Always a good time to read Maya Angelou's Still I Rise

I look to poetry to ease the pain I feel at the ransacking of my country's democratic principles -- and the destruction of our White House. I didn't automatically go to the poets and writers of the 1920s and 1930s, that era of uprisings in the writing world. I didn't go to the 1960s and 1970s, my time as a young man trying to understand why an America I worshipped was murdering people in Southeast Asia in my name. I sometimes send my readers to that past. But I came across Maya Angelou's poem "Still I Rise" on the Poetry Foundation's web site. It speaks to this time, when fascists are in charge of the three branches of our government. I'd say read it and weep, but if you ain't weeping already, I have no words.

But Maya Angelou does:

Still I Rise (excerpt)

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Read a presidential book on NO KINGS DAY 2025

My presidential bookcase, No Kings Day

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.”

As Pete Seeger sang: "We're waist deep in the Big Muddy, the Big Fool says to push on"

I've spent a lot of time in the 19-teens and 20s lately. A tumultuous time, even if you concentrate on one summer in America as does Bill Bryson in his nonfiction remembrance of 1927. Much of my time has been spent on America's involvement in World War 1 and the decade that followed. The time of my grandparents, you know, those olden days to me or to them, in many ways, golden days. It's shocking to delve deeply into a short span of history and see how much you don't know, how much I didn't know. 

I've written one novel based on my grandmother's diary as a nurse in France 1918-1919. It will be published soon by Ridgeway Press in Detroit. I've written another one set in 1922 in Colorado and other sites in the U.S. That one is in final edits. I read memoirs and fiction and poetry of the era. A few decades ago I read John Dos Passos's U.S.A. Trilogy. I dug out the trilogy from my local library. An amazing series, ahead of its time in its combination of fiction and nonfiction. I read many of the WW1 poets, the very angry ones and others. I read about fascism in its many forms, including its roots in Italy's tragedies in The Great War. 

I read plenty of material and saw many movies of those times. As I worked on my novels, I never thought that the war against fascism would come to America. That was a nightmare scenario best left to writers such as Philip K. Dick. 

But here we are, waist deep in The Big Muddy as sang Pete Seeger. The Big Muddy is 2025 America. Wars come home in so many ways. It also may become relevant as Trump sends his masked goons and National Guard soldiers to Memphis on the Mississippi. The fascist strain in American politics has risen again, much as it did prior to World War 2 with America First. I was shocked to learn how Italian fascist pilots vied with budding fascist Lindbergh to fly the Atlantic. They were welcomed as heroes by our homegrown fascists who sometimes battled protesters, communists and others, as they barnstormed the U.S. There were American fascists in 1927 and they are the progenitors of Trump's fascists (his father was one). 

I looked for feisty poets in the Poetry Foundation's category of "Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment." Subtitle: "Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises." Some great ones featured. I saw Maya Angelou's "And Still I Rise" and wondered how rabble-rousing it might be. Angelou was heroic in her resistance but also served as U.S. Poet Laureate and President Bill Clinton's inauguration speaker with "On the Pulse of Morning." These roles require a certain amount of diplomacy, a less-radical approach to topics. I worked in the corporate and government worlds so I know a bit about when to hold still and when to push on with my blog. But maybe I don't care anymore.

"And Still I Rise" is fiery and beautiful when read by Ms. Angelou. I urge you to watch her recite it on YouTube. If the link fails, read it on the Poetry Foundation site.

Bill Bryson’s “One Summer, America 1927,” when “America First” came to call

As I read Bill Bryson’s “One Summer: America 1927,” I realized that our history is comprised of an amazing number of knuckleheads and heroes. And sometimes, they are one and the same.

Charles Lindbergh, for instance. He became a hero overnight when he flew The Spirit of St. Louis over the Atlantic Ocean, the first solo flight by airplane. Many had attempted it. This scrawny bland fellow from Detroit accomplished it. Thousands of Parisians swarmed him when he landed at Le Bourget Airport. Ticker-tape parades in the U.S. followed. Crowds greeted him everywhere. He often took to his airplane to escape into the wild blue yonder.

By the time the U.S. entered World War II, he was disgraced by his embrace of eugenics and Nazism. He participated in the first “America First” campaign and proudly wore an air medal awarded him in Berlin by Herman Goering, one of the architects of the Nazi scourge. He survived to be one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials. “Lucky Lindy” tried to redeem himself by training American pilots in the Pacific during the war. But damage had been done. His name was stripped from all those streets and schools and airfields named in his honor.

You can still see The Spirit of St. Louis displayed at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum along the National Mall in D.C. I’ve taken my family there many times. The plane, so flimsy and tiny when compared to modern aircraft. It’s quite possible those other aircraft wouldn’t exist without it.

Bryson has been one of my favorite writers since his 1989 book, “The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America.” Writing humor is no mean feat and he does it with aplomb in so many books. Humor helps you understand contradictions such as Lindbergh, Babe Ruth, and Al Capone. But that’s why I read, to be entertained and educated in the ways of the world. This book did that. I almost quit several times.

My sister Eileen gave me the trade paperback a month ago. She enjoyed it and knew I was working on novels set in the 1920s. I am of an age where reading big books with small type is difficult. I read to page 80 in bright light but put it down. Then I remembered I have a Kindle Reader for such challenges and I borrowed the book from Libby. Ah, a lit screen and large type. Heavenly. I still put it aside for other things until Libby warned me that I had only five days left on my loan. I hunkered down and read the rest, including a bit of the back matter. So much research!

Sitting in front of another lit-up large screen, I wonder about a century from now, 2125, when a book comes out about 2025. The year of Trump and A.I. Who will be the heroes and villains? As someone who’s been resisting Trumpism since 2016, you can probably guess my answer. “One Summer: America 2025.” A nonfiction tale, told with panache by someone. First we have to survive this period of U.S.-bred fascism and racism. First that. Will books survive?

Big Bill Thompson was mayor of Chicago in 1927. Chicago is in the Trump crosshairs as are all cities in blue states. Big Bill knew that to rule the people must be kept clueless so, writes Bryson, “he started a campaign to remove unAmerican books from Chicago libraries.” He even scheduled a bonfire to burn “treasonous books.” One city employee upped the ante:

“The head of the Municipal Reference Library announced that he had independently destroyed all books and pamphlets in his care that struck him as dubious. ‘I now have an America First library,’ he said proudly.”

America First? Will that be the fate of Chicago’s libraries now that Trump’s goon squads are on their way?

Alfred Joyce Kilmer on "Trees"

I salute the turkey oak tree in my backyard.

It's a tough little oak. I was looking out the sliding glass door a few weeks ago and saw its leaves detach in a strong wind. Looked like late September in Wyoming but it was late July in Ormond Station, Florida. The flurry of leaves caused me to call the city arborist and she asked if the leaves were brown on the edges. They were. "Needs water," she said. She was correct. I started hosing it down every day and now the leaves have magically returned. 

The tree is a denizen of the soupy landscape that makes up my neighborhood. We're not in the soup but I can see it from here. I live in the dry section of the wetlands. We are right at the periphery of  the Hull Swamp Conservation Area and the Relay Wildlife Management Area. Wildlife we got. A neighbor spotted a black bear in his backyard. A big ol' Eastern Diamondback was squashed by an F-250 near our PO boxes. We've seen turtles and birds galore. 

We are interlopers here. But, back to the trees.

One of my father's favorite poems was "Trees" by Joyce Kilmer. It's beautiful, really, with memorable opening lines: "I think that I shall never see/A poem as lovely as a tree."

Dad knew the poem by heart. It's easily memorized, rhymed couplets in iambic tetrameter which makes for a memorable beat. Four iambs instead of the usual five in pentameter poems. I point this out because it would have been a great choice of poems to memorize during after-school detention at St. Francis Catholic Grade School in Wichita. If we seventh-graders transgressed enough to get detention, the nuns gave us a choice of poems to memorize. Because all 12- and 13-year-olds have places to go and things to do after school, we chose the shortest and easiest of rhymes. No free verse, thank you. No epics such as "Child Harold's Pilgrimage" or "Howl," although I am pretty sure Ginsberg and the Beats were not on the list of approved Catholic verse.

I once had a choice between "Charge of the Light Brigade" and some silly love poem. I chose the war poem and can still recite most of it. "Trees" was never on the list. Odd thing is, anything by Kilmer would have out me closer to war than Tennyson. He also would have brought me nearer to my Catholic roots had I known about the 1917 collection he edited, "Dreams and Images: An Anthology of Catholic Poets.

But "Trees" lives on in collections. Kilmer converted to Catholicism in 1913 and wrote of his spiritual life. He joined up at 30 to fight in the Great War. Died at 31 at the Second Battle of the Marne. He was leading a patrol into No Man's Land and disappeared in a shellhole. When his troops caught up to him, he was quietly looking over the bombed-out landscape. He didn't respond. They shook him, then looked at his face to see dead eyes and a bullet hole in his forehead. Death by sniper. He's buried in the U.S. cemetery in France across from the farmer's field where he was killed.

He's been called "the last of the Romantic Era poets." His poems are predictable and schmaltzy. They rhyme, for goodness sake. Across the blasted tundra, the British war poets -- Sassoon, Owen, Graves -- were leading the charge into the revved-up post-war realism of the 1920s. You might see Kilmer's poem "Rouge Bouquet" in volumes of war poetry. It's about 21 soldiers of New York's Fighting 69th who were killed by a random German shelling. His legacy lives on in the names of schools, neighborhoods, and a national forest in North Carolina. The Philolexian Society at Columbia University sponsors The Annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest. Lest you think this is just an Ivy League Putdown, it is taken very seriously on campus. Here's a description from the scribes at Wikipedia (I donated to the cause and got a cool [EDIT] T-shirt):

The Alfred Joyce Kilmer Memorial Bad Poetry Contest has been hosted annually by the Philolexian Society, a literary and debating group at Columbia University, since 1986, drawing crowds of 200–300 students and participants vying for the title of best of the worst. Columbia faculty members serve as judges. The event is usually held in November and is heralded by the appearance of "Bad Poetry in Motion" flyers around campus (satirizing the New York City Subway's "Poetry in Motion" series) featuring some of the best verses of the last 20 years, as well as door-to-door readings in the dorms, usually performed by prospective new members ("phreshlings").

The event is named for "bad" poet (and Philolexian alumnus) Joyce Kilmer. His most famous work, Trees, is read aloud by audience members at the contest's end. In 2012, the Columbia Daily Spectator listed the Kilmer Bad Poetry Contest #1 among its "Best Columbia Arts Traditions".

 As a writer and arts administrator, I commend the Society's efforts to promote poetry and its performance. I can see my father, an army radioman in The Great War Part 2 and accounting graduate of a small Catholic college, standing tall in the auditorium and reciting "Trees" with Ivy League youngsters and aging fans of an almost-forgotten poet. 

"Trees," Joyce Kilmer, those lovely, lovely trees.

Why did Bernice bob her hair?

"Bernice Bobs Her Hair," F. Scott Fitzgerald's short story published in the May 1, 1920, issue of the Saturday Evening Post. It was his first story to receive national attention. (Thanks, Wikipedia, for the image. I  wear your [Edit] T-shirt when I'm editing.)

I lived in 1919 for five years. It was the mid-to-late twenty-teens and, physically, I was in Cheyenne, Wyoming, but my mind was in 1919 Denver. This is the year my grandparents migrated to Colorado. War puts people in motion and the Great War  did that. But other factors were at work. Young people were restless, as we were to see in 1920s literature. We have always been part of a moveable feast in this country. We value the ability to get up and move. No state border guards to show our papers to. No permission needed if we decide to quit our job and move cross-country to take another one. Relationships break and partners seek new pastures, new people to connect with. 

Some move for their health. That was never more true than in the 19-teens when the flu pandemic and tuberculosis caused many to get up and go. In John Green's book "Tuberculosis is Everything," we see the rise of TB sanitoria throughout the western U.S., land of clean air, dry climates, and expansive vistas. Some cities got their starts with TB, places like Pasadena, Calif., and Colorado Springs, Colo. Denver's air, when it wasn't choked by those winter air inversions and coal smoke, was pristine, just the thing for lungers, as TB patients were called and not in a nice way.

So I spent much of my 20-teens in the 19-teens. I suppose part of me will always be there. The novel that arose from the project, "Zeppelins over Denver," is nearing publication. I've written a follow-up since, this one set in 1922. And I am always at work writing stories and blogs. I've surpassed my 10,000 hours of creative practice. I'm a bit tired of practicing and want to get on my way to doing and finishing and enjoying. 

I'm still hooked on the era. My Millennial daughter Annie phoned yesterday. She was deciding on a haircut for a job interview. She talked about getting a bob. 

"Bernice bobbed her hair," I said. 

Annie didn't recognize the literary reference but suspected it. "OK, Dad, who's Bernice?" 

"From the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story, " 'Bernice Bobs Her Hair.' " 

"What happens, Dad. A sad ending, right?"

I had to think. "I don't remember. It's been awhile."

"It's not Gatsby-like, is it? Grim and filled with messages about a corrupt society?"

"I'll have to get back to you on that."

So I pulled up "Bernice Bobs Her Hair and Other Stories." I was about to send it to my Kindle when I came across an  audiobook version. I began listening to that, took a break for lunch, and when I returned, I found a "Bernice" graphic novel just released in 2024. The cover illustration intrigued me and I downloaded that. I stayed up late to read. Glad I did. My neighborhood is dark and quiet at midnight, as is my house. Peaceful. My laughs echoed down the hallway and might have reached my slumbering wife but she didn't mention it the next morning.

I did not remember the track of this story. I must have read it in grade school, junior high, high school. Now I do remember another notable story of that era, "Why I Live at the P.O." by Eudora Welty. Richard Connell's "The Most Dangerous Game" was an eye-opener. They all were in the same Catholic Church-approved collection as "A Bottle of Milk for Mother" by Nelson Algren and something by Hemingway probably one of the Nick Adams stories. I linger over those stories now. They are deep, wild, and funny, what I missed out on as a teen.

I loved "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." I had so much fun with the graphic novel adapted and illustrated by John Paizs and published by Graphic Publications. The story was first published in May 1920 in the Saturday Evening Post. Its popularity cased the Post to publish another Bernice Story in November that included a color illustration of Bernice. Fitzgerald was paid real money by the Post and it helped launch his career. In 1920, writers earned a living by writing stories for popular magazines. This has not been true during my time as a writer. 

Go read "Bernice." A pleasant journey during troubled times.

Thumbs up to new public art on National Mall

 

New sculpture on National Mall in D.C. This is the kind of public art
we want to see. 

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.

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.

Irish poet Eavan Boland: "Memory itself has become an emigrant"

The title poem of Eavan Boland's collection "The Lost Land" always moves me. It begins as a confessional with "I have two daughters" but ends with one of the big topics in Irish and Irish-American writing: diaspora. You know the story: the Potato Famine, the rapacious of the English landlords, the sailing away. The Irish, always sailing away and landing on a foreign shore. The last lines always get to me. I send you to the Poetry Foundation web site to read the whole thing and other work by Boland. Go there now. Read an Irish writer today. Happy St. Patrick's Day. 

"Lula Dean's Little Library of Banned Books" brings comic relief to the book-banning hubbub

In several Wyoming communities, including Casper, Gillette, Lander and Sheridan, some members of the public have turned typically staid school board meetings into chaos by clamoring to have all LGBTQ-themed or sex-related books -- even textbooks -- pulled from shelves.--Kerry Drake, WyoFile, May 21, 2024

Add Cheyenne to the list.

Author Kirsten Miller's new novel takes its cue from the recent book-banning tide by Moms for Liberty and other right-wing groups. While whiney complainers go ballistic over books in schools and libraries that feature minority and LBGTQ characters, Miller's book provides us with some welcome comic relief.

“Lula Dean’s Little Library of Banned Books” is a rollicking novel about this most timely of subjects. I cared for the characters – even the bad guys -- and I ploughed ahead to find out what happens to book banner Lula Dean and Little Library saboteur whose name I won’t reveal here because it was so nice to shout “Ah ha!” when that character is revealed. One of the pleasures of reading is anticipating what happens on the next page. Our protagonist finds a way to use Lula Dean’s library to get banned books into the hands of everyday people in the town.

If you have ever come across a Little Library in your neighborhood, it’s like finding a treasure. A Little Library is as quirky as the people who install these distinctive structures in their front yard and stock it with books. It might feature one topic, say astronomy or gardening or children’s literature. A little librarian who is a fiction fan might stock mysteries or cowboy romances or just a hodgepodge of novels set in 18^th century France, Mars of the future, or modern-day Manhattan.

In a county library, books are arranged just so by trained librarians. You want “Beloved” by Toni Morrison, you stroll to the fiction section and find it under M. If confused, you can look up the location on the library’s bank of computers. And, this may seem quaint and outdated, but you also can ask a librarian. They are very helpful.

In Lula Dean’s case, she is so outraged by some of the “filth” foisted on unsuspecting teen readers. ] Lula Dean stocks her library with hardcover books on wholesome subjects. Titles include “The Art of Crochet,” “Contract with America,” “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” and “Buffy Halliday Goes to Europe.” It won’t be long before a bored teen turns into a dedicated saboteur who will muck up Lula Dean’s efforts to invoke the tenets spelled out in Project 2025.

Crystal Moore is a textbook housewife until she sees her husband cheating on her with a cashier at the local Piggly Wiggly. Desperate, she goes to Lula’s library to find a way to win back her husband. She picks “The Rules: Time-tested Secrets for Capturing the Heart of Mr. Right.” Once she starts reading she discovers the book is “All Women are Witches: Find Your Power and Put it to Use.” The preacher’s daughter is shocked, at first, but starts reading and finds some helpful advice that might “keep Janelle Hopkins’ giant boobs away from my husband.” 

Well, first she wanders into the woods to pick up items for a love potion from the "Witches" book. She gets lost in the woods and unleashes a string of obscenities that might not win her Mother of the Year honors. She finds a pond, strips, and goes swimming. She dries off by the pond and is absorbed by nature. She’s still there when the sun sets and the moon rises. Next thing she knows, it’s morning and a search party is calling out her name. She returns home but life is never going to be the same for her husband and family or the town of Troy. Its residents find secret texts in Lula’s library and put them to good use.

The author, who grew up in North Carolina, sets the novel in a small community in  Georgia. Why not some little town in the Carolinas or possibly even Wyoming? Why not, indeed (see the intro quote). Georgia has featured heavily in the Christian Right’s effort to take away books from our kids and eventually (we know it’s coming) from adult readers and even crotchety old guy readers such as myself. Georgia is not all MAGA hats and smoke-belching pickups. It’s also home to liberal Atlanta with its thousands of curious readers as well as Tyler Perry’s groundbreaking movie studio. Georgia is also home to Athens which enlivened the independent music scene with R.E.M., the B-52s, and Widespread Panic. Georgia-based Jimmy Carter and Habitat for Humanity practice the “woke” Bible with good deeds for communities across the globe.

We are reminded daily that not every burg wants to ban books. But there are too many that are. Ignoramuses with Bible in hand and a seething resentment they can’t explain serve on too many local school boards in every Wyoming county.  

This hubbub may eventually die down and readers decades from now may wonder what the fuss was about. I’m reminded of Carl Hiaasen’s book “Squeeze Me” and its predatory humans and Burmese pythons. The book’s only four years old and man what a fun ride it was. We had hoped that by this time the book’s main character, a certain human predator in South Florida, would be gone from the political stage. But he’s not. Someone should write a book about it.

Miller was inspired, finished the book in record time, and Harper Collins wasted little time in getting it into our hands. The publishing process is agonizingly slow so credit goes to Miller, her agent, proofreaders, and HC.

The big question: Do satires ever do any good? “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” is now 60 years old and me and everyone else in Wyoming’s Capital City are surrounded by nuclear missiles that could wipe out humankind at the punch of a button. Know-it-alls who want to tell the rest of us what to do and what to read have always been with us. The pungent film “Idiocracy” is now seen as a documentary. The brilliant “Catch-22” and “Slaughterhouse Five” did little to stop warfare. What’s the point?

The point is that fine books such as “Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl,” “Fahrenheit 451,” and “The Handmaid’s Tale” have something important to tell us. People who read are more informed and more engaged citizens. Maybe that’s what Lula Dean and her crowd are afraid of.

That’s exactly what they are afraid of.

 

 

The accountants who got us to the moon, July 1969 -- Part 4

Fate had other ideas. We couldn’t sell our house in a down market as hundreds of other Apollo pioneers were trying to do. My father reported that he hated Cincinnati. He took a job with NASA which still needed space accountants and returned to Daytona just in time for the new school year. School chums asked me to return their going-away present but my dog had chewed up the nice Frisbee they gifted me. I made the varsity in my junior year and started dating a girl who drove a Canary-yellow GTO but she liked driving my rusted little car so we switched up often.

Over the next two years, I attended my first rock concerts in Jacksonville and in December 1968, my buddy Rick and I took our military draft physicals downtown and his lifer Chief dad arranged for us to spend the night aboard his ship. In March of ‘69, our b-ball team went to the state tournament in the Jacksonville Coliseum where we lost in the semis. Thus ended my basketball career.

In July 1969, as I pondered an uncertain future, our family huddled around the TV watching Neil Armstrong on the moon. The day before, my girlfriend and I were making out on the beach in my little car. The rain came down as the news came on: “The Eagle has landed.”

Two weeks later, when the Apollo astronauts were back in the U.S., our house burned down. No casualties except... 

As the day faded into history, my mother went to work as a nurse and my father got a job crunching numbers with the State of Florida and commuted to the Jacksonville office. Dad still didn’t know how to swim but the rest of us did. We were water people, for now.

Bio: Michael Shay did some of his growing up in Florida but now lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with his wife and two grown children. He graduated from Daytona’s Father Lopez High School in 1969, Daytona Beach Community College in 1974 and University of Florida in 1976. He applied for reporter jobs at every newspaper in Florida but none would hire him so, like Huck Finn, he lit out for the territories. He gets to Florida as often as he can to visit family and friends. His story collection, “The Weight of a Body,” is available on Amazon. His novel, “Zeppelins over Denver,” is due out later this year.

He may be "A Gentleman in Moscow," but he doesn't get out much anymore

In a May 16 post, I was only a few hours into reading Amor Towles "A Gentleman in Moscow." Things seemed especially grim at that juncture so I blogged this:

The Count is charming and it’s great fun to read about him and his situation even though you know it’s going to end terribly. Not as terribly as it did for the Romanovs but still terrible. The ending of Book 1 clued me in on a possible fate for the Count.

It helps to read a novel to the end before commenting. I won't spoil the ending but will say that it was not what I foresaw. Towles has a way of planting clues that may be MacGuffins. Very clever. He's also a great writer with a flair for language that I only see in the best books. When I open a book, I want to go for a ride and Towles takes me on an extraordinary one.

The world is filled with intriguing cities and Moscow proves to be one. But it's not a locale I turn to automatically. "I feel like reading a big Moscow book today, one from the scintillating Soviet era." Most of us know Moscow through one of the long-dead classic Russian writers. Others have been fascinated with its dramatic World War II battles, me included. The real stories behind the battles for Moscow and Stalingrad are gruesome and uplifting. Remember, the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. were allies then.

Alexander Rostov is an aristocrat. Many of them were sent to the gulag or executed during the regime's early years. Count Rostov is threatened with both until it comes to light that he did a favor once for one of the Soviet bosses now in charge. He is sentenced to a house arrest at the Metropol Hotel, the swankiest inn in Moscow. The Count already lives there in a luxurious suite. The bosses move him out into a cramped room in the attic. If he leaves the hotel, he will be shot. So Count Rostov tries to make the best of it. Beginning fiction writers are often told that a compelling character faces a challenge. The story is in how that character reacts. And that's what we have in this novel. He's no longer a world traveler and man about Moscow. His bank accounts have been frozen. He is persona non grata to those Soviets who know which side their bread is buttered on (it's the Red side).

The long journey through the count's life is worth it. Many surprises await you.

Kristin Hannah's historical novel features the brave women of the French Resistance

I’m reading “The Nightingale” by Kristin Hannah. It’s the story of two sisters in a small French village occupied by the Nazis. The elder sister, Vianne, has a child and a husband captured during the Nazi blitzkrieg. The younger one, Isabelle, is the rebel of the family, kicked out of a number of boarding schools and now working for the French Resistance. The sisters live very different lives. They share a hatred of the Nazis and possess strong wills to survive the war. The more compelling story is of the Resistance. The author has said that the novel is a tribute to these brave women. They faced dying during guerrilla raids or arrest which also meant death or a trip to a Nazi extermination camp. I just finished a chapter where Isabelle with her Basque guide takes four downed RAF pilots from Paris over the Pyrenees to the British embassy in neutral Spain.

Imagine traveling undercover to Jackson in a train jammed with Nazis and then hiking over the Tetons to Driggs in late October, struggling up talus slopes and crossing waterways, all the while dodging Nazis on one side of the border or Franco’s fascists on the other side. Or maybe it’s a postapocalyptic jaunt where the bad guys are some of the right-wing goons who invaded the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Well-armed and stupid. Rain and snow will fall as you travel. It will be cold and you’re wearing running shoes and a light jacket.

You get the picture. These people were braver than brave. Their country had been overrun. Friends and family members had been killed by the Nazis. They must pay.

I don’t know what I would do. I’ve hiked Wyoming and Colorado mountains in all kinds of weather but I am always prepared. I am in my 20s (used to be), dressed for the climate and wearing good boots. I have five days of food in my pack and one of those tiny stoves. Good topo maps. Pretend I have a loaded Glock at my side, prepared for attacks by Bloaters (“The Last of Us,” episode 5).

Just think about it. The French Resistance had so much less and did so much more.

I’m looking forward to the film version of “The Nightingale.” Dakota and Elle fanning play the sisters. I hope the creators do it justice. You can see a teaser here.

Booth and the Our American Cousin we want to forget

BOOTH

That family name is infamous. John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. It is one of the most dastardly deeds in U.S. history. We still live with the consequences.

Booth didn't just rise from the Ford Theater stage and murder a president. He came from somewhere. He had parents, brothers and sisters. As a kid in Maryland, he was a scamp who liked dogs, rode horses, and played tricks on his siblings. He is not a monster, at least he's not in Karen Joy Fowler's amazing historical novel, "Booth." He's the third-youngest of the children of noted actor Junius Booth and his beleaguered wife. A Marylander, he turns into a Southern sympathizer and buys into the kind of political mind-rot our Uncle Jimbo in South Carolina now gets on Fox and social media. 

We know how the story ends. In tragedy, maybe the worst one in American history. An almost-famous actor kills the president and changes history.

One can almost hear the reporters of 1865 interviewing the neighbors. "He seemed like such a nice man. Last winter I saw him playing in the snow with the kids (a scene from "Booth"). A fine actor too. You just gotta wonder what went wrong."

Presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth. He seemed like such a nice man. Until he wasn't.

"Booth," an historical novel by Karen Joy Fowler, explores the Booth family history leading up to April 14, 1865, at a performance of "Our American Cousin" at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth, a Southern sympathizer and conspiracy nut, bursts into Lincoln's box and shoots him in the head. The country, part of it anyway, goes into mourning. Unreconstructed Confederates cheer. 

A divided country -- so what else is new? 

In "Alas, Babylon," The Big One drops and we see what happens

I was eight years old in the fall of 1959. We lived in the southwest Denver suburbs and my father worked at the Martin-Marietta plant further south. Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons plant was seven miles to the northwest. Further north were swarms of missile silos in northern Colorado, southeast Wyoming, and eastern Nebraska. During the school year, we participated in duck-and-cover drills at our neighborhood school. Nukes were a fact of life. The Cold War was in its prime. 

1959-1960 is the setting for Pat Frank's novel, "Alas, Babylon." The title (I read the 1993 HarperCollins trade paperback edition) is taken from scripture, the origin of so many book titles for classic novels. This from Revelation 18:10 in the King James Bible:

Standing afar off for the fear of her torment, saying, Alas, alas, that great city Babylon, that mighty city! for in one hour is thy judgment come.

Randy Bragg and his brother Mark grew up in the hamlet of Fort Repose, Florida. Randy served in the Korean War and went home to live the life of a bachelor attorney. Mark went into the Air Force and was a colonel in the Strategic Air Command in Omaha. He and Randy shared a code, “Alas, Babylon,” if it looked as if World War III was about to break out. One day, Randy gets the code from his brother who sends his wife and kids to Fort Repose because it will be safer than Nebraska’s Ground Zero.

Fort Repose was like so many 1950s Central Florida small towns. Its history included Native Americans, Spanish conquistadors, Confederate troops, and rednecks. It’s sleepy, hot and humid for half the year, site of Florida natives and a smattering of Yankee retirees known as snowbirds. African-Americans were called Negroes and some unflattering names by the ruling Whites. The living was easy but also separate and unequal. Disney existed only on TV and the movies. 

Bam! As Randy Newman wrote much later in his song, "Political Science:" 

Let's drop The Big One, and see what happens

And then:

Boom goes London, boom Paree/More room for you, and more room for me/And every city, the whole world 'round/Will be just another American Town.

Newman's satiric take is closer to my Strangelove-style attitude of "WTF were we thinking?"

Fort Repose is just another American town surrounded by important Russki targets in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville, and Miami. Boom goes Tampa and boom Miami. Nobody really knows how it started but survivors have much to deal with.

That's the great thing about Frank's novel -- he writes in detail about the daily struggles of a small town beleaguered by a Cold War turned hot. Randy is the only Army Reserve officer in town so he assumes command. He’s a good officer, mainly, although he does boss people around a bit. He also organizes a vigilante squad to go after “highwaymen,” nogoodniks who have beaten and murdered people in the town. They even hang one as a lesson to all.

The book is about survival, post-apocalyptic-style. It made me wonder how I would survive. I have no skills to speak of. Randy is a shade-tree mechanic, hunter, and fisherman. His cohorts in the town know which end of the rifle to point at deer and the occasional ruffian. They knows how to catch fish and crabs, where to find salt, which plants are edible. There’s a doctor in town and a retired admiral with his own fleet of small boats. There’s a love interest. And the ending is sort of happy.

As I read, I had to put aside my 2023 aesthetics. The Whites treat the Blacks as second-class citizens except when they need their automotive or farming skills. The attitude is not much different from characters found in Flannery O’Connor stories and William Faulkner novels. They were born into it and acted accordingly. Our family moved to Central Florida in 1964 and attitudes hadn’t changed much. My father worked on rockets at the Cape where before he had worked on the kind of missiles that rained down on the Reds in “Alas, Babylon.” Our integrated high school basketball team got into many scrapes when we ventured outside our beachside tourist town to play teams in the hinterlands. Places like Fort Repose.

If I was reviewing this book now, I’d call some of the language and attitudes archaic even racist. The book itself is solid. Frank knows how to tell a story and he did his research, not surprising when you learn a bit about his background. He was a Florida writer, too, living in a place like Fort Repose. He asked the question: what would my neighbors do if the Big One dropped? The author delivered. I read a book about nuclear war set and written in 1959, 63 years ago, a book I had never heard of. My sister Eileen sent me her copy which she already read. Not surprisingly, the cover features a bright red mushroom cloud.

Let’s drop The Big One now!

Poem for two doomed poets

On Philip Levine's birthday, a sad poem about two doomed poets from the Poetry Foundation web site. It's beautiful, really. I'll let Levine say the rest. Go to "On the Meeting of Garcia Lorca and Hart Crane."

Fiction welcomes us into strange new worlds

Lisa See's latest novel, The Island of Sea Women, could have been set on a distant world. On a little known volcanic island , women have been harvesting their food from the sea for generations. They are called haenyeo. They go into the ocean year-round but only when the shaman says so. These women practice rituals for the sea goddess. They float out to likely spots, breathe deeply, and dive to the sea bed for edible sea creatures. They eat some of the catch but keep most for family and to sell at the market. Many have been lost to wicked currents or injury. They persevere through genocide and famine and family feuds.

Otherworldy, right? Reminds me of the Fremen of  Arrakis harvesting spice and fighting off sand worms. 

But the island of sea women is a volcanic island named Jeju south of the Korean mainland. The women are real and have been diving for generations. See bases her excellent novel on these women.

“Every woman who enters the sea carries a coffin on her back. In this world, the undersea world, we tow the burdens of a hard life."

The story opens with the main character, Young-sook. We experience the culture through her life, from a child during Japan's World War II Korean occupation to 2008 as to old lady who still dives.  Her life is a series of challenges within her haenyeo clan, her family, other islanders, and invaders from Japan (World War II) and the U.S. (Korean War). See's story time travels, jumping from a present-day setting with Young-sook as a clan elder all the way back to her turbulent youth. Jeju now is a tourist hot spot with the usual assortment of clueless visitors. One of them is the granddaughter of her childhood friend Mi-Ja. Now the fully Americanized granddaughter butts into Young-sook's life and wants the real story about the conflict that shattered a friendship and sent Mi-ja off to America. The island people are survivors. Young-sook may be the most stubborn member of her clan. She resents the young woman but ends up opening up her life to her. And to us. 

Think about your image of 21st century Koreans. BTS, BlackPink and K-Pop. The bustling modern city of Seoul. The new Korean cinema, films such as Train to Busan and the Squid Game series, and comedies like Kim's Convenience about a Canadian-Korean family's convenience store. The Korean-made Korean War film Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War, may be an even more in-your-face war film than Saving Private Ryan. There is also the hermit authoritarian kingdom of North Korea which, to many Koreans, seems like another world. And is. Witness some wonderful novels about the North. My favorite thus far is The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson. It's illuminating how Americans are seen through the eyes of others. Those who know their history would not be surprised. 

The imaginary world helps us see the world in all its glory and horror.