ways, and that many of those victims were not poets but the guy next door and millions in poor countries. Its discovery by Dr. Robert Koch in 1882 as a microscopic bacillus, a highly contagious one, suddenly made TB a dirty word.

Green meets Henry Reider is a poor black youngster in Sierra Leone with Multiple Drug-Resistant Tuberculosis (MDR-TB). He has several strikes against him, as he’s poor and he’s black and he lives in an African country without the medical resources required for long-term treatment. When Green first meets him, the boy is so small and thin that he looks like he’s eight and not thirteen.

Green points out that lack of health care spending is rampant in Africa. If Sierra Leone spent the same percentage of its budget on TB treatment as we do in the U.S., that would be 48 U.S. dollars per patient per year. That is less than what one round of TB prescriptions would cost. These medications are expensive and need to be taken for months if not years. Green writes that the country has its own medical schools, hospitals and doctors. But the drugmakers in the West reap big profits and their attorneys work hard to extend patents. Millions with no insurance are SOL.

Read the second part of my review of "Everything is Tuberculosis" next week.