A Retrospective on Lost Innocence

As the tumultuous 60s reverberate into the 70s, with the certainties of previous generations becoming suspect and widely discarded, Drew is on a coast-to-coast journey through late adolescence losing his innocence and coming of age as the nation he passes through is doing pretty much the same.

MAPLEWOOD NJ, 1964 — the year the Sixties really began, a time when it seemed ‘The Times [really were] a-Changin’.

A childhood idyl in suburban utopia:

Dad prospering at work and mom making a home for her growing family: summer swims at the town pool; sailing in Rockaway Inlet on visits to Nana’s Breezy Point beach house; winter ski trips and a vacation to California’s Disneyland …

But always in the background, that nagging black-and-white TV war, slowly coming into focus before bursting into view, in full, living—deadly—color.

Personal crises converge to uproot the family, forcing an unexpected move to the Midwest. Frivolities and “fast times” at Andover High ensue in a privileged enclave of the American Heartland, as a presidency unravels and hopes fade for meaningful or lasting change. At Michigan State, an idealistic undergrad’s intellectual curiosity morphs into spiritual yearning and a quest westward, back to California, in search of an authentic ethos for a life at the precipice of adulthood, the point of no return.

This fast-faced, entertaining experiment in literary nonfiction — grounded in the personal experience of memoir and contextualized in vivid journalistic passages spotlighting key cultural moments of the era — follows the decade-long unraveling of one parochial schoolboy’s bonds to his “inherited” religion, at a time when the social mores and conventions of recent generations are passing away.

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IT TURNS OUT R.E.M’S MOST FAMOUS SONG, the one about religion, is not about religion (technically, neither is this Substack).*

Michael Stipe, who wrote the iconic line that became the title for the band’s ‘91 hit single, ‘Losing My Religion,’ adapted it from an old southern expression describing the kind of exasperation which leads to one, “losing one’s cool.”

Interviewer: “Could you use [the phrase] in a sentence in its original form?”

Stipe: “At the wedding, when your uncle stood up to speak, I almost ‘lost my religion.’ — I thought he would never shut up.”

Stipe goes on in the Netflix interview to explain that the song is really about.

“I created a character that’s calling out to someone, and we don’t know if that someone even knows if that person exists.” It’s a feeling of frustration, growing anxiety or consternation, even desperation, coming to the end of one’s rope; emotions which Stipe was connecting to the pain of unrequited love.

“[…

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AMERICAN TELEVISION’S “GOLDEN AGE” was a distant memory by the start of the 1963-64 ratings season when four of the five top-ranked shows were sitcoms or westerns offering nostalgic views of the country’s more rural past. Robert Young’s Father Knows Best, an idealized depiction of American family life from the previous decade, was still airing reruns in primetime when the Beatles arrived in America, a nation, in many ways, still living in the 1950s.

Their hit single ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ had just topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart — the band’s first #1 hit in the U.S. — when the Beatles landed at New York’s newly renamed J.F.K. Airport early on Friday afternoon, February 7th, 1964. Greeted there by thousands of giddy, young, mostly female fans, the band’s members were quickly whisked away to the Plaza Hotel where — apart from Saturday rehearsals and a brief photo op in nearby Central Park — they holed up, awaiting Sunday night’s scheduled appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

For weeks leading up to the event, CBS had been deluged with more than 50,000 ticket requests for a venue that could accommodate just over 700. Richard Nixon — who had recently moved to New York to practice law after losing the 1960 presidential race to John F. Kennedy — managed to snag two of the hottest tickets in town for daughters Tricia (17) and Julie (15). Millions more — nearly half the country — would watch from home that night when six out of every ten television sets in America tuned in to see what all the fuss was about.

My brothers and I watched from home too, but without much excitement. Attending second grade at Our Lady of Sorrows at the time, I had little interest in holding any girl’s hand, especially after having just recently dodged some unwelcome attention from Florence Tivenan, a girl who sat across from me in Sister Georgette’s class.

I’d been blabbering in class about a set of walkie-talkies my father brought back from Japan when Florence, feigning interest in them, asked me over to her house after school for a demonstration. Turned out, Florence’s interests lay elsewhere, something I learned as she chased me down into her basement, trying to steal a kiss. I was only rescued when her mother facilitated my escape after finding me squeezed into the tiny space behind a toilet in the family’s lightless cellar bathroom.

John, Paul, George and Ringo were having similar girl problems after landing in New York, though they didn’t seem to mind. Maybe it was a sign, portending the tumultuous decade ahead, when just over a month later the Good Friday Earthquake — a 9.3 magnitude megathrust quake, still the most powerful ever recorded in North America — rumbled across south-central Alaska for four minutes and thirty-eight seconds, collapsing structures and spawning tsunamis from its epicenter southeast of Anchorage.

Some say “the 60s” didn’t really begin until the Beatles arrived in February that year. Others look back to the previous fall, a few weeks before the shocking assassination of President Kennedy brought the idealized promise of his unfulfilled “Camelot” era to a premature end, when Bob Dylan entered Columbia’s “Studio A” in NYC to record his famous anthem, The Times They Are A-Changin’ — a capstone to the singer’s “protest song” period which presciently counseled an aging demographic of “mothers and fathers throughout the land, [not to] … criticize what you can’t understand,” or hinder a younger generation of “sons and daughters [drifting] “beyond your command.”

Or maybe it was something else, something in the news, passing without much fanfare during the dog days of summer that year, as the Beatles kicked off their first American tour; a harbinger of the momentous changes about to be unleashed in the decade of social upheaval that would follow, remembered now for many things, not least, a collective loss of innocence, the necessary, inevitable, inescapable consequence of all that would soon come to pass . . .

PART I: EAST COAST

1. Happy Days

2. Ladies of Sorrow

3. Lessons with Mrs. Fitzerald

4. The Popular Kids

5. Class Consciousness

6. Boy Meets World

7. This Too Shall Pass

PART II: MIDWEST

8. Stranger in Town

9. Déjá Vu (all over again)

10. Odd Man Out

11. Big Man on Campus

12. Higher Education

13. ‘New York, New York’

14. Exit Strategy

PART III: CALIFORNIA

15. Into the West

16. Beats, Hippies & Jesus Freaks

17. Listen to the Music

18. California Dreaming

19. The Enemy Within

20. City of Angels

Epilogue: Deus ex Machina

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BOB DYLAN RETURNED TO FOREST HILLS STADIUM in Queens Tuesday night, his second appearance at the storied venue since the ruckus he stirred up at the same venue in August 1965. That show, Dylan’s first full electric set since the uproar at The Newport Folk Festival the previous month — memorably dramatized in the recent Timothée Chalamet-helmed biopic — featured plenty of its own drama.

After their perceived betrayal at Newport that July, the West Village “folkie” zealots turned up on the grounds of the West Side Tennis Club in Queens ready for battle. Booing loudly from the start of the electrified second set, fans began sprinting across the courts to bum-rush the stage. Levon Helm fended them off with drumsticks, but some of the hooligans managed to yank pianist Al Kooper’s stool out from under him.

“All of a sudden, a slew of stragglers start running up onstage. Big beefy guards are tackling them on the stage. It hadn’t happened before! Pretty surreal. I turned around and see Kooper go down — Kooper’s gone!” — Bassist Harvey Brooks

The crowd tried to drown out the band with chants demanding a return of “the Dylan” who had opened the first set, alone onstage, with just acoustic guitar and harmonica. “WE WANT DYLAN!,” they shouted, as the enigmatic, mop-haired iconoclast played on, seemingly unperturbed, with an attitude best expressed in lyrics he would scratch out, in real time, a few months later in a Nashville studio, while recording “Most Likely You Go Your Way (and I’ll Go Mine).”

The pattern would repeat in years to come. The artist going off in a different direction, inspired by a new muse or divine encounter — the audience free to follow, or not. The angry crowd in Queens that night demanded Dylan’s return, but he would not, to Forest Hills anyway, for another 51 years.

Last Tuesday in New York, there was plenty of electricity in the air again. Violent thunderstorms forced the Yankees, eight miles away in the Bronx, to reschedule their game with the Pirates. Twenty miles to the south and east, Dave Matthews canceled his concert at Jones Beach. But Dylan’s show went on.

Granted, there was less electricity on stage than in times past. But there was still something in the air: energized during the band’s funky rendition of Dylan’s lone classic offering from the 60s, “It Ain’t Me Babe,” building during the Latin-groove inspired transformation of “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” and especially present in a few nostalgic moments late in the program when Dylan’s harmonica came out. Where there’s breath, there’s life, after all.

I experienced “live” Dylan only once before—nearly 50 years ago and mainly by accident—on a road trip up the coast from L.A. to San Francisco after failing to return for classes that fall at MSU. It was mid-Nov ‘78, when I drove into the Bay Area and noticed signage outside the Oakland Arena advertising tickets still available for a concert that night. Pulling off Highway 880, I bought a ticket for the show.

Inside the arena later that night, it was as if all the lost souls of the 60s had gathered, swaying and twirling together, Deadhead-style, in the back of the cavernous hall, to Dylan’s best-selling single from the previous decade, “Like a Rolling Stone,” desperately clinging to the song, it seemed, trying to recapture an already vanished mystique from a former age of wonder.

Dylan looked and sounded exhausted, nearing the finish line of the grueling 114-show Street-Legal Tour which had kicked off the previous February in Japan. He started swapping “Forever Young” for “Changing of the Guards” to close out shows when the tour reached the West Coast. Change was in the air. Another verse from a staple of the tour, ‘Señor (Tales of Yankee Power,’ performed at nearly every show that fall, might have spoken for the moment Dylan had come to:

“Let’s overturn these tables - disconnect these cables / This place don’t make sense to me no more / Can you tell me what we’re waiting for Señor.”

The two Oakland shows wrapped that Tuesday night. In San Diego, during Dylan’s Friday night performance, someone threw a small silver cross onto the stage. He reached down and pocketed the Christian trinket, taking it with him to his weekend shows in Arizona where fans first noticed it hanging from his neck as he played. Somewhere between Tempe and Tucson after one of those shows, Dylan had his “knee-buckling” encounter with Jesus.

By that time, I was already back on the road heading east, trying to process my own encounter with Jesus, experienced a few weeks earlier atop Mullholland Drive as I leaned back against my parked motorcycle watching the sun rise over the Hollywood Hills. Almost a year would pass before news of Dylan’s changed “way of thinking” would reach me back in New York.

As early as the previous October, during sound checks before shows, Dylan had been toying with an early, unpolished version of “Slow Train,” the song that would provide the title for his next album — his first and best gospel album — Slow Train Coming. Pre-release copies reached the British press that summer and London-based New Musical Expressbroke the news to the world, “Dylan & God – It’s Official.”

The early zeal of Dylan’s “gospel period” — not to mention the audience rancor he stirred up in the first live performances of his new music — has long since passed, but a remnant remains (of the former), surfacing from time to time, as it did again this week in Forest Hills, and especially two nights earlier in Bridgeport, where the aging convert closed his set with “Every Grain of Sand,” the most achingly beautiful, poetic offering and culminating song of that period.

In Forest Hills, Queens, on Tuesday night, barely an hour into his first and only set of the evening, the 85-year-old troubadour was working his way through the final few numbers of his prepared set list, toward the song which has been closing most shows on the current tour — “I Shall be Released.”

Third from last was the gentle ballad, “I’ve Made Up My Mind to Give Myself to You,” from 2020’s Rough and Rowdy Ways, with its pledge of fidelity, plea for understanding, and hope that “the gods go easy with me.” And also something else, buried in the middle verses and easy to miss, a reference and nod to a particular God.

If I had the wings of a snow-white dove
I’d preach the gospel, the gospel of love
A love so real, a love so true
I’ve made up my mind to give myself to you

Has he done so? Perhaps not very well, certainly not perfectly. But then, who of us has? And who are we to judge another man’s servant, anyway? To his own master he will stand or fall, as must we all (Romans 14.4).

Just past 9:00 pm — “not [quite] dark yet, but … gettin’ there” — the old man in the white hoodie, looking like one of the old Jedi warrior priests from Star Wars, stood up from behind his electric piano. Briefly extending an arm toward the crowd in appreciation, he shuffled offstage into the shadows.

“Any day now, any day now,” he may be released. I doubt we’ll see his like again.

“Men do not differ much about what things they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call excusable.” – Illustrated London News, Oct. 23, 1909

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THE SIGNING OF THE ANGLO-IRISH TREATY in 1921 marked the first major step toward the end of British rule in the southern twenty-six, of Ireland’s thirty-two counties. Beginning in 1937, with the drafting of the Bunreacht na hÉireann — literally “Basic Law,” i.e. Constitution — Ireland’s first Taoiseach (a.k.a. Prime Minister), arch-conservative Catholic Eamon De ValeraDe Valera, began working hand-in-glove with the country’s powerful, soon-to-be Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid, to inculcate Catholic teaching into every aspect of Irish society.

Fr. McQuaid was still just a priest when De Valera set to work on this founding document of the Irish nation, personally supervising the developing draft with significant input from McQuaid, then headmaster at Blackrock College, a secondary school run by the Holy Ghost Fathers in Williamstown just south of Dublin.

De Valera had attended the school in his youth and was living nearby when McQuaid hosted the Papal Legate and other dignitaries at a Blackrock garden party in June of 1932 to celebrate that year’s International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin. Fresh off his party’s victory in the February election, de Valera was present and noticed McQuaid’s diplomatic skills overseeing the event. Two years later, when de Valera formally initiated work on the new constitution, he turned to McQuaid for input, particularly on issues regarding religion and family.

The final document — draft sections of which were shared with Vatican officials in Rome before presentation to the Irish public — reflected McQuaid’s contributions, starting with a stipulation that the “State … respect and honour religion,” while acknowledging the “special position” of Catholicism in the new nation.

Constitutional prohibitions on divorce and abortion in the final draft bore the cleric’s handprints. McQuaid also wanted to give constitutional status to a pre-existing legal ban on contraception, but de Valera felt provisions in the 1935 Criminal Law Amendment Act were sufficient. It was this last stricture, combined with the nation’s woefully inadequate adoption policies, which led to the untold heartache and tragedy that would follow.

In the mid-20th century, Ireland had one of the lowest rates of children born out of wedlock in Europe. The stats were deceptive. So many young Irish women, unmarried and pregnant, were fleeing to England to have their babies, social workers started using the abbreviation “P.F.I.” in their reports to signify “Pregnant from Ireland.”

“The fear in these girls has to be seen to be believed,” wrote one social worker processing such Irish refugees. “What sort of society … puts girls into this state.”1 Leaving Ireland for “work” in England might provide a plausible cover story for some to explain their long absences from home, but for young women who couldn’t exercise that option, it was off to a Mother and Baby Home, where the shamed creatures were hidden away from society for the duration of their pregnancies, or possibly forever.

The Irish Times called this “archipelago of coercive confinement” run by the nunneries “Ireland’s secret service.” If a girl told her parents she was in England, her letters home would be routed through a UK “accommodation address.”

Some parents thought their daughters were on pilgrimage to the Marian shrine in Portugal. After delivering babies, these girls would return home with Fatima medals and souvenirs provided by the nuns to substantiate their “alibis.”2 Woe to the unfortunates, renounced by their own kin, who ended up in a Magdalen Laundry “to work, and sometimes die, in guilt-ridden, life-long servitude.”3

Then, there were the babies, who, if they survived infancy, would likely be fostered out by the nuns or given up for adoption — through an unregulated adoption system organized by Catholic organizations under McQuaid’s watch, but facilitated by the state — often to wealthy Irish Catholics in America eager to acquire such children in the immediate post-war years of the 1950s.

P.J. Haverty, now 73, was born inside one such home in Tuam and still lives nearby. After giving birth, his mother was sent to live in a separate wing of the Tuam home. Her visits to see him were limited to several times a day, and those only to breastfeed. After a year, she was forced to leave the home without him. His first memory of any tenderness came at age six, “when a woman who would become his foster mother held his hand and led him away from the home.”4

Catherine Farrell (now Corless) grew up in Tuam and went to primary school with children born in the mother and baby home. “I just vaguely remember them. They sat at the back of the class. They were skinny-looking, and they did have sores sometimes on their faces and hands,” Corless recalls. “We were told not to go near them.”

“Home babies,” they were called. The discrimination continued into adulthood, Haverty says. “When I got older and started going to the pub, there were elderly people who would switch seats, so they wouldn’t have to sit alongside you.”

Decades later, letters surfaced from Haverty’s birth mother, writing to the Bon Secours Sisters who ran the home, begging for custody of her son. The sisters refused, requesting money for his care, instead. In fact, income from illegal adoptions associated with such homes could be significant. Shortly before her death, the superioress of a large facility in Co. Tipperary admitted that donations coming back from American adopters amounted to the home’s “largest single source of income.”

The most horrific legacy of this incestuous intermingling of the religious and civic powers of Church and State, would manifest in the appalling mortality rates of children born to unwed mothers in the early days of the Free State and Republic.

In some years, through the 1930s and the War Years which followed, over 40% of ‘illegitimate’ children in mother and baby homes were dying before their first birthday.” They died of disease — measles, diphtheria, whooping cough — of malnutrition, and neglect, according to a government report which looked back to identify the causal factors which produced those tragic statistics.

In the late 40s, the government was working on its Mother and Child Scheme, a national healthcare initiative to provide free medical care to children and to educate women on their own health issues. But the nation’s incoming health minister, 32-year old Dr. Nöel Browne, failed to overcome resistance from the Catholic hierarchy, whose obsession with many aspects of female healthcare had — just a few years previous — successfully, and bizarrely, imposed a temporary ban on the use of tampons.

McQuaid’s letter at that time, to a minister for public health expressed the bishops strong disapproval “of the use of these appliances, more particularly in the case of unmarried persons.” He further expressed his view that “tampons could stimulate girls at an impressionable age and lead them into using contraceptives to satisfy their aroused passions.”

Unbelievably, McQuaid now led the charge to kill the new healthcare initiative. His letter to the Taoiseach, agreed to by the Hierarchy, claimed the “right to provide for the health of children belongs to parents, not to the State … [that] Education in regard to motherhood includes sex relations, chastity and marriage [and] the State has no competence in such matters. He concluded with a warning that “medical officers under the proposed service … may give gynecological care not in accordance with Catholic principles.”

In short order, the scheme was abandoned, with the rest of the cabinet abandoning Browne, who resigned his post, but not before transmitting his correspondence with the bishops to the editor of the Irish Times, who published it all, along with a scathing editorial announcing, “a sad day for Ireland … [with] an honest, far-sighted and energetic man … driven out of active politics. The most serious revelation, however, is that the Roman Catholic Church would seem to be the effective Government of this country.”

Postscript

Sometime in the early to mid-70s, with McQuaid probably already in his grave, and de Valera soon to follow, Frannie Hopkins and Barry Sweeney, aged 10 and 12, were playing in their neighborhood estate built over the former grounds of the St. Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam, Co. Galway, operated by the Bon Secours Sisters for some 35 years between 1925 and 1961.

Stumbling upon a concrete slab, they pushed it open to reveal a shallow, dark hole filled with tiny human skeletons. Barry, the younger lad, fell —or was pushed — into the disused septic tank, where he began to cry. Frannie helped him out and the two boys ran home to tell their story.

Locals assumed the bones belonged to famine victims as The Home - as it was known to Tuam residents — in the previous century, had housed poor peasants evicted from their rental properties during the Great Hunger. Workers arrived to level the property which had been disturbed and secure the concrete slab in its place. A priest came to pray. Thirty-five more years passed.

In 2012, Catherine Corless (mentioned above), after taking an evening course in local history, sat down to write an article about her memories growing up in Tuam and attending school with the Home babies of St. Mary’s. Digging deeper, she placed a contemporary map of Tuam over an 19-century town map and discovered the home’s old septic tank was located exactly where Barry had fallen in among the skeletons.

Corless has since collected 798 death records of children who died in the home and found records for only two of them, both orphans (a.k.a. “legitimate”) indicating they had been buried in the town cemetery. Ignored by local media for several years after her article first appeared, the story has now gone international.

In 2017, Dan Barry covered it for the New York Times, raising the provocative question, “Had Catholic nuns, working in service of the state, buried the bodies of hundreds of children in a septic system?” Later that year, an Irish Commission of Investigation confirmed Corless’s suspicions. In September of 2025, Liam Neeson began shooting a feature film that will dramatize the story and bring it to a mass audience.

Now 71, Catherine Corless, the amateur historian who refused to allow the world to forget The Lost Children of Tuam, wants something else. “The ideal would be to exhume those little bodies, and just show them some dignity and reverence, and to perhaps re-inter them in the main Tuam graveyard, which is only across the road.”

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“Targetry never makes up for a lack of strategy.” — Former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis, speaking at CeraWeek in Houston on March 23, 2026

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I SAW HAMNET IN DECEMBER. AT THE END, as the credits rolled and the film’s breathtakingly beautiful music played on, I turned to the two women who had come with me to the theater — still motionless, glued to their seats in stunned silence — and whispered to both of them, “This thing should take home all the awards.”

Well, Hamnet didn’t win everything at the Critics’ Choice Awards, the first awards show of the season, but Jessie Buckley, who plays Agnes Shakespeare, wife of the famous Bard, in the film, did win for Best Actress. Then came the speech which rivaled some of her best moments in the film itself.

She began by recalling her younger brother Killian’s recent trip to see the earliest known cave paintings in France. Buckley shared with the audience his observation that the prehistoric images found there weren’t discovered near the caves’ entrances, but in their “deepest, darkest parts” where these “first-ever artists decided to go … to tell their stories.”

Turning to her director sitting close-by, Buckley, an Irish-born thespian from Killarney, quickly gaining a reputation for the “emotional force” she releases in performance, paused, the emotional level in the room spiking, before addressing the film’s auteur directly.1 “Chloé Zhao, you have reminded me of the power of telling a story, and the journey that you can go on, to touch the deepest parts of what it is to be alive. Thank you!”

Buckley then shifted the attention of her rapt audience, resting in that moment on a visibly moved Zhao, to look at her co-star, Paul Mescal. “I could drink you like water, working with you every single day,” she gurgled in obvious delight. “You’re a giant of the heart. And thank you so much for making me a little bit more human.”

A week later, at Sunday night’s Golden Globes, Buckley was still trying to explain those comments to curious media after another Best Actress win for herself, and a Best Drama Motion Picture win for her film. Producer Steven Spielberg came onstage to accept the latter award, quickly passing the microphone to Zhao, but not before explaining his choice in hiring her to turn Maggie O’Farrell’s book into a film.

“I loved the book, but I felt there was really only one filmmaker, on the face of the planet, who could tell the story of Agnes and Will, and the spirits of the earth and the forest, and that was the exceptional, exceptional, EXCEPTIONAL, Chloé Zhao.”

Ms. Zhao spoke last, first turning to Paul Mescal, standing onstage behind her, asking if she might repeat something he had said to her that morning. Over the next ninety seconds, Zhao concluded her remarks with a heartfelt tribute to the artists gathered in the room, exhorting them to keep “learning to be vulnerable … [with] hearts open … to give ourselves fully to the world … [to] keep seeing each other, and allowing ourselves to be seen.”

This is a strange movie review, with little to no details about the film itself. But if there’s anything we’ve learned early this award season, it’s this — it takes magicians such as these to make movie magic.

I won’t belabor the point. Hamnet is a near perfect movie, beautiful to look at, and beautifully realized. Just go see it on a big screen, while you still can. Buckley has said her intention is “to make people feel.” Go to the cinema to see it and feel it, in a large room, with other people.

WATCHING ON REPLAY WHAT LOOKED LIKE a gangland, execution-style killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis last weekend brought to mind Leo DiCaprio’s character in the Quentin Tarantino film, ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.’

In this 2019 reimagining of Hollywood in the late 60’s, DiCaprio plays a has-been actor, Rick Dalton, who, in his own fictionalized heyday, portrayed bounty hunter Jake Cahill in the similarly fictitious 1950s/60s Western-style TV show, Bounty Law.

Lately, federal agents surged by the Trump administration into the Twin Cities seem to be borrowing a page from Jake Cahill’s Bounty Law playbook.

The thread that leads to Alex Pretti’s death on January 24th, can be traced back to last summer’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” signed into law by President Trump after House Republicans passed it (215-214-1) earlier that spring. Their razor thin margin of victory came on a vote taken with several Blue seats still vacant after the deaths of three elderly Democrat representatives in the first five months of 2025.1

Final Senate passage followed on July 1st in another close party-line (51-50) vote, with Vice President JD Vance casting the tiebreaker. Public Law 119-21 increased ICE funding from $10 billion to more than $100 billion by 2029, making it the country’s single MOST funded federal law enforcement agency. Trump and Stephen Miller had gained the robust, White House-controlled, federal police force they dreamed of.

ICE immediately went on a spending spree, aggressively expanding its workforce (from 10k to 22k) by launching an accelerated hiring program with up to $50,000 signing bonuses, $60,000 in student loan repayment, 25% premium pay (LEAP), and enhanced benefits to hire 12,000+ new agents by 2026.

The incentives were so compelling they soon began to impact local law enforcement’s own enlistment efforts. These hastily and unwisely recruited, poorly vetted and trained, new federal so-called “officers” are now turning up on the streets of Minneapolis where they face “pressure [to meet] daily arrest quotas … [and] are rewarded for making arrests, even if the immigrants they take in are later released."2

What could go wrong?

According to a 30-page document circulated among officials over the summer and reviewed by The Washington Post, ICE’s “surge hiring marketing strategy,” also referred to as a “wartime recruitment” effort, plans to “spend $100 million over a one-year period” reaching out to gun rights supporters and military enthusiasts “through online influencers and a geo-targeted advertising campaign,” in order to provide the agency with thousands of new deportation officers.3

Recruitment images posted on agency social media channels have proliferated, mimicking popular first-person shooter video games like Call of Duty and Hell Let Loose, while targeting young men “who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest” in guns, tactical gear and/or conservative thought leaders. Such images, combined with messaging calling for recruits willing to perform their “sacred duty” and “defend the homeland” by repelling “foreign invaders,” produced 220,000 applicants and 18,000 tentative job offers by year’s end.4

The ads use geofencing to direct “people near military bases, Nascar races, gun and trade shows, and college campuses” to an ICE website proclaiming — under an iconic image of Uncle Sam’s pointing finger — “America has been invaded by criminals and predators … We need YOU to get them out.” A disclaimer assures applicants they will “not need an undergraduate degree” to be hired.

Tim (not his real name), a friend of mine for nearly 50 years, lives near the spot where Alex Pretti was killed. Father, grandfather, and conservative evangelical — if anyone would have a sympathetic view of a legitimate policing operation, it would be this guy. Which makes his response to the question I emailed him last week — “How’s it going up there?” — all the more compelling:

“What ICE is doing is hellish. Citizenship and legal status is irrelevant [to them]. The only criteria for being targeted is skin color or having a funny name. Protesters lawfully exercising their rights are roundly abused, physically and chemically. The death of Alex Pretti was a gang killing, simple as that.

Our church alone has ~100 volunteers delivering food weekly to people who are afraid to leave their homes. We put our phones in airplane mode, turn off bluetooth, and circle the block to check for ICE vehicles before delivering. They are using illegal tech to track people everywhere and create a database of ‘dissidents’ — I guess that’s what we are now.”

In December, White House border czar Tom Homan — the man Trump just sent to Minnesota to calm things down — told Reuters, “You’re going to see … [arrest] numbers explode greatly next year,” as ICE moves quickly to more than double its work force and expand detention capacity.5 Homan said his plans “absolutely” include more enforcement actions at workplaces.

All this brings us to mind the 'Shadow Wolves’ a moniker for the country’s only Native American tactical patrol unit, specifically utilized for targeted interdiction operations, which operates along a 76-mile stretch of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. The name refers to the way the unit hunts, like a wolf pack. Folded into the new Department of Homeland Security in 2003, its highly-trained agents have worked effectively for decades tracking and intercepting drug and human smugglers in the rugged terrain of the Sonoran Desert.

Today, in the frigid north, ICE’s modern day bounty hunters are also hunting in packs, but that’s where similarities with their indigenous counterparts end. Lured into service with excessive financial incentives, these well paid, but poorly trained new ICE recruits, rushed into service on the streets of Minneapolis, are victimizing entire neighborhoods with their lawless, inhumane, and thus far unaccountable behavior.

When the inevitable tragedies began to unfold, senior Border Patrol commander, Greg Bovino, obscenely cast his agents as “victims” in the aftermath of innocent civilian deaths. Yet, in one sense — certainly not the one Bovino intended — the claim touches on something real, the kind of realpolitik Bob Dylan alluded to in the chilling lyrics of his 1963 ode to murdered civil rights activist Medgar Evers.

‘Only a Pawn in Their Game’

But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all, like a tool

He’s taught in his school, that the laws are with him, to protect his white skin …

Taught how to walk in a pack, shoot in the back … but it ain’t him to blame, he’s only a …

Dylan’s song about Evers was really a song about how rich, powerful white men manipulate poor, weak-minded, easily-influenced “pawns” to do their bidding. Other than skin tone — a slightly lighter shade of brown now — nothing much has changed in six decades for the new scapegoats in the cross-hairs. The strings are all still pulled from the top.

Updated Jan. 14

COVERAGE OF THE RELENTLESS bloodletting in Ukraine and Gaza these past few years has worn me down. So in recent months, I’ve mostly tried to push thoughts about Venezuela and the murderous hunting grounds off its coast into a distant corner of my mind. That kind of intentional ignorance is a comfort we citizens of these United States can no longer afford.

I awoke last Saturday to learn:

1. The Venezuelan “monster” Madura, was on his way to a NY York jail in handcuffs.

2. That we would be “running” his country for awhile.

3. While taking back “our” oil …

4. Which some unspecified Venezuelan(s) from the past had “stolen” from us.

5. Which some past American president had “decided not to do anything about.”

I learned all this during the President’s Saturday morning press conference, an event which in addition to these revelations, suggested that somehow all this relates to a speech James Monroe made to Congress in 1823, covered in my 10th grade U.S. History class, a subject I suddenly realized I needed to bone up on right away.

As George Will reminded his Washington Post readers that afternoon, the Monroe Doctrine — declaring "the Western Hemisphere closed to further European colonization [but] open to U.S. intervention” — might more aptly be referred to as the Adams Doctrine, after Monroe's secretary of state who, two years before his boss’s 1823 speech, made one of his own:

“Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will [America’s] heart ... be. But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own.”

The Post has also been instructive recently regarding the 100+ years history of U.S. involvement in Venezuela’s oil business, reporting what happened in 1914 after the discovery of rich petroleum deposits in Lake Maracaibo — Venezuela’s "oil lake” — when military dictator Juan Vicente Gómez granted concessions to three foreign oil companies giving them control of 98% of the Venezuelan market.

Read more

AMERICA IS SPLIT DOWN THE MIDDLE, or into thirds anyway, with Donald Trump winning roughly one-third of the country’s eligible voters in the last election. Another third went for either Kamala Harris or one of the other not-Trump options on the ballot. A third, similar-sized group, didn’t bother to vote at all.

Trump achieved his so-called “landslide” victory by winning 49.8% of overall votes cast, the third smallest margin of victory in a presidential election since Republican Benjamin Harrison’s narrow win over Grover Cleveland in 1888.

In 2016, Trump lied about winning the popular vote over Hillary Clinton (nearly three million more Americans voted for Clinton). His Big Lie claiming victory over Joe Biden came in 2020. His latest Lie, repeated ad nauseum since the last election, is about the size of his recent narrow victory in 2024.

Even November’s electoral vote was a squeaker. Trump scratched out close wins in the three tight swing states of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. But if the relatively small number of not-Trump votes in those states — for Jill Stein, RFK Jr. and several lesser-known candidates — had gone to Kamala instead, she would have won both Wisconsin and Michigan, and needed only to turn less than 1% (.0077) of Trump’s Pennsylvania voters to secure the 270 electoral votes which would have won her the White House.

America finds itself in a unique situation today, where one half of the country is convinced the other half of the country is going to destroy the entire country. It’s a sobering situation, begging an even more distressing question — What if both halves are right?

Not right about Trump, or Harris, or any particular issue up for current debate, but correct in their conclusion that extreme partisan elements in each half — that is both halves of the country — are each, in their own way, leading the nation down a path toward a debilitating period of national decline, if not outright ruination . . .

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A YEAR BEFORE THE BEATLES arrived in America, my parents left New York to relocate our growing family across the Hudson River to New Jersey, where Dad had taken a new job at Sea-Land . . .

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I HAD JUST TURNED SIX IN 1964 when my father made the epoch-defining Disneyland announcement which would divide the remaining twelve years of my youth into two distinct dispensations — B.C. (before California), and A.D. (after Disney).

Going forward, roughly every three years of my formative education would be marked by an abrupt change, beginning in September ‘64 when my older brother Steve and I walked down to bottom of Clinton Avenue to board the bus . . .

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18 MIN READ

OUR TRANSITION FROM PAROCHIAL TO PUBLIC SCHOOL in the fall of 1966 placed former Catholic school boys like myself on a strange kind of two-track (secular vs. sacred) educational path which, within a few years of my start at Jefferson Elementary Public school would culminate in very different . . .

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Preview: 'I, Patrick — the Lost Letters'

It can be a surprising to learn St. Patrick was neither Irish, nor Catholic, nor even a proper Saint, and never officially canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. The cardboard cleric, solemnified in bishop's gown and mitre, handed down to us by hagiographers of later centuries, turns out to be a poor reflection of the troubled young man who emerges from his own writings.

Patricius (his real name), a Romanized Briton, was born c. AD 390 in Bannavem Taburniae, a coastal village in western Britannia. His grandfather was a priest, his father a deacon, in the early Church in Britannia, that some say traces its roots back to Aristobulus, one of “the Seventy” mentioned in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans.

Calpornius, father of Patricius, was also a decurion in the local Roman civil administration, which made him responsible, among other things, for collecting imperial taxes due the emperor and personally liable for any defaults. Patricius was, in this sense, a scion of the empire, though, by his own admission, also a bit of a rascal in his youth.

At sixteen, he was kidnapped by Irish coastal raiders, taken by force back to Ireland, and sold into slavery. For six years he tended the herds of his master in the harsh mountain climate of the Irish northwest. At the end of that time, guided by a dream, he fled to the coast and boarded the ship which transported him back across the Irish Sea to freedom.

YOUNG PATRICK OF IRELAND is a work of historical faction, hewing closely to the known facts about Patrick, against the backdrop of the 5th century crisis in the Western Empire — the struggle between Romans and Barbarians, generals and bishops, for religious and political control of an empire in decline.

The original script for YOUNG PATRICK OF IRELAND has been adapted into a 10-part limited series for television; the first part of a story whose conclusion — ‘PATRICK OF IRELAND’ — is intended for a wide-screen theatrical release.

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“I have often heard Agricola say that Ireland could be invaded and held by a single legion and moderate number of auxiliaries, arguing the advantage — even if just for the coercion of Britain — of placing Roman arms in evidence everywhere, and thus sweeping independence from the map.” — Tacitus, Agricola

West Coast of Ireland, AD 450

Fergus led his weary mount along a lonely path, through the Wood of Foclut, toward the cliffs of Inishkea overlooking the Western sea. Struggling past the stubborn overgrowth which choked this rarely traveled route, he thought wistfully of the long stretches of well-tended Roman roads which had guided him, through Gaul, to Rome, so many years ago.

Roman roads — the arteries of her Empire — carrying that vast cargo of goods, the lifeblood of that multicultural society, stretching from exotic capitals in ancient Mesopotamia to her warm water ports in the Mediterranean, over imposing Alpine passes into rich fertile Gaul, to Augusta Treveri (Rome of the North), across the Northern sea to Britannia, as far as the frosty crags of Caledonia.

Commerce had been the driving engine of imperial expansion for the better part of a thousand years. The Roman road system made it possible, enriching her equestrian ruling class beyond even the wildest dreams of their rustic forebears, providing them a standard of living that was the envy of the world. Of course, crass mercantilism was beneath the senatorial caste. Roman law strictly forbade members of the Senate and their families from engaging directly in such trade. But they were never concerned by such restrictions—so long as they retained the power to tax!

Mercurius, Mercury — God of trade, and swiftness. A smug satisfaction accompanied the pleasure Fergus always derived from his command of Latin. Mercator, Merchant — the god Romans worshipped above all others, whose winged sandals of imperishable gold, ‘bore him swift, as a breath of air, over sea and earth.’ Such devotion had filled 50,000 miles of Roman roadbed with crushed limestone, gravel, sand, and rid the Mediterranean sea lanes of piracy. For all their talk of war and martial glory, it was the business of running the world that always animated these Romans most . . .

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WORK IN PROGRESS …

“The Britons submit to conscription, taxes, and other obligations imposed by the Empire. Allured by the attractions of peace: our colonnades, warm baths and elegant banquets, they call it civilization, though it was but another feature of their enslavement.”

Roman Britannia, A.D. 406

The oppressive late-summer heat rose in discernible waves from the floor of the portico, reflecting off an elaborate clay-tile mosaic depicting the Battle of Mons Grampius; its reflection adding another layer of suffering to the already long-suffering final year students of Theophratus the Grammaticus.

Bannavem Taburniæ’s renowned Greek tutor was in fine form, enraptured in a moving — or so it seemed to him — recitation of Ausonius:

   “A God to whom I cannot pray,

Pray, what is he to me?

   Mont Blanc, is he, or star afar,

Pentelic marble, Tigris clay,

   Or, isle in the southern sea...”

Keeping his eyes closed for effect, Theophratus’ ears remained attentive. He did not miss the faint, but unmistakable, scraping sound of a wax tablet carefully being nudged across the clay tiles...

... Fergus stood holding the reins of Patricius’ horse. “What was that about?” he asked, looking over at Theophratus earnestly conversing with Alexandros.

“I’m not sure,” Patricius replied with a frown, who mounted quickly while calling back to Alexandros, “We’re going ahead!”

Without waiting, Patricius goaded his horse into the busy thoroughfare, his friend following with a look of perplexion. Neither saw Theophratus pass his letter to Alexandros, nor could they imagine, in that moment, the far reaching series of events such a simple act would set into motion . . .

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WORK IN PROGRESS …

‘Hadrian put a great many things in order and was the first to build a wall dividing Romans from Barbarians. The outlying western military zones remained only nominally Christian, or colonized, and the Britons continued to feel the presence of the free Celts beyond the Wall.’

The two boys passed through Bannaven Taburniæ’s main gate at a slow trot. Patricius pulled up just before the crossroad, turning in his saddle. Fergus hesitated, “Martinus is expecting my help at the fort.”

Patricius, still distracted in his own thoughts, looked up toward the fading light in the western sky. “Do you think we have time?” he asked, suddenly flashing a mischievous grin.

“That’s probably not such a good —” Fergus began to protest but his friend, not waiting for an answer, had already heeled his horse ‘round. Flying past the startled older boy at full gallop, he shouted, “I’ll be waiting for you there!”

“Damn!” Fergus hissed under his breath, rising to the challenge and spurring his mount in pursuit. The two disappeared in a hail of flying dirt down the road toward Vercovicium.

The old Roman auxiliary fort at Vercovicium, guarding the western section of Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, lay nearly ten Roman miles away by the main road…

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WORK IN PROGRESS …