What I Learned, and Re-learned, About the Revolution

History teachers love to read about history, so when I saw that the first of three parts of Rick Atkinson's trilogy about the military part of the American Revolution, called The British Are Coming, had hit the shelves, I snapped one up.

It takes a while to absorb. It's 564 pages of text, with very detailed maps to which one needs to keep referring as Atkinson winds you through the very exciting, very dangerous, very precarious first two years of the Revolutionary War. Its language kept me near a dictionary. The sophistication of military and naval terminology, especially dated as they were, made my head shake. Sometimes it was as if he was so immersed in the 18th Century that he was talking to someone still living then. The research and notes are amazing. I'll leave it at that.

That can wear one out, but if one keeps going, the narrative is stirring and deep. I learned, and re-learned, quite a few things:

• This was no quaint conflict. This was fierce, no-holds-barred butchery, executed without hesitation by both sides. The British were especially fond of running the colonists through with their bayonets. The colonists were happy to pick off the proud British regulars as they marched with their bright red coats. Both greatly feared that aspect of the other.
• Should someone have died in the fighting, it would have been far better to have died immediately. Descriptions of those dying after days of helpless suffering were awful.
• Disease significantly slowed both sides: dysentary, cholera, and especially smallpox. Far more soldiers died from disease than from battle wounds.
• Colonial incompetence matched that of British unfamiliarity with the land, and in that sense, balanced each other out, at least early on. When the British knew where they were and what they were doing, as in Canada, they utilized their other advantages in training and supply to rout the Americans. When they didn't, they missed enormous opportunities, as in New York, to end the war quickly.
• George Washington was amazing, impetuous, and ambivalent all together. He and his undersupplied, perpetually underpaid, but incredibly inspired army--the numbers of which were never stable, since Continental Army regulars were supplemented by colonial militiamen whose numbers ebbed and waned--survived sometimes on sheer luck, sheer guts, and sheer feel for the situation. Smartly, he often convened war counsels of his officers before making big moves. Sometimes they disagreed, and he listened. Usually, they were right.
• The next time you're outside, walk about forty or fifty steps, or about thirty yards. Then look back. Atkinson writes that, at the Battle of Princeton (a week after the crossing of the Delaware at Trenton), Washington was that close to British regulars--and on top of his white horse to boot. You will think what I did: He's the bravest person I've ever heard of, or the craziest. He rode up there to inspire his men. Think it worked?
• One of the things that saved Washington in that situation was the inaccuracy of weaponry of that day. That's why soldiers stood together to fire at soldiers standing together on the other side: so they could hit someone. Still, there was plenty of carnage. See above.
• Congress exasperated Washington with its dithering. Fortunately, King George III insisted on trying to manage the war himself, not unlike Hitler long afterwards, and was obviously way off in some of his reasoning--which was badly shaded by the same British condescension which had a great deal to do with causing the conflict in the first place. But then, the American colonies were, by far, the largest and most lucrative part of the British Empire, which made their preservation under the crown an incredible priority. Once again, follow the money.
• Ben Franklin really was the walking, talking embodiment of what America seemed to represent to Europeans. That was good, because he was the driving force behind getting France, then Spain and the Dutch, to help out by shipping weapons (not all of which worked), then cash, and finally warships and soldiers.
• American schooners were re-equipped for fighting and poked holes in the British blockade of the colonies. At times, British supply ships were intercepted and captured, which frustrated the British to no end. Some of those ships carried messages meant for generals in the field. They never got there, causing confusion and mis-coordination. A regular round-trip to the colonies and back took over a year.
• The British treatment of American prisoners was ghastly. A good three-fourths of them died in captivity. Many of them were herded onto ships offshore, where they died of malnutrition, starvation, and disease. It reminded me of the Bataan Death March of WW II, or of Andersonville prison of the Civil War. Like I said: This was no "gentleman's war."
• I was led to believe that not much happened in the South during the war's early stages. Not so: The British tried to take the port of Charleston, South Carolina in 1776. The colonists threw them back. The British tried to organize a Tory militia in North Carolina the same year. The colonists routed them. The colonists drove the British out of the port of Norfolk, Virginia. The British burned the town to keep the colonists from benefiting from supplies.
• If it's possible, the rebel colonists hated the Tories more than the British. The Tories hated right back. In those terms, this truly was a no-mercy civil war.
• If there was an MVP for the colonists in those first two years, it had to be Benedict Arnold. No one had more talent, and no one used it better. He was both a field general and an admiral, fighting the British to a standstill in both ways in Canada and upper New York. He was badly wounded at Quebec, but kept commanding his troops through a desperate retreat with the British right on their heels. No, he did not get the credit he deserved, due somewhat to haughty arrogance that repelled many. Atkinson points out that he had a right to be bitter about it, though. His infamous betrayal is yet to come.
• How the hell the colonists got those field guns all the way from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston during the winter of 1775-76, through snow and over the Adirondacks (including downhill all that way, think about that) to drive the British out of there is a feat that surpasses the imagination. Henry Knox, later to become the first Secretary of War, was the mastermind.
• The crossing of the Delaware was an act of desperation. Washington's army was amazingly lucky, with help from a foggy night, to have escaped from New York, but he had lost plenty from desertions and enlistments that weren't renewed. He personally begged others to stay on if only for a couple of more weeks. In a scene made for television, he lined them up and asked them to give yet more for their country and their families. First no one stepped forward, so he asked them again. Then a couple did. He asked again and got a couple more. He kept asking, and a few dozen more stepped up. It allowed him to surprise the Hessians at Trenton the morning after Christmas. Then he pulled a fast one on Cornwallis to win at Princeton.
• Speaking of that battle: Two Americans we would hear from a bit later were participants. Colonel Alexander Hamilton got out of sickbay to help guide artillery. His death from gunfire would come later, applied by another former rebel, Aaron Burr. Captain James Monroe, all of 18, was wounded twice at Trenton, including in a lung. He must have carried it with him the rest of his life, including during two presidential terms, like Andrew Jackson.
• Paul Revere probably did not exactly say The British are coming, nor did martyred spy Nathan Hale probably exactly say I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. They probably did say something akin to that. The rest is the makings of legend. By the way: Revere was captured during his ride and the British later let him go, which I already knew. Hale was allowed to hang for several days as an example, which I did not know.
• Most of the time, dead soldiers and limbs that had been amputated were buried en masse. No time to lose on ceremony; there was a war to fight.
• Washington understood early that the defeat of his army, not necessarily the taking of territory, would decide the war. He knew he only had to outlast the British, who would eventually exhaust themselves. Victory meant only to avoid capture, fighting here and there to pare the British numbers and keep his own people engaged and feeling competent. More than once, the British knew they had him. Each time, inexplicably, they rested rather than relentlessly pursue. Each time, he got away, just barely.
• On the other hand, the British never hesitated to kill colonial livestock and burn cities. There were also reports of rape, sometimes stemming from the German Hessians who had been hired to take care of this dirty business. This, of course, enraged the colonists even more deeply.

My theory of warfare is bearing out. War, I taught the students, is about four things: Technology, production, strategy and morale, all over time. Who wins those four battles wins it all, or morale overwhelms the other three. One side either stops fighting because it can't, or because it doesn't want to anymore. That's why, for instance, when independence was declared, colonists pulled down a statue of George III in downtown New York City, and melted the lead into 42,000 bullets. Not much for technology and strategy, but for production and especially morale, it was a real winner. Good for them, because when General William Howe's army came in and took over the city, the British held New York for the rest of the war--another seven years.

In those years would come gradual, building, undeniable resistance that would become an unbeatable force. To paraphrase John Adams, the revolution really began in the hearts and minds of the American people. As of early 1777, it was already beginning to tell. The British would not only have to subdue Washington's army, but its whole support system, too, which grew with dreams of freedom and independence that needed to be established, not just declared. We know how that went. Rick Atkinson promises two more tries to tell us how. I look forward to both of them.

Just An Angel Waiting for Car Repairs

I never saw him. I had no idea he was there.

We were both waiting, among others, for our cars to be repaired. It was a dealer's shop, so I was in the showroom extended. It was spit-shined clean. There were coffee and snacks. I was told they'd be an hour because help was short that day, but I was in no hurry. I'm retired.

When I get the oil changed and everything else checked, I bring some of the Sunday New York Times with me. I never read the whole thing on Sunday, anyhow. Too much to go over. Sometimes, it takes the whole week, then comes another one. Here we were on a Wednesday. I was halfway through it. That seemed about right.

I was reading about how Seattle is trying a new approach to drug addiction--treatment across the board instead of jail, not a bad idea--when he came up behind me. Craggly-faced, he had more hair on top than I did and so his gray crewcut wore well. Stoop-shouldered, he couldn't have been taller than five-eight to start with. His flannel shirt had a tear near one of the breast pockets. His other pocket bulged with a cigarette pack.

I must have looked approachable, or considering the very casual way I'd been dressed, I must have looked blue-collar. There was no other explanation. He just decided I needed to hear what he had to say. I sat at a small, raised, circular table with four chairs. He, too, had a styrofoam coffee cup; his, too, had cream in it. He set it down.

"I see Trump is going after the unions again," he said. Something about me must have suggested I'd be amenable to such a sentiment. I used to be a nationally-elected teachers' union leader during the last decade. If he was looking for empathy, he needed to look no farther.

"Yeah," I said, with that tone that let him know I was in his corner. He dialed history back to Ronald Reagan, who had unleashed the anti-union attacks with his devastation of the air traffic controllers. This guy's tuned in, I thought.

"I'm a union man, too," I said. I mean, if he was going to hold court, I'd be the gallery. It was difficult to hear him over the Musak smooth music, even as he stood near my left shoulder. He didn't seem to be speaking that naturally with sotto voce; it was as if he was trying to keep from causing any kind of agitation, now that he had found someone to share common attitudes with. We'd learned to do that over the years, he and I. We didn't have to say so. I knew exactly what he was doing. Union people keep each other close. Others could be listening.

He continued with a review of his work career. It had begun in Marathon County at age 16. His father had just suffered a heart attack and couldn't work. Someone else had to keep the home going. He dropped out of school to work in a bakery. "They asked me when I could start," he said. "I said, 'I can start right now.' 'Okay, why don't you come back at midnight?' the guy said."

He did, and worked through to 10:30 that morning. That was his life for three years. He walked home from work. It took him an hour.

"I'd sleep until about 8 p.m.," he went on. "Then I'd go back to work." Some life, basically from 8 to 11 p.m. Then work. Then sleep. Teaching, I thought, was never that bad.

His union connections began in Manitowoc at the shipyards. Again, I have no idea why he was sharing this. He just decided he'd tell someone, and I was the guy that day. "I don't know how old you are," he said more than once. "You could be 80, for all I know." To which I thought, Thanks a whole lot. Do I really look that old? But just days before, I had just been mistaken for being my dad's brother. He's just turned 93. I laughed when that happened. Did I have any choice?

"I'm 73," he said. "You and I, we've been around." I told him I was 67, but I didn't have the heart to tell him that I'd been at the top levels of politics in Washington for six years, had been in nearly all the major cities for meetings, had met such people as Ted Kennedy, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Mr. and Mrs. Clinton. No. This was no time for dumping what was left of my ego on him.

He had worked in Sturgeon Bay for a few years, too. By that time, he'd met and married his first wife, but she preferred Milwaukee. He hadn't, but they moved. "But you got through it," I consoled. "Yeah," he sighed wistfully. "I got through it."

In Milwaukee, he worked for a Patrick Cudahy meat-packing plant. He showed me the company insignia on his watch. "I worked my ass off for that," he said twice. He had a pension, Social Security, Medicare with a supplement, and Medicaid. Life was all right.

Except for Medicaid, it was exactly the way I was getting around now. "You have to set your sights a little lower," I admitted. "But it isn't bad."

Having stayed in Milwaukee, he was working on his second marriage. "Been eleven years now," he said. "We're doing okay." "Good for you," I said, admiring someone who'd tried again at 62.

Karmically, his phone rang. He spent a couple of minutes on it, and I briefly returned to the New York Times. He hung up and decided it was time to end his soliloquy.

"Sorry to bother you," he said pretentiously. He knew better. I had held the ultimate barrier of putting my head down and continuing to read the paper at any moment, ending the conversation. But I hadn't. He had had his story to tell, and I let him tell it. Perhaps he had needed validation; perhaps he had spent the last few hours trying to sum things up and thought he'd try them out on someone who looked as if he'd care.

He had found that someone. But then, that someone remembered how often he'd sat and listened to others in his own profession describe their own careers, sometimes with a sense of wonderment: I'm still here. I'm still alive. Being a contributing member of humanity often obliges not what you say, but what you hear others say when they want you to hear it. The world crowds around all of us at times. We all have voices that need to be acknowledged, somewhere, somehow, by someone. I harkened back to the refrain from the play "1776": Is anybody there? Does anybody care? "No bother at all," I said. "Good to be with another union brother."

He walked on. Within a minute, I raised my eyes from the newspaper and looked to see where he was: Gone from that vast showroom as if he'd flown away.

He was back in ten minutes after having paid his fee. His stride was more confident now. Shoulders back, he stood straight as he walked back past my table, though he hadn't had to. He wanted to make sure I'd seen him leave. "Take care," he said, aiming at me with his hand like a pistol, the way people do when they're on a mission. Emotionally, he looked like he'd gotten an oil change.

We never knew each other's names. We didn't even shake hands. I had a master's degree, he didn't finish high school. My shirt didn't have any holes in it, and I would have been embarrassed to have worn one that did. There's no doubt he had ever gone to work wearing anything other than flannel shirts or t-shirts and jeans. I never wore that when teaching, and I had had to wear suits every day while on the road as a national union representative for six years. His career began in Marathon County and ended in Milwaukee; mine had tossed me to meetings and jobs in places like Little Rock, Arkansas and DC and Austin, Texas and Seward, Alaska and all the way to Ankara, Turkey, at one point.

We had absolutely nothing in common, outside of a Toyota that needed repairs. We also had everything in common: broken marriages, several jobs, and the aftermath, for which our unions had played an enormous role, placing us somewhere along that spectrum between comfort and desperation. Both had landed us here, in Milwaukee, one late summer day. It was, in total, not that bad of a spot. We had our unions to thank.

Angels show up when you least expect them, and they often don't look like it. Maybe I was his angel that day. Maybe he was mine.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Why I'm Glad I'm No Longer Teaching, Part I: The Ugly Residue of NCLB

It took me a long time to admit this because the job lasts longer than you do and I loved it most of the time I did it, but--I'm glad I'm not teaching any longer.

I've had enough of a chance to view the job from afar. As a member of the NEA Executive Committee during the last decade, I had an opportunity to visit many places in this country and see many schools. I also had the chance to listen to many members tell me about how teaching was changing. They didn't like it a bit.

"It's no fun anymore, Mark," said more than one of them. I had taken leave from my position in Cedarburg, Wisconsin, in August 2003. I would never return, though that was not my doing. Politics and paranoia spelled my teaching doom.

By the time that decision had been made, in 2007, though very disappointing, it wasn't all that surprising. The polititization of the profession, which has never been far from the surface, raged during Bush 43's dismal two terms.

That was because No Child Left Behind had been passed, which turned the determination of school competence strongly in the direct of the results of standardized testing. The NEA had not stood in the way of it, largely because it had been promised that funding for public education would be increasing. A rather stunning speech delivered at the NEA building sealed that fate.

Sen. Ted Kennedy, to whom the NEA's Friend of Education Award had been presented the year before, came to the NEA Board of Directors meeting in a surprise visit in February, 2002. He brought his two large, black poodles with him, as if he'd just been out for a walk and decided to drop by without an invitation, something that Senators never did (Perhaps he was: He wasn't wearing a suit.). He took the podium and, with one of the poodles constantly yelping, told the Board (of which I was then a member) to back away from opposing the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, of which NCLB was going to become a vital part. With President Bob Chase's tacit approval, we did, and that was that.

But bait-and-switch was underway in the White House. The moneys supplied that first year, 2002, would be by far the most of Bush's term. Looking back, it was the way it was always meant to be. That's because, in a twisting of logic that still makes no sense, schools that did not meet the adequacy standards of NCLB would have money taken away from it, not added on, thus by definition lowering the total funding necessary (as if to say: See? Told you you couldn't do it--something that teachers would never, ever say to students). Those standards demanded that 100% of the students would need to be competent in Math, Reading and Science--an impossible goal in any and every school--or eventually, the federal government would take over the inadequate schools, fire the administrators and the teachers, and virtually turn each of them into charters. Tough love turned into tough beans.

Back then, the specter of charter schools didn't quite have the onus now attached to them, but anyone familiar with education politics knew very well what that would mean: union power would be all but removed. As it was, the albatross of school failure had, until that point, been the stuff of campaign rhetoric. During 43's time, though, the Department of Education unabashedly began bashing the unions regularly, as often as it greeted the day. If nothing else, a wide propaganda campaign against teachers' unions came out into the open. The Republican mantra had always been that the unions were the chief cause of educational failure in America; now, policy had been carved out from it.

No Child Left Behind was eventually exposed for what it was: An underhanded attack on public schools to provide a bar that was always raised just a bit too far. Bush had buffaloed Kennedy and Rep. George Miller of California, who had shepherded the original NCLB through Congress. Infuriated, they hammered the 43 Administration during its second term for its deconstruction of the meaning of public education. With federal monies drying up, states and localities scrambled for dollars and cut programs that were once deemed important, especially in the arts and special education.

It didn't take teachers long to figure out the situation: They needed to 'teach to the test,' meaning someone else's test instead of their own. The demeaning of teaching has hung over the profession ever since, now more than a decade and a half. Bush and his education minions kept hammering away at a phrase we detested: The soft bigotry of low expectations. It was as if teachers no longer bothered to demand good work from students; merely adequate work. Left to ourselves, we would have done what was apparently asked of us; I sincerely doubt that many of my colleagues would have had a problem with it. We would have pushed them harder if we knew we had the support for it.

Instead, teachers had to figure out what would be asked on standardized tests and make sure the kids knew about it. The older they got, the more they caught on, too: a teacher they didn't like might have their job on the line, or at least a lack of a raise, based on the aggregate results of test scores. Passive resistance might take that teacher down. It gave the kids the classroom power--something that you never, ever want to do.

It also made teaching so repetitious that neither kids nor teachers felt good about it. Teachers feared that they'd run out of time if they decided to enrich the curriculum with class activities or simulations, for want of "covering the material." It's not as if teachers never cared about that; they nearly always did. But the daily grind could never let up, and that's never a way to deal with a semester or whole school year of coursework. There's nothing special about any teacher that has to just cover the book, either. Nobody could feel challenged, except to make students do something they didn't have to do, with no real consequences for them.

In my NEA years (2003-09), I gave speeches and commentary on this strange and damaging situation endlessly, raving against it the same way all leaders did. Everybody would nod in agreement: internally, it was low-hanging fruit to go after it. But 43 was re-elected, to our absolute disbelief and chagrin, due most likely to 9-11 hangover. We were stuck for another four years.

We had hope that the Obama Administration would relieve us of this iron collar. But by then, the recession had brought the country down low. Public education needed a surge in funding to survive, and that it got from a president who had our support in his campaign. But our bargaining position wasn't very strong then, either.

Barack Obama was a centrist: He wanted to find a place where all could settle, however uneasily. It would be an admirable but difficult position, since the Republicans were already determined to hold back absolutely everything he tried. Besides, education wasn't Obama's gold pin on his lapel: Health care was. The NEA backed him to the hilt, but it became compromised again on its own core issues.

We knew from the start that we wouldn't be getting the kind of support we were looking for. We pushed Stanford education professor Linda Darling-Hammond, long a union friend and an expert in teacher quality issues, for Secretary of Education. Obama had a different goal in mind, though: Straighten out the standardized testing, which had itself been compromised by a number of districts, such as Atlanta, in which cheating had been detected (to which I had commented more than once, though nobody else wanted to say it: What did you expect, with so many dollars on the line?). Arne Duncan had sniffed it out in Chicago, Obama's home. He got the nod.

With Obama's blessing (and an ability to turn a phrase so he never answered any question concerning it in a sufficiently direct way), Duncan's program was called Race to the Top. It created a set of benchmarks by which states could compete for funding, some of which were more favorable to teachers, some of which weren't. The problem was that the major benchmark was the fulfillment of standards that state governments were allowed to make for themselves. Most of them included reliance on the results of standardized testing, so not only did Race to the Top not get rid of such reliance, but allowed it to be doubled down and imbedded inside state educational cultures. States like Tennessee, for instance, allowed exactly half of its evaluations of schools and teachers to be based on test scores. That was, and is, absurd.

If states were to be allowed their own control over such evaluations as a compromise for Obama to get the funding placed, though, the ones controlled by Republicans will make sure to limit the effects of unions. Reliance on test scores is one good way to do it, especially if nobody trusts either teachers to do their jobs or administrators to observe and evaluate them.

But Obama and Duncan had committed the first mistake in problem-solving: They hadn't gotten to the problem itself. The true issue wasn't trying to clean up a system that had caved into test scores as its measurement: the issue was the overemphasis on test-taking itself. Obama did a lot of good things, and avoided a lot of bad things, as President, but not here.

By the time I spent a year in Washington, DC, looking for a job that never surfaced (2013-14), the test score culture had established itself inside the educational conversations in amazingly hard-baked ways. The whole system, it seemed, had simply turned and drilled into the entire aspect of test scores without challenging their validity or reliability any longer. I recall going to a conference which featured a discussion between researchers, two of whom had previously worked inside public schools. They were getting excited--excited--about giving tests to kindergarteners: Five-year-olds. I got up and asked whether they had figured in the simple fact that, during the testing, a number of them might have to go to the restroom. They got rather indignant.

The notion doubled down. I went to another conference at which three educational experts debated the benefits of controlled recess. You know, as long as they were controlling every aspect of curricula, why not control every aspect of schooling? I got to the mike again, supporting the single person who debunked it. Recess is the place kids work things out, I said (and so did she), kind of like any adult coming to the moment of aha! while walking, biking, or jogging; the physicality kickstarts endorphins, and you begin to put things together. Based on hearing that, I got solicited by people who wanted me to speak to prospective teachers. I did. They couldn't pay me, though. So it was during that recession.

In any event, governance via test scores continues. Tests prove only the ability of students to take a particular test--not the skills necessary to survive and flourish in the outside world. It doesn't broaden the students' worlds at all. In fact, it narrows them.

We do not need that today. We need wider perspectives and an awareness of all that the world encompasses. We get that by stressing the processing of information that is increasing geometrically, not arithmetically. Instead, we focus on content, the sheer volume of which is continually spinning out of our grasp. Measurement of school competence by test scores works in the opposite direction. Our system has been compromised by control freaks. We are the lesser for it.

It is due to a sad assumption: that education is the be-all and end-all of what people should absorb in their lives. Thus is the overreach of those seeking to get all of everything in. Formal education should be seen as the start, not the end, of a lifelong process and desire to learn as much as possible--to seek fulfillment that can never be completed, but can always be enriched. It is much the great gift of life itself that one can do that. But the battles over what is to be included within the box of twelve grades, at the bare minimum, too greatly stresses that portion of a learner's life--and, surrounded by requirements, too often turns them off. When they get to the end of it, then, they stop. We are feeding, not defeating, that trend.

My patience would wear very thin in such circumstances. My inclination to speak out would leave me in a position of non-support. I wouldn't be labeled a 'team player', and probably subjected to scrutiny beyond the norm. They might kick me out before I would step down myself, now unprotected by contractual arrangements. Either way, I'd walk away satisfied that I'd scratched that itch and it was time to move onto something else that made more sense.

Too bad. They took something great and covered it with ugly residue. Diane Ravitch was right: The main problem with American education is that no one can agree on why we educate children. But this sure isn't the way to do it.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Woodstock at 50: A Dream Deferred, or Denied?

Come on, people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another right now

--"Get Together" by The Youngbloods

One of the oddities I found at my 50-year high school class reunion is that nobody mentioned the class song. Its words are above.

Apparently, we are far beyond that now. It was only a dream.

Fifty years ago, too, came the ultimate musical love-in, be-in, and mud-in in the mid-August heat: Woodstock. It was wonderful, it was awful; it was a chance for terrific music, terrific friendship, terrific trashing of a landscape. It gained praise for young people, it earned condemnation for them. It was something of a dreamscape for some, it was a nightmare for others.

It was a little bit of everything. It probably couldn't have lasted another day, either. Losses in money were catastrophic for the festival organizers; it took years to settle with the groups and individuals who appeared. It took days for cleanup, since so much was left behind, sodden with rain and mud.

And yet, and yet. No fights, no bitter issues among the faithful attendees, despite universal discomfort by nearly every single one of the 400,000. A city the size of Tulsa, and nobody had a strong enough issue with anybody else to come to fisticuffs. Though I don't know of the average age of the festival goers, nobody could assume it might be more than 30. You have to admit: That's amazing.

I wonder: Did anybody have any weapons among them? How did they ever make it through three whole days without them? There isn't a single report that I've read that mentions it.

I was in northwest Massachusetts, visiting friends, the week after. One fellow I ran into said that water he'd had (it was scarce) had been spiked with LSD. It was the same with at least one member of Santana's band, too, said a New York Times reprise article.

Wanting to be stoned, and then being stoned, is one thing. Not knowing it's coming is quite another. It's dangerous. But he survived to tell the story.

The juxtaposition of this idealistic festival with the futile horror of Vietnam is inevitable and telling. This would not be the first time, nor the last, when the nation would be allowed to pursue whatever important and frivolous activities that it felt necessary or suitable while young people were killed thousands of miles away. Whatever guilt or retribution that someone might have connected to it was either ignored or quickly dismissed.

You might have said that indeed, those soldiers were fighting to preserve the freedoms we had and have. If someone wanted to do something that made it look like they weren't especially appreciative, then that, too, was part of the broad canopy of liberty that our society embraces. You might have also said that our freedoms were never the point: It was the freedom of the South Vietnamese that we were fighting for, just like the freedoms of those whom we liberated in two world wars.

Except now we know that our soldiers might not have even needed to be there by that time. Because of recently released documents, we now know that Richard Nixon had bluffed South Vietnam's president, Nguyen Van Thieu, into holding back on negotiations that had been begun by President Lyndon Johnson (by which he sacrificed running for another term) to get us out of the Vietnam War so Nixon could take credit for the eventual peace, regardless of how long that would take.

Because it closed the door on negotiations at least until Nixon became president, and because it took until Nixon's second term for us to guarantee that we would stop fighting, the blood of every single American killed in Vietnam during that time period--including those who died during the time of Woodstock, August 15-17, 1969--is on his hands. In all, that took nearly six more years, an extension of Nixon's corruption beyond his humiliating downfall.

Two and three months later, on October 15 and November 15, 1969, war protesters held massive demonstrations in Washington, DC. They had caught onto the big con, and wanted Nixon to know it. The dream of a world at peace had been denied, firewalled, and turned back.

It also had been betrayed. And here we are, half a century later, still unable to conclude that it all had been worth it. Peace with honor, as Nixon insisted? We got neither. A divided nation remained that way.

Nobody moves on without baggage. Memories are stubborn. Time might heal, but it also might merely scar over, leaving functionality at best.

I wonder what the time of 45's muggery of democracy will leave here. It won't disappear. It won't be pretty, either. How functional are we now? How does that fare on our horizon? Who could possibly have foreseen that at Woodstock?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

When White Privilege Stares You in the Face

It began innocently enough. I met with a group of writers who, like me, needed time away from whatever else was going on in our lives to do what we kept saying we needed to do: Write.

The group is called Shut Up and Write!, and that's pretty much what we did for an hour on Friday over a lunch break for some, in a coffee shop just south of downtown Milwaukee. For me, it was to jumpstart some important research I'd done for a book I'm writing, research that I had left unfallowed for far too long.

After cursory introductions--this was my first time--away we went. I pounded the latte I'd ordered along with the laptop keys. My notes weren't very legible. I had promised myself to redo them, but the time had slipped by. I couldn't get all of them for what they were. Nonetheless, I recalled some of them and the basic story, which was fascinating and will someday appear in the book.

Transcribing them took nearly the whole hour allotted by the group to get whatever work done one could. A fellow across the room at the coffee shop who was pounding away at his laptop came across when the facilitator called time and said hello. He had been up since about 4 a.m.

But why he'd been awake was the crucial point. He'd heard shots in his neighborhood, Sherman Park, and called 9-1-1. Nobody showed up. Nobody.

He'd learned that there had been some confusion about which precinct had jurisdiction. Nonetheless, he said, having someone at least drive by in the area would have been enough for him. I said that a police presence, at least, might have served notice that at least they knew something was up. "Yeah, a presence," he said in agreement.

I asked him whether he'd written down the incident, including the lack of police response. He hadn't. "You should do so," I said, "before you forget." I noted to him my lackadaisical response to the aforementioned interview, dealing with another dangerous situation (in fact, it had had a happy ending, a child-napping that had crossed continents seven years ago) that might have ended otherwise.

It was part of a book I'm writing on all the Graftons in the world. This one was connected to Grafton, West Virginia, the site of the founding of Mother's Day. The lady I interviewed was honored as a Mother of the Year, partly, I'd guess, because she lived in West Virginia, partly because of her absolute tenacity with which she'd hung in there for some two years to get her daughter back from a childnapping which had taken her to Africa. I had been there when she was honored and in doing so had shared part of her harrowing experience with her saved daughter in the audience. We'd exchanged business cards and I had followed up by phone.

The fellow from Sherman Park asked if I lived in Grafton, Wisconsin, not that far a drive from the bus station, half a block from where we were speaking. No, I'd said, I lived on the east side now. "Well, you wouldn't have this situation there," he said casually.

I kind of defended myself, saying that, just weeks before, a shooting had taken place near an east side corner that was maybe a mile away. "I think all bets are off about that," I said. "You never know when the next one's going to happen."

But it was a weak argument compared to his neighborhood and we all knew it. Here was a textbook example of white privilege. My neighborhood had few, if any, people of color living within it. The blacks I had normally encounter are panhandlers. One confronted me at the entry to a Whole Foods store, and, upon my refusal to help him, gave me a suggestion of sexual gymnastics I could perform if I had a minute.

Unquestionably, I also noted, similar situations have happened and will happen. This probably wasn't the first instance of police reluctance to respond. I recalled, too, my experience as a union grievance officer and staffer. "I always told the members to write things down right after they happened and to save the information," I said. "You forget important details that you don't think matter, but they might in fact be the deciding factor in a case. And I suggested, too, that he should tell others to do the same so stories overlapped and could be corroborated.

"People get much more respect for their accounts if they're written down, even if they're the only people to do so," I went on. And they do, because the computer always records not only the words, but the time and date in which they're written, so that nobody can complain about disingenuousness or outright lies.

Yet, under what new circumstances would this fellow get the attention he deserved? He hadn't sounded either panic-stricken or excessively needy. But he did sound pretty worried. And confused. There had been shots fired. The police had been called. Why hadn't they come? Were they all that busy at 4:17 a.m.?

I had no answers for him. Neither did anyone else. But we all knew without knowing. In that neighborhood, thoroughly populated with people of color, there were probably as many false alarms as actual shootings. People are easily jolted by anything resembling gunfire, especially people who live in places in which gunfire is more customary.

Maybe the police are too numbed by such reports to take many of them seriously. But that's been true for a while. In the book Evicted, which hit many best-seller lists, Matthew Desmond notes that during "the last decades of the twentieth century"--twenty to thirty years ago now--cities including Milwaukee began passing "nuisance ordinances," by which landlords could be penalized for the behavior of their tenants, including excessive numbers of 9-1-1 calls made within a certain timeframe. The police, in other words, tended to wash their hands of situations involving loud noises and domestic violence--including situations in which guns were drawn, if not actually used.

If that's the culture of the inner city, then, the poor fellow with whom I had the conversation faces an uphill battle at the very least. And it is there that white privilege glares at me. Nothing compares to the general climate that exists there, nothing that has reared its head in the time I've lived in Milwaukee, during the last decade and this one as well.

I wonder what he's thinking now. I wonder if he'll actually follow up. Can't blame him if he does. Can't blame him if he doesn't.

With that sad thought, but glad that I had suggested a path of some sort, I returned to my relatively calmer environment, an area with stately homes and pillars holding up porches, quiet days and mostly calm nights. It has plenty of money. I have a parking spot in the alley behind my apartment building. People use that alley en route to tasks and errands. A fellow of color was doing the same just as I pulled up. We kind of nodded and grinned at each other as I got out of my car and he passed me.

Then he stopped. "Wondering if you had a dollar," he said, being careful not to approach too closely. "I need to catch a bus."

He was dressed fairly neatly, with a Seattle Seahawks shirt on. I have said both yes and no to such requests. But something said yes this time. There are more panhandlers emerging now, more now that the income distribution becomes more distorted by the day. It is nobody's fault, and everybody's fault.

I pulled out a small wad of bills to give him a single. He trained his eyes on the twenty and a five among them. Would something suddenly happen, here at 1 p.m. on a Friday? And why did I have the mindset to consider it? The neighborhood wouldn't necessary dictate that I was in that kind of danger, but not 200 feet from where we stood, some drunk had taken out his unit and peed on a utility pole on a Wednesday afternoon at just about the same time a few weeks ago. He hadn't bothered to get anywhere near the pole, either. In fact, he stood about five feet back and sprayed away so anybody could see the disgust. Heading back from the pharmacy, I happened to have been there. It was impossible to miss. He could have used the alley, for mercy's sake. And there I was, without my cell phone to call 9-1-1 and/or to take his picture. Nobody else was there or watching, then, either.

Would the police have come running? It's a good bet. The address would probably have demanded it. It would have been too late there, too. But there would have been attention paid.

The panhandler thanked me for the dollar. Walking away, he added, "God bless." "You bet," I replied. Wouldn't have been anything wrong with that, either.

Three days later, the same thing happened. But I could tell this young man of color the honest truth: "I don't have a dime with me." His response surprised me: "Thanks for being nice about it. People aren't always very nice." "No problem," I said.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Hang on A Minute. Steve King's Not Crazy. Just Ask Billy Graham--If You Could

Say this for Steve King: He gets your attention.

The Congressman from Iowa's 4th District moved, uh, heaven and earth the other day by stating quite casually that, without rape or incest, the human race wouldn't exist. Thus, he concluded, banning abortion even after rape and incest is perfectly reasonable since, hey, more births perpetuate the human race, ain't-a?

Stop rolling your eyes. He can find justification. So can you. It's on Billy Graham's website.

You have to think that Franklin Graham, Billy's son and no wallflower when it comes to twisted political theory and being a 45 apologist, has maintained the site in the wake of his father's passing. Billy Graham has become something of a brand name, after all, kind of the Babe Ruth of preachers.

It's also a place where you can find biblical apologies, too. Like for the origins of the human race.

Every so often, it returns to Facebook: Someone in my 'friend' realm regenerates the site that says, interestingly, that Adam and Eve had two sons and some daughters, and well, the proliferation of the human race simply had to have taken place by, uh, that continued intermingling through the generations. Which is to say: the fact that there even was a next generation had to mean that brothers and sisters had to, uh, mingle. Significantly. Maybe a lot.

The site then says: Now, think about that. Take all the time you need.

Yup. If the Bible is the word of God, then somebody had to say that it's all right for brothers and sisters to have sex, so more and more children could be created. From there came first cousins and then second cousins, thank goodness, so we could avoid lawsuits way back then because you know, it would have gotten in the way of ark-building and other things.

Which is pretty much what Billy Graham's website says: that God granted permission for all that intra-familial sex to happen, kind of a one-off, but it could never happen again. (It's right there.) Which is to say that something that wasn't really sinful at one point now is really sinful, forever and ever, amen.

Pretty much taken for granted now, right? First of all, offspring from such unions becomes very risky indeed, which is why there are now laws against it. And, well, any consideration that such things should now happen is normally received with phrases like, Oh, ick. Never mind sinful, it's just a bad idea. And that takes care of that.

So who said it was okay way back then? God said. Who said that God said? Billy Graham. He's gone now, but we all know where he is, so--any questions?

Which brings us back to Steve King, who, ridiculous and offensive as everybody says he sounds, is doing no more than doubling down on what Billy Graham would be saying, and his son is most likely saying: Though it was a biggie, the apple had already been bitten, the original sin had already been done, so what the heck--let's let humanity commit a really huuuuuge (sorry, I know what that's quoting) sin so we can even have the discussion on what's a sin and what isn't. I mean, if there are no people around, how can we have the discussion? Kind of existential, huh?

But as usual, all this leaps over several pieces in this pseudo-intellectual chess game, kind of like allowing a pawn to leap right in front of a (bad pun) king and say, "Check!" First, you have to believe that there actually were a 'first two people', and that their names really were Adam and Eve. Okay, who named them? Who said so? And is that really the way humanity happened?

We know that humanity evolved. Okay, I mean, those of us, let me go out on a limb and say most of us, think that that's the way it happened, which is to say that science strongly implies it (A theory, not a mere hypothesis) but nobody knows because we weren't there. You can either think that within the process of apes becoming human, there might have been more than one occurrence of them becoming what we now refer to as men and women, so whatever names they called themselves, there probably wasn't just one Garden of Eden but most likely some caves and jungles and places like that where, you know, they pro-created at various times. (Or it may have happened as in the opening scene of "Quest for Fire," where a female is bending over at a water's edge and a male just flat decides he likes the view, can't fight the feeling, and helps himself without asking, announcing himself or even taking her to dinner. But then, that's rape. The film ends with a man and woman making love in the more traditional position, and the woman bearing the child.)

If your belief system overruns your sense of logic, then you can buy into the biblical account. Which is where Steve King and Billy Graham sit. Makes perfect sense to them, and all King's saying is: Doesn't everyone agree? His belief system has become his logic, dismissing all else.

Well, no, Steve. I don't have to agree. And your interpretation, however biblical it might be, can't and shouldn't justify a position which challenges whether society has evolved far beyond what you might think it should have, and doesn't have to accept the incipient livelihood of fetuses that are the product of acts we now consider barbaric. If the woman wants it, then all right; I know of someone who's around simply because her mother kept her after being raped.

But she didn't have to. And shouldn't have had to. Making women go on without that choice is barbaric, regaling them to a status of mere incubators for the unabashed whims of men. If you go there, then all bets are off and we regress to a world that, if it ever really existed, sure doesn't any longer. Those who are irate about this should extend, too, beyond the League of Women Voters.

Should Steve King be kicked out of Congress? You bet, by the voters of Iowa's 4th District. But then, he's just one of 435. We shouldn't take the time or trouble to expend the kind of energy it would take to interrupt a two-year term that can end the way it should. Besides, his committee status is gone, rendering him legislatively helpless. Relative to what's already in front of us, he's pretty small potatoes, a sideshow.

That kind of bother should be saved for kicking out 45. If it goes there, that would take a herculean effort. But it would be worth it. There's only one president, only one true existential threat to the country, only one enormous disaster unfolding right in front of us. If we're going to kick anybody out, he should go first.

But I've already said that. The number of House members who agree has now reached 123. And Anthony Scaramucci, of all people, has had the lights go on and now sees what's clear: 45's certifiably crazy, the people around him know it, and he needs to leave--yesterday.

His belief system ran into a torrent of facts. The truth set him free. Isn't that phrase found in the Bible? Wouldn't Billy Graham have said that, too?

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

The Almighty Dollar Will Be the Religion That Ends Automatic Weapons

My pastor prayed from the pulpit to end the scourge of automatic weapons: How long, oh Lord: How long? She looked stricken. So are we.

How long? Maybe a long time, maybe not. But as I told her after the service: Morality will have absolutely nothing to do with the end of automatic weapons. If it had even a whisper of an effect, we'd still have that ban.

But the Republican Party took it away. They took it away because the National Rifle Association, in conjunction with gun manufacturers, demanded that the profiteering in automatic weapons must continue. They screamed about the Second Amendment--a white elephant argument if there ever was one--and managed to get lucky in the timing of the naming of Supreme Court justices so that they got what they wanted: An individual mandate--for weapons.

A Democratic-controlled Congress and White House passed an automatic weapons ban in 1994. It certainly didn't end shootings. School assaults and deaths continued, including the infamous Columbine tragedy, which might have jolted the murder machine into high gear with copycat-itis. But to say that nothing has changed since Republicans voted the ban out during the next decade is to divert with irresponsibility. Think about the mass murders that have taken place just during this decade: places like Sandy Hook and San Bernadino and Orlando and Parkview and Charleston and now, in half a day, El Paso and Dayton. 269 this year alone.

But it was an NPR follow-up story that got my attention. It said that customers from Ciudad Juarez, just over the border, aren't shopping in El Paso nearly as much as they were before the shooting. A spokesperson for the business community claimed that that phenomenon was temporary, that business would pick up again soon. After all, it's only been a week. Things will calm down.

I wonder. Fear paralyzes. It creates a world of the mind that, once established, takes a similar jolt to eliminate. The shooter freely admitted that he wanted to gun down Mexicans, and that he did. Would you think twice if you thought that your shopping place or mall would be ambushed?

Is someone whistling past that graveyard, too? Never mind a possibly new recession: The onrushing, incessant, white supremacist mass murders may bring on less buying, more fear--and more ghost towns. If the business of America is business, will white supremacist violence run America into the ground?

Pretty soon, there will be too many of these attacks happening too close to each other, either by time or by location, to continue to brush them off as one-and-dones. There is a war brewing beneath the surface here. Its willful denial, if not advocacy, by 45, in addition to his horribly polarizing rhetoric which if it doesn't directly encourage such attacks certainly doesn't do what a normal, empathetic person in the White House should be doing--which is to condemn it in words and tone that sound and actually are genuine and heartfelt (which he can't do in a phony, scripted speech and is pathetic, infuriating and quite revelatory to watch him try)--leaves it to grow and threaten far more perceptibly than in the past.

The white nationalists are emboldened by the president's cluelessness, willful or not. He has never taken back his insistence that both sides of the 2017 neo-Nazi showdown in Charlottesville had good people. He can't say he's ever been wrong, either, or ever had a bad idea. To these twisted back-benchers, that matters a great deal. That is tacit permission, whether he wants to admit it or not.

So there's no reason to believe that these attacks will have any kind of respite. They will be unpredictable in place and time, but highly predictable in essence. The gradual, chilling effect of sudden demise will begin to seep into the American consciousness. Once it gets there, very little can pry it loose. It would go much deeper than the temporary halt to daily life that 9/11 caused. Yes, powder did get into some envelopes and a few flights were threatened, but we got past all that. It left residue, though, that re-emerged in the form of the re-direction of fear that never completely fell away.

That residue will gradually assert itself in terms of whether or not people will go freely and willingly into places in which they can purchase things--the coming-and-going of daily commerce. Yes, online shopping has a greater and greater hold on us now, but it's the subsidiary business that stands to suffer: The restaurants and parking facilities, for instance, that are there to serve those doing something besides the basics of what they've ventured out in public for. When people refuse to go out, those businesses dry up.

It will be those people of business who will cry out to Republicans, who hear no other voices other than that of themselves if something happens to them personally. It's the loss of money, fairly earned, and the freedom that is pretentiously being strangled, that will make Republicans face the reality of what automatic weapons are doing to the country at large: Isolating people from each other, making them afraid to venture out beyond their jobs and traditional connections.

But the complete effect of that loss will have to be connected with the dots of those who Republicans represent: either rural, small businesses that are in fact being squeezed out quite naturally anyhow, or the very rich who have direct connections to Republican offices and staffers. News reports will make little difference, since they certainly haven't to this point.

That will take a while, of course, unless a recession hits. If that happens, there will be an anger that will make the present expression seem quite timid. Scapegoats will be sought. Weapons may be wielded.

It will be only then that it will occur to Republicans that the empire of weaponry that they have sponsored has backfired on them. Relatives of theirs will get in the way. They will call home, shaken to the core, if not hit by gunfire themselves. That's the two-by-four to the head that it will take.

Then they will cry morality. They will call again for the death penalty. But the death penalty has already been administered--through policies that make it far easier to randomly eliminate human beings from this earth: for being Mexican (El Paso), for being gay (Orlando), for being Jewish (Pittsburgh), for being Sikh (Oak Creek, WI). Note to American mosques: Get some security. Get a lot of it. Hurry the hell up.

For now, we must keep rolling the dice and hope it doesn't come up snake-eyes. I cannot apologize for the cynicism of that, not if it reflects the truth of the matter. But neither can I look around, breathe easy, and say to myself: Well, it can't possibly happen here. The odds can't get worse. We're going to be okay. Democracy will be okay. The USA will be okay.

Not if all the signs point the other way. Not if permission has been granted to think twisted things and act upon them. Not if the agents of depraved destruction have been given the ultimate devices to carry them out.

We approach the ledge of civility now. If we step off that ledge, we will fall fast and fatally. Automatic weapons are nudging us toward that ledge. We will either arm ourselves to the teeth or bring ourselves back from it.

The sheer millions of automatic weapons that exist in this country already suggest the former, but the average American still considers it an excessive practice. Some of those owning them, though, are revealing their true purposes: to reinforce the racist mentality of white supremacy. If that grows, as long as owning one is legal, what else to do but protect oneself from the onslaught and get one? Nobody's going to take sadistic 20-something white men and retrain their minds after they didn't and wouldn't listen to their teachers or parents; no school exists for that purpose. They now run free, leaning over their laptops, waiting for their all-encompassing fixation to be released by someone's urging. They await the signal. They lack only organization.

Maybe it won't come to that. But it has to be the Republicans who will yield. The Democrats are already there. They aren't connected at the hip to the NRA, though. That it is low on funding is currently irrelevant to Republicans; their followers keep using gun lobby loyalty as a beacon to guide their votes. But it's the money of business that will, if anything, call them home. They can't run away from an economy that's fading, because then they will fade.

The Republicans are fond of sending out dog whistles. The ones they'll be getting from failing, shuttered businesses will be the ones to which they will flock. Meanwhile, go shopping but stay alert.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

CBS Sunday Morning: A Respite from the Furnace

Here's a newsmagazine with the following items amidst its 90-minute show:

• A segment on decoration of nails
• Practice for mermaid wannabes
• An interview with the actor-rapper Common
• An interview with actor Julianne Moore
• A brief account of how a car mechanic became a mid-career emergency room physician
• The New School's dance school 

And that wasn't more than 40% of the show. Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as soft news.

Or no news, as news can be defined. I mean, do I really need to know that Julianne Moore borrowed her stage names from both her parents? Or that some kids really do believe in mermaids? I mean, really. At times, I have to ask myself: Just why am I spending my time here?

This has host Jane Pauley's fingerprints all over it. It is thoroughly feminine, thoroughly artsy, and thoroughly runs away from anything remotely resembling the furnace of what's going on in the daily grind of ferocity. CNN and MSNBC, eat your hearts out. 

Pauley used to do the Today Show with the likes of Tom Brokaw and Bryant Gumbel, fighting for female recognition. She's there now, and so is her gender. Women have not only been given the anchor positions of nightly newscasts, but one also has her own, solid, weekly presentation that's been a staple for forty years (Where did that go?), and by golly, it's going to be as soft as cotton candy and nearly as sweet.

Do we need it? It isn't news. It doesn't really come close to that which we would call it. It's more like a cultural review, a who-knew flyover. And it's hidden, kind of, within Sunday morning, where folks can always invent reasons not to watch it, or half-watch it while getting ready for church, Sunday school, or brunch. It's casual, slow-moving, a way to get off the noisy freeway.

It's quirky, too, perhaps even more so than when it began in 1979 with the late Charles Kuralt as host. He passed the baton to Charles Osgood in 1994, who guided it until Pauley took over three years ago. If anything, it has become even softer, quieter, gentler. It is a 90-minute compilation of all the kinds of stories that the nightly newscasts feature in their last three minutes, meant to remind us that despite the strife and ferocity, some people still do neat things somewhere in America.

Maybe there isn't enough of that. Maybe there should be an entire network of soft news. There are worse things. That way, you know what you're getting. After all, there is a channel exclusively devoted to comedy, another one for game shows and, of course, ESPN for sports. Back in the '90s, a Milwaukee radio station announced that it would only have 'good' news on its reports. It completely ignored anything remotely resembling topics one could have an argument about. Whenever I heard it, which was rare, I just rolled my eyes. I do not need this, I kept thinking. It was mocked by those representing professional journalism, in the day in which we could actually tell the difference, pre-internet. But it held its ground.

It was directed toward an audience to which it had shifted with its music: Adult contemporary and throwback pop--Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Patti Page, Perry Como and the like. In other words, the World War II generation that was retiring and had no need for the intensity of rock, the crash of day-to-day news, and the portent of what might come from it. Here's a place where you don't have to worry about a thing, it seemed to say.

Now the baby boomers, those who are still clashing and trashing each other (and will, I predict, until the last one of us does The Twist), just might need this respite. It's genuinely exhausting to follow all the conflict and crises, real or imagined, of this jackass president and his minions. It's endlessly stressing. You can just feel your shoulders fall on Sunday morning, watching, well, Something Else other than the cruel stupidity that 45 displays daily. If a sigh doesn't come with an occasional smile, you must be watching it in another language.

I can't say that it's my favorite show. I can say, though, that I hope it continues to do for us in cultural information gathering what the rest of the week fails to do much or well--remind us of the goodness of most of the rest of humanity, and that in creativity, there is joy, happiness, hope and inspiration. We could use a bunch of that right now.

Next week, they're going to Florence. They've already been there, so it could very well be a repeat. I might watch it anyhow. Damn, it was good. You can see the Renaissance emerge right in front of you. What an exciting time that had to have been. Never mind that the pushback against it has never really died out, that everywhere that new thinking has surged, reactionaries usually affiliated with government and/or religion have pulled power moves to try to quash it. But none of them worked. They never have. 

In its own way, CBS Sunday Morning reminds us that in large places and small, the artistic inclination to make more of one's world than exists at any one moment is the kind of striving that always wins, that brings with it the best in human experience. May it forever be so.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

It's Only A Matter of Odds Now

I had to watch it. I had no choice. Death splayed itself right in front of me.

One minute, life was being enjoyed by something undebateably marvelous to look at. The next, it had been smashed into eternity, into memory, now just something to be cleared away.

But not yet. I had to watch it still, watch it and consider its last split second of life, when it had been turned from unobtrusive to an obliterative mess. Was there pain? It happened so fast that it may not have known what hit it.

Not much of a legacy, that. But less can be said of other things: That its matter mattered.

Would it be better that the same should be said of us, that our end could be quick and without moments to experience the utter devastation of fear? As long as it's inevitable, is there a place we can go to cut some kind of a deal? You know, accept a few years to be cut short so the end, though unknown, be free from trepidation? We'll all be gone a long time, far longer than we'd ever be, or might wish to be, around. We've all been told that that's the idea, anyhow. We've all been told that that is what gives life value: The very existential concept of nothingness that will ensue someday, somehow, somewhere. It waits for no one.

Our last moment of consciousness should have as much value as the first. We should be able to cheat death to the first moment that we will be consumed by it. Would the ultimate justification be, then, to die in our sleep? I know of some who did. Were those last hours a waste? Or were they a blessing?

So in a way, I was jealous of what was displayed before me, however ugly: the residue of what was a privilege of sorts--that an ending of life could be as spectacular as it was violent and instantaneous to boot. It never had a chance, but it was endlessly lucky that it never knew that it had a chance to even have. It was minding its own business when something got in its way: decisively, devastatingly, no questions asked.

That thing that got in the way, that object of death, was propelled by someone who realized it in an indirect way, but never cared to conceptualize its power until confronted with it. Operated unobstrusively, legally, simply because it could be, he decided it needed to be propelled so he could accomplish something that mattered not only to him, certainly, but to someone else he had never met. That he had put it into a position of lethality was regrettable, sure, but we all have to go sometime, don't we? If a lower form of life happens to be haphazardly floating in our path, what else can possibly happen but the end of it?

Force can have but two responses: To prove itself unconquerable, or to be itself denied by a superior force. That neither knew the other could come into each other's way one horrible, decisive day could be the fault of no one, of nothing. Was it his responsibility that he became the agent of sudden, infamous destruction? Or was it result of nature, of the clash of things of which only one can survive? Brutal, yes, but as true as it is either accidentally or intentionally. For the other living thing, it just wasn't its day--so much so that it would never see another one.

It competed, in a way, though it never intended to. It just wanted to live and be beautiful. It failed. Life continues for the rest of us. Other beautiful things exist. What the hell.

Darwin was right. But he never said it would be fun. For all living things to exist on that incredibly precarious and fragile level, though, throwing themselves unknowingly into the randomness of someone else's whim, is not only to sell them very short, but to deny them of all possibilities to grow, to gift, to be admired and appreciated, to enhance each of us and all of us.

I decided that I didn't need to absorb that lesson any longer. It was time to get on with whatever life I had left, the remainder of which might easily be determined by whether or not I might get in the way of someone else's device that could instantaneously splatter me somewhere, for someone else to clean up and perhaps mourn or consider momentarily.

Maybe it's better that way. Maybe it's better that I, endowed with white privilege, can now experience that very gut-level chill that people are now confessing publicly, but no doubt has been building for some time now; that without warning, for absolutely no decent reason, someone filled with that privilege that they assume should be somehow permanent can appear out of their own, singular, rabbit hole and casually spray death for a few moments before being gratefully wiped out themselves--a spectacular, meaningless, violent and instantaneous death, the explanation for which is as irrelevant as whatever motivated it.

That mass destruction awaited the Natives and Africans in ways they couldn't have previously fathomed, either, in this land, which prides itself on its freedom in a way that now seems so detached from reality that it must seem ludicrous to those watching this building disaster. Now it awaits Hispanics, who live here because they want to, but also because many of them, too, have been chased across a continent by nefarious forces not in the control of either them nor any government, a circumstance now creeping into our own nation. It awaited three thousand Americans on that awful day in 2001, in which someone else determined that their religion demanded that sacrifice, to create hell so they would achieve heaven. The El Paso assassin didn't confess his mass murder as much as he acknowledged it, in the same, casual way that any of us might have admitted that the sun came up this morning.

The deterioration of the souls of the 9/11 terrorists, which allowed them to justify committing that barbarism, has sadly created a buzzfeed to ours. Mass shootings, which used to be experienced as one-offs, have only increased since then. Do not tell me that there isn't a direct link. Do not tell me that they didn't win.

The reactionary murderousness that has risen and is now flourishing is the product of omnipresent racial viciousness that we never got over nor really ignored, but believed could not be mainstreamed. The United States of America has now been branded, like a helpless calf is branded, painfully and permanently, as a racially violent society. Several other countries have now warned its citizens of the distinct possibility of an insane attack, should they wish to explore these shores. Who can argue that? Who can argue with the Boston Globe headline the day after the latest two slaughters: This Is Who We Are Now?

I sit in a coffee shop writing this, among others also writing things. People have shot up coffee shops, too, as well as movie theaters, churches, schools, shopping centers, newspaper offices, and celebratory fairs (although understandably, scanning my memory, there are now too many examples for me to name all the venues; I'd need a slaughter-based website to keep track). It would be perfect, though. It's peaceful here, busy, energetic, non-corrosive, the kind of place in which you can lose yourself and pretend that nothing else existed or mattered while the suggestion of polite, gentle humanity surrounds you. Sheer luck would attend to my survivability, just as it would in my church, though security has been hired. But here, the police, as quickly as they would come, are a lifetime away. There's nothing preventing this gorgeous Saturday afternoon from being devastated by someone's horrible obsession.

We now live in a very dangerous place, where there are now only odds to protect us. It took but a split-second of the sad death of a unquestionably beautiful thing to drive that point home. I pulled into the filling station, threw some water on the windshield, and removed what was left of the poor butterfly.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

Back to the Classroom: A Few Corrections Necessary

I taught high school history and government for thirty years. I'd like to think I got a few things right.

But, as things have developed, it appears that I either missed a few other things, or some things have changed. I now wish to reconvene my classes to discuss these new phenomena.

First: The First Amendment's benefits to our society. As a teacher and a part-time journalist, I often discussed the need for the First Amendment to create a release for the "pressure cooker" that some of the more extremist elements in our society build up over time. If the rest of us don't allow that expression to happen at times, as uncomfortable as it might be, it will build up and spill out into violence. Nobody needs that.
Correction: It's become clear now, with the internet spewing all kinds of vitriol and nonsense, that extremists, especially those on the racist right, actually engage in creating new pressure cookers for the uninformed and obsessed of us to indulge in. Then the cleverer ones manage to influence the naive and easily spun into attacking innocent people who look different than they do--namely, white, male and young. This is not good news for the First Amendment. If anything, it encourages lawmakers to consider limiting it. This is dangerous, but no more so than the open manipulation of the easily influenced into committing violent acts. They got through school somehow, usually sitting there with arms crossed and slouching in their school desks, while someone tried to tell them how to be good citizens. But most, if not all of them didn't give a hoot. Many of them also thought Fox News was a good thing, too, because it fed into their growing sense of irresponsibility and victimitis, none of which got them good grades because they knew that that would take work and serious thought. My career began before Fox News arranged to give them easy access to half-truths and safety nets for their whining. I'm sure some of those students have had plenty of time to catch up with their contemporaries.

I do not apologize to them whatsoever. They got what they deserved. I do apologize to those who tried hard and paid attention most of the time. Look, I knew what I knew at the time I knew it. But I went on leave from my school district in 2003, and it prevented me from returning in 2009, so that was just about the time in which the internet and other social media had gained their sea legs. Plenty of reason to discuss it then. I was just prevented from doing so. I was a nationally-known union guy. That presented my school district with, it appeared, incredible danger. They saw a loophole in the contract and forced me through it, daring me to challenge them. I chose not to be knowingly connected with incredibly stupid adults and I walked away. Their loss.

Second: The implication I made, many times over, that the Japanese kamikaze attacks toward the conclusion of World War II were unique and singularly insane in recent history. I mean, who the hell else would intentionally fly their planes into someone else's ships, killing themselves and taking away any possibility that they could continue defending their country? Who else would charge at the enemy and resolve to get killed all at once instead of surrendering and seeing their families again? I said more than once: Is this crazy, or what? And the kids would shake their heads. Besides that, it didn't work. They sank some ships, but the Americans kept coming. Then we dropped two atomic bombs on them. The emperor got the point and told his people to give it up. The Chinese also did it, charging the UN forces in suicide attacks during the Korean War. No atomic bombs were dropped in that one, but once he became president, Eisenhower threatened the Chinese with them, and that business stopped, too.
Correction: There is a new group of demonstrably depraved extremists who are apparently convinced that going on singular attacks and saving their country from oncoming "invasions," as someone calls them, despite losing their lives either that very day or getting executed by a state government later--which they have no doubt they will do going into it--is an apparently growing idea. It puts to rest the quite racially condescending concept that only insane Asians would do such a thing, and that the rest of humanity got over that 75 years ago. I mean, Americans wouldn't do something as absurd as that, as pointless as that, as nihilistic as that, dissolving themselves in mass murder to absolutely no functional result, other than killing as many people as they can in six minutes or less. Would they?

Sorry, my bad. Call them the New Kamikazes. Sounds far more dynamic, like a rock group. And what were their most recent examples to borrow from? Why 9/11, of course. 19 guys wanting to go to heaven decided to kill three thousand Americans all at once, as well as themselves. Sounds perfectly rational--to use one's religion to give up one's life. Besides, that one worked. We have not been the same country since. They ruined much more than just a few buildings.

Third: At some point in some of my classes, I would remind the students that our president was supposed to be a moral leader, as close to that or far away from that ideal as presidents have been. At least it's something of a decent measuring stick to evaluate how good, or not good, presidents have been. What it actually means to be a moral leader, and what comprises the prerequisites for it, is an ongoing matter of discussion, of course, but the concept suggests that at the very least, presidents do think about it and try most of the time to behave in a positive, exemplary light.
Correction: Well, that notion is complete nonsense, now isn't it? We now have someone who drags us into the moral ditches whenever he feels like saying something, anything. He tells us that a hero isn't a hero; he gathers hundreds together to make racially-baiting commentary; he lies endlessly; he thinks most of what he does is a joke; he insults allies; he chases and grabs women and doesn't care what anybody thinks of it; he arranges to have migrant children remain behind wire fences; he complains of an "invasion" of migrants as if it's some kind of military action; he sits there and refuses to admit that by passivity, he allowed a foreign power to interfere into the election and clearly contribute to him winning it by coming in from the back door on a technicality; and he calls people names the same way a 5th-grader would. Beyond that, he has so many conflicts of interest in his business affairs that it's not unfair to say that other people own the presidency now; and he has committed acts of obstruction of justice and the only thing he cares about is whether he gets away with it.

The real mistake I've made is the pretense that nobody wanting to be president could ever get away with doing, being and saying all this. In fact, he couldn't even get close. There's no way either political party would stand for it. We wouldn't stand for someone who might easily influence others to commit violent acts to support his racist agenda. Would we? Crowds wouldn't stand there and yell "Send them back," right? That one got past me somewhere. I must be getting old.

Fourth: That people either follow the law or they must stand accountable, all the way to the highest levels of government. If they don't, there's a mechanism that will be utilized to do so.
Correction: I am so sorry about this. I have no idea what got into me. Of course the president can get away with stuff. He's the president. The laws don't apply to him.
The Constitution says the president can be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors. He hasn't been impeached, right? That means he hasn't committed anything serious enough to be impeached, right? That it would have to be really, really obvious for the president to be convicted and removed from office. Right?
Thought so. What a screw-up I've been. Good thing my district got rid of me. Were I there now, I'd actually might tell the students that when it comes to the president, the Constitution is just a piece of paper. I might even suggest having them tear it out of their textbooks. When some principal would call me in and chew me out for costing the district untold dollars by ruining those textbooks, I might respond that I was actually saving the district money by eliminating several completely obsolete pages. You're welcome.

Fifth: When the government borrows money endlessly, it won't ever matter. The government won't lose its credit. It'll never default. It'll be able to pay back that money eventually. Nobody will need to pay higher taxes, ever, to make up for that. The government, just like everybody else, will be able to borrow and borrow and borrow and simply promise that they'll pay it back. The value of the dollar will remain excellent. The trade deficit will remain marginal. Wages will be sufficient to do, well, something for those to whom wages matter. Inflation won't ever get to an absurd level. That stuff's for Greece or Venezuela or Brazil--you know, those people. Besides, the free market--Amen!--will solve all problems so that we're all taken care of because after all, we've never needed any safety net for anybody.
Correction: There is no correction necessary. These fables are established truth by those with enough money so no matter what happens to the rest of us, they'll still have their yachts and mansions and wonder what the poor people are doing. They are for those who believe deeply in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

Enough for this lesson. I hope I've cleared things up now. I'll be back to you when I've been proven wrong again. And again. And again.

The test won't be for a while: Nov. 3, 2020. Study up. Meanwhile, I'm off to see the Wizard....

Be well. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark

National Geographic's Reboot: A New, Involved Conscience and Paradigm

Remember National Geographic?

For those of you who no longer get it or haven't seen it in a while, it's changed: changed its covers completely; changed its format into a far more graphic geographic; and changed its approach from its emphasis on national. Its very intentional metamorphosis sounds the alarm like few other publications can: We are in trouble. All of us. Everywhere.

It looked pretty bland fifty years ago. It merely printed its contents on the cover, including page numbers. Then you looked inside and found topless women in places like New Guinea, where someone had spent the better part of x-years finding peoples who had never seen a camera and had no reason not to pose for it, so they did.

So the dirty Ernies of the world could sneak a look inside and check out large, small and sagging breasts on women of color. The men barely covered themselves, too. I always wondered that, if they had ever discovered and had access to the cheap lusting of adolescent white boys, might they probably take particular exception with those spears of theirs.

Then, having been to nearly every single undiscovered place above ground, the magazine started discussing the planet itself both above and beneath it. It also discussed economic and cultural development in places we already knew about, or thought we knew, in a kind of every-decade-checkup fashion. The writing was lively and positive. It sometimes hid deeper issues by mentioning them only in passage, letting someone else handle that part.

Its feel-good philosophy has done a 180. Its staffers have been sent out into this deteriorating world with, it seems, one overriding purpose now: To tell everybody what a mess we're now in. The photography is now even better and far more powerful in its story-telling capabilities.

Here are some samplings of this month's issue, focusing on migration and its effects:

• On the Cover: What looks to be a mother with an infant son, wading as she carries him. The main story is entitled A World On The Move: Seas rise, crops wither, wars erupt. Humankind seeks shelter in another place. The two people are from Myanmar, Rohinga refugees. This woman and child made it to Bangladesh. With 20 feet to go, she was so eager for a safe place that she grabbed her child, jumped from the boat and waded the rest of the way.
• Page 17: We Are All Migrants: Through time and space, humans are a migratory species. You are either moving or staying for a while: It has never been otherwise.
• Page 40: Walking with Migrants: Paul Salopek has been walking with migrant peoples for seven years. He began in Ethiopia. (I remember a DC cabbie from Ethiopia. I asked him why he came here. He looked into the rear view mirror at me: "Freedom." End of discussion.)
• Page 49: Terrific graphic map showing where Salopek went and how many people left each country--all in the Middle East or South Asia, from Cyprus to India.
• Page 51: A moving photo of a crying 5-year-old from a Syrian Kurdish family, finally having made it to Turkey. He's crying tears of joy.
• Pages 54-57: A fold-open display of net migration out of, and into, the leading countries in both categories. Sobering thought: as of 2017, the yearly rate of influx into the U.S. was a steady four million-plus. That could either justify a 'big, beautiful wall," or render its purpose completely pointless. Your choice. (Or a Marshall Plan for Central America, like Julian Castro has been suggesting in his campaign? Anyone? Anyone?)
• Pages 61-67: Fold-open display of sixteen Rohinga newborns, none more than two months old, now in Bangladesh. Six hadn't been named yet. The clear message: This is the reason their parents take the risk.
• Page 74: Story on Africans fleeing to Spain.
• Page 86: Not to be outdone, a story on migrants in Tijuana, Mexico, up against the U.S. border, with plenty of family pictures.

Where are all these people going? Not to the plains of South Dakota or the Himalayas, not if they can help it. They're going to cities, where jobs are, where at least the potential of care is. Thus National Geographic ran a special issue on cities in April, getting out in front of a worldwide trend that has been underway for quite a while now. They are growing incredibly: Tokyo, Mexico City, Mumbai. 

Fifty years ago, my residence of Milwaukee's population used to be in the U.S.'s top 15. It's been dwarfed since by many cities in Texas, Florida, and California. Get this: one of the largest Somali immigrant population centers is in Minneapolis. When I was with the NEA leadership during the last decade, I attended a statewide conference in Nebraska. There I learned that Somali immigrants were working in meatpacking plants in the southern part of that state. Did some of those in Nebraska move to the Twin Cities? I wonder.

The paradigm shift of National Geographic is clear: It's far more global with a conscience far more involved and concerned. Someone over in those offices gets it. Climate change, massive, unstoppable migration, and--we need to remember this, too--political instability and reactionary backlash are creating boiling points on the planet: Our planet, the only one we have.

It's a paradigm shift. It's a fierce decision to not only inform the world about itself, but to remind it about how much danger this little, floating speck of the universe is in. It's brave. It challenges its own market: We're finished playing around. Pay attention.

H. G. Wells once said that the world is in a race between education and catastrophe. National Geographic has chosen to commit itself to a sharply directed effort to bolster the first so we avoid the second. I salute it.

Be well. I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark