Current Events – Page 2 – 19 Cent Notebook

OF A JANUARY PLACE IN OUR MIND IN THE MONTH’S DYING MOMENTS

…of cold, sudden death minutes from the airborne journey’s end. The often horrifying mystery of life. But we go on, searching, we the living; searching for the dead, and for ourselves.

That was yesterday. Though, really, it’s every day. The cold shallow river still holds its terrible burden.

I go to Orlando tomorrow. I don’t want to go. (It’s morning. I go today.)

Another month in the subtropics while the country above me devolves in various weather through history. The river flows.

I don’t know what I’m saying. I’m tired.

Tragedy. Young skaters, their gift, their grace, their future gone in the ice cold shallows of the famous river in history–American history’s river. A current President who, no matter how solemn the occasion, manages to be rude, embarringlyly, infuriatingly, (disappointingly?) inappropriate, egoistic, partisan, uncharitable, self-congratulatory, self-involved….

Master of Puppets. Hope of those who’d be rescued from the Other Puppet Masters and their crazy ventriloquists.

We are, in our derelict, unreflective moments, all puppets delivered to the hands of life’s monsters, and life’s “petty pace…tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow…”

But we were all, in a moment two millenia ago, rescued from death. And from all that is rude, inappropriate, egoistic, etc. etc. It’s urgent that we believe it. That death was conquered.

As the old priest said from the Brookline pulpit years ago: you live–forever!

It was years ago, but it might as well have been yesterday. Or tomorrow. (I’m writing some of this in what was ‘tomorrow’ when I began it yesterday..)

Meanwhile….

America the Beautiful. America the Deeply Troubled. America the Divided. America of Terrible Accidents. America of Storms. America of Fires.

And, meanwhile….

No one read about my artist friend Knox, the artist in my last blog. Lonely old Knox and his post-Christmas apocalyptic visions. And the Devil chasing him, chasing me, chasing us. So what?

I’m sure he’s given up his “ghosts” and gone back to being just old crazy Knox, living forever (in my imagination.)

So be it.

Had to write something here tonight (today).

The New Year, the Yuletide might as well have been a hundred years ago. But, I always say, Christmas must be every day. And Easter too.

Goodbye, January. We march on toward spring, though, generally speaking, there is no spring in the clime where I now roost. Save an occasional chill and occasional gray sky, the climate is seamless, except in summer when it is blazes, turns, turns steamy and uncomfortable, seemingly without end — until the thunder rolls in at the end of days.

So be it. In exile. Everywhere is nowhere.

(Pray. For the Living and the Dead.)

Good night.

THE CAVE

It’s the Yuletide again. Good time, amid all the red and green festivities, to ask some pertinent questions.

Who was this person who was, Christians believe, both human and divine– God, second person of a mysterious Trinity and known as Jesus Christ?

Who, again I ask, was He?

There IS significant evidence that a man named Jesus Christ exited, a carpenter’s son who himself became a carpenter. But it is a fact that no ancient historian, at least for a very long time, took great note of the purportedly earth-shattering events surrounding his birth, his life as a healer, or execution at age thirty-three (to summerize: birth in Bethlehem, early, mostly hidden life in the backwater Nazareth, execution and death in Jerusalem. And Christians believe he rose from the dead — all this in the first century A.D. — or even prior to that, because certain anomolies in counting up the years suggest Christ was actually born around 6 B.C..)

Let’s stick with his birth, since this is that season. The Resurrection story can wait until Easter.

There are a number of false, pious gospels — called apochrypha — that add spectacle and power to the nativity events. But we’ve come to celebrate, instead, the extremely humble nature of the birth of the God/man regarded by millions to have been –and remain –the Massiah. The ancient Jewish world had been waiting for a messiah for centuries — someone who would right every wrong done to that race of people. There had seemingly been someone claiming to be a messiah on virtually every corner for much of the millenia before that quiet, paradoxical dirt-poor birth among beasts, dung and hay just outside the village of Bethlehem in the Judean hills.

His family — earthly mother and father-were required to travel to Bethlehem because history and scripture record that a decree had gone out from the Emporor Caesar Augustus ordering everyone to respond to a census being taken over the vast Roman Empire , also requiring every citizen to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. That was Bethlehem in the case of the couple named Joseph and Mary. (There was also an ancient prophesy that a future ruler of Israel would be born in Bethlehem. So, as one writer puts it, “external obligation and divine design” were intersecting, acccording to the Christian nativity story.)

Now, wait a minute!

Why a bloody, damn census? Upending everybody’s life, putting them on the roads of the vast continental Empire? Well, for tax purposes, among other things (what else?), and so the powers in Rome could know where to go to fill in the ranks of the Roman Legions. Empires need armies. Fresh young bodies.

(With all those people traveling at the whim of the Roman boss, small wonder there was no room at the inn.)

So far, so good. But –something that’s always intrigued me: where exactly was that famous stable/birthplace? Do we really know?

Multiple spiritual writers and modern scriptural historians, not to mention archiologists, give us the following information:

There is, among other sources, testimonial evidence in the writings of the saint known as Justin Martyr that there was, for a very long time , a site in or around the town of Bethlehem where Jesus Christ was believe to have been born — “a certain cave”.

I don’t just want to take a Catholic saint’s word for anything, but Justin’s evidence is interesting and credible because he was local and nearly a contemporary.

The saint tells us locals venerated that cave from a very early date and apparently preserved it in order to preserve the memory of the nativity. That cave, we’re told, was greatly talked about, even among enemies of the faith. (It is, presumably, the site that now sits under the grand Basilica of the Nativity located in the middle of a Middle Eastern zone of perpetual combat and which itself was beseiged in the year 2002. So much for Peace of Earth in that neck of the woods! But there’s always hope. Christmas is supposed to be all about hope.)

Actually, it must be noted that little of the touching simplicity of the nativity story would seem to have been preserved from that time of the building of that magnificent edifice. I have not had the privilege of visiting it, but I’ve read that you approach it as if it were a fortress. There is a gigantic encircling wall breached by a massive tower. It is Byzantine in the way it conveys a powerful impression of majesty. And, as noted above, it has been the scene of warfare, contemporary as well as in the deep past. Indeed, in 1873 it was the scene of a physical assault by the supporters of the Ordhodox Church on the Catholics. Such virulent divisions among Christians presumably professing faith in the same God are disheartening, and never-ending.

And that cave noted by the saint/witness is now said to be the sacred sight reached by a long and narrow subterranean crypt.

Oh, how , passing down that crypt, I would long for that former, simple cave! But then, they don’t build houses of worship over, say, Paul Revere’s house. This is just the way of religions.

St. Justin speaks not just of “a cave” but of “this cave.” He had in mind a certain cave. Justin himself was born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Flavia Neapolis (today called Nablus), some forty miles north of Bethlehem. ( I told you he was local.) He knew the area and the people quite well. Apparently, a century after that stable birth, the cave was still known and being preserved.

The Church of the Nativity was built over it –presumably they had the right cave — in 326 A.D., at the order of Constantine, the first Christian emporer and, according to some accounts, at the urging of his mother Helena, a devout Christian who obviously had considerable influence on her son.

Some anti-Christians, and also what I would call anti-Christian Christians, like to say Constantine “founded” Christianity. That’s another kind of warfare that gets waged over the body of Christ: historical/theological revisionism.

And for the ancient early Christian apologist and scriptural scholar named Origen, as well as for the evangelists before him, there is a verifiable particularity about the facts of Jesus’s conception and birth in that cave, and His subsequent infancy.

All this, they say, happened, not “once upon a time,” (as in a fable), but “in the days of Herod, King of Judea,” when “a decree went out from Caesar Augustus,” the emporer. The big guy in Rome. (Luke 1:5,2:1).

Herod was the local authority around Bethlehem, Judea — and, from all accounts, an utter monster. He’s part of a Christmas story –a negative part. But the story needed every part, good and bad, to seem true to life. We’ll skip over Herod for now. It suffices to say that you didn’t want to cross him.

So -it all began, in earthly terms, with taxes, the Roman bureacracy, a vile local Roman functionary, and a noisome government decree. It began “upon a midnight clear” and persists and summons our souls and imaginations to this day.

As for all the messy circumstances leading up to — and away — from it: sounds like real life as we know it.

Whatever the case, we know that a pregnant young woman and her spouse, with their donkey, sparse belongings and weary ( ultimately, many believe, saintly and, in Christ’s case, divine) bodies and souls, wound up spending the chilly Judean night among the hay and dung and livestock of a cave — reviled, rejected, alone.

I guess that cave is also the birthplace of what for much of the world remains a supreme, incredible earthly irony: the most important soul in history — according to the beliefs of billions –was born in a cave.

Also born that night: endless wonder. And there was something about a star, too. And shepherds, and choirs of angels.

And Magi. (We’ll talk about them later.)

MOUNTAIN ELEGY

I once lived in the mountains of western North Carolina.

I have this from the North Carolina State Climate Office:

Torrential rainfall from remnants of Hurricane Helene capped off three days of extreme, unrelenting precipitation, which left catastrophic flooding and unimaginable damage in our Mountains and southern Foothills.

The Blue Ridge are hurting. I’m hearing — we are all hearing –of the horrible travail there — so much and so many nearly drowned in violent, brown, debris-bearing storm floods. Seems odd to many, I suppose, that a hurricane could climb a mountain and dump all its water there — and cause its considerable river waters to rampage and overflow so catastrophically.

It can, other storms have done so before, it did last week. But never to this degree. 150 plus dead. The toll will likely grow.

An utter and historic horror, according to the State Climate Office.

It was close to a worst-case scenario for western North Carolina as seemingly limitless tropical moisture, enhanced by interactions with the high terrain, yielded some of the highest rainfall totals – followed by some of the highest river levels, and the most severe flooding – ever observed across the region.

I came and went too soon from that beautiful region where North Carolina, Virginia and Tennesee come together. The time frame was fall to spring, 1997 into 1998. I probably never intended to stay there permanently and — oh, I might as well tell you — left sooner than I wanted largely because I couldn’t make a living there. This was because it was, to a great degree, a resort area. I couldn’t earn money comparble to the cost of living — that being the bane of long-time locals who for generations have grown Christmas trees, worked trades, worked in factories, did what they could, got by, called it home.

To many in New England or around the nation, those patches of the country near Thomas Wolfe’s native Ashville and the region where I once lived 153 miles to the east in little Banner Elk are unknown terrain. They may not have known there are North Carolina mountains.

I lived in a wood hillside chalet-style house next to rows of saplings and partially grown fraser firs destined to be Christmas trees, nurtured by scores of local nurserymen. They rose slowly up beside a steeply sloaping street called Cynthia Lane. That was my street. As I looked out at those trees, I imagined them one day festooned with colorful lights, reflected in the sparkling eyes of a child on Christmas morning. It was good on Christmas morning to see so many trees still standing for Christmases future. They are harvested every seven years.

I’m a New Englander and knew ultimately I would want to go all the way home from Florida where I’d been living– for a second time — from 1990 to 1997. (So, what am I doing back in Florida, five years and, once again, a thousand miles from home? Another long story. I guess some of us have restless hearts, or are capable of seeking the geographic cure.)

In truth, my mountain time, while pleasant, was sometimes, during the winter, trecherous among steep, icy inclines, mountain highways and trails, rocks and pines — always, at a radio station, hearing and being embraced by the antic and narrative and welcome strains of country music.

I don’t know that I was listening to anything the afternoon , heading downhill in traffic, bound for Banner Elk from Boone, when I gently slid right off the road in my old Volvo. I didn’t go far — about ten feet, and to rest, though a bit unnerved.

It all remains wrapped around a place deep in my mind. And on my mind now are the region’s suffering.

One evening walking along Beacon Street in Boston beside the Public Garden and across from the famous “Cheers” bar, the Bull&Finch Pub, a woman called out to me from her van as she was stuck in traffic. She’d seen my t-shirt for the Mast Store in Valle Crucis, near Banner Elk. She knew the region. “I love Blowing Rock,” she said — another of the charming towns in the area.

Yes indeed, she knew the area.

There is, to a limited degree, a ski resort industry there on Beech and Sugar Mountains that attracts non-locals. But they were always having to make snow for the ski trails. I seem to recall some crystals from the snow-making apparatus blowing toward my hillside home on some occasions. That’s quite possibly as much a reverie as a real memory. But, yes, I do recall that you could tell when they were “making snow” which does not always fall naturally in enough abundance in the Blue Ridge to support the skiing public.

But, again, they get by, those ski trail folks.

Beach Mountain. Sugar Mountain and Hawk’s Nest ski areas — they are all there. Hawk’s Nest is where my son, during his first-ever attempt at snowboarding, wiped out on the last run of the night (after they had prematurely taken down the orange plastic protective netting), slid headlong into a trench dug for a downhill pipe line, slammed into the pipe and ruptured his spleen, landing in Wautauga County Hospital in Boone for emergency surgery. It’s where the young members of the ski patrol were so good to him in the wake of his accident, coming to visit him. It’s where I spent a night half-watching Godzilla movies in a waiting room, barely sleeping, waiting for his deeply upset mother to arrive from South Carolina, arriving near dawn. I had walked down a corridor, barely awake, as the elevator door opened and Renee stepped out and said, “where is he?” Poor Renee, she was probably mad at me, but, more than anything, worried about our son — who recovered just fine, thank God.

O yes, that is a memory. A mountain memory.

Currently, The Climate Office is recording that 16.67 inches of rain have fallen on Boone.

Memories are spilling out of me the way water is now still rushing down a mountainside.

Some great, proud and independent people live in Boone and the Banner Elk area. Tiny Lees-McCrea College is located in Banner Elk. Appalachian State University is in Boone. We’ve started to hear about its football program, but I mostly recall time spent in its fine library. I worked for little WECR-AM and FM radio in Newland, which, at that time (and perhaps now) had studios located in a triple-wide trailer down the road from the Great Eastern Divide. I worked the best I could, selling advertising — not my strength –to Boone auto dealers and merchants with Buddy Carpenter, a former Trailways Bus driver who had formerly been road manager for The Marshall Tucker Band. (I learned from Buddy that Marshall Tucker was a blind piano tuner in whose Spartenburg, NC storage area the band, in its formative years, practiced and developed their distinctive country rock repertoire.) Buddy also did the morning show. A young local woman who did the show with Buddy left to work at a local factory where I believe she was offered more money.

This was that kind of place –unglamorous, real, full of native-bred Scotch-Irish folks ekeing out a living around the city of Newland, way above sea level. Sadly I’ve forgotten that young woman’s name as, I’m sure, she’s forgotten mine, and forgotten me. It was, after all, twenty-seven years ago.

But I’m thinking of her and hoping Helene has not upended her life — hers and the lives of her family members. I’ll bet she has children by now and didn’t seem like the kind of person who would move away from native turf. As for Buddy Carpenter, sadly, I don’t even know if he’s still alive. I do hope you are well, Buddy. (Maybe the last remnants of the Marshall Tucker Band could locate him for me, tell me of his fate. Buddy once told me how founding band member Toy Caldwell was on board his bus during one tour, working out lyrics of the song, “Heard it in a Love Song” on a paper bag which he gave to Buddy and which Buddy planned to donate to the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame.)

During that North Carolina stay, I owned an old Zenith radio I’d picked up at a yard sale somewhere and I recall hearing that young woman who worked with Buddy speak my name out of it, referring to my reference, the former afternoon, to a program to adopt horses in need of permanent homes. ( The information was on a press release; I was filling time during a newscast in which I had few reliable sources of real news.) I’ll always remember her saying something like, “Yeah, Greg was talking about that program….” It was every bit, if not more special than seeing and hearing myself as a reporter on TV — hearing my name, spoken by a nice young moutain dwelling woman (was her name Karen? Sue? Mary?) and spilling out over the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Sounds crazy, I know. But every little thing during those mere nine months (or so) had meaning for me.

Now I’m hearing that all roads in Western NC should be considered closed…

And that what has happened there should be considered…

on par with eastern North Carolina’s worst hurricane from six years ago.

There were, in fact, a great deal of Florida license plates on cars that appeared during the summer months in the mountains. There are gated communities nestled in the mountain ridges where well-to-do Florida residents escape Florida’s summer heat. I was told locals had a mild disdain for these transient visitors because “they poke on the roads and complain about the food.”

Of course, the visitors always bring money to the areas they’re accused of despoiling. And many nice folks appear among seasonal visitors the world over.

For instance…

I worshiped at little St. Bernadette’s Church in the town of Linville, North Carolina where one Sunday I saw retired, legendary Miami Dolphins coach Don Shula coming up the aisle from communion. I couldn’t believe my eyes! And his former quarterback and Hall of Famer Bob Griese, who led the Dolphins to three consecutive Super Bowl appearances –winning two of them (the first of which capped off an undefeated, untied season, a feat that has not been duplicted in the NFL) also worshipped at St. Bernadettes.

Griese sat down with his wife in the pew in front of me one Sunday, turned and offered me, at the appropriate moment, the handshake that is called, “the kiss of peace” (which, in my role as a liturgical curmudgeon, I find superfluous and toucy-feely but which I could not wait to exchange that Sunday as Bob G. turned and grasped my hand. It was the hand that had thrown 192 touchdowns. And the legendary quarterback said, “God Bless Y ou.”

Blessed by Bob Griese! One day up in the mountains of western North Carolina.

From the Climate Office:

It’s no exaggeration to liken this to a Florence-level disaster for the Mountains, since the apparent rarity of the rainfall amounts and the impacts they produced – including large stretches of highways underwater and a plea from the NC Department of Transportation…

By a “Florence-level disaster”, I take the climate officials to be referring to the November, 1966 flooding of the raging Arno River which swamped and did horrible damage to the city of Florence and hundreds its art treasures. I had visited Florence — my one and only time so far — the summer before.

In the mountains, the masterpieces are all natural.

Beyond the glass behind the altar and tabernacle at St. Bernadettes is Grandfather Mountain, so named because, as you look at it, you see in the rocky outcroppings the enormous face of an old man turned up toward the sky. You can see God if you choose. You see him for miles as you approach the region.

Yes, for a brief, memorable time, I was part of that western North Carolina community. Coming and going so quickly, being easily identified by my lack of Southern accent as a damned Yankee. I’m sure no one there — and Bob Griese, wherever he is and whether or not he still comes to the region — remembers me. No matter, I’ve kept his blessing.

But I am praying for that region now, so utterly tormented by the rampaging, north-traveling remnants of a huge, millenial hurricane.

The North Carolina State Climate Office has concluded…

While the full extent of this event will take years to document – not to mention, to recover from – we can make an initial assessment of the factors that made for such extreme rainfall, the precipitation totals and other hazards, and how this storm compares with some of the worst for the mountains and for our state as a whole.

Have the young Christmas trees survived in Avery and Wautaga Counties?

It may be a bleak Christmas in the high country. I hope not. I spent a very nice Christmas there.

In fact, the greatest damage may be in neighboring counties and across the state line into Tennessee — death and destruction from raging water.

I pray for them as well.

May there be deliverance for the whole region by the time snow falls over the wide, welcoming beautiful face of that celestial mountain grandfather.

HARMONY AMID HORROR

Harmony, as it happens, is the name of a seriously topical musical of the same name. I wish I’d seen.

It came primarily from a seemingly unlikely source — Barry Minilow, who (though I was not aware of it) is Jewish and in the brilliant twilight of his career, though its most public manifestations were melodic juke box hits like “Copacabana.”

But Harmony is serious business about a seriously discordant period of modern human history.

Why am I writing this?

Because I just happened to stumble on a two-year-old review of the show. (It is my habit never to visit the bathroom, public or private, without something to read. Thus, before heading to the privvy, did I pick up a two-year-old magazine from one of my pack-rat-stacked piles of obscure journals (these admittedly being fire hazards which I insist on keeping around for the fire they ignite in my brain).

On this visit to that periodical, I turned to the “stage” section.

And there it was. Something old but still new on a subject that is, sadly, eternal — the undaunted human spirit amid state tyranny, bigotry and terror. And it was, further, a musically relevant offering from the world of show business that did not have its origin on The Voice or America’s Got Talent –and was not seeking to push some politically correct “message” into my ears and down my throat.

Harmony is about a six-member 1930s comedic German singing group with three Jewish members that gets caught in the raging Nazism of Weimer-era Berlin. It’s based on fact and set in the same milieu that is the setting for Cabaret, among the most celebrated stage and screen hallmarks of Seventies America. The group became so famous that they appeared in more than twenty films and toured internationally with the likes of Marlene Dietrich. Manilow and librettist/lyricist Bruce Sussman, according to the review, “tweaked” the show for a quarter century and “devised a cunning range of songs for both the boys’ cabaret act and to illustrate their off-stage drama.”

If Jersey Boys about the The Four Seasons can offer compelling drama in its contemporanious American context, I can only imagine how much off-stage drama can be drawn from the story of a mixed Jewish/Gentile troupe “stayin’ alive” and hiding in plain sight in the world of the Third Reich.

Again, from the review I learned that the show offers songs ” ranging from “snappy, sometimes slightly naughty comic numbers suitable for debauchery-seeking Weimer nightclub audiences to lush ballads such as the standout duet called Where You Go,’ which is sung by the wives of two of the singers.”

Of course, life on and off stage gets complicated for the group and their families, such as when a fan who also happens to be a Nazi officer informs the singers that they “project the image that Germany is amusing and non-threatening.” (Reminds me of how current Russian, Chinese, Iranian or North Korean shills now and then proffer similar, transparently false assurances that their dreadful societies are fun boxes of freedom and light-hearted amusement.)

Among the group’s edgy efforts while on tour to project the truth about their country’s growing agony — in this case, during a show in Copenhagen — is inclusion in the score of a “witty but chilling song” entitled “Come to the Fatherland” which concludes, Or we’ll come to you.

They survived during Germany’s twelve-year Nazi nightmare. In 1933, they came to Carnegie Hall and the NBC airwaves and were tempted to stay but reluctantly, probably wrongly, feared they would not be welcomed here (this according to this review which, by the way, was written by Kyle Smith for the journal New Criterion in June, 2022.)

The show’s narrator,apparently paralleling Joel Gray’s memorable role as Master of Ceremonies in Cabaret, is an amiable group member named Chip Zien. I get the sense that that was the name of one of the actual group members, the last of whom died in 1998. Some of his commentary, according to reviewer Smith, is “tense” and “regretful.” His “younger self” wishes it had made different choices than, perhaps, to have stayed home during such a dangerous, horrific time for all Europe and the world, thereby giving any measure of aid and comfort to Nazi oppressors.

The the show is also obviously a tribute to all long-suffering Jewry, to all who shielded and protected the singers, and to Holocaust victims. In fact, the 2022 performance took place at the National Yiddish Theatre in the Museum of Jewish Heritage in lower Manhattan.

Barry Manilow is on record saying Harmony is the career achievement of which he is proudest.

Rightly so.

But have there been any subsequent performances of Harmony over the last two years?

Manilow, Sussman and coreographer Warren Carlyle apparently staged the 2022 version on a very limited budget with minimal sets and scenery changes, relying heavily, according to Smith, on video and photoraphic images.

Some college, or even high school drama department or community theater somewhere should take note. A musical that finds a way to seriously yet entertainingly illuminate the problem of anti-semitism would be very timely indeed.

HURRICANE HELENE

It will be just a storm here. But as of 2:57 p.m., September 25, 2024, there is an ominous gray, a buiding steady ominous breeze, a silence, a realization that some neighbors have fled. Anxiety. The old Florida thing.

It is out there in the Gulf, freshly emerged from Cancun. It will get stronger over warmer waters. Stronger and stronger.

A widening, multi-colored, swirling electronic blob on the TV radar, embracing, it seems, everything and threatening everything and everybody with wind and water. A monster.

I pray. And I think of those quiet Gulf-front villages and roads of the Panhandle, constantly being reconfigured by these ancient, prowling, giant, all-devouring meteorological beasts. In some cases, nearly wiped off the map. Mexico City, for instance. Wiped out.

And they give these creatures names so that they almost have faces, arms, legs, lips. Female or male, they are androgenous bodies destined to dissolve into rain, fluttering and stirring branches on some northern sidestreets until the sun shines again, and all is still and all is memories and so much is broken in its wake.

I must leave my tin and vynl domicile for somewhat safer ground.

AMERICA’S SEARCH FOR MEANING, CIRCA 1975

It’s fun to look at the last chapter of old history text books to see how the authors chose to frame the long past “present moment” for the high school or college student of that hour.

Long ago, at a Tampa, Florida yard sale, I bought a thick (over 800 pages), impressively illustrated American history text book called, The American Nation by Columbia professor John A. Garrity. ( I recall how the working class, thirty-something guy selling it on his front lawn lamented his own failure as a student to value it more –at the very moment he was letting it go for a few dollars.)

The big old tome is notable, at least to me, for how heavily and not inappropriately it vividly emphasizes –right from the first chapter– the often previously neglected or underplayed history of America’s tragic interaction with the slave trade.

The American Nation was first published in 1966; my edition is from 1975. Hence, it ends speaking of Watergate and the fall of Richard Nixon. And, in between, of course, the troubled history of the Vietnam War gets extensive treatment.

But back to that last chapter.

It is portentiously titled, “A Search for Meaning.” Garrity evokes and somewhat demolishes what he calls nineteenth century American historian George Bancroft’s “naive assumption” that he was telling the story of God’s American Israel. Adding…

(F)or Americans had always assumed, and not entirely without reason, that their society represented man’s best hope, if not necessarily the Creator’s. The pride of the Puritans in their wilderness Zion, the Jeffersonians’ fondness for contrasting American democracy with European tyranny, what Tocqueville called the “garrulous patriotism” of the Jacksonians, even the paranoid rantings of the latter-day isolationists all reflected this underlying faith. Historians, immersed in the records of this belief, have inevitably been affected by it. Their doubts have risen from what the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr called “the irony of American history”: the people of the United States have been beguiled by their real achievements and the relative superiority of their institutions into assuming that they are better than they are.

(I detect here early signs of the pendulous Obama-era liberal political and academic emphasis on America’s sins and resulting assaults on American confidence that has led to the equal and opposite cry to “make American great again.” But, whatever….)

Among other things, Garrity goes on to asks:

Has modern technology (and this is 1975) outstripped human intelligence?

Has our social development outstriped our emotional development?

Garrity concludes: No one one can currently answer these questions. Nevertheless, we may surely hope that with their growing maturity, their awareness of their own limitations as a political entity, the American people will grapple with them realistically yet with all their customary imagination and energy.

In othe words, he drew up short of any predictions, but gave a nice pat on the shoulder to 1975 Americans before we ran back into the game.

How have we done in fifty years — with our “customary imagination and energy”?

Historian Garrity died on December 19, 2007 at the age of 87. I wonder how he thinks we did on the path to national maturity and emotional development –and did he perceive, in his final years, the unexampled threat Artificial Intelligence added to fears human intelligence might be on the brink of being “outstripped”?

It’s interesting that Garrity invokes the evaluation of theologian Reinhold Niebuhr who is also credited with that prayerful evocation of divine trust and human limitations that has, in this increasingly and aggressively secular age, become a staple introductory prayer at meetings of many addiction recovery groups:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change

The courage to change the things I can

And the wisdom to know the difference.

Let me hear a big American –Amen!

WHAT I LEARNED AT THE PICNIC

Nothing like a bright, sunny day at the end of August to get you thinking about the environment. I want to save the environment. I like wind and sun. I doubt we can live by wind and sun alone.

But who am I to say so? ( My former colleague Tom Matteo in Massachusetts heats with solar and says he hasn’t had a power bill in three years.)

I’m sure he’s not alone among solar –or wind — boosters. In time, their individual testimonials may heat up the push toward reliance on sun power or turn the blade on wind.

There are skeptics, millions of them, and those whose life-long livlihoods and skill sets and knowledge of the pitfalls of wind and solar are generating abiding objections and warnings about the limitations of sun and wind power. Beyond that, they, like I, would warn against extremes and government coercion when those in power decide they will force us off reliance on fossil fuels.

A weekend ago, I attended a picinic of Local 7 of the United Association of Plumbers and Steamfitters in Upstate New York. There were hot dogs, ribs, wings, the works.

I wound up with a copy of the Association’s trade journal containing an editorial by its General Secretary-Treasurer, Derrick Kualapai.

Seems in our time, I’m not the only one warning against the extremes. Kualapai is the man issuing the warning here — against those who insist adamantly — and sometimes intolerantly –that alternative clean sources (ACS), must be limited to wind and solar. To insist on these sources solely – and I don’t doubt there are many in the environmental movement who do — is, in Kualapai’s words, to insist on “extremely narrow and unrealistic approaches” to the quest for a cleaner environment.

Of, course, Kualapai is a major stakeholder here.

One must always be suspicious of the motives of any writer — of those arguing any point of view — be the motive financial, ideological or what have you. So I invite everyone to be skeptical right along with me. The union for those who earn their living by traditional ways of doing anything might always have ulterior motives for their arguments. But, of course, that does not automtically make their point of view wrong.

Kualapie says his union supports policies that protect and preserve the environment. “Let me be clear at the outset,” he writes in the Journal ( of the United Association), ” we are not climate deniers.” He insists, with the same vigor as those who might attack the union on these grounds, that the union and its members “advocate fiercely for smarth, sensible, decorbonization strategies, including green hydrogen, bioenergy, geothermal and thermal energy networks, as well as advanced nuclear systems, including small modular reactors, and carbon capture utilization and storage.”

Sounds great to this layman, though I don’t know what “capture utilization and storage” is all about except maybe, as the awkward phrasing suggests, the capturing and re-use of carbon that the power industry has managed somehow to store? (Can you tell I was an English major?)

But I’m being told here that these are all options to a narrow focus on wind and solar as exclusive alternative clean sources of energy. Industry stakeholders actually like these alternatives. But I’m being told many in the environmental movement do not.

And Kualapai concludes, “while the UA recognizes the push for wind and solar energy, we’ve also learned that –even with maximum development –they will never solely provide enough power to ensure a sufficient supply of reliable energy for the future.”

“Never” is a challenging word. But that’s what he says, while I’m sure the Green Movement is insisting, ‘never say never” when it comes to wind and solar.

But I ‘m glad I went to the picnic. In the interest of balance, I guess I’ll have to watch for the next picnic held by the Green Lobby. After all, a hot dog is a hot dog, whether you heat it up using gas, wind or solar.

Charcoal briquettes are best.

And in all liklihood, at a Green Lobby event, I’m not likely to be eating meat.

A corn dog will do.

“YOU WILL KNOW THEM, FOR THEY HATE ONE ANOTHER….”

That’s a 180-degree variation — in the form of an ultimate negation –of the ancient Scriptural passage telling us we will know Christians for they “love” one another.

Conversely, I say, you will know a Mafioso — unreconstructed or cooperating with authorities — because they hate one another. It must have something to do with the dark nature of their work. Obviously.

Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr noted in weekend editions that yesterday, June 9, was the 90th birthday of Stephen “The Rifleman” Flemmi who is serving a lengthy federal terms for murder, etc.. at an unspecified location in the nation. Wherever it is, it is far, far from his home of Boston. A true exile.

Carr quotes the late former Mafia capo Frank “Cadillac” Salemmi’s very hateful comments about Flemmi who was, after all, a close former business partner. He basically called him a crybaby. Others from that dark side of the tracks readily chime in when talking about Steve — and, of course, he has appeared in public rarely, and only to testify against former mob associates in an effort to lighten his own penal load. The last time was in 2018. This act, of course, is regarded as the ultimate violation of every criminal enterprise’s strict code of conduct (“ratting out” fellow members). But Steve is now on the ‘inside’ (of walls, chain link and concertina wire) looking ‘out’ (at nothing, including any prospect for freedom before the Angel of Death comes for him as he, an earthly ministering angel of murder, came for as many as fifty souls during his criminal career.) So –he probably cares little about what former associates think of him.

I wonder if he prays? I saw him, during one court apperance readily –and I dare say humbly — acknowledge his role in murders and even in the sexual exploitation of a stepdaughter. He seemed contrite — as much as any sociopath can be contrite, quietly admitting his “moral responsibility.” Does God hear the prayers of the spiritually and emotionally deformed who are genuinely sorry? Is he genuinely sorry? Even capable of genuine sorrow? God knows.

As a reporter, I once sat at a hearing in federal court in Boston in which Frank Salemmi, Steve Flemmi and Patriarca crime family soldier Bobby DeLuca sat side-by-side while a fellow Mafioso-turned-informant testified against them in a pre-trial hearing.

That informant was a strangely seemingly likeable character named Angelo “Sonny” Mecurio. In early images of him, he looks fierce, cold and hard — and overweight. In the dock, opposite his former compatriots, he seemed a paunchy, subued,even exhausted, strangely likeable old man with a wry turn of the eyes and lips. He could have been yours or my benign old uncle. He had gone so far in his effort to get leniency and break free of the mob as to wear a “wire” into a Mafia Induction Ceremony. Imagine the consequences if he’d been discovered! It was bad enough that, at the end of his criminal career, he’d been the one to lure Frank Salemmi to a mob meeting in Saugus at which there was an unsuccessful attempt on his life by fellow mobsters engaged with him in an underworld power struggle.

So, here were Flemmi and Salemmi, as I say, side-by-side — and already doubtless hating one another. Did they ever really like — or trust — one another? Is that possible in the Underworld?

Flemmi, like Mercurio, would go on, eventually, to testify against Salemmi, who, by the way, would in due course, loudly declare in open court that he was “done with the mob” only to be later implicated in the murder of a Boston nightclub owner and sent back to prison — along with Bobby DeLuca, who was forced to acknowedge his role in the same murder.

How did all these guys feel about one another? Mercurio gently upbraided one questioning attorney for referring to mob associates other than the ones sitting across from him, as “friends.”

“You keep call them ‘friends,'” Sonny complained. “At some point in time, they became EX-friends.” Subsequent to that, when asked by Federal Judge Mark Wolf if he liked the men across from him, Sonny said, “not really.” An understatement, no doubt. For some reason, Wolf decided to ask Sonny, “do you like me?”

“You’re alright,” Sonny said sheepishly.

Right answer — to a judge. But Judge Wolf was probably wondering if Mercurio, at this stage of his wayward life, liked anybody, much less loved them. Which gets to the point I’m making here about a defining mark of those who pledge their fealty, their very life to such darkness.

Did Sonny at least fear the men he’d worked among and was now betraying? At that question from somebody, Sonny shrugged and said, “look at the record. These are not Boy Scouts.”

One probing attorney asked him, “did it ever occur to you that you were acting as an agent of the government in this role as an informant (which is what Flemmi and late Irish Mob Boss James “Whitey” Bulger would offer as preposterous defenses for their efforts to undermine the Italian Mafia while carrying on their own criminal mischief. And it was Flemmi’s attorney, as I recall, who was asking the question.)

“Of course,” said Sonny. “I’m a stool pigeon.” When a barely supressed chuckling broke out across the sparsely populated courtroom, Sonny, in response, shrugged again. He seemed to be saying -wordlessly –that he was just calling a spade a spade. His candor almost seemed a form of contrition.

And, for that matter, entirely unrepentent-to-death James Whitey Bulger would never let anyone call him a “stool pigeon.” No, he insisted he was some new iteration of an Undergover Confidential Agent.

Yeah, right.

When that rationale collapsed as a defense strategy, he declared, “do with me what yooz want.”

And they did. They left him in prison far f rom home and were so careless about his incarceration — some would say deliberately so — that he became savagely and fatally naked to his hateful Mafia enemies.

Only God knows if James Bulger ever said anything like an Act of Contrition, though he insistently identified as a Catholic. Good thing God’s mercy is infinite.

Sonny Mercurio died in 2006, regretting — it was reported in his obituary — ever having taken on the role of mob informant, but resigned obviously to hating and being hated by his old crime cronies. Frank Salemmi, body scarred and punctured by the bullets of that assassination attempt (outside the Saugus, MA iHop), died in prison in 2022 at age 89. He, too, seemed resigned, at the time of sentencing to his imminent re-imprisonment; no it wouldn’t be his first tour of “the joint” and he had obviously lied when he said he was “done with the mob.”

He was, I believe, a family man, oddly enough, like a lot of these guys. But the mob came first. That was Frank’s family.

Bobby DeLuca, only 84 by my count and, so far as I know, still alive, had been serving a five-year sentence for lying about what he knew about the murder of that nightclub owner (who was, himself, a man who chose the wrong company in his life), but was released in 2022 on compassionate leave with a bad heart and kidney disease and, therefore, very susceptible (in the court’s eyes) to COVID.

All of which is to say…

Mobsters lead unhealthy lifestyles. Beyond fatty meats, pasta ,donuts, cigars and cigarettes, they also seem addicted to easy money, danger, and being feared and, ultimately, hated. Can you love hating people? We also know that it destroys the hater. So I believe. But that’s Christian psychology, currently being violated the world over.

Of course, much of what Mafiosos do to others and to one another is supposedly “strictly business” — or so the old trop goes. “Nothing personal.” Lethal amorality on steroids.

For the heck of it, I looked up an address in Boston’s Dorchester section (my old section) visible on early Flemmi crime records, and also visible as accompanying illustrations next to Howie Carr’s weekend column. It was Steve Flemmi’s address as of August, 1958 when he was just 24. I looked at the front porch. Someone had hung a rug over a second floor porch. No one’s going to put up a plaque by the chain link fence and llittle yard of shrubbery in Steve Flemmi’s honor. No one living there now, I’m sure, has any idea that, decades ago, a stone-cold murderer and mobster was being nurtered in that house along that quiet street off Washington Street. He was a Korean War veteran whose military MOS (Military Occupation Specialty) had been “Rifleman,” meaning a rifle-bearing member of a combat unit. From the time of his discharge, he entered into a life of crime. I heard him say so in court. Who knows why (Again, God knows.)

I don’t know if it was his long-ago criminal associates, impressed by the combat veteran in their midst, or Flemmi himself who decided to recycle and adopt his military specialty as the odious street nickname, “rifleman.” Reporters love to say it. It sounds so evil and so Godfather, so Sopranos. The glamour of evil.

But millions of American male soldiers and Marines, now and in times past, have borne that title through a time of war. Steve “The Rifleman” Flemmi decided to dishonorably deploy it, turn it on its head and keep it forever — wherever he is now.

How intimidating! (Once upon a time.)

How– hateful! (Now and forever.)

WITHER WE U.S. BOOMERS, AS JUNE DOTH ONCE AGAIN BLOOM ?

When we hit 35, we posessed 21% of the nation’s wealth. Millenials nearing that average age possess just 3% of the nation’s household wealth.

So says a fascinating volume noted below that broke upon the scene almost three years ago.

It has been alleged in various quarters that our bid for personal freedom ended up destroying the institutions and restraints that made freedom safe and possible.

The book containing those charges is Boomers: The Men and Women who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster. (Sentinel, 2021)

I’ve only scratched the surface and so cannot make a good case for or against Andrews’s dire thesis. But, being a Boomer, I’m certainly interested in exploring her less than throroughly rosie exploration of the civilizational contributions — or desecrations — of Steve Jobs, Aaron Sorkin, Heffrey Sachs, Sonia Sotomayor — Boomers all, and all, among others, scrutinized in this book . And, of course, of millions of others (including, as I’ve indicated, myself), will have to examine our own consciences and our sense of our own contributions or divigations.

To mention just one person:

Camille Paglia has always interested me, a flashy Boomer contrarian. I don’t hear much about her lately.

But I agree with those who admire her for resenting the over-elevation of pop culture and the denegration of academia — and, with critic/observer Michael Brendon Dougherty’s mordent aside about “the naivete’ of a generation that thought the worst effects of free love could be handled tidily by penicillin.”

But Dougherty concedes, “If Boomers are going to die with nearloy three-fifths of our nation’s wealth (which apparently Andrews’s book maintains), “we had better find a way to be written into their last wills.”

I’m one Boomer who doesn’t expect to reap that bonanza. So I know no one will be interested in finding their way into my will.

Not a post-Boomer soul.

NIKKI HALEY

I usually avoid politics in these politically hyperventilating times. . But a recent tortured political enterprise, now ended, has provoked me into the arena. I’ll say my piece, then slip back into the shadows.

I speak of Nikki Haley’s quixotice candidacy.

Nikki probably never really had a chance, and ultimately probably did nothing more than douse a certain portion of the American electorate with purple dye so Democrats know where to hunt for wobbling, disgruntled voters to rescue their senescent blowhard placeholder from the morgue reserved for one-term losers.

At the outset, when it seemed she just might have a shot at the White House, she endured the predictable, execrable slanders from the Left, beginning with the dreadful , narcissistic Don Lemon, formerly of CNN, who dismissed her as a woman NOT in her prime.

The so-called Progressive Left has no shame. Theirs and the Democratic Party’s appalling influence from Washington to Hollywood is probably why Republicans wound up with the convex carnival mirror opposite with the likes of Marjory Taylor Green and Lauren Boebert who, as one pundit has commented, appear to mistake regular appearances on cable news and social media taunting thier opponents –wearing MAGA hats — with the business of governing. Indeed Green famously suggested we split up as a nation with “a national divorce from the Left.”

But, back to the demise of Nikki Haley….and the Left’s abuse of her.

Recall how Donald Trump was (rightly) attacked for engaging in “birtherism” during the presidency of Barrack Obama. The hypocritical Left did the same with Nikki Haley over her Indian heritage, suggesting there should be a search of South Carolina probate records to see just who and what she is. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan declared that Haley, former U.N. Ambassador and South Carolina governor, should not be understood as a positive example of how successfully minorities can advance in the United States because she “uses her brown skin to launder white-supremacist talking points.”

I guess she wasn’t black or brown enough for them. It’s the old Clarence Thomas exceptionalism.

And they asked about her name (as Barrack Obama was quizzed about his name). Mary Trump, a favorite of the Left for her regular excoriation of her uncle Donald, tweeted, “First of all, f*** you Nimrata Haley.

(Yes, these are dreadful times. Perhaps I should refrain from such harsh words for the President. It’s just that I loath his obvious and toxic and manifest phoniness and his rosary-bead-rattling Whited Sepulchre Catholicism while he actively, aggressively attacks the pro-life moment at every turn, pledging now to negate the hard-won, generational victory of that movement by reimposting the legally insupportable national abortion license known as Roe V. Wade rather than let the people decide where and how much they wish to be pro-abortion. Fear not, those of you who support abortion rights. You’ll be winning in the long-short term. But the other side deserves some bargaining power. I fear you fear our national conscience will be awakened to this horror and it will cease. That, my friend, is a long way off.)

Nikki Haley ultimately probably hoped to be the face of traditional institutional Republicanism and traditional conservatism in the post-Trump era. –a noble aspirtaion, but I fear that ship has sailed. And it didn’t help that she indulged in her own form of identity politics, speaking of how her family, “wasn’t white enough to be white, weren’t black enough to be black.” Enough already! Let us finally usher in a truly post-racialist era.

So, she fought on, resisting Trump’s pressure to withdraw. I have to admire her for that, up to a point. But it was a rolling example of futility that, again, just let the Democrats know where the reluctant Democrats and renegate, non-MEGA Republicans might be lurking.

I don’t know if she’ll ever be back or might, more likely, drift into political oblivion. She never, ever truly cut a very strong or forceful figure –no fault of hers. A University of New Hampshire poll at the outset of her candidacy had her only at 8 per cent. This improved as time marched on and other challengers dropped out. But not by much.

Nice try, Nikki. You just weren’t what we were looking and praying for.

Now, pray with us that we somehow survive the coming four-year hell that the purgatory of bad choices has left in your wake.