The Whale Outweighs This Minnow

On the cover of The Atlantic's magazine this month, the cover article is entitled, "[47] Wants You to Forget This Happened." With it, a photo displaying the chaos the of Jan. 6 uprising, now five years past.

A court case concerning an inscriber in Muskego makes that shout with irony. He was a full year ahead of this national magazine, but without access to glossy pages. He chose another medium and surface to pronounce the same sentiment: in chalk, on a sidewalk. He wrote, on Jan, 6, 2025, "Remember Jan. 6."

The reaction to it was quick and predictable. After some investigation and a positive ID from video cameras (see below), the writer was arrested for disorderly conduct.

The sidewalk on which he wrote was right outside the Muskego Post Office. The writer, a fellow named Jim Brownlow, is a person who might know a thing or two about controversial speech. He is 77 years old, and God bless him, still an active librarian. (this story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel) I don't know whether the Muskego library system has been assailed by the likes of Moms for Liberty, but considering the situation, I wouldn't be surprised.

"Remember Jan. 6" is, at it stands alone, a politically neutral comment, crying out for context. So why did Brownlow feel so compelled to proclaim such a sentiment on a public sidewalk, or what he probably believed to be public, since it's actually privately owned (a strip mall located nearby) by Muskego Partners, LLC, which received numerous complaints from those who either don't want to hear about Jan. 6 anymore, or who want to hear it only from people with whose political affiliations they're more confident? For himself, police believe that Brownlaw also wrote close by, "We almost lost our democracy," which pretty much clarifies that (he denies the latter). "If we're going to improve our democracy, we've got to remember what happened on that day," Brownlow said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel.

He's right, but now I'd like to ask him: How's that working for you, or perhaps--for us?

Originally, Brownlow, who was recorded on camera, was charged with criminal damage to property, a low-level criminal offense. But because he was potentially a criminal (!), he was handcuffed and taken to the police station for booking.

Handcuffed. For writing an unobscene message. A real threat to public peace there, right? What's he likely to do, wield more chalky weapons? Does he play hopscotch, too?

The charges were reduced to disorderly conduct, with a potential fine of $565. I don't know of Brownlaw's financial background, but for most of us, $565 isn't chump change. He chose to fight the charges--himself, lawyerless, the cost of which could easily have run rings around his potential fine.

The court system, of course, has stretched out what should be a simple matter. More than a year later, the case is still tied up without resolution. The decision was supposed to be made this past Monday, but the judge, Lisa Warwick, has ordered new briefs to be filed by next Monday, with a final decision made to either dismiss the case or proceed with final arguments within a month.

So it's back to the internet for Brownlow, who's already spent lots of time, he says, on research. How much sleep this has cost him from nights awakening at 3 a.m., staring at the ceiling, wondering what in blue blazes kind of country this has become to make this big of a deal over something this minor to string it out more than a year, is unknown.

But he has a case, and I think it's a damn good one. There are limitations on speech in our society, and there should be; intentional speech meant to do damage is wrong and should be prosecuted. But it has also been a watchword of our political and social culture that the benefit of the doubt should go to the speaker because the response can be both immediate and expose a disingenuous or lying speaker (such as the one who cause the insurrection features on The Atlantic cover) to be exactly that by doing what the respondents, too, are supposed to have every right to do: speak out in corrective, even defiant, opposition. Such rights are, at present, being smothered by ICE agents in Minnesota as you are reading this.

Where such a situation is unclear, it's been a rule of law that the relative damage done by the speech, or its threat to public safety, should be weighed against the intent of the speaker. Such challenges have, you might have surmised, gone all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court and started doing so long ago. A few come to mind--my master's degree in journalism working here--which you might want to google:

• Near vs. Minnesota
• Gitlow vs. New York
• Whitney vs. California
• Brandenburg vs. Ohio
• Johnson vs. Texas

All these cases, decided back in the last century, featured ferocious attacks that simply overwhelm what happened in Muskego. It pales in comparison. Our jumpy, post-9-l1 attitudes are probably the only thing that's keeping this case, simple and obvious, from a quick, summary dismissal.

The litigants claim that it's damage to property that should measure cost. By chalk? Let's return to hopscotch. Is there such a thing as indelible chalk? You mean a sharply streamed water hose can't wash it off--at a cost of what?

Will a dismissal of the charges lead someone else to write something else on that same sidewalk? Will Muskego develop a kind of "sidewalk debate"? Funny: Nobody had before. Mr. Brownlow is left to measure his act against the trouble he's had to go to. But he got the attention he sought. The message got through. The price he's paid for that is plenty--and far too great.

This shouldn't be close. We have more serious issues to contend with, such as whether or not fascism, recently introduced in America, will make other efforts to achieve justice moot and, as Mr. Brownlow may or may not have also written, dispose with our democracy. Such matters outweigh those sidewalk scribblings like a whale outweighs a minnow.

But then, we've just learned that part of the reason why 47 is obsessed over Greenland is that he didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize--until he did, from the vice-president of Venezuela, whose country he has seized. A temper tantrum addressed? A booby prize delivered? A world gone crazy?

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

All You Have to Do Is Look

The blogs and newspapers are filled with hope nowadays. The awful treatment of the immigrants, the Epstein files, the terrible attacks on other countries--all of it--suggests that enough of the country won't possibly put up with this nonsense for the Republicans to survive keeping their majorities in Congress in the upcoming elections next November.

But all you have to do is look at one thing, one other thing that suggests that people will overlook all the other nonsense and rationalize voting for the Republicans again.

You see it nearly every day, too: The price of gas. All you have to do is look.

The price in the Milwaukee area has dropped to $2.37 a gallon, by no means the lowest in the nation. This is the lowest it's been for months. You can rationalize about the prices of other consumer goods rising, and well they may be. You can grouse about the job numbers slowing down, and well they may also be. But those are hidden in newspaper reports, explained in more than one sentence, filled with economic gobblygook. Won't matter.

As long as that number stays low, stays even beneath $3 a gallon, the Republicans are not in trouble. That's the number they will point to, the number that the Democrats are helpless to change if they even wanted to.

Plenty of articles have run for years now that says that the president has nothing to do with the price of gasoline, one way or another. But 47 will brag about it, lie about it, during the next campaign. They'll take the credit as evidence that their policies are working for America.

Remember, too: Many of his supporters will rationalize anything so it doesn't get in the way of doubting their support for him. Cults work like that. So if they have something noticeable, something right out in the open, which indicates anything positive, they'll rush right at it.

I'm not saying it can't be overcome. I'm saying that if Democrats think that the latest disasters will work decisively against the Republicans later next year and they don't need to work very hard, they will get hung on yet another tree of naïveté.

People keep forgetting, or at least ignoring it: Elections are close. The country is split so closely you can't get a toothpick in there. Democrats just won't believe it. They refuse. And yes, it's difficult to accept that those 'over there' who believe the other side's propaganda and lies continue to do so. But they do. They accept the packaging that 47 and his minions concoct.

What that means, sadly, is that the betraying facts alone won't do. It's the packaging that will turn people  away from the nonsense and towards the light. And Democrats have traditionally been bad at that.

Republicans have been working on it, been donating money to it, been honing it to a fine edge for about 60 years now. They failed miserably in 1964, when Barry Goldwater ran for president against Lyndon Johnson, the incumbent. The Democrats had a built-in advantage with the hangover of the Kennedy Assassination, so they won in a walk. But the Republicans knew they were on to something, so they continued with the research, the largesse, and the results.

The late George Lakoff, a linguist from U-Cal Berkeley, wrote about this about 20 or 25 years ago, and not nearly enough people were listening. He noted the think-tanks that Republicans were forming and how they were twisting our language to fit their needs. His predictions have become all too clear. The Republicans have become too good at packaging their phraseology.

Project 2025, for instance, has done horrible damage to our governmental system, with doubtless more to come. But that has been buttressed with major social research money over the last six decades. No question that they've thrown some of that money away. But behind it came much more.

Example: The Democrats have tried to capsulate their new appeals under the heading of "affordability." But gas prices are diving too fast for them to keep up: That is the most obvious indication of dropping prices, even though they have nothing to do with what's going on inside grocery stores. They will lose on that word. Unless gas prices will spike somewhere down the road, they will have to come up with something else. Gas prices will counteract "affordability."

Besides, "affordability" is an awkward, made-up phrase that's clumsy to use. Republicans are masters at drawing people's attention away from issues that make them uncomfortable, pay for advance polling, and coming up with something that sticks better in people's heads.

How much does this matter? Think about the 2024 election campaign ads. You knew the Republicans would use their massive moneys to scare you about trans-people eating up sports awards in high schools. That ridiculous notion was a contrived chimera. But it had its effects on minority males. They broke for 47. In a close election, that made the decisive difference. We are living in a deepening dystopia because of it.

So ignore what the pundits are saying now. Wait until later. If gas prices remain low, we'll all feel better about that, the Republicans will try to attach it to the imperial presidency, and things will tighten up again. If prices go up significantly, say over $3 a gallon again, enough of those who remain on the margins will more likely dash to the other side. 

Only prices on groceries can fog over gas prices. Yes, that may make more of a difference. But 47 will keep making promises, keep blaming Biden, and keep the count close. And there is the matter of seizure of ballot boxes, too, if it's obvious that Republicans will get clobbered, drawing on some bogus legal remedy.

Irrational? But how is 47 in there again at all if not irrationally?

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Your Country Is Doing This

I wouldn't be surprised in the least if we had just seen the final installment of "60 Minutes."

Canada ran the "60 Minutes" excerpt on the prison dungeons (that's what they should be called) in El Salvador for those people picked up by ICE and transferred there. An overwhelming percentage of them don't deserve to be in any kind of custody. The conditions there, as they are described, are nothing less than abuse.

If you recall, Bari Weiss spiked the report in this country. Of course she made up excuses:

• She didn't have enough opportunity to review it. That's a lie.
• Alfonsi said that she had attempted to contact the White House, the Department of Homeland Security, and the State Department for comments.r lie.Weiss said that she had contact numbers that Alfonsi didn't have, implying that had Alfonsi had them, she would have gotten through. Another lie. "Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story," wrote Alfonsi in a comment she published. "If the standard for airing a story becomes 'the government must agree to be interviewed,' then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes board cast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state."
• It will be aired later. Yet another lie, or at the very least, a dismissal into irrelevance. "Later" might mean 2029, when 47 is through (maybe) with his second term.

Weiss didn't allow a discussion on the matter requested by Alfonsi, either. That silence is complicitness in the coverup.

But the internet world is too transparent. It's on You Tube now. I saw it. I know what's in it. Go and find it.

The report, made by correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, is devastating, like those arrested are being treated. Remember: Our country is doing this. These are human rights violations unlike any other suffered by anyone prosecuted or held captive by us, which frankly is saying a lot. 

The evidence, if that's what you want to call it, that got them into that hellhole is flimsy at best, at worst non-existent. They were released after 242 days of pure hell, yes, but because of an exchange for American prisoners in Venezuela. Needless to say, that probably won't be happening again.

The pretext for these arrests is that these men are "the worst of the worst," except most of them are far from that. One of the inmates interviewed after release was merely waiting for his asylum case to be adjudicated. "I never even had a traffic violation," he said.

Stephen Miller, that snake behind most of this, lashed out at the management of "60 Minutes" and condemned the perpetrators for being murderers and rapists. If any of them are, they deserve to be treated humanely while they are being held--which they're not--and arraigned like any other person within these borders as they await trial on charges brought against them.

I have no doubt that the 47ers are assuming that the Supreme Court, or at least a deceitful majority of it, will spin the 14th Amendment, which is coming under review, enough to justify harsh and disgusting treatment of non-U.S. citizens. They're just getting out in front of it a bit, you know.

What that means, too, is the unthinkable, at least to this point in our history: That people who speak out about these outrages will be labeled "enemies of the state," and imprisoned--a cancellation of the First Amendment and the descent of our society into that of a police state. We are all but there, folks. Count on it. 

It's okay if you aren't that scared right now. You'll have plenty of time for that when it all hits you.

In the meantime, what is the rest of the reportorial staff of "60 Minutes" going to do--Scott Pelley, Bill Whitaker, Lesley Stahl, Anderson Cooper, and the rest? They are compromised, too. If they quit, will "60 Minutes" disappear, or be re-staffed with marginal, if any, credibility? Scott Pelley has been quoted recently as saying that "60 Minutes" hasn't lost its integrity, and that all their stories are being broadcast. He'll likely be adjusting that viewpoint now.

In any event, a fellow named Jeff Newton, a producer of "60 Minutes" for 15 years (and "Vice" on HBO, another outstanding piece of journalism), got up on Facebook to comment on this usurpation of journalism (which I'd recommend if you can spare 15 minutes): " '60 Minutes' is fucked," he said, more than once. I'd be surprised if it wasn't. "Democracy really does die in darkness," he said in quoting the statement from the masthead of The Washington Post, "and it's getting darker by the day."

Lots of lights have just been turned off, in fact. The bootlickers are winning. And we, we the people, are watching whatever power we've had slip away in real time. Watch for the next attack, which will be aimed at the Post and the New York Times. They're whatever national journalistic credibility we have left. By this time next year, we may have nothing at all except independent bloggers without funding, if that.

Once again, please understand: Your country is doing this. The "news" will be manipulated and adjusted to make the state look great, even if it steals others' rights right out from under them. The authorities are violating hundreds of people's civil rights, and sycophants within the news community are trying to keep us from knowing it.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Let's Compare, Shall We?

47 has offended so many of us in so many ways that I seriously doubt that anyone's keeping track any longer. His latest is a classic: Putting himself on an equal basis with someone whose sneakers he couldn't possibly lace.

I'm talking about John F. Kennedy, whose name 47 has deigned to supersede on the face of what used to be the Kennedy Performing Arts Center in Washington, DC. I went there more than once when I had an office there and also lived there a while back. It is a tribute to a president who, representing the best of us, had an attraction to and a deep appreciation for the performing arts.

All 47 has a deep appreciation for is basking in the glow of a bunch of very rich people so he can be identified with them, being rich himself. But that richness only consists of how many dollars he can possibly be connected with, not rich in things that truly matter: Style, eloquence, tact. In those, he has consistently displayed himself, and continues to do so daily, as a national embarrassment.

Yes, I am embarrassed to have him as my elected leader. I take nothing from him as an example except for how not to act, what not to say. It is a slap in the face of our political life that he was allowed to get anywhere near this otherwise cherished position, where he is allowed to represent anything good about my country. As big and, yes, as diverse as it is, it still flows from the same roots and same actions that identified it as undeniably American. He only wants to enhance not its prestige, but his. But the harder he tries, the less he does so.

Instead, he seizes upon opportunity after opportunity to name things and buildings after himself, in a ridiculously desperate attempt to become 'famous' and to name his own legacy. But in his utter stupidity, he fails to understand that he succeed in that attempt. Only the populations that follow him will, and he must surely understand that to a certain extent, many will strive to forget nearly everything about him.

Not so John F. Kennedy. To be sure, his name became connected with many things that could have been named after other famous or noteworthy Americans; his assassination, dramatic as it was and so deeply mourned, reflected excessive admiration and lionization, tarnished in later years by the discovery of a rather jaded personal life. But to name a performing arts center after him has never seemed inappropriate. He enjoyed, rather at times basked in, the performing arts, having noted musicians perform at the White House--Pablo Casals, Igor Stravinsky, Ella Fitzgerald, even Chubby Checker, for instance--and people got dressed in gowns and tuxedos for the concerts. This was a direct influence of Kennedy's wife, Jacqueline, who saw the White House as a place of elegance and enduring class.

Not so 47. He has, instead, destroyed the East Wing of the White House, which used to contain the offices of the First Lady, just because he didn't like it. That wing was exactly where the Kennedy sponsored concerts were held. For him to destroy it represents that much more of an abomination, a curse upon what was an excellent addition to the building's history. 

Not ironically, the National Trust for Historic Preservation has sued 47's administration for that destruction. Kennedy addressed a meeting of the Trust's delegates in 1963, a little more than a month before he was murdered. He said, in part: "What you are attempting to do and what interests me, of course, is trying to maintain and keep alive in this country a very lively sense of our past....with all that sense of motion and progress and looking to the future, we have a good many things in our country that are worth retaining. One of these, of course, the most important, the White House...."

47, I guess, wouldn't agree. He wants to make the East Wing one big ballroom, to hold dinners and raise money for, I suppose, himself. This ghastly ruination of a significant part of our history wrenches us from our moorings. I was lucky enough to take a tour of the White House about 25 years ago. No way I would subject myself to that now. I deny belonging to anyone or anything that would ruin that history for me. I am not responsible for it. I cannot attach myself to it in any way.

Consider, also, the crassness with which 47 makes public statements. He put himself on awful display again Wednesday night, when he tried, I suppose, to rally his supporters into further denial of what's right in front of them: A country and society that he's leading right down into the sewer. 

I have a copy of Kennedy's official papers and speeches during his presidency: It is refreshing to read them again with a yearning for something, anything, meaningful to come out of our present leader's mouth. 47 said, almost to make an excuse, that his Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, who herself had found herself embarrassed by her own comments to Vanity Fair, rather made him get up there and once again make a complete fool of himself. Effective staff assistance would rather try increasingly to get him to shut up.

To combine the names of both these presidents on the facade of one building, any building but particularly one devoted to the performing arts, as 47 has just done, is to combine silver with mud. It signifies the affliction under which we presently suffer: a tribute to phoniness, to contrivances, to fakery and fabrication. 

47's name will go down in tribute, sure. Now that it has ruined two very honorable buildings in our nation's capital, it will descend in dishonor for generations to come. The mistake the country has made, twice, in electing him will only now multiply in scars he casts upon our national landscape.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Now You Can Feel It

The post office does you what's supposed to be a favor by telling you when parcels sent through the mail are supposed to arrive. It does that through its own website.

The other day, it said that something was to arrive last Friday. It didn't come. That's happened before. It usually arrives the next day.

Then it said it would come Saturday. It didn't arrive, either.

Then it said it would come Monday. Nope.

Then it said it would come Tuesday. I didn't believe that. I was right.

At this point, I sincerely believed that it had been lost. There were things I had sent for that would be genuinely helpful with battling a case of arthritis that has suddenly sprung up. I thought about sending for it again. But why pay double?

It finally arrived Wednesday, five days after the original notice. I did not sigh with relief. I simmered. More like seethed.

This is annoying and builds up tension that you can fairly feel. It is also, I have learned, something I--we-- should probably get used to.

There's been an adjustment, I've been told, where cost-cutting is at the center of postal services. What's the best way to do that? Why, slow things down, of course.

Mail is now being routed through regional centers, a process called "consolidation." As a result, there are delayed postmarks, at least a day later. This is being called Delivering for America, which makes you think that somehow, the government is more on your side than ever. But it's not. Surprised?

The advice? Adjust by sending what you need to send earlier. That especially means bills. Meaning: If you don't want your payments to skyrocket, or pay the extra adjustment bill at the end of the pay period, you'd better get cracking.

That irritates, doesn't it? It's a way of artificially making you displeased with government. If that's some kind of experiment, it's working very well.

It's a way that someone has to make your security feel that much more tenuous. The other effect is to find something more efficient. Like: a private entity. If you can.

In a big city like mine, Milwaukee, that's not too tough. But what about if I live somewhere rural, say west of Wausau or north of Eau Claire? I'm familiar with those areas. Trying to find something out there is like finding a geographical marker. Best of luck. Guess you'll just have to wait.

Privatization is the government's deepest threat. It's an ongoing test: Can a private business deliver on its promises better and more efficiently than government?

It's one thing to try that on your own. It's quite another to get driven into that choice by forces beyond your control. But there's a disingenuous backdrop: Relying on government to deliver for you either gets to cost too much or doesn't meet your brand of efficiency or quality. That's arranged for by lack of funding, just like this shenanigan. So you're forced to conclude that government is against you instead of for you, and you turn elsewhere.

If you've spent a career in education, you aren't surprised in the least. That's where it began and still thrives. Milwaukee, in fact, is something akin to the founder of that attitude, seeing as how it went to the state Supreme Court to have its voucher program approved. That was 35 years ago, and the result has been staggering, if not unpredicted:

• a two-tiered system
• overcrowded classrooms
• dilapidated buildings
• shrinking classroom supplies
• the steadily dropping morale of teachers

All of which is a patented effort to look askance at the public school system as inadequate, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy meant for parents to siphon their kids into privatization. The fact that the public continues to fund these privatized schools has continued to be beside the point. The draining of funding toward public schools makes them look bad, which is only appropriate because increasingly, they can't help it.

Most of the time, though, it is only those within that system that notice that things are slowly but inevitably unraveling. With the mails, though, it's universal. We all notice. And it's not going to take years: It will take only months to see that backing away from a pursuit of increased quality belongs only to the administration that's responsible for it.

The next time something you were anticipating coming through the mail gets there two and three days late, think of those responsible. Think of the neglect it will take for that to additionally fall apart within a relatively short time. Then think of what's happened to education--not because of those who are practicing it, but because of those who are supposed to be caring for it, but don't.

Think about that when you get notice that, in case whatever you sent someone in the mail for Christmas got there a little late. Everybody will apologize, but there will be no oversight involved. You can read that last clause any way you wish.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Of "Caste" and Other Worthy Books: The Protracted Battle

I must say that I've not yet read the book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, by Isabel Wilkerson. I have it, but I haven't read it.

Apparently, if I lived in Llano County, Texas, I'd consider myself pretty lucky. I wouldn't be able to find a copy of Caste there in any library anymore.

Such is the effect of a recent Supreme Court decision, issued just a few days ago. The Court decided not to intervene in a local dispute about that and other books in county libraries, which had made itself up through the federal appellate court in that circuit.

Caste is, apparently, a powerful testament to the racial divide which still plagues us. Wilkerson is also the author of an important work entitled The Warmth of Other Suns, which documents the experiences of those caught up in The Great Migration, as it is called, from the South to mostly large Northern cities in the years between the world wars--a movement that changed the political and cultural landscape of the United States forever.

Wilkerson calls our divide a caste culture. Many, including me, have never heard it put that way. We think of that as belonging almost exclusively to India, which has declared their class divisions as such, while turning our backs on our own obviousness. It's how so many of us learned about the word and its horrible unfairness, dooming millions (out of a country which now boasts a population of over one billion) to lives without hope of upward mobility.

But a caste culture we are. We know of the stories. We know of the ceilings. Such was also established, for a time, in Nazi Germany. But the Nazis had an excellent example to draw from: Us. Our abuse of blacks and Natives was, and still is, a blueprint for systematically excluding people from significance just on the basis of their race. 

The following is from the preface to Caste. It alone is plenty food for thought: Enough for it to be one of Time magazine's ten best nonfiction books of 2020, and receiving a 2020 National Book Critics Circle Award, among others (source: Wikipedia). But this book may be banned now in many other libraries, for reasons you'd quite frankly have to ask the banners, because it's (purportedly) incredibly well done about a topic necessarily turned on its ear for examination. But since book banners are gathering nationwide, one community at a time, it may lead to an epidemic of banning without the kind of challenge it deserves. So enjoy: You have a place where you can at least read a few pages. It's called "The Man in the Crowd":

        There is a famous black-and-white photograph from the era of the Third Reich. It is a picture taken in Hamburg, Germany, in 1936, of shipyard workers, a hundred or more, facing the same direction in the light of the sun. They are heiling in unison, their right arms rigid in outstretched allegiance to the Fuhrer.

        If you look closely, you can see a man in the upper right who is different from the others. His face is gentle but unyielding. Modern-day displays of the photograph will often add a helpful red circle around the man or an arrow pointing to him. He is surrounded by fellow citizens caught under the spell of the Nazis. He keeps his arms folded to his chest, as the stiff palms of the others hover just inches from him. He alone is refusing to salute. He is the one man standing against the tide.

        Looking back from the vantage point, he is the only person in the entire scene who is on the right side of history. Everyone around him is tragically, fateful, categorically wrong. In that moment, only he could see it.

        His name is believed to have been August Landmesser. At the time, he could not have known the murderous path the hysteria around him would lead to. But he had already seen enough to reject it.

        He had joined the Nazi Party himself years before. By now though, he knew firsthand that the Nazis were feeding Germans lies about Jews, the outcastes of his era, that, even this early in the Reich, the Nazis had caused terror, heartache, and disruption. He knew that Jews were anything but Untermenschen, that they were German citizens, human as anyone else. He was an Aryan in love with a Jewish woman, but the recently enacted Nuremberg Laws had made their relationship illegal. They were forbidden to marry or to have sexual relations, either of which amounted to what the Nazis called "racial infamy."

        His personal experience and close connection to the scapegoated caste allowed him to see past the lies and stereotypes so readily embraced by susceptible members--the majority, sadly--of the dominant caste. Though Aryan himself, his openness to the humanity of the people who had been deemed beneath him gave him a stake in their well-being, their fates tied to his. He could see what his countrymen chose not to see.

        In a totalitarian regime such as that of the Third Reich, it was an act of bravery to stand firm against an ocean. We would all want to believe that we would have been him. We might feel certain that, were we Aryan citizens under the Third Reich, we surely would have seen through it, would have risen above it like him, been that person resisting authoritarianism and brutality in the face of mass hysteria.

        We would like to believe that we would have taken the more difficult path of standing up against injustice in defense of the outcaste. But unless people are willing to transcend their fears, endure discomfort and derision, suffer the scorn of loved ones and neighbors and co-workers and friends, fall into disfavor of perhaps everyone they know, face exclusion or even banishment, it would be numerically impossible, humanly impossible, for everyone to be that man. What would it take to be him in any era? What would it take to be him now?

What indeed? For the pestilence that threatens to now engulf us will not end with its creator. Count on that. There are too many--you can already see them, too, in the headlines--who believe, or have made themselves believe, that they can turn the USA into a cesspool of cheap obedience and white supremacy. We dangle on the edge. Those who would ban a book like Caste will now ban other books just as important and just as revealing, as it has a book about the Ku Klux Klan, about a transgender teen, and about the sexual changes we all go through.

The original case was heard in federal court with the advocates of reading, of libraries, of freedom having won. The county briefly considered closing all its libraries, but it won a reversal in federal circuit court. And now the Supreme Court will not review it, letting the reversal stand and potentially engulfing many other local communities in the same ongoing battle for the public's minds.

That battle is proving to be protracted. In order to maintain some decency about the right to think, people of my age, or so, will have to practice resistance for the rest of our lives. That need to resist may be coming, soon, to a town either near you or to the one to which you belong. This ugly era of authoritarianism assures us of that.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Garbage in the White House: The Chief Creep

It stunned me, I must admit. I never knew.

As a member of the Executive Committee of the National Education Association, I got myself invited to a member conference in Lincoln, Nebraska, in 2008. I don't recall the precise title of it, nor the precise focus. But a discussion of the challenges of English as a Second Language (ESP) broke out in one of the presentations that I attended.

It was there that I learned that not only were there members having to deal with Hispanic students in South Sioux City, Nebraska--just across the Missouri River from Sioux City--but that immigrants from Somalia were working in meat-packing plants in mid-state, were sending their kids to public schools, and those kids needed help.

Somalis. In the middle of south Nebraska. More than a decade ago. Who knew? Talk about a language transition. Wow. 

That thought came to mind when 47, in his ever-present eloquence, referred to Somali immigrants as "garbage," with vice-president J.D. Vance pounding the table in agreement. 

He continued with his generalizations that amount to racism. "These aren't people who work," he is reported to have said. "These aren't people who say, 'Let's go, come on, let's make his place great.'"

But clearly they are working at jobs others would avoid, and have been for some time now. He's unleashing another ICE round-up of immigrants in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, not too terribly far away from Lincoln, and wants to justify it to himself as necessary.

Karoline Leavitt, ever the obedient sycophant, called those remarks an "epic moment." Well, yes. I wonder if they'll go up on whatever monument additional minions put up for 47, like the Gettysburg Address and the Second Inaugural inside the Lincoln Memorial. He said he was a better president than Lincoln, didn't he?

What he's really doing is conflating all Somalis with Ilhan Omar, one of the original "Squad" of four particularly notable female, Democratic members of Congress, back when the media made something special of them. He's obviously resented that, resented that anyone get attention outside of him, and has carried it over to include her along with others trying to make this now rather confusing country their own.

"She's garbage," he said. "Her friends are garbage." Omar happens to represent part of the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, so I'm sure he's getting ICE ginned up to do their worst. As if they needed to.

It has mystified him as to why we would accept people from "shithole countries" in Africa. I have one answer for him to contemplate: Because they're better people than you are, dummy. And, again, turning some away and deporting some more does nothing more than shout at the wind, seeing as how Somalis have been here much longer than he'd ever want to consider. He's not going to clean up anything.

Instead, it'll make us look quite the opposite than what we've been used to being. "His obsession with me is creepy," Ms. Omar said. Right again. Creeps do act creepy. And the chief creep, the biggest creep, is likely to act the creepiest.

He's truly not well. Garbage? The new, overdone, ridiculously ostentatious East Wing can't disguise the smell coming from the building.

Those Somalis working in the meat-packing plants had kids. Some of them might be married already. Some of those married might have married white people, too. And had kids. He ought to think about that while brewing his fetid stew of racist, fascist hate.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark