Dear UF: No donations for you until Gov D is gone

Feb. 17. 2026

TO:             University of Florida Annual Giving Program

FROM:       Michael T. Shay

RE:             Gator Nation Stand Up and Holler Giving Day

I am a proud Florida Gator, class of ’76. I have donated to UF when the budget will allow. I’m retired now and the budget allows but I am not donating and there is one reason for that: Interference in UF by Gov. Ron DeSantis and the GOP-run Florida State Legislature.

It is alarming to see the search for a UF president go on and on as we await DeSantis’s choice to rule the state’s flagship university, my alma mater. These right-wing politicos take their order from the Trump wing of the GOP and it has led to disaster on the national and international scenes.

So today, on the eve of Giving Day, looking at Mr. 2-Bits’ tie pinned to the bulletin board above my PC, I decline to donate until DeSantis and his MAGA goons are gone. Instead, I donated $25 to the Independent Florida Alligator. Their reporters are on the case and I will continue to follow the Alligator with interest and with whatever support I can send their way.

I leave you with this:

Two-bits, four-bits, six-bits, a dollar

All for an independent UF stand up and holler!

The crowd cheers.

Editor's Note: Read the Alligator's latest story on the unending UF presidential search.

America's Big Weekend: Tanks roll on D.C. streets, Marines protect L.A. from old hippies carrying signs

Top part of an image posted by an old friend from L.A. I told the friend I wouldn't use his/her/their name due to the fact that it's not a great idea to name names right now. If U.S. Senators can get arrested and  cuffed for asking questions of Fuhrerin K. Noem, than none of us are safe. My name is on this blog and has been floating in Cyberspace for 20 years. I cropped this to remove the bottom part of the poster because it was more inflammatory than necessary, or so says the editor. Something about betrayal, what some of us are feeling as Trump sends Marines to L.A. to shoot protesters. He is holding his grand birthday parade in D.C. tomorrow. Wonder how close it will pass to the Vietnam War Memorial just off Constitution Avenue, or the World War II Memorial at the far end of the Reflecting Pool? Will you be able to see those monuments from the tanks clanking down the pavement? I need to mention the name JOLEA on the image. Anyone know who that is, an artist or maybe an organization's acronym?

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!

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 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.