John Fabian Witt’s new book asks if the American Experiment can be saved

Beginning Oct. 16, I will be reading John Fabian Witt’s book “The Radical Fund: How a Band of Visionaries and a Million Dollars Upended America.” I ordered the book after reading his guest essay in Monday’s New York Times, “How to Save the American Experiment.” The graphics caught my eye, a drawing of a big red hand pushing down on a platform and a group of people pushing from below. The Big Red Hand looked like it belonged to a marble statue or a giant, ponderous and huge. During other times, the resisters might be labeled “the people” or “the masses,” The Masses being one of the leftist mags of the 19-teens (later New Masses).

In any case, Witt’s essay grabbed my attention. How do we save the American experiment? I’ve been asking that very question since Trump took office for the second time. I have good days and bad. This essay gave me some hope.

Witt captured me when he talked about how a messy war and a pandemic bred a decade of strife that ended in a failed economy and then to a surprising resurgence.

Yes, the 1920s. A time of race riots and red-baiting and the Insurrection Act. Unions pushed workers to organize and the workers protested and were clubbed by guys that acted a lot like 2025 ICE Storm Troopers.

Hard times followed by harder times followed by a global war that birthed the U.S. as a global power. Until it lost its way.

I am obsessed with the 1920s. I just finished writing a historical novel set in 1919 Colorado. It will soon be published by Michigan’s Ridgeway Press. Its characters come to Colorado to start anew after war and sickness and failed dreams. They come to reinvent themselves. Colorado, Denver in particular, has always been a place for people to find themselves. Find gold, too, whether it be the actual metal or penny stocks or pot farms or the fresh powder of mountain ski slopes. As a native Denverite, I admire the magic but know the shortcomings. Historians such as the late David Halaas and Tom Noel have helped me delve into the past. I was a childhood fan of the Denver Public Library and spent many adult years in the Denver History Museum and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. A wonderful place. I don’t live there any more. Why? I’m, an American. I move on. It’s what we do. I’m now back to Florida. As you know from late-night comedians, Florida has its own problems.

Witt’s message is not so much “move on” but dig in, into those entities that make a difference. He writes about Charles Garland, a millionaire who used his fortune to fund the American Fund for Public Service or the Garland Fund. It was overseen by muckraking writer Upton Sinclair and ACLU founder Roger Baldwin. They funded entities that pushed for civil rights, a living wage, and, in the 1930s, Social Security. Woodrow Wilson’s presidency petered out and led to the totalitarian tendencies of Harding and then to rich-boy Democrat Roosevelt who surprised us all, both hard-right Wyoming ranchers and big-city liberal labor agitators.

America, the Arsenal of Democracy, helped win the war and reaped the fruits of its labor and good fortune to bring prosperity in the 1950s and its most annoying demographic cohort, the Boomers. Say what you will about us but we helped the good times roll and now, well, we face the same political shitstorm as our offspring.

So, I write scathing letters that seem to fall on deaf ears. I support organizations such as the ACLU and the Florida Democrats and Wikipedia which is now under attack by the MAGA crowd. I support the independent WyoFile in Wyoming and the Independent Florida Alligator at UF, my alma mater. They are all under attack and need us. Protests are great but pointless if you don’t act and then vote in 2026 and 2028.

As the actor astronauts in “Galaxy Quest say: “Never give up…and never surrender.”

Our daughter Annie begins the new year by getting "washed in the ocean"

A fine day for a baptism. 

Our daughter Annie arrived with Chris and I for the Salty Church’s annual New Year’s Day full-immersion baptism. Annie was joined by 51 others who all wore the same black T-shirt with this inscribed on it in white letters: “Washed in the ocean freed from my past today I am new” (see photos). Annie, Chris, and I were joined by family members and friends and we trudged through the soft sand to the water. 

Some of us walked, I trudged. But I was prepared. I used my high-performance rollator walker to blaze a trail through the sand. The rollator was equipped with big knobby tires which, I surmised, would be a better machine for the beach than my tiny-tire-and-tennis-ball-equipped walker. I pushed it forward and then walked to it, pushed again, walked, so on and so forth. The idea was that if I pushed it as I did across our living room, too much weight would dig-in the wheels. Now I’m not saying I am too much weight but I am and my ploy worked for a time. That’s when Joe the Biker arrived to assist. Dressed in black Boot Hill Saloon T-shirt, jeans, and big boots, he was equipped for riding his Harley and to assist a handicapped old guy through the sand. He stomped down the pesky sand granules to make a runway that paved the way to water’s edge wherein dwelt the hard-packed sand. Joe said he liked baptisms and while he was not one of the baptizees, he was happy to be here and considered it a blessing that he was sober and alive and well in ’25 and praised Jesus and I said Amen.

I was mobile via my legs the last time I was on this stretch of beach 10-plus years ago for my brother Dan’s funeral or send-off is a better term. I joined a long line of mourners that had walked from the Salty Church to the Grenada approach and onto Ormond Beach. Surfers paddled out for the appropriately-named Paddle Out and airplanes piloted by Dan’s friends flew over in the missing man formation.

But today was for the living and a fine day it was. Blue skies, gentle breeze, modest waves. Annie donned her T-shirt and joined the crowd. The Salty Church preacher greeted us, said a prayer, and issued the day’s instructions. I could tell Annie was a bit nervous but also giddy with possibilities. She is the Evangelical of the family, attendee of conservative Christian churches and one who dwells within the web of True Believers. This is the last cynical thing this fallen-away Catholic will say on this post. For this day, I am not a sarcastic liberal. I have written here about my recent experiences in a Seventh-Day Adventist Hospital where doctors and nurses and CNAs and therapists worked for 25 days to save my life. I am indebted to them and to an organized religion that would build a healing place and hire healers to manage it. While in a coma, I dreamed of reaching out and touching the hand of God or someone very much like him or her. I listened to the twice-daily prayers over the loudspeaker and said some of my own prayers. I allowed others to pray for me and took communion from a lay communicant from St. Brendan the Navigator Catholic Church. I absorbed departing greetings such as “Have a blessed day.” I often repeated their blessings.

I have much to learn from the congregation of human beings.

One of those things is that my daughter, whose struggles with mental health issues have caused her much pain, will now be baptized. I watched as two church members said a prayer, lowered her into the water, and how she sputtered and smiled when she emerged. She was touched by the spirit and the fact that her aunts and uncles and nieces and family friends came out to see it happen. And then we convened at our house for cake and tea. Annie opened gifts which included earrings and necklace crosses and a giant conch shell my brother brought from Palm Bay. The cake was delicious and a chocolate phantasmagoria.

All told, a glorious day.

Happy New Year: Fear and Loathing in 2025 America

A friend once asked me to name my favorite writers. It's a long, long list, but I gave him the top five: Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Flannery O'Connor, and Hunter S. Thompson. Fine writers all.

My friend who shall remain nameless made an astute observation: "But you don't write like any of those authors." 

A fair point. I don't write like any of them. But how could I? These writers had their own styles that are much admired and frequently copied. That's what beginning writers do: imitate their maestros. But you eventually move on to find your own voice if you stick with it. I've stuck with it and crafted my own style and it apparently has few fans in the publishing world but that's life in the fast lane. 

I haven't given up and I'm called to write for a number of reasons that make up my 74 years. My parents read to me and I gobbled up Yertle the Turtle and Winnie-the-Pooh. I read cereal boxes at the breakfast table and billboards as I peered out those big windows in post-war automobiles. I wrote stories for my third-grade teacher Jean Sylling and she put one up on the bulletin board. It was about aliens in a flying saucer landing in my Denver backyard. I was embarrassed but also thought it a bit grand, a story I wrote put up for all my classmates to see. 

My father the accountant had a big library and I read through many of them without really understanding what was going on. My mother usually had a baby in one arm and a book in the other. That's who introduced me to "Catch-22." She read and laughed and I was curious but was only 11 and not interested enough until I was in high school and close to draft age and Heller's novel haunted me and made me laugh. I turned on my chums to the book and its hilarity resonated with them but we rarely talked about the war part. 

Strange happenings were all around and I soaked them in but did not write about them. My parents and eight brothers and sisters were all distinctive entities and I inherited their nuances. My forebears visited my dreams. I attended Catholic School and irony and metaphors surrounded me but I was not aware of it until later, much later. I watched "Get Smart," "The Monkees," and the evening news and they all kind of blended together. Sex was a puzzle that we Catholic teens were left to figure out on our own and it's still a work-in-progress. 

My childhood and teenhood were all precursors to hard lessons to come. I really thought I had it made at 18 and the world was my oyster although I'd never eaten an Atlantic Ocean oyster as I surfed in that salty sea whenever I didn't have to take care of my siblings or go to school or go to work to afford that school. I dated the most beautiful creatures on Planet Earth but they might as well have been the imaginary aliens that landed in my yard in my third-grade story. 

Speaking of alien life forms: I am no closer to understanding the human condition than I was in the third grade. I refer to recent happenings in the U.S. of A. It is past time to revisit Thompson's Fear & Loathing chronicles and Yossarian's naked self and Billy Pilgrim's time jumps and the residents of Macondo and O'Connor's Misfit. I may not fully understand them but they live inside me every second of every day.