The word “ontario” comes from the Iroquois. It means either “great lake” or “sparkling water” depending on how you say it.

If you did your own study of early American history and did not rely on the version taught at most public schools you will remember that when the Founding Fathers were devising the Constitution they relied heavily on the input of members of the Iroquois nation. The Iroquois or Haudenosaunee Confederation was designed as a participatory democracy. It united six tribes each with distinct differences under a charter known as The Great Law of Peace. Benjamin Franklin and John Adams write extensively about the inspiration this oral constitution gave them when forming a way forward for the thirteen colonies. The analogy that the Onondaga chieftain Canassatego used was that a bundle of arrows, bound together, had a much better chance of surviving than each individual arrow alone which could be broken easily. On the back of the U.S. one dollar bill is the Great Seal of the United States. Perched on that seal is an eagle with a bundle of thirteen arrows bound together. A direct steal from the Iroquois and a way of honoring both the nation and their aid in forming these United States. So you can see how ridiculously foolish it is, after 250 years of preserving this union through the rule of law and the shared dedication to the idea of democracy, for Donald J. Trump to unilaterally change the name of a lake that forms part of the longest border between two countries in the world. Five thousand five hundred twenty-five miles of peacefully maintained border. They have shared this border since 1783. And on his own, for no other reason than that he was thwarted in his outrageous demands placed upon one of our primary trading partners and our oldest and closest ally in the western hemisphere.

But Donald J. Trump doesn’t do it for comic effect. He does it with no self-awareness, no sense of irony. He does it ignorant of history or of the strength of tradition. He doesn’t do it out of need. He does it out of arrogance and pique. He does it because time started when Donald J. Trump started and ends only when he is silenced. He does it regardless of its affect on other people because other people are merely transactions for him, currency for him to use to mirror himself. He will be a harmless little man once he is alone sitting in a cell with one window. But where he is today he is dangerous. And he is dangerous not in and of himself but only because people listen to him and believe him and do what he says no matter how silly and foolish he is. Only we the people can change that and we will when we vote.

Canadian Bacon is the way to go. It’s much healthier than regular old bacon. It is also John Candy’s last feature film. Written and directed by Michael Moore, the Flint, Michigan, resident who directed Bowling For Columbine and a bunch of other documentaries with bite that we should have been paying more attention to. It is Moore’s only narrative film and it might have been better if he’d asked a Canadian, like Ivan Reitman to direct but that’s not the point. The point is that it is free on youtube.com and it is perfect for right now when our favorite village idiot, improvising in his role as President of the United States, is declaring war on our good neighbors to the north. Albeit a trade war but he has hinted at putting boots on the ground and since the war in Iran is not working out so well for him he may want to start another one closer to home.

The plot of Canadian Bacon has Alan Alda as a fumbling and bumbling American president whose ratings are falling starting a war against Canada. The sheriff of Niagara, the city on the American side of the Falls, played by John Candy, a Canadian in real life, takes this “war” seriously and gathers his deputies and a bunch of people with nothing to do on a Saturday night to invade Canada. Lots of typical Canadian jokes some of which work and some which don’t but, again, the point is that this 1995 film saw into the future and laughed. It won’t, of course, be funny when we start paying more for things that suffer from Donald J. Trump’s 50% tariff on Canadian products like bacon or Labatt’s Blue. Hopefully we won’t have to send Ryan Gosling and Dan Ackroyd back over the border, or worse yet put all Canadians in internment camps like we did the Japanese during WWII. It would be a pretty funny camp though with Seth Rogen, Gosling, Danny, Jim Carrey, Ryan Reynolds, Sandra Oh, Rachel McAdams, Mike Myers, and many more.

If you have time take a look at the things Trump and his lackey tried to put into the trade agreement with Canada, the one that Canada walked away from. Like telling them to stop being a bi-lingual country. Like dictating who they can trade with. Like telling them who and how to make cars and pick-up trucks, which they already do just fine. And, what for me would have been the maple leaf that broke the wolverine’s back, like having to wait for Donald J. Trump to change his mind whenever that bug got up his ass again. How the heck is he even doing tariff’s again? I thought the Supreme Court told him not to. But they have as much integrity as a maggot on mushrooms, so WTF?

Good thing Mark Carney, the Prime Minister of Canada, can read. He is also a banker so he can probably even read compound sentences. Donald J. Trump, as the world’s best known narcissist, thinks that he is the smartest person in every room and consequently believes that everyone is dumber than he is so he probably didn’t realize that the Canadian leader could see the con coming. As the world’s best known bully he also thought Carney would curl up and quiver with fear. Trump, it goes without saying, has never been in a Toronto bar until closing with a bunch of Canadians. They’ll eat glass to make a point if they have to.

On a note closer to home, there are a lot of people running for office in November who need money to keep up with the Republican candidates who have billionaires who don’t pay taxes backing them up. A lot of scientists like Dr. Annie Andrews, running for Senate in South Carolina, Dr. Amy Acton, running for governor of Ohio, Dr. Abdul el-Sayed, running for Senate in Michigan, Jasmine Clark, a microbiologist running for the House in Georgia-13, Dr. Megan O’Rourke, an ecologist running for the House in New Jersey-7, and Sam Wang, a neuroscientist running for the House in NJ-12. There is also Angie Nixon who is running to be the next Senator from Florida and Jon Ossoff who is trying to get reelected to the Senate from Georgia, Troy Jackson in Maine, James Talarico in Texas. A lot of good candidates and since the Supreme Court, those people with the integrity of a maggot on mushrooms, made politics about money with the Citizens United decision back in 2010 they all need money. Even a dollar helps, mostly because it means one more person supports their ideas and their candidacy. The mid-terms are inevitable now so wash your voting socks and get ready.

Tom lived with his dad because his mother died.

Well … maybe we’ll get into that later.

For half the year his dad lived in a cabin at the base of Blanca Peak in south central Colorado. Karl was his dad’s name and he liked everybody to call him Karl, even his son. Karl was a forester for the Colorado State Forest Service. During the winter months they lived in Alamosa, Colorado. That’s where Tom went to school. That’s where his mother had gotten sick. But she actually died in Colorado Springs, at the hospital there.

I guess we’re going to get into it now …

His mother’s name was Sara. “No ‘h’,” she would say if someone asked her name. “Sara, no ‘h’.” Simple and plain. That’s how she was. Born and raised on a small cattle ranch on the Arkansas River, the part they call the ‘gun barrel’, near Americus, Colorado. They call it the ‘gun barrel’ because it runs south, straight and true just like a gun barrel from its headwaters above Leadville down to Salida, where it begins to turn east on it’s long journey to the Mississippi and on out to the sea. Sara used to say that Tom was born on a horse because he practically was. She was out on a trail ride with Karl and her dad looking for strays and signs of wolf when her water broke. The two men helped her deliver the baby under a Ponderosa pine tree with the aspen leaves singing their song in the wind nearby. Karl mostly held her hand and whispered encouragement as he tended the small fire they lit to heat water from the creek down the hill while her father coaxed Tom from the womb into the cool afternoon air of the mountains of Colorado in September. I say coaxed because he hummed a little song he made up as he helped his daughter stay focused and caught his grandson as Tom slipped, squawking, from his mother. “He’d delivered calves most of his life. You were easy,” is how she said it when she told friends the story and Tom was around to listen. They called him Tom then and there because they were fans of the New England Patriots.

Sara was tiny, five foot two in her socks, but as solid as the land she grew up in. By ten years old she was rounding up cattle all day and into the night when it was time to bring them down from the high country for winter. She barrel raced in local rodeos. Won a few blue ribbons. She had a reputation for being funny, loud, and a little wild at the cookouts after the rodeos. She was famous locally for punching Hugh Rackman right in the mouth when he said something nasty about her friend Brick who later wanted to be called Brenda. Hugh went down hard and stayed. She kicked his boot and said, “That busted tooth will remind you to keep your mouth shut.” The crowd that had gathered laughed at that. The laughter was what kept Hugh quiet long after the tooth had been capped.

She was tough, no doubt about that, so when she started losing weight and getting tired after half a days work it was worrisome right away. And then her leg broke when she jumped down off her horse to tie up a calf to be branded while working the roundup on Brenda’s father’s ranch. They set the leg as best they could then put her in the back of the pick up to drive to the hospital in Alamosa. The doctors there set the leg properly but they thought there might be something more wrong with her that they couldn’t do anything about. They recommended going over to Colorado Springs. Over there they found cancer in the bones of her leg and hips and recommended radiation so she stayed there in the hospital. Karl and Tom stayed in a little motel for a few days but Karl had to work and Tom had school. Her mom and dad came over to visit her and bring her things but she went downhill pretty fast and Tom saw her just five more times on weekends before she died.

Tom was nine at the time and he got pretty mad when she died. It had all happened so fast and Karl didn’t know how to talk about it so Tom just had to watch as the strongest person he had ever known just dwindled down to nothing at all and then was gone. At nine years of age he had never felt alone at all and then suddenly, for no good reason, he felt completely alone. Karl must have felt something but he was no good at talking about it and there was work to be done so he did it and kept quiet. Tom took his cue from his dad and just moved from point a to point b and back again and kept to himself. He cried alone at night. People and critters die when you live close to the land but life goes on and you just make the adjustment and keep moving.

Sara had died at the end of July so Tom went back to work on his grandparents ranch until the end of summer. His grandmother kind of went to ground after her only daughter died and his grandfather didn’t seem to notice him unless he forgot one of his chores. Nobody talked much when they sat down to eat dinner. He didn’t finish the Little League baseball season with his team. He was a good left fielder and could hit for average if not for power and they missed him. But they understood. They thought it was because there was no one to drive him down from the ranch into town for games and practice. But that wasn’t it at all. In the fall he started fifth grade still pretty much going through the motions. Even though they had always liked him other kids gave him plenty of room which of course made the feeling of being alone much more real.

Karl went back to work for the Forest Service up at the cabin at the base of Blanca Peak. After Labor Day he moved back down into town and that’s when Tom moved from the ranch back into the house in Alamosa. Dinners in that house were even more quiet but at least his grandmother wasn’t bursting into tears at inexplicable moments, like when he would ask for more potatoes, the way she did at the ranch. It is a long, cold winter in the San Luis Valley but Tom sensed that this one was going to be longer and colder than the ones he was used to.

End Chapter One …

A couple of things get over looked in the general turmoil created by Donald J. Trump and his random acts of cruelty as he lashes out at anyone, any nation that does not treat him like the golden prophet he believes himself to be. One is the assault on public lands in the United States.

Approximately 640,000,000 acres of land in the United States is owned by the government. That is 28% of all the land. It is our land just like the White House is our house. We the people are the government when we choose to vote. Most of this public land is in the west and Alaska. The government takes care of it, manages it, through several different agencies: the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the National Parks Service (NPS), and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS). The BLM along with the USFS manages the land that is, or rather was, Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Escalante National Monument. During his first term Donald J. Trump reduced the size of Bears Ears by 85% and Grand Escalante by 46%. Joe Biden restored both to their original size. When he took office again Trump reduced Bears Ears by 90% . At the same time he reduced Grand Escalante National Monument by nearly 91%. It sounds like the story of King Solomon and the two women who each claim ownership of an infant child. Only Joe Biden understood that the land belonged to the people. It was not his to play with. Donald J. Trump wants his friends in the fossil fuel industry to have access to the land so that they can drill for oil and natural gas.

When they were whole and intact each Monument was home to innumerable species of wild life and plant life, astonishing vistas for people who wanted to walk and camp there, and countless places sacred to the native people who lived there long before Europeans immigrated to this continent. They were also home to many native people who raised cattle and sheep to make their living from the land. When he reduced the size of each monument he also disbanded the Bears Ears Commission which was a working coalition of five tribal councils that shared in the management and decision making process about anything that happened on what had been their home territory.

The Hopi, the Navaho, the Pueblo, and two separate Ute Indian tribes have claim to the land of both Grand Escalante and Bears Ears. The Navaho came to the land in the 1400’s CE. The Hopi have lived and worked their land for at least 2000 years. The Ute were established in what we now call the Four Corners country in the early 1500’s CE. And the Pueblo have been there for as much as 7,000 years. The fact that their ancestors lived and worked the land for so long does not give them claim of ownership. Ownership of land is a European concept and not one that the native people cling to. Their relationship to the land is based more on sharing. With the wildlife, the plants, and the spirits that inhabit the land. The value of the land is not in what they can take from it but in what it offers them as a gift. And they respect that gift in every action that they take as they live and work in what is and has been their home for thousands of years. When Donald J. Trump steals once again their rights to the land, rights that have been protected by treaty after broken treaty, promise after broken promise, he not only disrupts their immediate connection to generations of ancestors, tradition, and culture but he makes an inherent promise to destroy the land, its spirit and its beauty, by drilling for oil and gas and carving countless numbers of roads through the wild land in order to take money out of the ground to enrich himself and his friends. And once again, as he did with the East Wing of the White House, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, the Kennedy Center, and wants to do with his triumphal arch, the painting of the Eisenhower office building, and the Smithsonian Museum complex as he demands they re-write the history displayed therein he desecrates the true and complete story of America and crushes that truth under his jack booted heal. He also takes what is ours for his own amusement and pleasure. And he takes without asking. That is rude in the worst possible way.

When my son was young he often slept in bed with us. His mother went to work early so she would try to sleep while I read him a book or two as he got drowsy. Then I would turn out the light and usually he would ask me to tell him a story, any story, just a story. Like all stories mine rose up out of memory, the fabric of the story woven by imagination from the threads of truth that remain from things that really happened or were wished for, dreamt of, or experienced.

One such story was about a boy who lived with his father and mother in a cabin near the base of a mountain in Colorado. The boy went out one day to explore the mountain and the lake that lay behind the cabin at the very base of the mountain. It was late spring/early summer and he decided to climb to where his father had pointed out an eagle’s nest high above the lake. He wanted to see the fledgling eagles while they were still relegated to the nest. They were not quite ready to fly but the boy thought that he was. I created this story in chapters over several weeks. After hard days of playing, learning, and growing, two books and my voice droning on in the dark usually got him to sleep pretty quickly, so my chapters were short and usually defined by his breathing getting deeper and slower as he drifted into sleep.

Yesterday I started to write this story out for the Substack because I am so tired of writing about Donald J. Trump and the fusillade of outrageous atrocities he has been hammering us with. I wanted to write about something fun and adventurous, something that had nothing to do with the condition of the democracy we are, most of us, trying to preserve. The following few sentences are how I began:

“Tom lived with his dad because his mother died.

“(Long pause.)

“Maybe we’ll get into that later.

“For half the year his dad lived in a cabin at the base of Blanca Peak in south central Colorado.”

That’s how it came out. As I indicated earlier stories, at least the stories I tell, come out relatively spontaneously. They are motivated by whatever I have been thinking about or feeling during the day, about whatever dreams or hopes I have been manufacturing and carving with my imagination, and are shaped by whoever happens to be listening. After I wrote those four lines and stared at them wondering where to go next and, more importantly, why the story began that way now when it did not begin that way years ago when I spoke it in the dark to my son sleeping safely by my side. The first line and then the long pause while the narrator of the story absorbs the fact of that first line and then, not so deftly, avoids going deeper into the death of the mother is what interests me and what caused me to stop and think about it. I don’t remember the name I gave the boy when I began the story twenty-five years ago, something like Jake, I think, something a little more rambunctious, and my immediate audience was my son so I wanted a name that could harmonize with his name and make it linger in his memory. When I began to write it out yesterday I named him Tom, something a little more plain, more generic, more common, hoping to paint a portrait of a boy that was much more complicated by starting with a relatively blank slate: Tom. But the thing that really stopped me from writing is why I killed his mother. As the story teller I did kill her. I chose for her to have died.

As far as story telling goes having a dead mother makes the personality of the boy, Tom, a little more interesting right off the bat, a little tragic and also mysterious because the story teller doesn’t want to talk about it right now but says they may later. As I wrote it I didn’t know how she would have died. I thought perhaps violently in a crime or an accident, or of disease. All of those deaths, any death of the mother, would be tragic and violent and inexplicable to a young boy but each one in its own way would affect him differently. And it would affect the father differently, too. Every kind of death will be grieved differently and that is essentially what one very vibrant thread in the tapestry of the story is going to be about. Loss and the grief that follows is a very strong current in my life right now. Something that I am trying to articulate and understand and learn how to do more gracefully.

Part of the sense of loss and grief is due to what I was trying to avoid when I sat down to write about the boy and his climb to eagle’s nest. The emotional devastation that Trump’s world has imposed on all of us is inescapable. It cannot and must not be ignored. So, even though I sat down intending to write something lighter I immediately, unconsciously, introduced massive unavoidable loss and then dodged its implications. Many times writers will say that they do not control the narrative. They imply that they merely follow where the characters take them. They can move the story in a certain direction but if they are writing from their unknowable heart they will be surprised by what a character says or does and, if it takes them on an unexpected, unplanned path then so be it. The emotional, psychological truth is the mystery we are trying to solve by writing and we must allow ourselves to be surprised.

As I sat and studied those first four lines I realized that I killed the mother because the divorce from my wife, my son’s mother, was more devastating than I have ever really acknowledged. To me, to my son, and to my wife. I mean … I have acknowledged it consciously but it is something, like the death of a parent, or a sibling, or a lover, a pet, or a close friend, that you never quite get over, should not get over, something you carry throughout your life. That is where and why grief and mourning become such a mystery. Loss, in many ways, and how we handle it defines who we are.

In the culture that we have created here in the United States we tend to live in the future and ignore the past. Our literal history, which is filled with things like the genocide of the indigenous peoples who were here when we got here, the physical and emotional brutality of slavery, the ignorance and greed of Manifest Destiny, as well as with the energy, innovation, generosity, heroism, political insightfulness, care for the land, and humanitarian guidance that we are famous for and justifiably proud of, is more conveniently forgotten than lived with everyday. Especially the bad stuff. We need to remember the good stuff but also the bad stuff because where we came from and what it cost us to get to where we are now tells the whole story of who we are now and who we will become as generation follows upon generation carrying the stories of the nation forward through time.

Today we are living through a time where the truth is hard to know because lies have become the common currency of communication. It is exhausting waking up each morning to see what inflammatory verbiage has been posted by the primary spokesperson, the story teller of our country’s present. The economy is as good as it has ever been according to Donald J. Trump and yet we know when we go to the supermarket or fill up our car with gas that it is not. Iran has been bombed into submission according to the Pentagon and the President and yet we here each day about another bombing of an apartment building or a missile strike in Oman. So we have to ask more questions, dig deeper, so that we can see past the truth that we are told by the media as they repeat without question the language that comes out of the White House. So that we can determine for ourselves what is the reality of our existence and what our future might feel like.

And once again I find myself unable to free myself from the foul smelling odiferous present to float in the clear cool water of memory and story telling as I allow myself to be dragged back into the swamp created by Donald J. Trump. Tomorrow I will try to find the music.

Back when Ronald Reagan was selling arms to Iran to raise money for the Contras in Nicaragua, at a time when Iran was under a strict arms embargo and there was a law, the Boland Amendment, to prevent money from going to the Contras, he was never held accountable and we called him the Teflon president. Nothing seemed to stick to him. Well, he had nothing on Donald J. Trump. Today the New York Times published a opinion piece about all the ways that our current president has attempted to tear down our democracy. Now, I consider the New York Times to be a corporate owned right wing rag but occasionally they get it right. They touched a nerve a couple of weeks ago with their report on the security concerns about the gift of a flying palace from the Qatari government. Trump’s personal law firm, going by the name the Department of Justice, issued grand jury subpoenas to four Times reporters to force them to reveal their sources. There was enough ridicule about it that the DoJ withdrew the subpoenas. However, this opinion piece is pretty spot on. But Trump’s open assault on the democratic process and the rule of law is only part his porous presidency.

-He fomented an insurrection on January 6th, 2021. -He was convicted on 34 felony counts in New York. -He stole top secret documents when he left office the first time and hid them in a bathroom at his home in Florida. -There is credible testimony that he raped girls as young as fifteen. -He has single handedly tanked an economy that had recovered more completely from the damage that Covid-19 did than any economy in the world. -He helped murder over 73,000 Palestinians in Gaza. -He thumbed his nose at Ukraine and applauded Russia over the unprovoked invasion by his buddy Vladimir Putin. -He has killed at least 52 people in detention centers managed by his always for profit friends. -He has detained and imprisoned more that 150,000 people using the thugs, thieves, and reprobates in his private army of I.C.E.. -And the list goes on … and on … and on.

Now, he has had help in all this breaking of the law, in all this morally reprehensible behavior. There to aid and abet him is a seemingly endless line of lawyers to clog up the courts; 218 Republicans in the House of Representatives; 53 Republican Senators; his entire Cabinet; the staff of the aforementioned Department of Justice; Stephen Miller; Russell Vought; any number of White House staff and hangers on who constantly cheer him on no matter what obscenity he is uttering. Clearly a collection of cowardly clowns. Even more clearly not a majority of the citizens of this country. And yet on he goes. As he has said himself he is the President of the United States and he can do whatever he wants. Is that a law that has been written down somewhere? Is that the way democracy works? Was that the plan of the Founding Fathers two hundred and fifty years ago?

How many cowards does it take to screw up a generally fine country? Or to screw in a light bulb? According to AI, “It takes just one coward to call an electrician and then hide in the other room until the job is done.” The Republicans in both the House and the Senate have been hiding in their closets since January of last year. It is time for them to start coming out of the closet. There is nothing to fear but the truth.

You’ve heard the phrase, “You can’t make this s*&t up.” Well it turns out you can. And if you are President of the United States of America you can not only make it up but you can make it happen. Read Heather Cox Richardson’s article on Substack posted yesterday evening for a comprehensive list of the “s*&t” he is making happen now. You probably know it all already but are conveniently spacing out the implications and repercussions just because it is all so familiar and what is going on in your garden is closer to a reality that you can live with than a ballroom hiding a bunker, or a two hundred fifty foot tall “triumphal arch” plunked down right in the line of sight of Arlington National Cemetery, the Lincoln Memorial, the Washington Monument and the Capital building, or the self love implied as Donald J. Trump cozies up to Kim Jung Un while turning his back on long time allies in South Korea, or a list of the names of the innocent people who have been killed while in the hands of I.C.E. agents and the for profit penal outfit given the task of housing all those “illegal aliens,” and then there is the lovesick ghoul, Natalie Harp. And, of course, the war in Iran takes a back seat to no other debacle that this man has led us into with his greed, his ignorance, his incompetence, and his ceaseless desire to kill everything that isn’t him.

It’s late and I am boring myself once again because it is the same old same old as it has been for eighteen months. I am going to sleep on it and tomorrow tend my garden.

We have heard words like “unprecedented,” “unimaginable,” “untraditional,” and “inconceivable” used in reference to the actions and statements of Donald J. Trump for at least eighteen months now. So we shouldn’t be surprised when the current President of the United States makes statements and takes actions that appear to attempt to squash the voting rights of whole groups of citizens who have been voting legally for half a century. There is a genuine and well earned fear that he may even declare one of his imaginary emergencies and try to cancel the elections in November.

He has hinted at it many times and it is unprecedented, unimaginable, untraditional, and inconceivable, all those words that have become media catch phrases as he acts out his cartoonish version of what his America should be like, so what should we expect but the unexpected. All indicators point to the fact that his candidates, ones that support him unequivocally, will lose come November and he cannot stand losing so … there will be no elections. If there are no elections then there are no elections to lose. To his great humiliation he lost one election in 2020, which neither he nor his coattail clinging pals will ever admit publicly. In the on/off, up/down, left/right, binary reality that he inhabits losing means he’s a loser and that doesn’t scan in his limited view of the world and his vision of himself in the world. But we have known what kind of man he is since long before anyone even knew what the definition of narcissism is.

According to the Fourth Edition of the American Psychiatric Association: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders the nine traits of a narcissistic disorder are:

• Has a grandiose sense of self-importance ( e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements).

• Is preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty or ideal love.

• Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people (or institutions).

• Requires excessive admiration.

• Has a sense of entitlement, i.e., unreasonable expectations of especially favorable treatment or automatic compliance with his or her expectations.

• Is interpersonally exploitative, i.e. takes advantage of others to achieve his or her own ends.

• Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others.

• Is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her.

• Shows arrogance, haughty behaviors or attitudes.

Sure sounds like the leader of the free world, doesn’t it?

Now the question is: Why do these traits constitute a disorder? Everyone, to one degree or another, exhibits some narcissistic traits at some point. It is considered a spectrum. For one thing, it doesn’t seem like there is much room in the narcissist’s world for anyone else unless they are willing to completely give themselves over to supporting the fantasies and needs of the narcissist. That can and does apparently work for some people in a one on one relationship until the one doing all the giving gets tired of the one doing all the taking and takes a walk. I suppose a person can run a business and be a full on narcissist but I don’t imagine the employees would be too happy, at least not for too long. But to try to be the leader of a country in the world today, the way it has evolved, where every nation depends on a whole range of other countries for economic stability as well as security, a world that requires compromise and cooperation, alliances that are based on trust and equality, well, that is going to be a real challenge not only for the narcissist but especially for the people that he/she leads. When a narcissist tries to run a democracy, where the general population is considered, in fact encouraged to have their own mind-set about issues, where the government is designed to be “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” there are going to be obstacles all over the place. For the narcissist and therefore for the people whom he/she is elected to lead. The obstacles can create such stress on the person with Narcissistic Personality Disorder that they can become a Malignant Narcissist, one who begins to make decisions simply because they enjoy seeing the pain and suffering of the people they are supposed to be helping. They can become actively cruel and sadistic. Again, that sounds like the situation we now find ourselves in.

There is no cure for malignant narcissism, or for simple narcissism, unless the person is willing to acknowledge that there is something wrong. That goes against the very definition of what a narcissist is and thinks. The longer a person is allowed to live and rule as a narcissist the harder it is for them to admit that they have problem. The problem, by definition, is always the other guy. The malignant narcissist will eventually break the law because they feel themselves to be above and beyond the law, better than everyone else, at which point they can be taken into custody, tried in a court of law, and incarcerated for treatment and for confinement and isolation so that their actions no longer have a damaging effect on so many people.

In spite of the fact that many people think Donald J. Trump is stupid he knows this fact. He knows he has broken the law, many laws; he knows he has done things that society as a whole, we the people, think are against the laws of man; and he knows that he will be held accountable as soon as he is no longer the President of the United States. The morally corrupt Supreme Court has seen to it that we have to wait until he is no longer President before we can hold him accountable. But he will be held accountable. There are rumors going around Washington that he plans to resign after the mid-term elections put Democrats in charge of the House and the Senate. If he resigns he can then be pardoned by J.D. Vance, the Vice President who would then become President, and, once pardoned he can go on his merry way surrounded by the wall that money can build to keep people with a lot of it from paying their debt to society. Then it will be up to the states to hold him accountable. He can only be pardoned for federal crimes by the President. I am sure that Fani Willis still has her files on the State of Georgia charges against Trump for racketeering in trying to change the results of the 2020 election in that state. The State of New York, which feels a certain amount of guilt about having loosed the malignant narcissist on the world, will find something to try him on. He has already been found guilty on 34 felony charges of attempting to tamper with an election so he can just be sentenced and sent away so that we know where he is while we go after those that aided and abetted him. Remember that Doctor King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He didn’t say it but I will: We can bend that arc ourselves. It is up to us to bend it and we will.

I recently spent two days fishing on the East Fork of the Bitterroot River in Montana. After an hour plus drive up from Missoula I parked at the East Fork trailhead near the river, got my rod together, put on my wet wading boots, vest, lanyard with tippet material, Gink, and nippers, hung my sunglasses around my neck, attached a collapsable staff to the back of my vest to help me navigate the steep banks and river rocks and proceeded to hike up river about a mile whereon I bushwhacked down to the river as it found its way though a meadow.

At this point the river is about twenty to thirty feet across; a relatively easy roll cast to get a little dry fly up against the bank on the other side. The wading is a little trickier as I get older but not bad. In spite of it getting late in the season there is plenty of water flowing: cold, clear, fast water. I have to summon trust that my recently replaced knee will keep me upright. The third point of contact that the staff gives me makes it possible. I can easily criss-cross the stream to get a better angle on a pool below a riffle so that the fly drifts through in a natural way without giving it away as an artificial. The stream will pull the fly line making the fly move across the current rather than floating easily along like a real caddis fly just drying itself in the air after rising up from the bottom as it breaks out of its larval husk into maturity.

I almost always start out with a Parachute Adams fly just to find out what fish might be looking for as they make their living hunting and eating larva, mature flies, and dead spinners as they rise through the current to the surface or float in or on the surface at one end or the other of their short life. The Adams is a gray bodied fly with hackle from the breast of a brown or grizzly (brown and white) rooster for the tail and what they call the palm. The palm is formed when you wrap the hackle horizontally above the eye of the hook so that the fly floats lower in the surface of the water. Tied just above that hackle is a white piece of yarn, or the white hair of a calf. This is called the post and it is there to make the fly more visible to the fisherman. The post is what makes it a “Parachute” Adams. It looks, I suppose, like a parachute as the fly floats gently down to land without much ado on the surface of the water. But the real purpose of it, as I said, is to make it visible to the person on the other end of the line and the rod. No one can be quite precise about what natural the Parachute Adams represents. It can look like a mayfly or a caddis fly which is why it is so versatile and has been around for so long.

Trout usually feed under the surface where they are safer from predators and where there is admittedly more food floating by. Fishing under the surface is usually done with nymphs, the larval stage of the insect, or with wet flies, which replicate the insect just under the surface as it begins to emerge from its husk, or cocoon, if you will, to dry its wings and take to the sky. A wet fly can also replicate a dead or dying adult after it has fallen back into the water after mating and dropping eggs. I almost always fish with dry flies, flies that float on the surface. It is a little esoteric and probably quite elitist but I consider myself a dry fly fisherman and consider all others to be cheating. Letting a nymph float through the seam that separates the smooth water from the faster moving riffle where the structure down under roughens the surface water with an orange or yellow piece of yarn or foam attached three feet above the fly as an indicator feels too much like bait fishing. Since you can’t see the fish strike the nymph the indicator will bob up and down to indicate that a fish is trying to eat your nymph. My favorite thing about fishing is seeing the fish rise to the dry fly and either attack it rising out of the water to do so or slowly and silently sip it after examining it carefully to see if it is the real thing or an imitation. Seeing that fish shoot up from the bottom to take a little Parachute Adams as it floats down stream takes my breath away, quickens my heart rate, and makes me almost jump for joy. I have missed many a strike by lifting the rod tip to quickly before the trout has fully taken my fly. I get excited.

I once caught a rainbow trout in the Madison River near the Cliff and Wade Lake bridge and I still can see his twenty-one inch body, in slow motion, come out and up from under a cut bank and swallow whole my Royal Coachman fly as it raced down the chute of fast water running a foot off the bank. Another big fish, a cutthroat, in the narrow reaches of the North Fork of the Blackfoot River, is burned into my memory as it rose straight up out of the depths of a pool beneath a cluster of rocks, took my fly and continued to rise into the air, flipping its tail to dive back into dark water until I set the hook and fought it for fifteen minutes in the fast moving water and brought its twenty-two inches to my hand. I once hooked a cutthroat, maybe 18 inches long, in that same stream and as I worked him around a large rock under the surface, a Bull trout that must have been four feet long came around that rock and tried to eat my little cutthroat. I had to sit down immediately. I had never seen a trout that big.

Most fishermen like to catch big fish. I prefer the little ones. In those two days on the East Fork of the Bitterroot I caught a lot of little ones. Anywhere from four inches up to sixteen inches. Tiny little cutthroats up to a sixteen inch Brown trout. Twenty fish the first day, ten to twelve the second day in half as many hours. To be totally candid I don’t really keep track of how many or how big the fish are. It all is happening so fast and my mind is filled with other things, like how beautiful the creatures are, how they feel in my arm as they fight against the line and the rod. I want to get them back in the water as quickly as possible so that they can live to be caught again another day. I am even silly enough to think that I am training the young ones to be more challenging opponents next year when I come back. Once they have felt the sting of the hook they may think twice the next time they see a little Parachute Adams float through their window of opportunity. Which means that I will have to be a better fisherman the next time I walk up the trail and down to the river.

When I was younger and fishing with my father I was impatient with the time between fish. And there were many days when we would fish for five hours or more and not catch anything. I know that is one of the reasons I like to fish little streams with little fish, the ones most fishermen avoid. I can feel that muscle on the other end of my line more often and watch that little splash of water where there was stillness just a moment before as a little fish takes my fly as part of his constantly moving feast. That is also why I don’t mind walking a few miles up a small stream. I get to places that don’t get fished very often and therefore the fish have not been wised up to the art of dry fly fishing. That way I also avoid running into other fishermen. The first day on the East Fork there were two men fishing just beyond the trailhead. I walked on past them about a half a mile and fished up river for maybe a mile and one half and never saw another human being. It is a very restful when you feel like you are the only human on the river. The second day there was a man in the parking lot getting ready to get on the river but he went downstream while I went up and I never saw him again until I came off the river and he was still fishing right below the parking area.

Sometimes you don’t catch any fish and then I console myself by remembering that my father, when I would complain about not catching anything, would say, “We’re not really here to catch fish. We’re here to get outside and listen and look and feel the world around us. And … to practice casting.”

I am glad that democratic socialism can now be talked about in public in the United States. One version or another of socialism has been present in our politics for a long time. A lot of what FDR and Frances Perkins, his Secretary of State, did during the Great Depression might be considered socialism by both its enemies and its friends. And it all happened in a democracy. Yet it has always been difficult to talk about that kind of support of the working class in terms like ‘democratic socialism’ because words like ‘socialism’ bring to mind the world of the Soviet Union and their goal of taking over the world. At least we were led to believe that they sought “world domination,” as the cockroaches in the children’s cartoon The Fairly OddParents once chanted. We needed an enemy during the Cold War and they seemed apt.

The current curiosity about the phrase begins with Bernie Sanders and continues with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani and the hundreds of thousands of young people who believe they see a way to reimagine and restructure the establishment ordained future of this country. Bernie is relentless, annoyingly so to some people, but that relentless pursuit of creating a dialogue has paid off because there is now room, even on Fox News, for a rational and civilized discussion of democratic socialism. Although Fox News does resort to the glibly bullying tactics for which they are famous. Those mainstream discussions have in the past always been motivated by fear and the need to create a boogeyman out to destroy our way of life. But these days there is a need to understand what democratic socialism actually is, what people who say they are democratic socialists actually want, because it seems as though the “other way,” the old ways, are failing us. It is, therefore, a good thing to have these discussions.

Even the seriously liberal David Remnick, who has been the editor of The New Yorker magazine since 1998, exhibits some of that latent fear and anxiety when interviewing Megan Romer, co-chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. (Interview is linked to the image above.) We tend, perhaps as humans but certainly as Americans, to want to see things in a binary way. It makes everything more easy to understand if it is definitely black or white, up or down, liberal or conservative, capitalism or socialism, constructive or destructive. Of course nothing is that simple.

“Defund the police” is a slogan or a brand for a movement, that moved into the mainstream during the protests about the murder of George Floyd in 2020. Those that have inherited the fear of the Cold War and shy away from the idea of socialism take the phrase to mean that there will be no funding of police and therefore no police. They take it as an absolute. An absurd and unproductive notion. The phrase, and hence the movement, if you parse it out, merely asks that the exorbitant amounts of funding that have gone toward militarizing the police over the past thirty years be redistributed, in part, to projects that would actually make neighborhoods safer and more welcoming. Such as education, green spaces, parks, playgrounds, projects that work at the basic causes of crime, like poverty and drug and/or alcohol abuse. The result, in places that were listening without fear, is that many police departments across the country have begun approaching certain cases with social workers rather than armed, masked, and sometimes violently aggressive police forces. There is more awareness and attention to mental health issues and drug addiction in domestic abuse cases and in some street crime and it is recognized that the presence of heavily armed and aggressive force merely exacerbates the possibility of violence rather than subdues it. For example witness I.C.E. as they hurry to round up every last illegal immigrant and deport them using the threat of violence as their only tool.

“Tax the rich” is another phrase that has attached itself to democratic socialists. They are called to account for not having specific information about what that phrase means. The rich, or those that have dreams of being listed in that category, fear that it means we are coming for all of your money. In a pragmatic reality the idea comes from the fact that most of the wealth in this country is produced by workers who do not take home the amount of money that the so-called “owners” of the industry do. The current tax code is written so that there are plenty of loop holes through which the very wealthy can avoid paying taxes at all or in part thus allowing them to accumulate more wealth while those who cannot afford good lawyers and accountants, the workers of the world, continue to pay their fare share. At the end of WWII the highest tax bracket was assessed at 94%. Until 1963 it was at or about 91%. Today the highest rate is 37%. The rate at the end of the war and up until 1963 had a cap as does the rate today. You only pay that rate on income above a set amount. The tax at that rate allowed the government to pay for the war and to begin programs that helped to educate, protect, and raise the standard of living of a whole class of people. Working people.

Democratic socialism embraces the working class. They want to lift people out of poverty and help them feed their families. They are very pro-union because when workers unite they are not as susceptible to being taken advantage of by owners. Today the “working class” is very different than it was in the early part of the last century. People worked with their hands and their backs and their feet, they moved dirt and rocks to grow food for people to eat, or to dig minerals out of the ground, they worked in factories building things that would make life easier for the people at home. We are no longer an agricultural or a manufacturing economy. We are a service economy now. The work that the working class does is considerably different and more intangible that it once was. The change is due primarily to technological innovations and advances that make it easier to produce the things we need to live. We also make things all over the world and ship them anywhere in a matter of days. So the economy, as well as being a service economy, is a global economy. It is impossible to isolate yourself from the rest of the world. For example, if you close the Strait of Hormuz and cut off 20% of the world’s supply of oil and close to 35% of it’s fertilizer it is felt throughout the globe.

The working class today is anyone who has to work to make a living. They sell their labor and do not own companies or have investments that pay them dividends. The working class is most of us. Yet the few, the ones who own big tech companies control most of the wealth and thereby the government. Their wealth is in the shares they own of the companies that provide the services we have come to depend upon and that we pay for. Most of the people who work for a living do not dream of being rich. They are happy enjoying the fruits of their labor with their family and friends and they take pride in working. They want to feel safe and they want their children to get an education so that they may not have to face the difficulties that the parents faced. But they know that nothing comes easy.

Candidates who are openly democratic socialists have been winning elections everywhere lately. Tonight a democratic socialist is within 0.4 percentage points of winning the Democratic primary for Governor of the state. Her name is Francesca Hong and she has run a remarkable campaign. But Wisconsin is a remarkable state. It has produced Senator “Fightin’” Bob La Follette, an early progressive politician. It also produced Senator Joe McCarthy who stoked the fear of communism that was growing in the country after WWII and caused a lot of people to lose everything, including their lives to suicide. The City of Milwaukee was run by a socialist mayor for close to fifty years and the city thrived, winning national recognition and awards for its health programs and for the prosperity and lack of crime amongst its population.

Our knees used to jerk when the word socialist was mentioned but not any more. Today we are asking questions and trying to understand how it works and why because we see that it does work in places throughout Scandinavia and Europe. In Europe they call it social democracy and no one cringes and turns to flee. They understand the government’s responsibility is to the people and not to the few who are able to exploit the people and bend the system to their will by buying it. It starts when people are fed up with corruption in government and Donald J. Trump has become the poster child for corruption.

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach him to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.” That is an old saying the origins of which are obscure but it seems to be universally accepted. As I understand it, if you give a man a fish, he may be grateful, but he is also in a kind of emotional bondage to you. Accepting charity, however much it is needed, can leave a feeling of indebtedness that can be a burden. Sometimes a practical burden and sometimes it is only felt spiritually. However, if you teach a man to fish you encourage him to feel independent, able to sustain his own life and, perhaps, the lives of his family. That can give a man a feeling of pride. It feels good to be a productive member of society.

In the above paragraph I consistently use the male pronoun. “Give a man a fish … .” I do it out of habit, because that is the way I have always thought of it and that is how most of society thinks of it. Not just that particular saying or that idea but most ways of talking about humanity are articulated in terms of men. I can’t honestly begin to understand what it might feel like to be, by reason of my gender alone, left out of any conversation about important concepts like how to truly help those in need or whether it is a good idea to go to war. Or any conversation that has to do with the condition of humanity. Everything is always in terms of men. The woman, the female, is an addendum, an adjunct, paid less for doing the same work, never turned to first when an opinion is needed, always somehow secondary. That’s the way it is, that’s the way it’s always been, in general, in the public sphere. I don’t mean that it is actually true, but the perception in the arena is that women stand behind men if they are allowed to stand at all.

Yet 60% of the people who graduate from undergraduate colleges are female. Women earn master’s degrees at a rate of 63% compared to men and Phd’s at 59%. So why do we want to know what men think and ask women only when we need confirmation? And if “money talks,” as is especially true during the time of Trump, why do we think men know what they are talking about when 51% of the personal wealth in the country is held by women. As probably not everyone knows we only allowed women to vote in elections in this country in 1920, one hundred and six years ago.

That is when we began to teach them how to fish. But we did it in long, slow, confusing lessons because it wasn’t until the 1970’s when women were finally allowed to have a credit card in their name and open a bank account without their husband looking over their shoulder. And I seriously doubt that we needed to teach them. Most of them. They had been watching men mess it up for centuries and could probably do it better than the men who had been condescending to them and hog tying them in the public arena all that time. And still, today, only 29.7% of the House of Representatives is female and 27% of the Senate, while 50.9% of the population identifies as ‘she/her/hers.’ While the number of women registered to vote is roughly 10 million more than the number of men. But the times they are a changing. The most consistently articulate and strong minded people fighting against the Trump/Vought/Miller take down of democracy are women. One of the strongest, youngest, and most influential of these voices is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And the men, mostly older, that sit with her in the House regularly dismiss her as a waitress or a bartender.

I don’t think it takes a long time to learn how to fish but it seems to be taking men a long time to teach women how to do something they already know how to do: manage people’s needs, write policy that clarifies those needs and how they should be managed, and then git ‘er done. That could be because the men doing it have gotten so old and complacent, so fat and rich from the graft that they indulge themselves in from their seat of power that they have forgotten why they are there in the first place. What is really taking a long time is for the population to realize that they would be better off in the hands of a woman and for them to shrug off the dependency on archaic, hierarchal versions of how the world works. Maybe it is actually men who need to be taught how to fish?

Libby and I bought a restaurant. It was big place with three indoor sand volleyball courts, three bars, and a tiny little kitchen that could turn out five hundred fish fry dinners on any given Fish Fry Friday. They love fish fries on Friday in Wisconsin. We named it Libby Montana. The story I told when people asked why Libby Montana, which they always did, was that when we left Los Angeles I wanted to move to Montana and she wanted to come home to Wisconsin so we compromised (pause for effect) we did what she wanted. Always got a laugh. Next laugh was when I said, “This way I can get up every morning and go to Montana and I don’t have to leave Libby to do it.” It was a good family oriented place. Simple American comfort food menu, prepared well, with good fresh ingredients, toys and children’s books on the floor in the family room so kids could play and not bug their parents while they waited for their perch or cod or walleye or Cookie’s meatloaf or the really good burgers and pot pies.

When you name a place Libby Montana you have to have a western theme to the decor but we didn’t want to go overboard. A friend said we “needed some dead stuff on the wall” if we were going to call it Montana. So we found a big buffalo head and mounted it up on the wall above the bar. We had a huge map of Montana, almost six feet wide and four feet high, in a very fancy frame just inside the front door and topographical maps of some of my favorite fishing places framed on the wall. The servers didn’t have to wear cowboy boots and string ties or talk like they were from the west. We just hinted at the western theme. We wanted to be classy but fun.

That same friend who told us about the “dead stuff” sent me a Montana license plate that was an old one, maybe from the 1930’s or so. It said in raised letters near the bottom, “Prison Made,” meaning it had probably been made at the old Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge. I screwed it into the wall next to the pay phone in the front hallway near the door to the old bar, the one where Al Capone used to hang out when the building was a house of ill repute. A whore house for those not too squeamish. One day, after we’d been open a couple of years, I walked through the front hall on my way to the kitchen as I did my morning rounds and I realized that the license plate was gone. Some drunk the night before had pulled it off the wall and taken it home. Or taken it out of the building and thrown it out the window of his car as he wandered home. I make the assumption that the thief was a male and that he was drunk because most of the late night customers fit into those categories and it could only have been taken late at night when no one was in the dining room ust stragglers in teh bar.

I did a regular gig on the local morning drive time radio show with two guys named Bob and Brian. I came on around eight or so and we just talked. I reviewed a few movies, old ones and ones that were playing in theatres at the time but mostly we just riffed with each other and it was a good way to promote the restaurant and I really liked Bob and Brian. They both presented as conservative Republicans and I was definitely not so we could always bump into each other and get some laughs from that.

I was due to go on the air with them the day after I discovered the license plate to be missing. I thought it might be a good way to get the license plate returned if I told the story of how it came into my possession:

When I was around six or seven I was walking through the little Montana town where my grandparents lived, Philipsburg, an ex-mining town up near Georgetown Lake. I often went for walks with Granddad through town when I would stay with them in the summer. He was a known figure in town and people always greeted us warmly and they seemed to like to talk to me and encourage me. People are like that with six year olds who pays attention to them and something about the kind of man my grandfather was made me want to pay attention to the people that he paid attention to, which was just about everyone. On this particular day, after nodding hello to Eunice Chambers who ran the Gem Store, the one that sold all kinds of sapphires dug up in one of the local mines, my grandfather stopped dead in his tracks and said something like, “Oh, my golly.” He was prone to that kind of inflection. He enjoyed being happy and surprised and commented on it by using words like “golly” and “oh, my.”

I looked up at his long face on the top of his long legs and body and said, “What happened?”

He pointed at the old car parked in front of the candy store and said, “I think I made that.”

I laughed because I knew he was wholesale grocer and never worked making cars. At least I didn’t think so. He said, “No, I did, I’m sure I did. I made that license plate when I was up in Deer Lodge.”

I said, “What’s a ‘Deer Lodge?’”

He took me by the hand and walked me over to the bench that sat in front of the candy store so you could eat your fudge while watching the world of Philipsburg go by slowly in the sun. We sat down and he leaned in to tell me what felt like a secret between just us. I always felt with Granddad that he was sharing something with me that he had never shared with anyone before. Ever. But this time he was even more secretive. He said, “Keep this between us. Your Grandmother doesn’t like to talk about it and I think your mother may have just plain forgotten, but when I was young, just after your mother was born, I spent eight years in prison in the old Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge.”

I had trouble keeping my mouth closed so I just nodded and might have muttered, “Uh huh.”

He went on, saying, “Just before your mother was born I gave your grandmother a very nice watch. It had a few diamonds in the band and was the nicest thing she had ever had. She loved that watch. But one day a man we both knew just took it from her. He always sat on a bench, like this one, in front of the General Store, the store that was where Doe’s restaurant is now. He had watched Nelle when she went in to buy some things and followed her when she came out and walked back home. The way she told it, he called to her when she was right in front of that alley, the one you like to hide from me in, up the street. She stopped because, as you know she is polite and kind to everyone, always has been, but don’t get me wrong, she’s tough too, tough enough for anything. So she stopped and turned around. The man, and I’m ashamed to say I don’t remember his name, probably Bill or something like that, then kind of walked her back into the alley a little bit saying things about how nice she looked and how pretty her watch was and how he’d sure like to look at it. She obliged because, as you know, she is a very nice person and open and generous and not suspicious of anyone. Most of the time. When she held her arm out to show him the watch he grabbed her wrist and pulled the watch clean off her and ran up the alley ‘kind of laughing,’ as she told it.”

My mouth and now my eyes were wide open and amazed that my grandmother, who made the best apple crisp that I have ever tasted, had been bullied and robbed violently in the the middle of this town in broad daylight. My grandfather, seeing my alarm said, “This town has not always been so easy going and law abiding as it is now. In fact, if you want to know the truth of it, it may not be as law abiding now as it appears to be. Don’t be scared, just be aware and keep your eyes open all the time.” I still think that my Grandpa was the smartest and wisest man I’ve ever met.

I was getting a little mad now at this man, Bill, or whatever, that had been so mean to my grandmother. I demanded, “Well, what happened? Did that man ever give the watch back?”

My grandfather looked at his feet, then up and down and across the street and finally he said to me in a voice even quieter than his usual voice, “I went after him and got it back. I knew the man, he had a reputation in town. He was a trouble maker and a drunk and everyone knew where he lived so I went over there and demanded that he give the watch back. He wouldn’t do. He lied and said she had given it him or that he had found it and it was his because finder’s keeper’s and all that. He laughed at me and made fun of your grandmother saying she was to little to wear a watch like that and what good was a watch going to be to her when she was about to have a baby. Then he started to push at me and yell at me to leave him alone and get out of his house. I got pretty mad and I finally just hit him and knocked him down. He kept taunting me and laughing and then I did something that I am really sorry for and I think about it a lot and I want you to listen carefully and think about what I did and what it cost me and don’t ever let yourself get as mad as I got.”

He sat for a long minute, his big hands clasped in front of him as he seemed to be finding the best way to tell me the story of what had happened way back before my mother was even born. He finally pressed his lips together, unclasped his hands, turned to face me and said, “You know that I spent part of the Great War, the first world war, in the Kingdom of Hejaz, what we now call Saudi Arabia.” I didn’t think that I did know that but it was familiar to me, so I nodded and mumbled, “Uh huh,” again.

He went on, “In some of those countries they have very strict laws about everything, but really about stealing. What they do to thieves is they cut their left had off.” If my eyes could have gotten bigger they did then. He went on, “They do it to mark the person forever as a thief and to keep him from using his hands again in a violent or stealing kind of way.” He was rubbing his left wrist now. “And … well … I did that to Bill. I cut his left hand off with an ax he had in the corner of his shack. I was mad, which is no excuse, and I just grabbed it and put my foot on his arm and chopped it off with one blow. Right at the wrist the way I had seen them do in one of the villages during the war down there in that desert. They did it with and old sword though, not an axe.” He paused again, but only for a second, and seemed to pull himself together, and then he said, “And they sent me to prison for it and I deserved it. I spent eight years in that big stone house and believe you me, I learned my lesson.”

We just sat there silently for several minutes. Just staring at our thoughts that seemed to be hovering just above the middle of the street. Pretty soon the old dog that always slept on the sidewalk in front of the bar barked and at that my grandfather, who was still the same man to me only changed some how in ways that I didn’t really understand for a long time, anyway, he slapped his knees with those big gentle hands of his and said. “Let’s go for a ride. Come on.” With that he patted my back and went to the car that was still sitting in front of us, the one with the “Prison Made” license plate. He lifted me up and swung me into the passenger seat while he strode with his long legs to the driver’s side, jumped in, and bent over to pull some wires from under the dashboard. He cut them with his knife and touched two of them together and the car started right up. He drove easily down the hill and right on out of town. We drove to the river and got out to go down and get a drink of water. We sat on a fallen tree and watched the water go by for a while, not really talking but just sitting and thinking. Then he put his arm around me and bent over and kissed the top of my head, and whispered, “You’re a good boy. Keep it up.”

Then he took his knife again and unscrewed the license plate from the front of the car, put it in my hands, hopped back in, told me to climb aboard, and we drove back into town. He parked the car right where it had been before, tucked the wires back under the dashboard, and we walked home. He had long loping strides and I had to hurry to keep up with him, but boy, oh boy, that day I really liked my grandfather. I think I decided that day that I wanted to be as honest and gentle, but also as strong as he was. When we got to the house he stopped and bent over and said, “Remember, this is just between us. I want you to keep the license plate. We’ll just say we found it out by the big road and I thought you would like it as a keepsake. That’s all true so you won’t be lying, not really. We call that bending the truth a little bit so as not to hurt other people. In this case your grandmother.”

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When I finished the story Bob and Brian were kind of looking at me the way I must have been looking at my grandfather that day when I was six years old. I told them that I hoped whoever took the license plate off the wall of Libby Montana was listening, as almost everyone in Milwaukee was, and that they would just return it, drop it off on the front steps, or something, because it meant a lot to me, the same way my grandfather’s memory meant a lot to me, and they were all tied up together.

No one ever returned the license plate. I put an old picture of a Montana town in the sun up there to cover the holes from the license plate. And even though I made the whole thing up I really like the story and I think Granddad would like it too because he would know it was just a story and stories carry the truth around with them just in a made up kind of way.

There’s something in everything that is going on right now that feels really good.

Zohran Mamdani in New York City exercising what the Nation Magazine calls “The politics of joy.”

Troy Jackson bringing Maine together in a way that people had begun to feel with Graham Platner. But with Platner is was because everybody wanted it to happen so badly but they had not looked closely at the candidate. Something needs to happen. In Maine and everywhere. Susan Collins has been knitting her brow, worrying, hemming and hawing, and finally voting the way the GOP wants her too for so long, almost thirty years, and Mainers are tired of being ignored. They want something new and Platner was certainly new. But he blew himself up and Troy Jackson, who has been doing the good work for decades was ready to step up. He is for the working man all the way, has been since his beginnings, and has never faltered. The pundits are saying it’s a late start but Jackson started years ago, not running for office but standing up for the working class and that is ultimately what 2026 is all about. The working class taking back the country from the elite intellectuals and the billionaires.

AOC, Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Aryanna Pressley, the original group of Democrats called “the squad,” and the rest of the outspoken, brave women who represent people in Congress and the Senate: Jasmine Crocket, Cori Bush, Elissa Slotkin, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono, Tina Smith, Patti Murray, Kirsten Gillibrand, Pramila Jayapal, Becca Balint, and others.

The courts are picking up steam and being more candid in their judgements against the current administration’s corruption and ignorance of the rule of law.

A lot of good is happening which points to a future that can include people of a vast diversity of thought, race, and gender identification, and lead to a world that is wide awake to the need for equitable treatment of all people.

And yet …. it appears that there is a debate in Washington today over something that is so blindingly obvious that it barely needs to be discussed.

Donald J. Trump has enriched himself and his children to the tune up to 4 billion dollars since he became President the second time. He has done it through the most insider of insider trades on the stock market. He has done it by promoting cryptocurrency at the same time he is selling cryptocurrency using his office as President as his soap box. He is selling bibles, watches, sneakers and images of himself using his influence and office to enrich himself and those who support him. He is spending tax payer dollars to line the pockets of supporters to whom he has given no-bid contracts to destroy the East Wing of the White House, the facade of the Kennedy Center, and the Reflecting Pool.

And now he wants to create what the media is calling a slush fund that would be accessible to anyone who he believes has been unduly punished by the rule of law, specifically the 1600 men and women who stormed the Capital in January of 2021 to disrupt the process of electing the President of the United States, who was not Donald J. Trump. The same men and women who were convicted of the felonies of assault on a police officer, parading in a public building, and obstruction of a public proceeding. Not treason, which is what they were guilty of. Those same men and women who were then pardoned and released back into the population by Trump as he sent them all his love and affection calling them “heroes.” Now he wants to send them money. That alone is so absurd that it should be laughed onto the dung heap of history. However, attached to that Department of Justice - an obvious misnomer if there ever was one - legal settlement of the ten billion dollar lawsuit brought by Trump, en famille, against the I.R.S. is another absurdity that should have them rolling in the aisles and peeing their pants rather than seriously debating its legitimacy.

Trump is demanding that he, his children, and any companies associated with him be exempt from audits by the Internal Revenue Service. Forever. A get-out-of-jail-free card if ever there was one. And, in case you were wondering, there is not a g-o-o-j-f card in this country because the rule of law is what we have based our legitimacy as a sovereign nation on for over 250 years. “All men are created equal,” if you remember, especially under the law. If you want to be exempt from anyone looking at your tax returns then it is pretty obvious that you intend on cheating on your tax returns. Next he’ll be asking to just live tax free on the taxpayers dime until the dust of everyone in his family blows away in the wind.

The courts have said no once, the judge saying that Trump’s suit was in bad faith, ridiculous, and that his lawyers needed to be professionally rebuked. He appealed and now the whole absurdity is tied to the nomination of Todd Blanche, his primary lawyer, to the position of Attorney General of the United States. Todd Blanche is the man responsible for the Epstein file debacle which has disappeared into the Reflecting Pool, the Canadian smoke, the rubble of destroyed infrastructure in Iran, and buried under the bodies of children murdered from beyond the horizon by Pete Hegseth’s incompetency.

Apparently you can make this stuff up.

History matters to some people. Not just historians. It matters to the descendants of people who lived it. Even if they aren’t aware of the details, they carry in their blood and in their bones the history that their people have lived.

We create history. We create it as a fable when we tell our children where we came from and and why we left there and came here. We create it with decisions made today as tomorrow relentlessly approaches.

Our past is inexorable. We can ignore it, re-write it, lean into it, embrace it, and either learn from it or not. And our history does not stop at the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean. We are the heirs to a global history that goes back to the first people to wander out of Africa looking for better weather.

Our future is in our hands. We own our future and our children’s futures and their children, and theirs and on and on. What we do today creates the history that will be written tomorrow.

And that brings me to Ukraine. Ukraine today is at the center of the future of Europe. Our past and our future are linked forever to the future of Europe as it is the genesis of the stories of our past. The holocaust that Netanyahu’s government in Israel has spawned in the Middle East has taken the front page away from Russia’s war of annihilation in Ukraine. But the front page merely reviews the moment. History is written as we look back over our shoulders stumbling blindly forward into the unknown. And the history of Ukraine takes us back to those people who wandered out of Africa 50 to 70 thousand years ago.

Here is an excerpt from a piece written in 2014 by the American attorney Victor Rud, when he was chair of the foreign advisory council for the Ukrainian National Association. I thank Greg Olear and his Substack Prevail for leading me to this piece:

“Ukraine is the land, wrote English historian Norman Davies, through which most peoples passed on their way to settle the rest of Europe, and to become the nations and countries that we know today.

“In the Middle Ages, the Kyivan Rus’ (not Kyivan “Russia”—more below) Imperial Dynasty was the largest political entity in Europe. Following Kyiv’s adoption of Christianity from Byzantium, the precursor of modern Ukraine became a powerhouse of intellectual discourse, religion, and cultural life. In its size, grandeur and advancement of education (mandatory for women), in its equal rights for women, in the arts and the sciences, Kyiv eclipsed other European cities such as Paris and London. European kings and the English monarchy married into the Kyivan Dynasty. Among them, King Henry I of France married Princess Anna of Kyiv; she signed her name to the marriage document, he used an “X”….

“Russia” at that time did not exist, and had as its antecedents Finno-Ugric tribes that separately evolved into scattered principalities in the north that rejected Kyiv’s dominion. Most telling was their sacking and rejection of Kyiv in 1169 that was not matched until the city’s destruction by the Mongol Horde a hundred years later. The Kyivan Rus’ Empire collapsed with the latter onslaught, but in the process shielded the rest of Europe from the same fate.”

The last sentence is particularly interesting because today Ukraine is still shielding Europe from the ambition of Vladimir Putin and his people. Putin’s ancestors were serfs and peasants from the north of present day Moscow. Serfs were the Russian version of a slave. They were descended from those Finno-Ugric tribes that Rud mentions. The ones that resisted Kyiv’s rule. Putin, unlike his acolyte in the west, Donald J. Trump, is a student of history and he is consciously turning his ancestors resistance into aggression as he continues to try dominate and subdue Ukraine. He has been at it for twenty-two years, since the 2014 adventure that claimed the Crimean Peninsula and the warm water port that the Soviets and the Russians before them had always wanted. Putin is also carrying forward into history the cruelty and aggression of the Soviets under Stalin. Stalin, if you remember, starved to death 3.9 million Ukrainians during what is called Holodomor in 1932-33. He did it primarily because they resisted in spirit his domination over them. They did not revolt. They simply respected their history as an independent people capable of leading the world with their strength and their sense of justice. Stalin may have been jealous of that history but he certainly did not respect it. Nor did he understand or respect the central role that Kyiv and Ukraine has played in the history of Europe and the west. Or he may have been afraid of that history and the strength it brings with it.

Ukrainians on the other hand do know, understand, and respect that history. Every person who has given their lives defending Ukraine against the invading hoards from the north and the east knows. Every living person who withstands nightly merciless bombardments knows, understands, and respects that history. They live it everyday. But they are not victims. They are strong and brave and will stand against the invaders until the last of them is gone. But this war in Ukraine is not a side show to history. It is the main event of history of this moment. And we are all affected, all involved.

The people of the United States may not understand intellectually how their history is linked directly to the history of Ukraine but they feel it. Some Americans tend too think of themselves and their country as the beginning and the end of history. Roughly 61% of Americans support Ukraine. We were all Europeans before we became Americans. And before that we passed through Ukraine to our what would be our homes in Europe. Before that we wandered out of Africa. We are all linked. It has always been a global world. For a long period of history we ignored that and thought of ourselves as potential conquerors of our neighbors. That is the past. We are building the future with the decisions we make today. It is time, here in the United States, that we put those decisions in the hands of people who are cognizant of history and competent in making decisions that ensure everyone a future.

The emotional through line is pretty clear. Donald J. Trump, as we have all learned, is a performer. This is a fact of which he is very proud. A limited one to be sure but one who fully invests himself in the moment as long as he is in control of the moment. As long as the script is one he knows and has planned. Covid-19 was not in his plan. The presidency of the United States was supposed to be an eight year jaunt with time for golf, plenty of attention, and the opportunity to make a lot of money and leave it all, including government, in the hands of his kids when he retired after two terms. A dynasty. That was the script, the plan, and as president he could do anything he wanted, to whomever he wanted, whenever he wanted. So it must have seemed like a walk in the park.

When a performer has to improvise we get a good impression of who she/he really is, what really makes them tick. The kind of person you are in a crisis, how you respond, says everything about how you measure up to the public persona you want everyone to believe is really you. The you that lurks just out of sight behind that facade will usually show up in a crisis. We all do it to one degree or another. Your mother-in-law comes to visit, she’s always mistrusted you but she’s harmless and she doesn’t stay long so, to keep the peace and so that your wife keeps making pot roast on Friday nights, when Miriam comes to visit you are nice to her, solicitous even, smile a lot, and share her jokes with her, go get her a cuppa tea and a biscuit if she wants one. But on this one particular visit she gets sick, has a tiny stroke, slides off the couch onto the floor like she died, has trouble breathing, and generally changes the script right before you were about to go play a round of golf with your buddies.

Well, when Covid-19 hit Donald J. Trump just kind of stood there with his mouth slightly agape, hands uselessly at his sides, babbling about things he knew nothing about, trying to improvise, ambling unbidden to the kitchen to get a cuppa tea, carelessly stepping right over the body, now in seizure on the floor, as he assured everyone listening that we’d get over it. Drink bleach, take two aspirin and call me in the morning, nothing to worry about, its a Chinese hoax. He was pretty ineffectual at a time when, as leader of the country, people were looking to him for leadership. He came up empty.

But, luckily for us, there were professionals, doctors, scientists, people with experience around, people trained to respond to a crisis situation and they got to work. Dr. Anthony Fauci was one of them. Dr. Fauci had worked in the service of medicine and the government for 54 years. For thirty-eight of those years he was the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, (NIAID). When Covid-19 began killing people and filling up hospitals Dr. Fauci was where the buck stopped. He, like Trump, didn’t know what to do at first either. However, he had been doing that job when the AID’s epidemic was hitting and he understood a crisis. He knew that we needed to act quickly and calmly. He knew doctors and scientists who knew more doctors and scientists and he went to work trying to slow the gathering storm of death that the pandemic presented.

Dr. Fauci appears in public to be a personable man, sincere, knowledgeable, compassionate, concerned, trustworthy, and articulate in front of a camera, a big plus at the time. And he has fifty-four years of service and the testimony of hundreds of professional people with whom he has worked closely to back up that reputation. And the reputation holds when things were going well and/or when thing hit the proverbial fan. He was believable and Donald J. Trump was still wandering in a circle looking for his putter. So he disagreed with Trump and as we all now know that made him the enemy. He told the public something that could save their lives and Trump said, “Drink bleach.”

And in that moment Donald J. Trump’s script changed. To a greater degree than we recognized at the time Trump lost the election of November 2020 because he had no sensible and sane, trustworthy response to the crisis that we all faced together. And he still hasn’t gotten over it. He and his band of not so merry men and women-who-wanna-be-men still deny that he lost the election of 2020. He churned up the violence in his most ardent, militant, and stupid followers and they stormed the Capital on 6 January 2021 to stop the course of the free and fair election. The one that he lost by over seven million votes to Joe Biden. He spent the four years of Joe Biden’s presidency denying that elections legitimacy, accusing everyone who ever said anything bad about him of being a traitor, and he actively began running for the job again. He wanted desperately to get back to his fairy tale script. He spent a lot of time in court during that time but that allowed him to stay in the news and whenever he was in the news he was running to be president again, running to turn back the clock and deny the results of his incompetency over Covid-19. Fox News continued to be his mouthpiece.

He gathered to his ample breast as many wealthy people as he could find and promised to make them even richer and safer in their palaces and on their yachts. He had his new best friend Elon fix the ballot boxes in key states. He bribed, threatened, and cajoled people in Congress and his mouthpieces in the media on Fox News and throughout the infinite world of the Internet trumpeted his innocence. And when the lies and denials and insults worked and he was once again back in the driver’s seat of his own dream of himself he went to work with a vengeance. Anyone who had ever questioned him was harassed and humiliated. With some, like James Comey and Letitia James, he used the Department of Justice to drag them into court and through the press. Others, like Rand Paul, who dared to step out of line and oppose him, he merely mocked. He had the Department of Justice, which he considers to be his own law enforcement agency, arrest and charge LaMonica McIver for assault on a federal officer because she resisted when they tried to grab her colleague the Mayor of Newark, Ras Baraka, while they were doing their job inspecting the detention facility known as Delaney Hall. His I.C.E. agents shot and killed seven civilians in cold blood. We know the names of the white people, Nicole Good and Alex Pretti, but there have been five others killed: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, Ruben Ray Martinez, Joan Sebastian Guerrero, Silverio Villegas Gonzales, and Keith Porter. And now the war in Iran. This is how he improvises, war and murder. This is the man behind the jovial fat man who makes jokes and dances like he has to go to the bathroom.

He has flayed around for nineteen months swatting the people that have never believed him and are proud to say it and now he has come for the one who started it all. Doctor Anthony Fauci knew what to do when a pandemic hit and Donald J. Trump didn’t. And he revealed himself to be not only incompetent but pretty petty and stupid. And thus he lost the election in 2020. And so Fauci is called before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, now chaired by Rand Paul, the Senator from Kentucky. Paul is not a fawning kind of person. He has crossed Donald J. Trump on several occasions. So he has a lot to make up for if he wants to get into the good graces of the man in the Oval office. So he attacked Doctor Fauci with the verbal equivalent of Elon Musk’s chainsaw. Every other Republican senator threw mud at Fauci. Doctor Fauci saw it coming and decided, with his lawyers, not to play the game. He took the Fifth Amendment, they say 100 times. The perception, when one takes the Fifth, is often one of guilt. If you refuse to answer because you might “incriminate” yourself it feels like you are saying I did something wrong and I don’t want to talk about it. But Fauci was just refusing to play the game with a bunch of men who were currying favor with a violent, corrupt, and vengeful man who only knows how to intimidate. Fear not respect is what he seeks. It is grade school mob thinking.

There are no winners here. There are only losers in the world of Donald J. Trump. And we the people lose the most until we stand up and say no more.

Photo by Doug Johnson, Doug Johnson Photography

Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, back when Donald J. Trump was thought to be laughable and no one who knew him took him seriously he spent a lot of time talking about building a wall. “The Big Beautiful Wall” was to run along the border between Mexico and the United States. There was some indication that his pet project was to resemble, in purpose if not in design, the Great Wall of China. The Great Wall was begun 2,300 years ago by Emperor Qin Shi Huang as a project to connect many lesser walls built by individual warlords. We are talking a long time ago when people were still throwing spears and swinging swords at each other. Back when “warlord” was an actual job description. The Ming dynasty completed and fortified the wall in 1644 CE. So it took almost 1900 years to become an established part of the landscape, the security system, and the economy of China. And now it is a tourist attraction.

The purpose of this vast engineering feat was to keep the Mongols and other northern nomadic tribes from raiding villages and farms in what the Mings thought of as their China. It also gave the emperor the opportunity to collect taxes on goods that crossed the border. Think tariffs. It was also supposed to slow and control immigration. It was a success as far as the mddle one of those purposes but it failed to prevent the continuing invasions of the Mongols and later the Manchus who just broke through, went over, under or around the wall if they felt the urge. It also had no effect on the number of people who legally tried to immigrate to China to find a better life.

Trump’s wall does not seem necessary. The Mexican government hasn’t shown any signs of invading since we took Texas away from them by force of arms in 1845. Ninety percent of illegal drugs smuggled into this country from the south come hidden in vehicles owned and driven by U.S. citizens at official points of entry. Most of the people seeking asylum from violent and oppressive regimes also enter through official ports-of-entry and they do so following the legal requirements for asylum seekers. Although it is entirely legal for asylum seekers to come into the United States anywhere between official crossing points. In other words the law still states that we welcome the stranger if they are fleeing an oppressive force and seeking asylum no matter how they get here.

In 2015, the year Trump first tried to make immigration our major concern as he campaigned for President, 23.7% of the 331,333 immigrants apprehended trying to enter the United States illegally were seeking asylum. Because it is such a long, arduous, expensive, and dangerous journey one must believe that the other 76.3% were seeking a better life, better opportunities, perhaps some of the freedoms for which we were once so famous, and/or trying to reunite with family. I understand that it is difficult for people who suffer from an innate racial bias, people who are terrified of being “replaced” by someone who speaks a different language, or eats different foods, or has brown skin; I understand that people who fear the Mexicans, Guatemalans, El Salvadorans, Hondurans who come here to work and to raise their children, fear them because they are “the other,” they are different. People who seek absolute authority over other people, people who want to be dictators or lead totalitarian states, exacerbate and hyperbolize existing fears in order convince the people they seek to be master over that they need protection. Thus Trump uses words and phrases like “invasion,” “rapists,” “violent criminals,” “poisoning the blood of the country,” “mentally ill,” and now “communist,” to describe people he has never met, except perhaps when they served him iced tea at one of his American golf courses.

Trump is a performer. All politicians to one degree or another, I suppose, are performers but Trump has a particular flair. Big, bold, brazen, brassy, and gold might describe his style. To speak hyperbolically is his only way of speaking. He can dodge criticism for misstatements and out and out lies by saying he was kidding or it was just a joke. Violent insults have become the norm for him. We expect no less. Unfortunately his words manifest actions so now we are “bombing Iran into the stone age” as we murder children and destroy civilian infrastructure. We are murdering “violent drug smugglers” in fishing boats from over the horizon off the coast of Venezuela. And they are building the long promised wall, the one that Mexico was going to pay for but isn’t, the one to protect us all from the non-existent hoards invading from the south and they are building it across some of the most beautiful landscapes that we have. They are building it where no one crosses the border, where it destroys trees, rock formations, parts of the landscape that are sacred to indigenous people’s who have lived here for thousands of years, and to American citizens who have hiked and camped and lived with the earth in places like Big Bend National Park in southwest Texas.

The photo above was taken by Doug Johnson, photographer, teacher, outdoorsman, and friend. It pictures Santa Elena Canyon in Big Bend National Park. The sovereign nation of Mexico is on the left and the sovereign nation of the United States is on the right. The Rio Grande River flows through the canyon. As they build this wall, this fever dream of a lonely, old, narcissistic man, they are blocking access to the water in the Rio Grande river for wild animals that live in the area: javelina, deer, mountain lions, bears, seventy-five species of mammal, twenty species of bat. As the Jeff Goldblum character in the movie Jurassic Park says, “Life will find a way.” And the animals who live there will find away to water, to live. But many won’t and is any of it necessary?

The link below is to a short clip about the destruction of ancient cotton wood trees to make way for the “big, beautiful, wall.”

Remember that video when Trump was entering a photo op with several other world leaders at a NATO summit in Brussels. They were all walking and talking down a hall that opened into an open space where microphones and cameras and reporters waited. Trump was lagging a bit behind either because he lumbers slower than most or because he was trying to figure out where he was and why but he came out of his daze as soon as he saw the cameras and microphones. He then used his bulk to push through and he put his hand on the shoulder of Dusko Markovic, the Prime Minister of Montenegro, and moved him aside, with no “excuse me” or anything, looking left and right, clearly not at Markovic, to find the cameras so the he could be the first and right in the middle of the picture. A version of the same thing happened after he presented the Spanish football team with the World Cup trophy. He tried to move to the middle in front of the team who were already standing in their assigned position but he had to be led away to the side so that the people who had done the work could get their picture taken. He clearly thought that everyone was gathered there to celebrate him. He’s trying to do the same thing now in Washington, D.C., only with buildings, monuments, existing structures, and plans for new ones.

The East Wing of the White House was the beginning. He thought it needed to be torn down to make room for his ballroom and the bunker beneath that can house him if and when America ever gets back into the hands of we the people and we come for him. And so it is gone. He did not ask permission. He is a guest in our house but he took it upon himself to destroy a wing of the house. We won’t get it back and presidents don’t have to put down a damage deposit so the tax payers will have to pay to clean up the mess.

He put his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C.. He put his name on the Kennedy Center. He wants to put his face on a $250.00 bill. There is no $250.00 bill. He wants one created. It is law that no living people be put on our currency. He wants a $1.00 gold coin to be minted also with his face and signature on it. The foundational reason for barring living people from being honored on currency is that the founders of the country were making a concerted effort to abandon actions that spoke of a royal tradition. George Washington set the standard by refusing to be put on a $1.00 coin.

He wants to erect a “triumphal arch” on Memorial Circle directly in line with the Capital, the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, and Arlington Cemetery where those who died defending our freedom are buried. When asked who the arch would celebrate he pointed at himself and said, “Me.” He wants to put himself in a visual line with the women and men who put on a uniform and died for our country, with Abraham Lincoln, who held the country together through the Civil War, George Washington, who led the army of patriots who created our democracy, and the Capital building that symbolizes the representative government that was established when we broke free of the tyranny of the King of England. He wants to write himself permanently into history before he has done anything courageous, made any sacrifice at all to earn it.

He began insisting that exhibits throughout the several branches of the Smithsonian Museum, exhibits that tell the hard truths about the history of our country, be removed or altered to tell a more whitewashed version of the story of the United States.

The origin story of the United States is the story of our mercurial relationship with the people who were living here when Europeans began arriving. When the people we refer to as the Founding Fathers were planning how this new government would work they depended heavily on the input of the Iroquois Confederacy. The Iroquois had established a coalition of tribes that served as a model for the participatory democracy that the Fathers hoped to establish. Many of their precepts are written into our Constitution. The Great Seal of the United States has a bundle of thirteen arrows all bound together representing the thirteen colonies. It was a symbol taken directly from the Iroquois notion that “many arrows bound together cannot be as easily broken as one.” After accepting the native people’s advice on how to live in this wilderness and how to best build a nation we proceeded to systematically try to eliminate them from the country that we were building. We took their children from them, cut their hair, refused them the use of their language and traditions, essentially committing a deep and abiding genocide of an entire people and their culture. Those that we allowed to live we made to live on reservations, land that to us was useless at the time. But when minerals were discovered on some of that land we took it back, sometimes by trickery and sometimes by force. And as more and more of us came we needed the land that we had given to the indigenous people and again we reneged on our promises, broke our treaties, and took back the land and the water and the way of life that they had created there. For a long period of time we have lived in relative peace with the Indian. But now Donald J. Trump is taking back 90% of Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments to allow coal and uranium mining operations to carve up the landscape and pollute the waters. These are public lands, our lands, and they are places of great beauty, places where we can walk and find a peace and a harmony with the natural world. But more importantly they are sacred lands to the indigenous people who lived in the four corners country of south eastern Utah. They are sacred also to women and men who walk there and have enjoyed the beauty of that land for generations.

But Donald J. Trump is elbowing his way to the front of all our lives, pushing us back and away so that he can take center stage, the position of power and importance. The European leaders that he disrespected and pushed aside in Brussels believed that they needed him and they were polite, even chivalrous in allowing him to stand in the middle of the picture. But we have learned that, as the children’s book says, “If you give a moose a muffin he will want some jam to go with it.” And now Donald J. Trump wants everything, he wants it all, and enough is never going to be enough. To stop him the peaceful way we must be sure that the system of voting in this country is still ours and not his. We the people still have the power to say no and we can do it peacefully by voting. But we may have to act up and act out and make some “good trouble”in order to make sure that as many people who have the right to vote by their citizenship get to the polls in November and are not intimidated when they get there. If the moose takes the jam and does not allow a free and fair election we may have to put our foot down and force him to leave and go back into the wilderness of his ego.

One of the greatest pleasures in life, in my not so humble opinion, is conversation. What passes between two or more people in conversation about something as simple and seemingly mundane as the weather can not only help you prepare for a day of wandering around the city, town, or trails where you live but it can lead into the deeper, more complex issue of the economic effect of a succession of thunderstorms on the business of agriculture, or tourism, or the dangerously increased possibility of wilderness fires and floods. It is by these casual conversations that we find out who our friends are and who they might become.

One of the most powerful things about the Christopher Nolan film, The Odyssey, is the range of conversations it is creating. From the white supremacist’s disgruntlement at Helen of Troy being played by a beautiful black woman to the far ranging discussion of whether Odysseus is a hero because he wanders or does he wander in order to consciously or unconsciously become a hero? Is the urge to wander an innate characteristic of the male of the species or are we meant to question what is being avoided when out wandering, collecting adventures and stories and, if you are a contemporary American, becoming rich and famous as an ‘influencer’? If you stay at home and tend to your children, your crops, and your family your stories are liable to be about the quality of salt used to preserve your meat or whether your children will grow up to be good citizens with good manners if you terrorize them with stories of violence and brutality rather than encourage them to be open, welcoming, and altogether hospitable to the stranger.

There is also the conversation about when the famed Trojan horse is discovered half buried in sand at the edge of the sea what does it mean when Nolan says that his inspiration for that image is the half buried Statue of Liberty at the end of the early version of the Planet of the Apes. Is his intention to predict or reflect the fall of a mighty civilization into ruins because of its own neglect and arrogance? In other words: Is he talking about us? Or when the character of Calypso shows up on the beach looking like a super-model in an Abercrombie and Fitch promotion should we question the dangerously seductive nature of perceived beauty or welcome the soothing effect that her kind of beauty along with the narcotic of the lotus flower offers us?

And why does Nolan omit the clever the details of the word play in the story of the Cyclops in the cave that we all learned in grade school. In the story the clever and canny Ulysses tells the giant one eyed Cyclops that is holding him and his crew prisoner in the dark cave that his name is Noman. After Odysseus has blinded the Cyclops and the giant’s friends ask him who has slain him he says, “No man has slain me,” and they think him a fool for suffering and do not pursue the men from Ithaca. Leaving that word play out and portraying the Cyclops a bit like Goya’s painting of Saturn Devouring His Son only more frail and sympathetic because he is, in a sense, disabled having only one eye to see the world with, followed by the brutality of sticking a fire hardened log into that lost, lonely eye and running for safety as the perceived monster screams in pain asks us to see Odysseus as something a little less than the very smart, brave, strong hero of our dreams. And, of course, Homer sees it that way also when he has Odysseus scream out, in his pride and arrogance, his real name and address as he sails away from the land of the Cyclops thus daring the Cyclops to do something about it and bringing down upon himself and his men the curse that kills them all, except for the man of the title.

Which brings us to the greater question and the endless conversation of the gods, the power we give them, and the many tiny ways that we endlessly try to usurp that power. We create the artifice of a predetermined destiny, of an all powerful god or a collective panel gods, in the same way that we create any story meant to illustrate the flawed humanity of mankind. As we do so we simultaneously rob, or deny humanity of its responsibility for what happens here on our earth allowing us to behave in the most destructive manner imaginable just like the monsters we fear and blame for everything.

I can’t remember the last time that a piece of popular culture, art if you will, a mass entertainment so blatantly asked these questions and precipitated these powerful conversations. Conversations change the world. Conversations are the beginning of making the world safer, better, more comfortable for all creatures that inhabit it. Conversations are where the future is shaped either in dreams, hopes, or aspirations. It is where we understand what the agreed upon truth shall be. And conversations about the Odyssey are everywhere these days. May they continue and become the way for us to reshape the world in a way that preserves mankind and the planet we are tasked with enjoying and protecting. Or, if not “tasked,” as though by a superior intelligence, then suppose it to be our duty to our hosts and our guests to show them a good time and make them friends.

On July 24th I posted another article I called PART THE SECOND OF CROCUSES AND TULIPS.

Obviously I don’t edit myself very well.

Anyway, they are two parts that make a whole. The whole is to be one chapter in a book I am working on that I am calling Spaces. It is a book about the theater spaces that I have worked in over the course of fifty-two years of acting in plays. I will also address spaces that I have lived in like the Madison River in Montana and some non theater spaces where I have performed. The purpose is to try to understand how spaces and the people in them have affected my life. I realize that it may be completely boring and no one will want to read it but I feel that the spaces we live in and work in feed us more than we usually acknowledge or know.

If you get a chance to read those two articles back to back I would greatly appreciate any thoughts you may have about its impact on you, whether you think it is worth my pursuing and what you think might be missing from the work itself, what would make it more interesting.

I am just throwing this chapter, rudimentary as it is, out there to test the waters. I will soon get back to what is happening in the country and the world as we know it.

Be well and be safe ….

The Milwaukee Repertory Theatre in those days rehearsed and performed in the Todd Wehr Theatre in the Marcus Performing Arts Center (PAC) downtown by the river. It is an intimate little theatre seating 498 people around a thrust stage. The building, which takes up an entire city block downtown, was opened in 1969, but the Milwaukee Rep moved into the Todd Wehr in 1968 while construction was completed on the other spaces. So it was still pretty new when we opened the 1970 season. The building houses two larger venues, Uihlein Hall, the symphony hall, and the slightly smaller Vogel Hall, a more versatile music, dance, and theatre venue. There is also a large space for parties and events, the kind of thing you are supposed to dress up for because there are floor to ceiling mirrors on every wall that doesn’t have floor to ceiling windows looking out onto the parks that are on two sides of the building. The Todd Wehr is at the back of the building near the river and because everything is kind of crammed together the backstage of the Todd Wehr sits right below the backstage area of the symphony hall and there is a very low ceiling as soon as you step off the stage into what is the backstage area. If you are doing a running exit or entrance from upstage, as often happens in Shakespeare, you literally have to duck your head or lose it. But once on stage and facing the audience you are in a warm little space where you can feel every member of the audience, even the two rows of balcony seating as the audience wraps around the stage.

The Rep had a good reputation under Tunc Yalman’s leadership. They had recently moved into the new theater with expanded office space upstairs and a large rehearsal room, plus green room and a full compliment of dressing rooms for the actors downstairs under the theater. In it’s third season in the new space there was a lot of excitement about what the Rep brought to the city. Season ticket holders pretty much filled all the seats every night and on matinees too. Of all the formal theatres I’ve worked in it is still my favorite. Acoustics are good, the audience is close and you can see and feel them once you have their attention. In those days, the early seventies, the audience was keen to experience classic plays performed in a surprising way. Milwaukee was a good theatre town, by which I mean that the audiences were smart about watching live theatre. The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had a vibrant theatre department that had spawned Theatre X, an experimental theatre generally appreciated at the level of any experimental work being done in New York or Seattle at the time. So the audience and the local theatre artists had a good range of experience. The barely noticeable downside to the audience was that they were primarily white and from the monied and educated class but, for this young company of actors, it was enough to have a fanny in almost every seat every night and to be playing the classical repertory in a way that struggled to defy a dry academic reading of the plays. We didn’t care. We were happy to be acting and working together.

Tunc was in his last year as Artistic Director and he wanted to build a company that was all his. He kept a few of the fan favorites, local actors from previous seasons, but the majority of the company was made up of young actors fresh out of school with little to no professional experience.

There were five actors from NYU before it became known as the Tisch School of the Arts. NYU offered as close to a conservatory kind of training as anywhere in the country other than Yale, Juilliard, Carnegie Mellon, or A.C.T. in San Francisco. And it had the streets of New York City as its home so all the actors from there had an edge as well as a carefully schooled craft. At least four of them went on to have careers in Hollywood on television. One actress from Carnegie-Mellow continues to this day to have a good career in television. Three of us came from the University of Michigan. One went on to a very distinguished career as a newscaster on ABC in New York City. One has disappeared from view. And then there was me.

The University of Michigan was not the kind of school that trained actors. You learned by doing plays. There were teachers that taught “acting,” but it was mostly script analysis, how to read a play and tell what to think about when you created a character: when did the play take place, what descriptors could be used about the society and the culture that the character lived in, what did the character want and need and what were they not getting. There was no sense memory, no emotional recall, no improvisation, no movement, no voice work. We learned to be on time, listen to the director, and never miss an entrance. Other than that we were on our own. There was no “method.” Although we were encouraged to read Stanislavsky. None of the teachers imagined that any of us would pursue a life in the theatre. We might teach but seldom did anyone go on to work professionally. James Earl Jones graduated from Michigan but fifteen years earlier than I did when it was a very different school. Arthur Miller took a degree in English from U. of M., and they did his earliest plays there, but that was decades before I was there. I don’t mean to diminish the school but it was not N.Y.U. If it wasn’t for James Francis Xavier Coakley I would have ended up running a gas station.

The kids from N.Y.U. had voice training, movement training, circus training, guest workshops led by people like Andre Gregory and Jerzy Grotowski. I had never done a warm up in my life, never gotten my body and my voice prepared to talk loudly enough to be heard in the back row when playing an intimate love scene, never thought about what question to ask myself before I made my first entrance so that I would be present in the scene I was entering upon. But the kids from N.Y.U. were very generous with what they had learned and I was eager to know more. I learned to juggle from one of them, a man who became a good friend, and carried three lacrosse balls where ever I went for years afterward. The entire company of actors would get together in the upstairs lobby to do a warm up before every performance. It was led by one of the actors from NYU and included circus techniques and vocal and breathing exercises from Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre. I still do variations of these warm ups before any performance that I do. Doing them all together in the space where the audience would be gathering as soon as we went downstairs to put on make-up and costumes not only served to get our personal instrument ready to perform but brought us all into the same head space, the same rhythm, the same consciousness as it were and bound us together in a common purpose.

By the time I reached Milwaukee Rep and was being taken seriously as an actor, being paid and expected to fulfill the professional obligations of showing up on time, ready to work, knowing my lines, sober, I had done probably fifteen to twenty plays. The last three years of college that is all I did. Act in plays and work three jobs to pay for a roof over my head and beer after rehearsal. The choice I had while sitting in the Halstead-Baird’s den staring at the Complete Works and a bottle of rye whiskey and on my hands and knees in their front yard planting crocuses and tulips was to either work in the professional theatre or move to Nova Scotia and build an experimental theatre company with friends. I took the money and the road well traveled. I have regretted that decision at times in the course of fifty-five years of working because it can be a lonely business. You do a play in a space and when the play ends you move on to another play and another space, another world with another family. That season at Milwaukee Rep in the Todd Wehr Theater was the only time I stayed with the same group in the same space play after play after play. There are moments on stage in that lovely little space that crystalize what it means to me to work in the theatre. Moments with other actors, who I have since lost touch with, moments with an audience of strangers who I was never introduced to except in the formal way of myself being in the light while they sat watching from the darkness. And moments with directors a few of whom literally began to teach me how to act.

On the opening night of You Can’t Take It With You, the wonderful gem of a play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart with the classic odd ball cast of characters, while we all sat down to dinner at the big dining room table in the warm glow of the stage lights, almost the entire company, or so it seemed, at table to break bread together under the guise of doing a comedic play something happened that is forever ingrained in my memory as a metaphor of what happens when you do a play. The table was set with dinnerware and glassware loaned by a family of season ticket holders who we had all been told were in the audience on this night. The glasses were beautiful, elegant, the glass etched in fine filagree, the rims gilded, the flatware donated by the same family, set all around the table. At some point during the conversation, which is infused with the tension that might happen when two families of totally opposite political and economic backgrounds come together to celebrate the young love of the next generation, some unwillingly, others with the openness, grace, and wisdom born of selflessness, the Russian ballet master, who has shown up unannounced but still welcomed at table, in the heated manner of a passionate artist banged his fist upon the table. It had never happened before in any of our month of rehearsals but on this night, of all nights, his fist happened to hit one of the beautiful silver forks and as it rose high in the air, tumbling, tines over shaft, glittering in the light, up and across the table in a lazy arc toward the opposite side of the table everything slowed down, all eyes in the audience and at the table glued to the poetic flight of this piece of loaned silver, a silence that seemed to last for minutes set in as we sat, mouths agape or clamped firmly shut in consternation and expectation, all wondering what and how this excruciating yet gorgeous moment would end and the play resume. We waited. The fork finally landed right in one of the empty gold rimmed, still empty, wine glasses that sat innocently in front of Essie, the candy making ballet student and elder sister in the family hosting the dinner. And it broke into pieces, some large some small, leaving the base and the stem just as it had been before the flight of the fork. It seemed that everyone in the room, audience and actors alike let out a gasp of astonishment at what was clearly an accident. Although, there may have been some in the audience that thought we had staged this spectacle and executed it just for their amazement, we most assuredly had not. There was a moment of silence, far more brief than the one people traditionally offer in memory of those recently passed on from life, when the actor playing Essie, one of the N.Y.U. trained amongst us, leapt from her seat, began apologizing, in character, and, excusing the accident, hurriedly picked up what she could safely retrieve of the shattered glass, wrapped it in her napkin and carried it, still apologizing, to the kitchen off stage. The other actors, following the first rule of the stage, “ The show must go on,” began improvising lines to cover her hurried exit and resumed the written dialogue almost immediately, and on we went more awake and alive than ever. In that extended moment is everything that is beautiful and dangerous about live theatre. It is not perfect, it is never perfect, because perfection only happens in dreams. It is vital, authentic, and potent because it is, like life itself, unpredictable, spontaneous, unexpected and, ultimately, you have to deal with it. And in that dealing is revealed whatever grace you can manage to muster.

The director of the second play we all did that season, As You Like It, by Shakespeare, explained to us during rehearsal one day what the difference between live theatre and film or television was, he said simply, “In the theatre you can be shot.” That is exactly how dangerous, how precarious it is and it demonstrates what the stakes must be when ever you walk out into the light while people are watching you from the darkness. It takes that kind of courage and you share it with everyone on stage with you. And part of that miracle is that the lights in the darkness can be turned on and suddenly the audience, too, is just as unsafe, just as alive, and just as courageous as those they came to see. In our production of As You Like It he demonstrated that moment at the very end of the play. After the comedy and drama of love and sexual identity, gender swapping, and clever manipulation, along with the keenly drawn conflict between seemingly safe city life and life in the forest amongst beggars, thieves, noblemen, and wild creatures, when, in true Shakespearean fashion he brings everyone together to bind them all in the sanctity of marriage for the longed for happy ending, our director had Touchstone, considered the ‘fool’ in this play, return to the stage with a lily that had been flown in from a florist in Boston every day for the production. He then took from the many pockets in his costume of colorfully camouflaged coveralls a can of gold spray paint and proceeded to gild the lily, as the saying goes, and lay it down on a rag in the middle of the stage. Rosalind has the last line of the play, "If I were a woman I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell." After speaking the line directly to the audience she departed the stage leaving me, her lover and new spouse, alone on stage with the gilded lily. I, as the innocent dupe of love, Orlando, then retrieved the still slightly damp gold lily and climbed with it into the audience to present said lily to a random audience member entirely of my choosing. Each night a different lily. Each night a different recipient of the gift of the unexpected as only the theatre can deliver.

Whatever I may or may not have learned about the craft of theatre in that season of repertory in the cold wind off the lake in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I definitely learned the value and the meaning of live theatre and the freedom that comes with the courage of living every moment, keeping it real, and always alive. I worked with that director, Tim Mayer, three more time before he died, far too young, from liver disease brought on by a lifetime of drinking too much rum to fast in a rest stop somewhere on the New York State Thruway. He was an endless source of amazement and knowledge and as close as I have come to true theatrical genius.

Whatever happens on stage between two actors binds them together as nothing else ever can. They may never see each other again as they move to the next play, the next space, the next family, but if they do happen to meet they immediately have between them the shared memory of that experience of living together in front of people who, if only for those brief few hours, shared that experience and that space. It is a great gift and only the artists amongst us know it.