(Norman Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech”, from the National Archives, painted in 1943, and published in the Saturday Evening Post. Rockwell’s “Freedom of Speech,” was inspired by FDR’s January 6, 1941, State of the Union Address, where he outlined the “Four Freedoms” which went on to be included in the United Nations Charter. Those freedoms, as spelled out by President Roosevelt were: “Freedom of Speech, Expression;'“ Freedom of Worship;” “Freedom from Want;” and “Freedom from Fear.”)

US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts was correct last week, when he wrote in a blistering dissent to the Supreme Court’s tone deaf 5-4 decision to greenlight the developer Trump’s illegal ballroom, that the construction was “likely unlawful.”

The same is true about the senior medical care project in Healdsburg, in the shadow of the SMART Train Station, when local laws specifically prohibit the use of that site for medical care, and favor the building of affordable housing for working families.

The people of our town—educated, engaged and enthusiastic for greater inclusion—with 1/3 of our population being of Latino Heritage—are ready to fight for what’s right. That courage frightens our timid town officials, terrified of incurring the wrath of rich, powerful real estate interests. Freedom from Fear, anyone?

All along, and under local ordinances and State laws encouraging affordable housing and more inclusionary housing—for seniors and everyone of Healdsburg’s non-wealthy citizens—that Hudson street site—located smack in the immediate zone of the SMART Train Station Local Plan—was supposed to be shaped by a high level of community input, not by high rollers rushing to game the system, and sneak “medical care” into an area where it IS strictly prohibited by Healdsburg’s land use code.

The proposed construction of a Residential Care Facility for the Elderly (RCFE) which includes both “personal care,” and “medical care,” in an exclusive community requiring a nearly million-dollar equity buy in, is not just, as Justice Roberts wrote of The Bully’s Ballroom “likely unlawful,” it is clearly unlawful, under our local zoning laws. Those of us with experience in public health know how “luxury” RCFEs or Continuing Care Communities for the wealthy have become golden cash cows for developers who reap vast profits from multiple millions in high buy-in costs from rich customers.

Worse, Healdsburg’s local Planning Commission gave conditional approval of the Hudson Street proposal on the basis of false information. At last month’s meeting the developer’s representatives —when asked if the proposed RCFE facility would include “medical” as well as “personal” care— misinformed the Commission, saying it would not, despite the fact that medical care is authorized—and in some instances state law requires—RCFE’s to provide medical or clinical care.

And, at virtually the same time the developer was misinforming Healdsburg’s planning officials that there would be no medical care at The Hudson, the company ran a recruitment ad seeking a “Regional Clinical Nursing Leader,” whose responsibilities include overseeing “clinical operations.” Under Nursing guidelines “clinical means involving or relating to direct medical treatment or testing of patients.”

So, surprise: in the same breath that the wealthy developer’s team was telling one crucial falsehood to the Planning Commission, it was confirming that, in fact, medical care IS central to his RCFE operations, by actively head-hunting to hire an expert in medical & clinical care to oversee all of their operations, including in Healdsburg.

A number of Healdsburg citizens, led by long-time residents Jon Eisenberg and Lewis Bangham, filed an appeal to the City Council of the The Hudson’s flawed plan, and demanded that the Planning Commission rescind its’ conditional approval of the proposal on the clear grounds that material facts were misrepresented to them by the developer. In a court of law, such a material misrepresentation is perjury; but, in the court of public opinion, it was simply the way the wealthy were accustomed to editing the facts to fit their own self-interests. But that misrepresentation should be enough to enable the Planning Commission to overturn their own conditional approval, since it was a decision based upon false information. The timely and concise Healdsburg citizens’ appeal insists that the City stick to the letter, the intent and the spirit of local and state zoning and affordable housing laws in the best interests of the people of the City.

That misrepresentation of the truth was only the first head fake by the developer to see if Healdsburg’s public officials could be tricked into killing community involvement. The other powerful threat to our prized local democratic process, was for them to simply bulldoze—the way Trump bulldozed the East Wing of the White House— over the existence of the SMART Train Station Area Plan—the specific, City-created planning framework for the area to ensure citizen involvement in this crucial plan for our future involving mass transit.

Similar “overlay” plans were created in Saggio Hills, the Mill District, and in North Healdsburg (Enso Village), to create and accommodate a diversity of needs for affordable housing, and an RCFE that would qualify for providing medical care.

That inclusive planning process worked, producing an abundance of affordable units, and a legitimate, state-of-the art RCFE rendering medical & clinical care (Enso Village), providing proof that community-based democracy can do what it’s supposed to do, when the only price attached to it is public participation, and the time taken to do the right thing.

That’s how democracy is supposed to work.

(Bill Ayres died this week, just one week after the death of Rolling Stone Magazine’s long-time music writer, Dave Marsh, who wrote the forward to the book Bill co-wrote with Pete Fornatale, entitled “All You Need Is Love.” It was the central message of Bill’s life, and he acted on it, in every way he could, every single day. I first wrote this opening piece 30 months ago, on Martin Luther King’s birthday to celebrate, during his lifetime, the lessons of love and humanity Bill Ayres taught us. I repost it today, to honor Bill’s life and the impact it had upon me and millions of others whose lives he touched, and changed. My piece is followed by the posting of an article from “WHY Hunger” Magazine, honoring the life and legacy of Bill Ayres, which continues to this day. Please contribute to WHY Hunger to carry on the fight against poverty and hunger, to which Bill dedicated himself. You can find a link to donate at the very bottom of the article.)

One of Dr. King’s Disciples of Love, Hope, Humanity & Social Action.

How a small town Catholic priest from Long Island, gained a nationwide congregation of the hungry, the exhausted, and the powerless, and brought out the best in everyone to make life better.

By Steve Villano

To be in the presence of Bill Ayres, former Catholic priest and co-founder of WHY Hunger with Harry Chapin, is to be bathed in the warm glow of hope and love.

Whenever we celebrate human service, and try to replicate in some small way, the life and actions of Dr. Martin Luther King, Bill Ayres’ life gives us mortals some practical instructions of just how to do it.

As with Dr. King, the driving forces of Bill Ayres’ activism are his faith, and his love of the dignity of all human beings. It’s what’s guided Bill’s life for some six decades—in addition to a unique sense of how music can change individual lives, and through it, the world.

Our Bill Ayres of Huntington Station, NY, whom I know and love--the real Bill Ayres, as I call him, so he cannot be confused with the Chicago-area, headline-grabbing, violence-winking, Weather Underground’s Bill Ayers (different spelling) —is the real, long-term radical social activist. His indefatigable efforts fighting hunger and poverty continue to make a difference in thousands of lives each day. Beyond his remarkable work fighting hunger, poverty and food insecurity with singer/songwriter Harry Chapin, and the Chapin family over the past 5+ decades, Bill Ayres’ own life and work is the stuff of inspiration.

It’s fitting that Huntington’s Bill Ayres—our Bill Ayres-- shares a birthday with long-time Civil Rights leader, Julian Bond, on the day before Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday. Not only did both men march and work with Dr. King, but they devoted most of their lives to practicing the kind of targeted, effective, never-ending non-violence which Martin Luther King preached.

Both Bill Ayres and Julian Bond became aware of the continuing struggle for civil and human rights in this country at roughly the same time. Bond co-founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) while a student at all-Black Morehouse College in 1960, where he first met Dr. King. He risked his life registering new voters during Freedom Summer in Mississippi, in 1964. Ayres, entered the seminary to study the priesthood, in 1963—not to escape the troubled world, but to embrace and repair it, influenced by the teachings of Catholic progressives like Dorothy Day & Thomas Merton.

Just after the 50^th Anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, I interviewed our Bill Ayres, in the New York City headquarters of WHY Hunger, and in the tranquil beauty of his beloved Heckscher Park in the Village of Huntington, L.I., not far from his home. We peacefully strolled around the Park’s lake, when I asked him about the influence of Dr. King on his life’s work:

“In 1963, I was in the March on Washington, I was a kid, in the seminary. Then I marched with him lots of times, heard him preach in the church, read all his stuff, and, I knew that racism was an evil; poverty was an evil and that they were all very much connected…”

Ayres attended the Immaculate Conception seminary in Huntington for six years in the early 1960’s where he began reading Dr. King’s “stuff”, as he described it.

“The inspiration for me in all of this is, of course, the social teachings of the church and the Gospel of Matthew, and lots of other places. King is kind of the one who put that into action. Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator driven out of after a military coup in 1964, wound up in Boston College and taught with a friend of mine up there and at UN. I met him a few times and heard him speak. He had this whole thing that the root cause of hunger is poverty and the root cause of poverty is powerlessness—I repeated this mantra to Harry Chapin a couple of times when I first met him. That’s always been our theme.”

We stopped walking as Bill’s kind, gentle-blue eyes, underscored that point:

“It’s the powerlessness that comes from on top, from oppression; racial oppression, sexual and, economic injustice. That’s where we came from and that’s where we’ve always been.

Serving Catholic parishes in conservative Long Island towns like Babylon and Seaford, Father Bill Ayres, did not look the part of the “radical priest,” despite, his deep, Catholic Worker beliefs. I asked him if he ever met the Berrigans, the “radical priests” of the 1960’s, arrested on many occasions for protesting the War in Vietnam, and destroying draft board records.

“Interesting. I met them, but didn’t know them. After I was ordained there was a priest friend of mine, who was a friend of the Berrigans. And Berrigan invited him and me to meet Thomas Merton. I never got there. Berrigan couldn’t go and we cancelled the whole thing. It’s one of those missed opportunities. I was on marches with the Berrigans; I was part of the anti-war movement. I would have loved to have met Merton. His book, The Seven Storey Mountain, influenced me to become a priest. He was a convert; He was a big influence on lots of people including me. A remarkable man.”

Thomas Merton’s writings and teachings influenced not only Bill Ayres, but generations of progressive Catholic activists to move well beyond the fundamentalist strictures of the hierarchy of the Catholic Church establishment.

It was the Church’s unyielding restrictions against priests marrying that drove Bill Ayres from the organized priesthood. After 13 years of serving two Catholic parishes, Bill met and fell in love with his wife, Jeannine, to whom he was married for almost 50 years. But while, Ayres may have formally left the priesthood, his life of service to others never left him. His congregation grew to a national size when he met Harry Chapin by interviewing him on Ayres’ radio program “On The Rock,” in 1973.

Serendipitously, Chapin’s great-aunt through marriage was Dorothy Day, one of the heroic figures in Bill Ayres life:

“If You look on my desk, I have a picture of Dorothy Day. I used to go down to her gatherings on Friday night on Christopher Street. (In NYC) I was very influenced by Dorothy Day; she was one of my role models, radical Catholic, sort of who I am. Harry and I talked about her, “Well, you know, I’m related to her,” he said, “and he was proud of it”.

It was Bill Ayres who alerted me to the remarkable book by Day’s granddaughter Kate Hennessy, “Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty,” which, in intimate and exquisite detail, illuminates the life that the revolutionary Catholic worker lived, and how much she accomplished for others.

And it was Bill, ever the teacher and mentor, who took from his personal bookshelf, a the dog-eared, underlined, hard-copy of a book—a guide for social action, really—which meant a lot to him—and gifted it to me. It was his copy of Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed, “ a blueprint for honoring—and acting for-- the humanity in all of us.

Bill Ayres’ all-encompassing humanity can leave you in quiet awe, and I was sure he must have had the same effect upon Harry Chapin, whom he met while still a practicing priest. I asked him if Harry believed in God:

“There’s an interesting thing here,” Ayres said. “ I’m a Catholic priest here and he’s this rock and roll guy. An interesting partnership. He loved it. He just thought it was a wild thing. He called me “Wild Bill” because I did all this crazy stuff. But he said to me, ‘you know, I’m not a believer; I come from a bunch of agnostics; I grew up in the Episcopal Church, I sang in the Episcopal Church. But I’m not really religious. ‘

“However, he evolved. And, part of the evolution was that he saw the goodness in the people who were running these food pantries and soup kitchens. And he had this great line, “I believe in the believers.”

“ Just a few months before Harry died, we were having this conversation about religion. He said , “I believe in God.” Big breakthrough. “But I don’t believe in a god of fear or vengeance. I believe in a god who loves people. I believe in a God that gives lots of hugs.” Harry liked to hug people. He and I talked about Jesus over the years. The whole thing is love and justice; it’s what’s it all about.”

Bill Ayres’ book, from which I frequently seek inspiration, hope and guidance, is his simple, soul-refreshing teaching tool which he wrote with his radio soul-mate, Pete Fornatale, entitled “All You Need Is Love..and 99 Other Life Lessons from Classic Rock Songs.” The book is dedicated to Harry Chapin, especially for Chapin’s use of his music, song and story-telling gifts to help “millions more to have food in their stomachs, dignity in their lives and hope in their spirits.”

It’s what Bill Ayres devoted a lifetime of service to doing, and practiced every single day.

Honoring Bill’s Legacy

Bill Ayres believed that ending hunger required more than providing food. It required healing, justice, and the power for communities to shape their own futures.For five decades, that conviction guided Bill’s work as WhyHunger’s co-founder, Executive Director, and Ambassador. He helped build an organization committed not only to meeting immediate needs, but to confronting the root causes of hunger and investing in lasting, community-led change.Bill taught us to listen before acting, to lead with hope, and to keep going even when the road ahead loomed long and difficult. A gift in Bill’s memory will carry that work forward by helping WhyHunger connect people with nutritious food, invest in grassroots solutions, and advance the human right to food for all.You can honor Bill’s extraordinary life by helping continue the work to which he devoted it.

Please donate to WHY Hunger to recognize the lifelong work of Bill Ayres, Harry Chapin, Sandy Chapin and the entire Chapin family in fighting hunger and poverty.

Donations in Bill’s honor can be made here.

THE LIFELONG LEGACY OF BILL AYRES (reprinted from this week’s publication of WHY Hunger, the official publication of the international anti-hunger, anti-poverty organization co-founded by Harry Chapin & Bill Ayres, in 1975.)

William J. Ayres lived a truly remarkable life, leaving behind a profound legacy of love, compassion, community and enduring hope. Born on January 14, 1941, Bill credited his grandmother with teaching him to keep an open heart and to “try and see the good in everyone.” That early foundation set him on a lifelong path of seeking justice and serving others.

In 1963, Bill joined a quarter of a million people at Dr. King’s March on Washington, D.C., an event that forever shaped his understanding of race, justice, poverty and power. Over his lifetime, he participated in many more protests and marches for social justice. He attended St. John’s University for two years before studying philosophy and theology at the Seminary of the Immaculate Conception in Huntington, N.Y. He remained a devoted St. John’s Red Storm basketball fan, attending games into his eighties.

(Photo By Moya McAllister)

Deeply moved by his faith, Bill answered the call to become a Roman Catholic priest in 1966 and served in two parishes over 13 years, embracing a life of service. In 1968, the Diocese of Rockville Centre on Long Island asked Bill to host a local Sunday radio show, launching a long and storied career on the airwaves. As host of “On This Rock,” Father Bill Ayres played rock music, interviewed guests, told stories, and seamlessly wove in lessons about faith, justice and compassion. Bill soon brought that same unique blend of storytelling and purpose to television when Charles Dolan gave him a platform on his pioneering Cablevision network.

When he fell in love with his future wife Jeannine, Bill left the active priesthood to build a life with her. His ministry of compassion and service didn’t end; it simply took a different form. Together, Bill and Jeannine raised two beloved daughters, Michelle and Suzanne Ayres, and their cherished granddaughter, Jaida Blatt.

For 40 years, he hosted “The Bill Ayres Show” on WPLJ-FM, a late-night call-in radio show where he played music and offered advice to young people. Bill became the longest-running continuous host on the station before broadcasting his final live show in May 2019.

Radio brought together Bill’s love of music, storytelling, faith and rock ‘n’ roll. He was the first person to interview Bruce Springsteen on network radio. That encounter sparked a lifelong friendship and partnership with Springsteen, Jon Landau, and Barbara Carr that was rooted in a deep commitment to harnessing the power of music to end hunger.

Then, a serendipitous series of radio interviews, first with musician Tom Chapin and later with his brother Harry, changed the course of Bill’s life yet again.

(Photo by Diane Maple)

After Bill and Harry connected on-air about their shared outrage over the growing crises of hunger and poverty, they decided to meet for dinner. Around the kitchen table, Bill, Harry and his wife, Sandy Chapin, sketched out a plan to make a lasting difference. In 1975, they founded the anti-hunger and social justice organization now known as WhyHunger.

A gentle visionary with steadfast conviction, Bill fiercely believed that hunger is solvable. He knew that making nutritious food a human right for all required digging deep to address hunger’s root causes. He also knew that local communities held the wisdom and power to solve it, if we could only learn to listen and follow their lead.

Guided by these principles, Bill and Harry created the first Hungerthon in 1975, a 24-hour radio show that raised funds and brought national attention to hunger, alongside radio DJ Pete Fornatale and general manager Mel Karmazin at WNEW-FM.

Now in its 41st year, the Hungerthon campaign has raised tens of millions of dollars through radiothons, concerts and community action. Its national broadcasts have become synonymous with the Thanksgiving season, airing across the nation on SiriusXM, iHeartRadio New York, and CBS Radio New York/Audacy New York.

Bill’s belief in the power of music to drive change extended far beyond Hungerthon. He forged an innovative partnership with Hard Rock International and helped galvanize the “Imagine There’s No Hunger” campaign with Yoko Ono Lennon to expand access to healthy food for children around the world.

(Photo by Diane Bondareff)

Together, Bill and Harry held numerous benefit concerts and opened a national policy office in Washington, D.C. Their advocacy drew steadfast bipartisan support from former Board Member Senator Patrick Leahy, D-VT, and Congressman Ben Gilman, R-NY, and helped lead to the creation of the first Presidential Hunger Commission, the first National Hunger Hotline, school meals, and millions of dollars in federal food and nutrition aid. Working side by side, Bill and Harry also helped start Long Island Cares and the Center for Food Action New Jersey.

When his dear friend Harry died tragically in 1981, Bill saw a promise that still had to be kept. He devoted the rest of his life to securing WhyHunger’s future and expanding its impact, serving as its Executive Director until his retirement in 2015. That year, as WhyHunger celebrated its 40th anniversary, Bill received the organization’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

At WhyHunger’s 50th anniversary gala in 2025, Bill helped present the inaugural Bill Ayres Social Justice Award to CNN’s Laura Coates. This annual award honors individuals like Bill who are driven by moral conviction to unite communities, amplify marginalized voices and fight systemic injustice.

In 1998, Bill co-authored All You Need is Love: And 99 Other Life Lessons From Classic Rock Songs with his dear friend and radio colleague, Pete Fornatale. And in 2021, he wrote The Journey into the Mystery: Finding God in Your Everyday Life, which was formatted by his daughter, Suzanne Ayres.

Bill leaves us with an indelible legacy and a powerful example of what it means to live with purpose. His warmth, care and generosity left a mark on everyone he met. He taught us to listen before acting, to lead with hope, and to keep going even when the road ahead looms long and difficult. Those of us who knew Bill, worked alongside him, or called him a friend were lucky to be part of his story and to witness what an open heart, a bold vision, and a relentless commitment to justice can make possible.

Our hearts are with his wife, Jeannine, Bill’s family and friends, the Chapin family, and the extraordinary community of people he brought together around this mission.

Donations in Bill’s honor can be made here here.

(Public domain photographs of 1865 Slave Quarters, and of the original cover of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly,” by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1850), the book that highlighted the tiny little hovels, and horrendous conditions under which slaves were forced to live. In, the last panel is the logo of the Healdsburg SMART Train Station, an enthusiastically supported change expected to create more economic opportunity for all—regardless of income— in the wealthy North Bay community, in transportation, affordable housing and the job market.)

I sat in the crowded hearing room in Healdsburg City Hall on Monday night, August 11, to hear and see the City’s Planning Commission present a proposal for a new Housing development, across the street from the soon-to-be built SMART Train Station.

Many of us—long-time residents and relative newcomers alike—were enthusiastic supporters of the SMART Train extension into Healdsburg, as a means of broadening economic opportunity, affordable housing, and more accessible jobs in our wealthy community, often derisively referred to as “Beverly Healdsburg.” We were eager to share the abundance our town had to offer.

Three months earlier, on May 8, 2026, some 1,000 of us packed into our town’s brand new Foley Family Pavilion—funded by the foundation of a leading local wine family— to celebrate the Healdsburg Station Groundbreaking. Every local, state and federal elected official representing our region attended, shook hands, spoke, and cut a huge-ribbon. We all whooped and hollered when our State Senator, former Healdsburg Mayor, professional auctioneer and soon to be new Member of Congress Mike McGuire led us all in cheering that “A New Train Was Coming To Town.” Excitement and pride in our City was palpable.

I sat, surrounded by friends & neighbors on that beautiful day in May, and thought of August Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize nominated play, “Two Trains Running,” which focused on the competing choices we each face in life. The unforgettable quote of one of the main characters kept playing in my mind, like background music:

“There are always and only two trains running. There is life and there is death. Each of us rides them both.”

That day we were all choosing life, and putting people’s basic needs ahead of profits.

Like Mike McGuire, we could see the future, and we loved it, and felt the economic opportunity that ALL of our neighbors could enjoy, regardless of income. Farmworkers, hospitality workers, restaurant staff, small business owners and their employees, would be able to get to their jobs by taking the train to Healdsburg, or south to Santa Rosa, Petaluma, San Rafael, or anyplace else. Tourists would arrive by the trainload to visit Healdsburg’s restaurants, hotels and wineries and sample our exploding music and art scene, and our hospitality.

Anticipating this—and reflecting our town’s overwhelming support for the”New Train Coming to Town,”—Healdsburg’s 5-member, elected City Council created the Healdsburg Station Area Specific Plan, guaranteeing community involvement, of which the City’s website clearly states:

“This plan will integrate housing, infrastructure and multimodal transit improvements, ensuring sustainable and transit-oriented growth around the SMART Station…and, a programmatic environmental impact report will be prepared as well.”

A highly educated and engaged electorate has demanded that the City of Healdsburg follow this formula for citizen participation. It has successfully, and sometimes painfully, followed it many times before by creating special planning districts for new housing, hotel and retail developments in other parts of town:

• The Mill District, which contains both the most expensive apartments in town and some of the most affordable in The Randall, an exquisitely designed and economically accessible housing complex, which houses very low, and low income families in the very heart of Healdsburg;

• The Saggio Hills District, where, after years of negotiations, three phases of affordable housing (covering a range of low-income and some moderate income levels) are being built as part of a compromise with Le Montage resort, with the first three-story section on upper Parkland Farms Road scheduled to open in two months;

• The NorthVillage district, where an upscale, comprehensive and legitimate Continuing Care Facility (Enzo Village) faces not only a Charlie Palmer resort, Appellation Healdsburg (rated one the finest resorts in the country by Travel & Leisure), but also the aesthetically beautiful and very affordable Burbank Housing development—Bowman Place—which sits above planned retail space, looking right into the terraces of Enzo Villages million-dollar apartments.

Each of those special planning districts, took years of hard work and compromise to integrate a diversity of housing options for all working families as well as wealthy ones, in various neighborhoods of Healdsburg. The clear intent, and contract with the community, was that the same multi-party planning process would be followed again in the SMART Station Area Specific Plan, especially since local, state and SMART train transportation and housing priorities are to make mass transit more accessible for working families.

All of that excitement, community involvement, and careful city planning was jettisoned on August 11, when the City’s Planning Commission unanimously decided to bull ahead with a 3.6 acre housing proposal in the shadow of the SMART Train Station, without EVER convening one session of the City’s promised “Healdsburg Station Area Specific Plan.” The democratic process that makes small city life in Healdsburg special, and desirable, had been shattered. “The Hudson” housing development was being shoved down our throats, whether we liked it or not.

This utter disconnect was shocking to every Healdsburg resident in the room: our elected-City Council committed, in writing, to move in one direction in the immediate SMART Train Station Area, and the Planning Commission, elected by no one, moved in the entirely opposite direction. The only way we could stop this train from running off the track, was to file a detailed citizen appeal (which is presently being done), at the cost of $1800 to Healdsburg taxpayers who simply want a place at the town’s ample table, and a fair process to be followed, with our outrage compounded by the fact that we have to pay extra—$1800 extra— just to get heard by our elected officials.

Pulverizing the democratic process was only the first surprise the Planning Commission had for Healdsburg’s taxpayers. Still to come was their act of sheer civic cowardice (‘We have no choice,” ) in the face of a well-financed, and clever bastardization of both our local and state Senior Housing Laws, and the microscopic shrinking of the size of the Affordable housing the proposal provided.

In quickly became evident that “The Hudson’s” senior housing (masquerading as a continuing care community) was really only a ruse to sell the luxury, large sized units (from 1600 to 2,000 sq. ft,) to wealthy seniors who could afford the astronomical buy-in rate of at least $700,000 per unit, the “market rate,” established 2 years earlier by Enzo Village, a legitimate Continuing Care/Long Term Care/Memory Care facility in North Healdsburg. (Ironically, Enzo Village—which went through a long and arduous planning process with the City, has more, and larger sized “affordable” units, for people in need of the kind of health care provided, who are not wealthy. Enzo Village has 221 Independent Living units; 30 Assisted Living units/beds; and 24 units for Memory Care patients. The Hudson’s is planning only 6 Memory Care units, and thus, far, it’s “Assisted Living” claim is in need of life support.

“Senior Housing” under “The Hudson’s” proposal is for wealthy seniors only, despite the abuse of the name—and making a mockery of the label “affordable housing”—in order to game the California Density Board Law, and Healdsburg’s Inclusionary Housing Ordinance, and secure an increase in the number of “market rate” units it could sell.

And if the “Wealth Wall” wasn’t an insurmountable hurdle for most moderate income Healdsburg Seniors to scale at “The Hudson”—22% of Healdsburg’s population is in the 65-84 age range—the claustrophobic closet-sized “Affordable” housing units immediately eliminates “working families” from the mix of prospective tenants, in violation of Healdsburg’s own Inclusionary Housing Ordinance.

Bruce Abramson, a long-time Healdsburg resident and advocate for affordable housing, stated the facts quite clearly in his public testimony to the Planning Commission:

“The public should know that the average size of the luxury market rate units (at the Hudson) is 1,681 square feet, in comparison to the 377 square feet for the 10 “affordable units.”

All of the “affordable units” at The Hudson are studio apartments, unlike every other Affordable Housing development in town which include many one, two and three bedroom units to house entire families. For example, at “The Randall” in the Mill District, there are 19 one-bedrooms, 11 two bedrooms, and 11 three bedroom apartments.

The Hudson’s hardly human-sized units are slightly larger than the Slave Quarters, or Slave Cabins, or “pens,” of the 19th Century, when entire slave families of five or six were expected to shoehorn themselves into 250 square feet or less.

Harriet Beecher Stowe writing in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly” in 1850, and then again in “A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in 1853, described the sub-standard Slave housing this way:

“The Negroe quarters are of frame and clapboard, seldom affording a comfortable shelter from wind and rain; their size varies from 8 x 10, to 10 x12, to six to eight feet high. Sometimes there is a hole cut out for a window, but I never saw a sash or glass in any…all the Negroes on the plantation were lodged in hovels, as is the custom in the country.”

While “The Hudson” is not proposing to construct “hovels,” the asphyxiating affordable housing “pens” planned for across the street from the SMART Train Station—which clearly excludes working families larger than one person—smash Healdsburg’s humane affordable housing standards established over decades: from Fitch Mountain Terraces I & II near Badger Park; to the Parkland Senior Housing, at the entryway to Parkland Farms; and, to more recently, The Randall in the Mill District, Burbank’s Bowman Housing near Enzo Village, and all three planned phases of Saggio Hills.

Planning Commission members, City Attorneys and even some elected Healdsburg City Council members will lamely lament that their “hands are tied,” or “they have no choice.” When they say that, remind them of what the brilliant Yale Professor Timothy Snyder (author of On Freedom, On Tyranny, Black Earth, and many other books) has written:

“One of the most dangerous sentences in politics is ‘We Have No Choice.’ There is almost always a choice, even if every choice is difficult. Once leaders convince themselves that history, revolution, national survival, or some higher cause has eliminated all alternatives, almost anything can become permissible.”

(ICE’s new “Electric Gloves”. The "Conductive Distraction and De-escalation devices" manufactured by Compliant Technologies can cause a person to drop to the ground in pain with one touch.Mother Jones illustration; GLOVE user manual/Compliant Technologies.)

The writer Ralph Ellison was 74 years ahead of his time.

In his National Book Award winning work “Invisible Man,” (Random House, NY, NY, 1952), Ellison detailed the joy white supremacists got from giving electric shocks to Black and Brown men.

That may explain why the white supremacists running the Trump Administration, the Department of Homeland Security and ICE (in their veins), are having multiple orgasms over their new “Electric Shock GLOVES,” meant to “harm people and avoid being sued,” as the investigative reporting magazine Mother Jones reports in its newest issue (“The Orwellian Company Behind ICE’s New Electric Shock Gloves,” by Sophie Hurwitz.

Mother Jones directly quotes the CEO of Compliant Technologies, Jeff Niklaus, from a 2022 YouTube promotional video:

“We have a saying, ‘Feeling is Believing.”

Hurwitz points out that “in promotional clips, you can see people losing control of their limbs, falling to the ground, and crying out in pain after a light touch from the GLOVE. In 2022, the company called it a “weapon” in Instagram posts.”

Mother Jones goes on to quote Assistant Chief Adam Glueck, of the Cape Girardeau Police Department in southeastern Missouri, which purchased electric shock gloves for the Girardeau PD officers.

“In today’s society, you know, everybody is filming everything; everyone has a cellphone,” Hurwitz quoted Glueck as saying. “If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.”

I read these chilling quotes when the news hit about ICE buying $10 million of these portable electric chairs for its abusive agents to use on humans and my mind immediately recalled the opening chapter of Ellison’s “Invisible Man,” where the legendary Black writer described an electric shock torture devised by the White elites of a southern town to use on young Black athletes.

Ellison’s eloquent, and electrifying, account was told through the eyes of a young, bright Black character who earned a college scholarship and was informed that in order to pick up the scholarship he had to perform certain “puglistic entertainment,” along with nine other well-built Black men, for the enjoyment of the rich, white, powerful and inebriated audience:

“ All of the town’s big shots were there in their tuxedos, wolfing down buffet foods, drinking beer and whiskey and smoking black cigars. It was a large room with a high ceiling. Chairs were arranged in neat rows around three sides of a portable boxing ring. The fourth side was clear, revealing a gleaming space of polished floor.”

“We were a small tight group, clustered together, our bare upper bodies touching and shining with anticipatory sweat, while up front the big shots were becoming increasingly excited… Suddenly, I heard the School Superintendent, who told me to come, yell, ‘Bring up the Shines, gentlemen! ‘Bring up the little Shines!”

“We were ordered to get into the ring…All 10 of us climbed under the ropes and allowed ourselves to be blindfolded, with broad bands of white cloth…I felt a sudden fit of blind terror …I stood against the ropes trembling… it seemed as if all nine of the boys had turned upon me at once…

“Everybody fought everybody else…I heard one boy scream in pain as he smashed his hand against a ring post…The (White) men kept yelling: ‘Slug him, black boy! Knock his guts out! Uppercut him! Kill him! Kill that big boy!’

But, as Ellison wrote, the even more dehumanizing and shocking part of the night’s entertainment for the White supremacists— bankers, lawyers, judges, doctors, fire chiefs, teachers, merchants and pastors — all dressed in tuxedos, was yet to come.

The screaming, rich, racist White men “rolled away the portable boxing ring, and set up a small square rug in the vacant space surrounded by chairs. An emcee gave the signal for the young, Black men to “come and get your money,” a collection of gold, coins and a few crumpled bills tossed in the middle of the rug.

“As told, we got around the square rug on our knees. ‘Ready, Go!’ the emcee said. I lunged for a yellow coin lying on a blue design of the carpet, touching it …A hot, violent force tore through my body, shaking me like a wet rat. The rug was electrified…my muscles jumped, my nerves jangled, writhed…

“Suddenly, I saw a boy lifted in the air, glistening with sweat like a circus seal, and dropped, his wet back landing flush upon the charged rug, heard him yell, and saw him literally dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by too many flies… his face was gray and no one stopped him when he ran from the floor, amid booming laughter,” of the White Supremacists who took great pleasure in administering pain to these Black boys.

The horrific scene from Ellison’s Invisible Man could be right out a training video for the perversely named company, “Compliant Technology.”

As Mother Jones reports:

Human rights organizations like Amnesty International have long raised concerns about electric shock devices like the GLOVE, as well as other products that Compliant Technologies sells, like electric shock belts and vests, which the company recommends for prisoner transport, courtroom use, and use on “combative individuals” during medical procedures like blood draws.”

Hurwitz goes on to write that “The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” Yumna Rizvi, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Victims of Torture, called the gloves “inherently abusive equipment that facilitates torture.”

The Electric Gloves of Human Torture are scheduled to be delivered to ICE by the end of March, 2027, unless Congress, somehow, stops the delivery, of the inhumane device.

But, Niklaus, the “Compliant” Technologies CEO—who believes Trump was annointed by God—is a former Blackhawk Helicopter pilot and a conspiracy theorist.

Mother Jones reports that: “ There is already a pending wrongful death lawsuit, against Compliant Technologies, that alleges that a 43-year-old man named Jonathan Mansfield died because corrections officers shocked him 27 times with the gloves and 13 times with a Taser. Two of the glove shocks lasted 45 and 99 seconds. The manufacturer’s recommended limit is 15 seconds.

Based upon ICE’s track record of killing and brutalizing detainees in it’s custody, or on the Streets of American Cities, what are the odds that at least one untrained, rogue ICE agent will use the Electric Chair Gloves on a Black or Brown victim for much more than 15 seconds?

Or, maybe, as Ralph Ellison foreshadowed this form of torture decades ago, ICE, and private for-profit companies like “Compliant Technologies,” will just build more monstrous metal holding cages and electrify the floors, electrocuting each adult or child considered not “compliant enough.”

Augustus Trump Gloop,

The Nincompoop, played

Everybody for his dupe.

Ate dollar bills by the scoop,

Especially yours,

Whether or not you bought his poop.

Grifter, swindler, cheater, fraud,

Built a life on lies and gaud —

Took a bribe from the Qataris,

A jet designed by Mata Hari.

“Hurry, Hurry, I need this NOW,”

Trump Gloop said, passing methane like a cow.

“More, I want MORE,” His Corpulence whined,

Another half-billion, and his pockets were lined.

Augustus Trump couldn’t wait for the world to see,

The King’s Air Chariot, made for “Me, Me, Me!.”

But Gloop ignored what he’d been told,

And no security came with the Flying Tomb of Gold.

“Iran could shoot it down,” said Gloop’s glutinous team,

So highly overrated.

Even though they swore Iran’s forces were “obliterated.”

That’s what who stated?

“Quick! Switch the Plane! The Plane!”

Gloops goons said,

“Better that His Flatulence’s face

Be red, then dead!

Back they went to the Air Force One of Old,

Reminding us that like the Disappearing Ballroom,

And the Deflection Pool, they’d wasted so much Gold…

Or, at least, hid it into places that would hold their loot,

And the kickbacks flowing to August Trump Gloop.

And so, again, Augustus Trump Gloop,

The Nincompoop,

Played everybody for his Dupe,

Including the Press, left holding the Scoop.

Gloop went to the Galley to pick up a snack.

And sucking his gut in, slipped out the back.

But the sight of junk food in front of his face,

Had Trump Gloop drooling for one tiny taste.

He ripped open his happy meals,

Tiny fingers working hard;

And His Flatulent Corpulence

Stuffed himself with Lard.

When the Galley landed,

Gloop couldn’t get out,

With ketchup and mustard

Dripping from his snout.

The Press was a decoy,

The Plane was one too,

Only Gloop would survive

If enemy threats came true.

But in his schnorrer madness

To eat his way out first;

Augustus Trump Gloop,

Just simply, burst.

August 6, 2026

(Simon & Garfunkel’s “The Sun Is Burning,” song protesting Nuclear Weapons, and the use of the first two Atomic Bombs by the US upon hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians. Copyright by Simon & Garfunkel, 1964)

Don’t let Donald Trump’s, Pete Hegseth’s and Bibi Netanyahu’s endless bombardment of lies about Iran, Muslim nations, and other so-called “Terrorist States” vaporize US history into thin air the way hundreds of thousands of innocent Japanese citizens were slaughtered by our own country at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 81 years ago this week.

And, don’t get distracted by the culture of American corporate glee that celebrates August 6, as “National Root Beer Float Day.” Really.

For those of us who still have memory, and don’t believe in whitewashing our history, we have to keep reminding our children and grandchildren that, yes, our country really did commit two back-to-back massive War Crimes against civilian populations, killing, burning and radiating more than 200,000 humans beings. And that contrary to the prevailing corporate and political narrative, committing such War Crimes was not necessary to win World War II.

Hitler was already dead for 3 months, when the first bomb was dropped, the Nazis had surrendered, and Victory in Europe was already celebrated by the Allied Forces on May 8, 1945. The original legitimate justification for the US Manhattan Project—to beat the Nazis to developing an Atomic Bomb so they couldn’t use it against the world—no longer existed. Hitler was now dead. And, the Japanese—with nowhere near the scientific sophistication of the Germans or the US,—were about to surrender.

But, don’t take my word for it. Instead, listen to the warnings of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, then the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who had just defeated the Nazis and liberated thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps.

Before the decision to use the bombs in World War II was made, in the summer of 1945, Eisenhower—just off the battlefield—expressed his strong reservations to President Harry Truman’s Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson, who was leading the charge to use the weapons because we had them. General Eisenhower, the most revered military leader in the United States at the time, made his position clear to Stimson:

“ I told him I was against it (using the bomb) on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon…”

However, what happened after the end of War World II in Europe and the dropping of the first Atomic bomb on Hiroshima just a few months later, was a carefully calculated plan of American diplomatic intimidation, aimed more at impressing Soviet leader Josef Stalin who, with Truman and Winston Churchill, were negotiating over the future of Post-War Europe at the Potsdam Conference in a Soviet-occupied part of Germany, according to historian Gar Alperovitz, in his masterful book of that period, Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima & Potsdam—the Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (Vintage Books, 1965, New York, N.Y.)

A growing chorus of battle-hardened military leaders like Eisenhower, strongly opposed sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians as human pawns in an international power struggle between the US and Russia. Admiral William D. Leahy, the most senior Naval Officer on duty during WW II, called the Atomic Bomb “barbarous,” and of “no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”

Perhaps the most damning assessment of the Truman/Stimson decision to drop the unnecessary and apocalyptic weapons of mass destruction upon the people of Hiroshima on August 6, and on Nagasaki three days later, came from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey:

“ Certainly prior to 31 December 1945 and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the War, and even if no invasion had been planned.”

And, even the Supreme Allied Commander of the Allied Forces in the Pacific, General Douglas MacArthur stated numerous times before his death, that he believed the Atomic Bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view. In fact, as Oppenheimer himself later said, the original reason for developing the Bomb to beat the Nazis, morphed into something else:

“I don’t think there was a time where we worked harder at the speed up (of the development of the bomb) than in the period after the German surrender.”

Then, why did we then become the first and only nation in world history to drop, not one, but two nuclear weapons on civilian populations, despite the fears of some scientists, that even a test of the Bomb might set fire to the atmosphere and consume the globe in flames? Why did we do it, if the Atomic Bombs were no longer necessary to defeat the Germans or the Japanese and end World War II?

Some answers, like the outcomes of many criminal trials, reveal themselves in details, dates and bold face:

• · FDR died of a heart attack on April 12, 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term of office, elevating Harry Truman—inexperienced in foreign policy and who never previously met either Winston Churchill or Josef Stalin —to the Presidency;

• · Hitler killed himself a few weeks later on April 30, 1945, effectively ending the War in Europe;

• · One week later, on May 8, 1945, Germany surrendered and the Allied Forces declared Victory in Europe;

• · On July 15, 1945, President Truman arrives on a Sunday afternoon for the crucial Potsdam Conference, scheduled to begin on July 17^th.

• · On July 16, 1945, the US Manhattan Project’s “Trinity Test” of the Atomic Bomb—the first Nuclear Test in world history—was carried out in Alamogordo, New Mexico, 210 miles south of Los Alamos.

• · The following day, on July 17, 1945, the Potsdam Conference-- to negotiate the terms for the end of World War II-- began in a Soviet occupied part of Germany, just outside of Berlin. In attendance were Winston Churchill, President Truman, and Soviet Leader Josef Stalin. It was the first time Truman met either Churchill or Stalin.

• · July 24, 1945, Truman tells Stalin at Potsdam that the United States had successfully detonated the world’s first Atomic bomb the previous week;

• · July 25, 1945, the formal order to use the Atomic Bomb as a weapon of war against Japan was given by Secretary of War Stimson, with President Truman’s approval.

• · The Potsdam Conference concluded on August 2, 1945. The Soviet Union had not yet declared war on Japan, an important consideration for the US, to preclude Russia’s designs for expansion in the Far East;

• · August 6, 1945, the first American Atomic Bomb is dropped on Hiroshima killing 100,000 to 150,000 people;

• · August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declares war on Japan, at 11 pm that evening, the night before the second US Atomic Bomb is dropped on Nagasaki, and Russian forces invade mineral rich Manchuria, then under Japanese control;

• · August 9, 1945, the second American Atomic Bomb—six times the size and strength of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima—is dropped on Nagasaki, killing 80,000-100,000 people.

• · August 14, 1945, Japan surrenders, ending World War II.

The evidence of the world’s first Nuclear weapons being used as tools to intimidate Stalin and Russia—more than as weapons to defeat Japan—is followed to its logical conclusion by Alperovitz in Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam:

“It might explain why none of the highest civilian officials seriously questioned the use of the bomb as Eisenhower did; for having reversed the basic direction of diplomatic strategy because of the Atomic Bomb, it would have been very difficult for anyone subsequently to challenge an idea which had come to dominate all calculations of high policy…Were Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombed primarily to impress the world (specifically Stalin) with the need to accept America’s plan for a stable and lasting peace?”

Truman’s hand-picked Secretary of State James F. Byrnes of South Carolina, meeting with Manhattan Project scientists in May, 1945, told them that it was necessary for the Bomb to be “successful” because “our possessing and demonstrating the bomb would make Russia more manageable in Europe.”

Testifying before Congress some years later, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who headed the Manhattan Project and was adamently opposed to using the Atomic Bomb on civilian populations, admitted that the obsession with post-War stability was the “problem” of Russia:

“Much of the discussion revolved around the question raised by Secretary Stimson as to whether there was any hope at all of using this development (of the bomb) to get less barbarous relations with the Russians.”

A few hundred deaths of Americans in proximity to the New Mexico bomb-test site, and the incineration of a few hundred thousand Japanese children, women and men, were, by those cold calculations, simply the inhumane, collateral damage of war, in a world gone completely mad.

Think about that the next time you hear Trump, or Hegseth, or Netanyahu rant about not letting Iran develop a nuclear weapon because that ancient culture is not civilized enough to control its use. Defining which nations are “terrorist states,” depends upon who is crafting and using the definition, as well as the weaponsof mass destruction, which are the very essence of abject terror against humanity.

(The wickedly smart White Rose—played by the actor BD Wong—from the USA Network series “Mr. Robot,” which ran for four years, from 2015-2019. The character of White Rose was the transgender leader of the Dark Army, a Chinese Hacker Group. The remarkable Wong, a star of stage, television and movies, and a long-time activist for progressive causes, won a TONY Award for his portrayal of Song Liling, in “M. Butterfly.” This spring in Philadelphia, Wong will do a one-person show of “The Glass Menagerie.”)

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She and Trump,

Are BOTH Hyenas.

Devouring humans,

Destroying Justice;

They kept their promise;'

They simply eat us…

Don’t cry for Jeanine,

Because her boss is meaner….

The truth is,

She isn’t sober;

Trump isn’t either—

He’s drunk on power,

She’s just hungover,

From all devoured.

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She chose her poison.

All through her wild days,

Her mad existence,

She kept her focus,

The camera’s gaze,

And Liquid subsistence.

Trump hired kickback

Contractors, Pirro-ina;

For massive paint jobs,

A whitewash cleana...

The truth is,

There were no poolboys,

Just mob-upped bagmen,

Out to fool all US boys.

Don’t cry for pickled Pirro,

White Rosina;

The truth is,

She picked a hero,

To charge as vandal.

All through her wild days,

Her legal record,

The same such scandal.

Don’t cry for Jeanine (hiccup!) Pirro,

Who knew the mad king,

Was just like Nero;

He burned down justice,

To lie and steal more.

And give himself,

The keys to jails’ door.

And all Pirro got,

Was one more good pour…..

Don’t cry for her,

White Rosina,

The truth is,

She sold her soul.

To the Flaccid Weiner.

All through their wild days,

Of star-fucked fantasy,

They kept their focus,

On fame’s apostasy….

Don’t cry for Pirro,

White Rosina;

She may sound tougher,

But her soul’s no cleaner,

Then the Reflecting Pool,

Wrecked by Little Weiner.

The truth is,

What turned it greener,

Was a reflection,

Of ALL of their

Scummy demeanor…

(Artwork created by Bob Englehardt for Cagle Cartoons, 2020)

Six years ago this month, I published a piece about Dr. Tony Fauci assuring him that many of us had his back. And, it wasn’t just because we are both passionate Italians from Brooklyn who believe public service is a sacred calling.

Nope, many of us who worked in the HIV/AIDS field and have admired his life-saving work for decades, would do everything in our power to protect him, amidst the craziness and back-biting of the failing first Trump Administration in the summer of 2020, during the COVID Pandemic. He was the only truth-teller in a land of liars, conspiracy freaks, frauds and flim-flam artists, and our very lives depended upon his integrity, courage and devotion to science. He was our Yoda.

Already coming under attack from anti-vaxxers, anti-science nut jobs, and QAnon crazies surrounding Trump, I urged Dr. Fauci to speak the unfettered truth about how Donald Trump was incompetently & ignorantly mishandling the federal response to the COVID 19 pandemic, resulting in, ultimately, over one-million infections and deaths in the United States. Trump’s abject stupidity (“Just ingest bleach”), and his malignant incompetence (“one day, like a miracle, it will go away”) were killing us and many people we loved, including the 92-year old matriarch of our own family.

At almost the precise time I was suggesting that he blow-the-whistle on the Trump Administration’s anti-science idiocy and preventable harm being done to tens of thousands of people, Dr. Fauci was struggling to stem the catastrophe of Covid-19 from within that negligent Administration, since he still had Trump’s support and respect, and he was polling as the most trusted public official in the nation. Yet, like Generals James Mattis and Mark Milley who held their noses and battled to save the country from within, Fauci used the force of his intelligence and commitment to public service to survive, but he could not hide his growing misgivings to himself over what was happening before his own eyes. To preserve his sanity and sort things out, he kept a “private” diary for three years.

On August 4, 2020, as we learned from Dr. Fauci’s private diaries just released this week, Fauci complained that:

“Trump is desperate and doesn’t understand the pandemic.”

Four days later, Dr. Fauci’s private observations became even more dire: '

“POTUS acting even more erratically.”

We tried to warn Fauci, at the peak of his popularity, to step out and bring the Science-denying sociopaths in the Trump Administration tumbling down, but his great sense of duty, idealism and ego got in his way. Plus, at that time, who was willing to believe the endless depth of the dunderheadedness and depravity of Donald Trump and the people propping him up? Things began to take an even more dangerous turn, as the pandemic raged on, and Fauci wrote about it:

Fauci diary, August 31, 2020: “Trump stoking violence and racial tension in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Portland, Oregon (in the aftermath of George Floyd demonstrations.)…embracing false claims by RightWing QAnon groups about deaths relative to COVID-19. QAnon is saying that all the other deaths had nothing to do with COVID-19. The POTUS loves this and is tweeting that Fauci & Birx (Deborah) shut down the country for only 9,000 deaths. What an idiot! “

The actual cumulative COVID-19 death toll in the United States at that time in 2020 was 206,005 reported deaths, with overall confirmed cases approaching 7.2 million cases, making QAnon crackpot conspiracists—whom Trump was trusting for information—approximately 200,000 deaths off the actual total.

As the 2020 Election approached —an election which Joe Biden won by over 9 million popular votes, and 306 to 232 Electoral votes—things got worse. Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary entry of October 15, 2020:

“ As the election nears, the cases increase and surges are more inevitable as we enter cooler weather. Trump is on the campaign trail spewing nonsense. He is really out of control. A true embarrassment.”

Two days before the 2020 Election, which Trump would lose, Trump was bonkers. Fauci wrote that Trump told him:

“You constantly drop bombs on me (by telling the truth); everybody wants me to fire you—you have to be more helpful.

Death threats against Dr. Fauci, his wife and his three daughters, had ratcheted up as the election approached, and for the balance of the year bodyguard protection became a necessity. The vitriol and viciousness aimed at Fauci and his family grew more virulent after Trump lost the election, as Trump was spinning out even more into an “alternate universe,” as Fauci wrote.

Only 10 days after the election on November 13, 2020, Dr. Fauci wrote in his diary:

“ Continued surge: 138,000 new infections yesterday. POTUS has no interest at all in the pandemic. He’s focused on blocking Biden from being POTUS; he is embarrassing the USA….craziness has overtaken the country.”

Even after Biden became President, and Dr. Fauci became his top Medical Advisor, Fauci was increasingly appalled by Trump’s behavior. He wrote in his diary on March 29, 2021, two months into the Biden Administration:

“Trump is truly an obnoxious adolescent.”

Dr. Fauci could have just as well been describing the spoiled child of Ron Paul, Senator Rand Paul, of Kentucky, an eye doctor who cannot see straight because of his insane jealously of Dr. Fauci’s distinguished medical and scientific career, or Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s HHS Secretary with no medical background, who lead the anti-vaccine movement in the United States for more than two decades, spreading destructive & widely disproven lies about autism and childhood vaccines.

Fauci’s immense public popularity continued into Biden’s presidency, as the Pandemic proceeded to spread and the first COVID vaccines were administered on a broad scale at the very beginning of Biden’s term, despite opposition by Trump supporters around the country, and anti-vaxxers. RJK Jr., in November, 2021, published a scurrilous book about Dr. Fauci (“The Real Anthony Fauci: Bill Gates, Big Pharma and the Global War on Democracy & Public Health”). The Science Based Medicine website called Kennedy’s lie-infected screed “a conspiracy theory extravaganza.”

Still, the garbage-dump of a book amplified the drumbeat of hysterical attacks against Anthony Fauci, as his power over the nation’s public health priorities grew during the first two years of the Biden Administration. Fauci left the Biden Administration at the end of 2022.

But the hatred of Fauci and his positive influence on the nation’s public health, by RFK, Jr., and the juvenile mean-girl Senator Rand Paul, festered for years. When Trump was elected President in 2024, RFK, Jr., was appointed head of HHS, and stacked the agency that has enormous influence over public health with the anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists who set out to dismantle much of the work Dr. Fauci accomplished over five decades of public service. Senator Paul became Chair of the Senate Homeland Security Committee.

Kennedy, who famously claimed to have snorted cocaine off of dirty toilet seats to prove he wasn’t afraid of germs or parasites, assigned some of his most rabid anti-Fauci staff members to comb through three years of contemporaneous notes which Fauci made on government computers over three years, from 2019-2022, during the height of the COVID Pandemic.

Dubbed, “The Fauci Diaries,” it’s took Kennedy’s malevolent minions some eight full months to assemble Fauci’s writings—a staffing decision made at precisely the same time HHS made deep staff cuts and failed to control cases of Measles and Cyclospora induced diarrhea exploding across the United States. Once completed, RFK, Jr., in another act of personal revenge against Fauci, handed over more than 1,000 pages of “The Fauci Diaries,” to GOP Senator Rand Paul, who was chairing a Senate Homeland Security Hearing looking into the origins of COVID.

The Kentucky Republican’s kangaroo-court of a hearing enabled Paul, an insecure, arch enemy of Dr. Fauci going back years, to verbally abuse Fauci and demand that Fauci’s attorney be tossed out of the Senate hearing room. It also provided a platform to Ohio Republican Senator Bernie Moreno, to shout at Fauci, “Who the Fuck do you think you are? Do you feel like you are in deep shit?” Those questions were odd, coming from Moreno who has not raised any questions to his own son-in-law, about the domestic violence charges filed by Moreno’s own daughter against his son-in-law—GOP Ohio Congressman Max Miller—for violence against her and against Moreno’s young granddaughter. Moreno’s Ohio voters may have been wondering how hard he’d fight for them, if he wouldn’t fight for his own daughter and young granddaughter. The Fauci show-hearing gave Moreno the chance to act tough.

Senator Paul’s sham Hearing also shined a spotlight on the Lex Luther-like bulging head of one of the biggest hypocrites in US Senate history, Senator Rick Scott of Florida. Scott, whose former health care company—which he oversaw— was found guilty of committing a $1.7 billion in Medicare fraud—self-righteously & shamelessly grilled the leading public health advocate in the nation’s history about Fauci’s record of combatting the most deadly pandemic in U.S. history. Scott, shameless as always, did this with a fraudulent sense of high dudgeon, despite his company being found guilty of committing 14 felonies of defrauding the US government. To avoid prison time by taking responsibility for the egregious crimes, Rick Scott, instead, took the Fifth Amendment 75 times, AND pocketed $350 million from American taxpayers whom he stuck with the bill for his fraud upon the US Treasury.

Ironically, Trump Administration officials and Republican Senators and their right-wing media maggots have been whining about the fact that Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment rights some 100 times, despite Rick Scott’s record of cheating US Taxpayers by taking the Fifth Amendent 75 times, and Donald Trump—who once famously said “only the Mob takes the Fifth”—invoking his 5th Amendment rights over 400 times in a civil deposition in NY involving his companies defrauding New York State out of over $450 million. Two years ealier in the same case, Trump’s son Eric, a key officer in the Trump Organization, took the Fifth more than 500 times.

Now, at 85 years old, it’s more important than ever for Tony Fauci to know that those of us who have witnessed, first hand, the great advances he guided in medical science and infectious disease research, treatment and care—particularly in the area of HIV/AIDS— during his 54 years of stellar public service, will never be forget his achievements, nor allow them to be minimized.

No one else, before or after Dr. Fauci, has had the enormous capacity, credibility, knowledge, record of accomplishment, depth of expertise, passion for public health, and track record in getting a huge bureaucracy to move into action as Anthony Fauci exercised on behalf of all Americans in battling a cascade of serious public health challenges.

No puerile histrionics by Rand Paul; no feigned outrage by Bernie Moreno—who won’t even protect his own daughter and granddaughter from domestic abuse; and no transparently hypocritical hyperbole by Florida’s utterly corrupt Medicare Fraud King Rick Scott, can undo the historic accomplishments in public health, and public service, of Dr. Anthony Fauci.

With Fauci, the Force is strong.

####

(At the nearly 100-year old Chapin Family compound in Andover, New Jersey, Tom Chapin—Harry Chapin’s younger brother, and— a singer/songwriter/activist and Grammy Award winner in his own right, ponders the photo of his brother Harry (center, on mantlepiece) and the painting of his maternal grandfather, the 20th Century literary giant Kenneth Burke, or K.B., as he was called. The portrait of Kenneth Burke, with the old manual typewriter at his shoulder, was painted by Tom and Harry’s paternal grandfather, James Ormsby Chapin, a prominent depression-era folk artist.

( Photo & Story by Steve Villano)

(This month marks the 45th Anniversary of the death of Harry Chapin, and the interest in this unique life of an American musician, artist and citizen activist continues to grow. I’ve written much about Harry Chapin, and had the distinct pleasure of working on the documentary entitled “When In Doubt Do Something,” about his life with Producer Rick Korn, and Harry’s son, Jason Chapin. Yet, what frequently gets overlooked by the focus on Harry’s music and his family’s continuing fight against poverty and food insecurity, is the fascinating story of the generations of Chapin (and Burke) history-makers which came before him. Here is part of that story:

Harry Chapin’s life was, at it’s core, a love story — a complicated, triangulated, convoluted, undisputed, multi-generational, non-denominational, big-brotherish, earth-motherish, Bohemian-maniacal, Yankee Puritanical, serendipitous, so ridiculous love story that it could just as well have been fiction, or the subject of one of Harry’s own story songs. But, it was a love story as real as life, with roots as deep as roots can reach, and lots of reminders that it happened, and was not just imagined.

It’s a story that dates back decades, into generations and centuries, back in time before there was a country to be part of, or proud of, but not before there were some things that mattered so much, everything would be risked.

It began, as many love stories do, with some headstrong romantic infatuated with the notion that, somewhere, there was a better life than the one he or she was living, and that something — anything —needed to be done to bring it about. That headstrong romantic was not Harry.

Unlike Frank Sinatra, who came from a family of poor immigrants, during a time of virulent anti-Italian and anti-immigrant fervor in the United States, Harry Chapin was born of American bluebloods — White Anglo Saxon Protestants who came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony just two decades after the first African Slaves were dragged in chains to the Commonwealth of Virginia.

The risk-taking romantic in the Chapin family was Harry’s great grandfather to the ninth generation, Deacon Samuel Chapin, who escaped England in the 1600’s with his wife and lover Cicely, to be free from religious persecution. Deacon Sam Chapin became one of the founders of Springfield, Mass., where — in one of the first colonies to abolish slavery in America — former slaves knew they would find a welcoming haven, just across the border from Connecticut, an early slave-holding state.

Unlike Bruce Springsteen, who grew up in a working-class enclave of Freehold, New Jersey, or Elvis Presley, whose parents and grandparents were dirt poor in Tupelo, Mississippi, or Billy Joel, with whom he shared a musical legacy passed on by their fathers, the social, intellectual and political skills of Harry Chapin’s ancestors put them among the elite of American culture. To them, the Mayflower was a means of transportation, not an historic old New York hotel, nor a moving truck on US highways.

Harry’s maternal grandfather, Kenneth Burke, authored 15 books, and among students of language, was considered a literary and linguistic giant for most of the 20th Century. In 1981, the year Harry died, “KB”, as family members called him, won the National Medal for Literature, at 84 years old.

Burke brought the practice of the literary & artistic salons, made famous by Virginia Wolfe and the Bloomsbury Writers in London, Gertrude Stein in Paris, or Dorothy Parker and the Algonquin Round Table in New York, out to a 165-acre family compound in Andover, New Jersey—still used by the Chapin family– he purchased with the proceeds from a $2800 literary prize he won in 1928.

There he entertained writers, artists and philosophers from around the world, giving them space and freedom to work on their craft and discuss it, while he did the same. That kind of laboratory for creativity and learning, and a passion to do something that mattered, even if it didn’t pay well, was not lost on Harry Chapin, nor his brothers, who spent endless summers of their youth barefoot and sometimes bare-bottomed in the Walden-like environment at Andover.

In fact, it was KB’s daughter Eleanor’s husband, Ricky Leacock, the great documentary film maker and inventor of the art of Cinema Verite and a colleague of such giants of documentary filmmaking as D.A. Pennebaker and Albert & David Maysles , who perfectly captured the atmosphere of Andover in a short film featuring the young Chapin boys, and their male cousins, entitled The Barebottom Tribe. Few other families could boast that one of them was a legendary filmmaker making home movies, but that was the milieu in which the Chapins and the Burkes came of age.

During some of the most tumultuous times for intellectuals, writers and artists in the United States in the 1930’s, 1940’s and early 1950’s — at the peak of Red-baiting and anti-Communist hysteria — Burke hosted writers like Malcolm Cowley, Jon Dos Passos, Shirley Jackson (author of the later-banned short story The Lottery), and Ralph Ellison; poets William Carlos Williams and e.e. cummings, and artists like Alexander Calder, and a local scenic and portrait painter and illustrator named James Ormsby Chapin, who did some design work for The Dial Magazine, which Burke edited.

Shortly before his book The Invisible Man was published(Random House, NY, 1952), Ralph Ellison sat on Kenneth Burke’s piano bench at the main house in Andover, and as KB’s son Michael Burke recalled, read excerpts from his incendiary book on race relations in the United States:

“Ellison sat on KB’s bench, and I was mesmerized as he read from the chapter where he described young Black men boxing bare-chested for the entertainment of the wealthy, White elite of the community, “ Michael Burke said.

Toward the end of the chapter, the winning, young Black boxers were forced to jump for coins tossed onto an electrified carpet by the inebriated, inhumane White men, who found entertainment in the young Black men’s suffering. Each coin the young Black athletes touched sent an electric shock through their bodies until, as Ellison wrote, “ I saw one boy…his back glistening with sweat like a circus seal…landing flush upon the charged rug, heard him yell and saw him literally dance upon his back, his elbows beating a frenzied tattoo upon the floor, his muscles twitching like the flesh of a horse stung by many flies.”

On other days, Michael Burke, who became like an older brother to Harry Chapin, would hear William Carlos Williams read his poetry, or use the hand-shaped, wire toilet-paper hold made by Alexander Calder, with the middle finger extended to hold the roll of paper. Andover, and the literary world Kenneth Burke nurtured, was a remarkable, Renaissance-like, place, and for the Chapin brothers it was an endless summer camp.

“It was an ever shifting feast of people, all kinds of people “ Princeton historian Sean Wilentz said of Andover, where he spent some time as a child. Wilentz, the author of books on Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson and five other history books — and one of the country’s foremost authorities on Bob Dylan (Bob Dylan in America, Anchor Books, NY, 2010) — grew up right behind the Chapin/Harts in Brooklyn. His family ran the 8th Street Bookshop in Greenwich Village, and his father Elias Wilentz, who edited The Beat Scene —an early anthology of Beat poetry — was a drinking buddy of Kenneth Burke’s.

“There was a whirwind of activity there, “ Wilentz said, “and all of this was going on in this sylvan, beautiful rural atmosphere — in the middle of nowhere. It was a Bohemian, but very loving environment. In that family, everybody got divorced, but no one ever left. When you were welcomed in by them, you knew you were loved.”

Those “sylvan, beautiful rural” mountains of New Jersey also appealed to James Ormsby Chapin as an escape from the highly commercialized New York City art world, which he detested. A close friend of the poet Robert Frost’s for three decades, Harry’s paternal grandfather illustrated Frost’s first book of poetry, North of Boston, in 1917. The following year, in 1918, a serendipitous encounter on a NYC subway train between James Ormsby Chapin and his former high school teacher, Abigail Forbes, led to the two dramatically different personalities getting married.

James Ormsby Chapin not only did illustrations for Robert Frost and Kenneth Burke, he designed several covers for Time Magazine and become one of the most accomplished depression-era artists of his time, with his haunting depictions of people enduring the hardships of life, inspiring painters of the caliber of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Decades later his grandson Harry would be so deeply influenced by his painting, that the younger Chapin’s story songs seemed as if they simply put lyrics to the lives of the beaten down individuals James Ormsby Chapin captured on his canvases.

Many resembled the people Harry Chapin encountered years later in Flint, Michigan, when he gave benefit concerts there for Michael Moore’s Flint Voice, and may have explained the deep connection they felt for each other. However, the marriage between the distinguished and proper Victorian schoolteacher, and the much younger bohemian artist was not nearly as enduring as James Ormsby Chapin’s art. Their marriage lasted only two years, with Abby Forbes giving birth to one son, James Forbes Chapin, who would later become the father of Harry Chapin, and his brothers James, Tom and Steven.

Serendipity seemed to be the stuff of life for the Burkes and Chapins. In the mid-to-late 1930’s, several years before Harry was born, James Ormsby Chapin took a teaching fellowship at the Summer Art Institute of Claremont College in Southern California. While there, he walked into a small sportswear shop and in another act of kismet similar to how he met Abby Forbes on the NYC subway, and how, years later, Harry would meet Sandy Gaston Cashmore when he showed up at the front door of a Brooklyn brownstone to give her guitar lessons, the talented portrait artist recognized the young, lithe Mary Fisher from one of his art classes and was smitten when he saw her amidst the delicate dresses she sold. He told Mary he wanted to paint her portrait, and by August, 1937, they were married in Pasadena, California.

The artist Chapin and his new wife, moved back east and into an old barn on Kenneth Burke’s sprawling Andover compound where they lived and Big Jim painted. When his grown son James from his marriage to Abby Forbes visited Big Jim and Mary at the Burke compound, James — already a musician at the age of 21 — met Elspeth — Kenneth Burke’s eldest daughter, and later, Harry’s mother — and they immediately fell in love, marrying in 1940.

Mary Chapin, in her unpublished diaries entitled “The Beginnings of Our Life Together,” chronicled the artists and writers who dropped in and out of Andover, and called life at the Burke compound “bliss.”

“In the mornings, everyone did his work,” Mary Chapin wrote. “The writers wrote, the painters painted, the comforters (mostly the women) prepared the creature comforts. Jim’s (Chapin’s) easel was set up in the open section of the barn.”

Then Mary, who would open a dress shop in New Jersey before taking off in 1968 to Canada with James Ormsby Chapin and their two sons Elliot and Jed who were avoiding the draft for the Vietnam War, located the thread which stitched all of the Burkes and Chapins together:

“In the case of the Burke household, not even the problem of the broken family was going to do them damage. In later years, I asked one of their young men how it happened that he had such strong family ties even with the families marital scrambling. He said that he felt as if he just had more people loving him. There was plenty of love.”

Harry Chapin was born into this fearlessly creative, loving, hippie-ish family in 1942 — on the first anniversary of Pearl Harbor — and was exposed, from his earliest years, to a world where wealth was measured in the richness of the writing, artistic work and the hurricane of ideas swirling around him, not in dollars. To create, was to be alive, and, with family, all that was necessary for success. The fundamental non-financial values of Harry’s family were not the same of Sinatra’s, Springsteen’s, Elvis’ or even Billy Joel’s, where daily economic survival was essential. To the Burkes and the Chapins, money really didn’t matter.

Harry Chapin, like Pete Seeger, had been blessed with a simple, carefree life, despite members of each of their families — including Seeger himself — being “Blacklisted” for their political activities by rabidly anti-Communist Right Wing public officials. Seeger’s own father, Charles, was forced out of the music department he established at the University of California at Berkeley because of his publicly professed pacifism toward World War I. Imagine, being forced out of Berkeley for being a pacifist.

At virtually the same moment Charles Seeger was being booted from Berkeley in 1917, Harry’s great Aunt Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers movement, was being physically attacked for her work in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. A journalist who wrote for the Socialist and IWW (International Workers of the World) newspaper The NewYork Call; interviewed historic figures like Margaret Sanger and Leon Trotsky; and was close friends with the playwright Eugene O’Neill, Dorothy Day crusaded against American entrance into World War I, and in favor of Women’s Suffrage.

Day’s work on the movement to secure the right to vote for women nearly got her killed. She joined her friend Peggy Baird Johnson (who would later marry K.B’s best friend, the writer Malcolm Cowley) at a November 1917, Suffragette demonstration in Washington, DC, where Dorothy and Peggy would be arrested along with 46 others and jailed for 30 days.

During her incarceration, Dorothy Day was nearly beaten to death by guards armed with billy clubs in “the worst and most brutal incident of the treatment of the suffragists, where they were dragged, kicked, trampled and choked,” according to Day’s youngest granddaughter, Kate Hennessey, in the comprehensive biography of her grandmother, Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (Scribner, NY, NY, 2017). Three years later, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified, securing the right to vote for women.

In sharp contrast to their ancestors, Harry Chapin and Pete Seeger lived charmed lives.

“ I was born into a very easy life in many ways,” Seeger said. “ My parents were professional musicians and when they split up I went to spend vacations with my grandparents who had a private house in the country.”

It’s as if Pete Seeger was foreshadowing the path that awaited Harry Chapin.

While Harry’s grandfather Kenneth Burke was a music critic and understood all the elements of sound, orchestration and lyrics, and his “private house in the country” paralleled that of Pete Seeger’s grandparents, the most likely musical influence for Harry, Tom and Steve Chapin, was their father, Jim Chapin, who became a top drummer with some of the leading musicians of his time, including the Glenn Grey Orchestra and Tony Pastor. He taught and wrote books on drumming, most notably Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer, Volumes I & II,which became, and remains, the essential professional instruction book for most modern drummers, more than a decade after Jim Chapin’s death in 2009.

Jim Chapin’s drumming Techniques book became world famous, but his musical career did not, missing some opportunities to play with the biggest bands of his time.

“Dorsey (Tommy Dorsey) didn’t like his foot,” said Harry’s younger brother Tom, flashing a sweet smile at the memory of his father. “He didn’t hit the base drum hard enough.”

Much later, Tom Chapin would say that his father’s example “provided the joy of music. He was a fun, attractive guy who loved to play. We’d see him on weekends, and the sense of possibility (of a musical career) was there.”

Jim Chapin’s obsession with his music kept him away from his wife Elspeth, and their four sons, and that, as well as his love for other women, contributed to their divorce when Harry was only 6 years old.

But, when Harry, Steve & Tom played as The Chapins in clubs like the Bitter End and the Bottom Line around New York in the mid-to-late 1960’s, their father Jim joined them on the drums, keeping their music a full family affair for a while, underscoring the musical tradition into which the Chapin sons were born.

Harry’s early insights about poverty and hunger came from the brilliant work of Michael Harrington, a friend and colleague of his politically astute oldest brother James, who was active in the Democratic Socialists of America. Harrington’s book, The Other America detailing extensive poverty and hunger in the US (Penguin Books, NY, 1962) seized the nation’s attention when it was published, especially that of President John. F. Kennedy. The book became the blueprint for JFK’s—and later LBJ’s–War on Poverty. It also served as one of the inspirations for the Chapin family’s lifelong fight against poverty and food insecurity. James Chapin, Harry’s oldest brother, would serve as Harry’s political guru and advisor throughout his lifetime and steered him toward making a difference on a single, significant social issue.

Born to privilege and into a family of thinkers and artists, Harry felt compelled to do something about the promise of what he believed America was supposed to be for others not as fortunate as the Chapins. His unapologetic patriotism, and unfettered sense of fairness, would, at roughly the same age, lead him to take the same approach Frank Sinatra took in 1945, at age 30 toward civil and human rights activism.

Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, into a struggling Italian family of immigrants — less than an hour from the Andover compound where the Burkes and Chapins would congregate. Pete Hamill, in his remarkable book about Sinatra entitled Why Sinatra Matters, writes how “music was the engine of Sinatra’s life.” Not so, for Harry Chapin. He was the engine of his own life.

““Having Harry for a brother was like having a steam engine for a brother, “ said his oldest brother James Chapin, during Harry’s memorial service at Grace Episcopal Church in Brooklyn, in 1981, acknowledging the effect he had on everyone who came in contact with him. He would never take “no” for an answer, had boundless energy, and was as relentless in fighting for his social and political causes as he was in pursuing his musical career.

“Harry gave away more than he got, “ said Billy Joel, in an interview in his motorcyle shop in the heart of the Village of Oyster Bay, not far from where the Chapins lived in Huntington. “ He concentrated on helping people, whenever he could, giving his money away to other people, for a cause. He had so much talent, and he used it for other people, not for his own gain.”

“We need Harry now more than ever,” Joel said. “Today, when it’s all about greed, all about selfishness, he’d be nudging the hell out of me, out of everyone, to get involved.”

Yet, his music and his life as an artist, in a family of artists, mattered to Harry as much as his activism and citizenship did.

Harry Chapin’s great gift was to merge the many parts of himself — artist, activist, decent human being, brother, father, citizen — into a sort of one-man movement — “a movement among movements” to paraphrase the great social activist and food insecurity guru Frances Moore Lappe, whose first book, Diet for A Small Planet (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1971) had a profound influence on the Chapin family’s thinking about poverty, hunger, income inequality, and the politics of social change, and whose second book Food First, was funded with a starter grant from Harry.

“He wanted to change the world,” said Big John Wallace, his longtime guitarist, fellow singer, and childhood friend dating back to Brooklyn’s Grace Episcopal Church Choir, where they first sang together.

“And he did.”

(My book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother” Heliotrope Books, N.Y.—available on Amazon—and my brother Michael Villano, as I remember him.)

My brother Michael, nine years older than me, would have been 86-years old this week. He’s been on my mind a lot lately, since my son has just co-authored a book about the great chefs and winemakers in California’s wine country, and my brother was a first-rate chef.

He was my first hero, a calm gentle presence in my chaotic early life, the opposite of my father whose temper could explode as quickly as the steam boilers he labored over in the bowels of the basement of a rich man’s office tower in mid-town Manhattan. Gifted with patience, my brother Michael would assemble all of the toys my father had no patience, or time, for putting together.

I always saw my brother through my mother’s eyes, and that view was rose-colored, gentle and perfect, even when my brother’s life veered into a far different direction in later years. To my mother, to me, my brother was always there, ready to help, to calm the waters.

He could build anything—a four-poster bed, a bicycle, or a house like the one he constructed in Paradise Valley, Arizona, when Arizona was still an undiscovered paradise. I once watched him cook a meal from scratch for two dozen people, each ingredient carefully chosen, each choice delicately considered, each course, better than the one before. I was mesmerized by his short, stubby fingers and how much they looked like our mother’s. In a different time, in a different life, with different financial backers than those who dragged him down, my brother could have become one of the great chefs of the world. Who knows? He may have even been featured in my son’s book.

My brother’s life and mine, diverged sharply over the last several decades of his life. As I detailed in my own book “Tightrope: Balancing A Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother,” (Heliotrope Books, N.Y., 2017) Michael worked with the Gambino Crime family and John Gotti as a “bagman,” during the same time I was working with New York State Governor, Mario M. Cuomo—the most prominent Italian-American public official in the United States, a model of integrity who revered the Rule of Law.

I knew, first-hand, that Mario Cuomo had no connections to the Mob, because I did. And my brother and his organized crime associates talked openly how “Mario Cuomo was unreachable,” and how Donald Trump—who slobbered all over them in New York’s construction industry-- was a cash-cow they loved to bully, because he would do anything they demanded, terrified of their toughness. Kind of like how Trump still rolls over for another gangster today, Vladimir Putin.

My idolization of my brother Michael turned into sadness, anger, sorrow and then, in the end, love again. He had lost his way, made a cascade of mistakes, and got sucked into a whirlpool of debt and obligation and personal loyalty he could not escape.

On my brother’s 70^th birthday, in 2010, we met for lunch at a waterside restaurant in Northport, Long Island, facing Crab Meadow beach. I told him I was working on my book, and had been since 1988, when he was sentenced to 90 days in prison for income tax invasion.

“Just like Al Capone,” he would joke, referring to the tax evasion convictions, which I didn’t find too funny because of the pain it put so many of us through.

Each time Donald Trump compares his, thus far, 34 Felony convictions to the 23 that Capone had, as if to prove he was tougher and more of a criminal outlaw than Capone, I am reminded of my brother’s braggadocio.

I told Michael I was the only one who could tell this story, and the only one who would do justice to it. He agreed, and was very supportive, even enthused about it.

“Just don’t rat anybody out,” he said to me, in typical New York mob fashion.

I smiled at him.

“That would be kind of hard, Michael, since everyone is dead,” I said.

John Gotti was already dead for 8 years, at age 61, and my brother was no longer involved with the Gambino Crime family. It was 17 years since I worked for Mario Cuomo, and I was now running a non-profit organization and living with my family in Northern California.

In early Spring, 2014, I learned that my brother was battling pancreatic cancer. I no longer had an unlimited amount of time, nor did he. I wanted to finish this story I had been working on for nearly 30 years, so he could read it before he died.

I could not write fast enough. In November, 2014, my brother Michael lost his 9-month long battle with pancreatic cancer. My manuscript now had an added purpose: to give new life and meaning to the memories of my brother, complicated as they were, and to our relationship.

Then, within 60 days of my brother’s death, Mario Cuomo died. I had run out of excuses for not finishing my book. All of the principal characters were dead, but me. And no one else had written the story to give me a final reprieve, as I had hoped, so the only option left was for me to tell it myself; to excise this growth from inside me.

Ironically, after my book was published in the summer of 2017, there were a number of people who wished it had never been written. Sure, as Pete Hamill noted when he wrote “A Drinking Life,” family members hate when “one of their own,” tells the stories everyone was trying to hide.

My family was no different than Hamill’s. My mother died 10 years earlier so I didn’t have to worry about her being upset about “airing our dirty laundry.” In fact, I purposely postponed telling the story as non-fiction for 14 full years before my mother died.

In 1992, I had lunch with the elegant Italian-American writer Gay Talese, at one of his favorite restaurants around the corner from his E. 61^st townhouse in Manhattan. Talese had asked Mario Cuomo to write a book-jacket blurb for his autobiography Unto the Sons, and the Governor delegated the task to me since he had no time to read the book, and knew I loved Talese’s writing.

Talese and I talked a bit about his book, his family, and about the difficulty Italian-American writers experienced in revealing family secrets. As a probing journalist, Talese wanted to know what my family secrets were. I told him that I had written two fictionalized versions of the story—each one, approximately 500 pages.

Talese looked straight at me and told me that such a powerful and unique story begged to be told as non-fiction, a form or writing he favored. He challenged me to do a 10-page outline for a non-fiction book over the next few weeks.

When I got back to him, my “10-page outline” had grown to a 154-page annotated and detailed outline, complete with quotes, contemporaneous notes and sources. Talese took one look at the tome and told me: “You’ve got the book right here.”

“There’s only one problem with it, Gay,” I said. “I won’t publish this story in non-fiction form while my mother is alive, and while Mario Cuomo is still Governor. It would kill my mother, and it could be distorted to be used against Cuomo.”

So, I sat on the story for years, work-shopping it as fiction, as a stage play, or as a screenplay. My brother Michael may have been fine with the non-fiction story of our lives—even a little titillated by it-- but his surviving family was not, despite my painstakingly portraying my brother as my life-long hero, and as a good man, who simply lost his way.

The Cuomo family hated it, and expressed to me through confidants that “the book should have never been written.” They were not happy with having Mario Cuomo’s name in the same book as someone affiliated with “the Mob.”

“Why,” I responded, “Only Cuomos are supposed to write books? Only their versions of stories are to be told?”

It did not matter how much I explained that the book was written as an eye-witness account of how Cuomo had NO mob connections; that I wanted to definitively dispel the vicious, ethnically prejudiced rumors that because Cuomo was Italian he must be “mobbed up.” Nothing could have been further from the truth, and I wrote the book to give first-hand evidence to that.

To the Cuomo’s none of that mattered. They were worried about the headlines linking the name “Cuomo” with any mention of the Mob, even if it was to prove those rumors were all lies. Astounding.

In settling on “Tightrope’s” full title, I rebuffed the suggestion from marketing people to put “The Mob” in the book’s title, to sell many more books. I rejected that suggestion, not just to protect Mario Cuomo from malevolent screen shots, but because my life was not torn between me and The Mob, but between me and my brother, who happened to work for the Mob.

In the end, it was my story; nurtured inside me for more than three decades; told over years in parts to therapists, friends and colleagues; recorded in dozens of notebooks, memos and papers kept contemporaneously from my years of working with Mario Cuomo; and from my endless days of witnessing my brother’s criminal record unfold in Federal court, and, finally, being the only family member present to watch him get sentenced to prison.

My brother is dead 12 years now, and each time I go back and re-read a portion of my book about him, he is still alive, and, I’d like to think, wishing he had followed a different recipe for his life and been more in tune with the kind, good person I knew and loved.

(45 years ago this month, singer/songwriter/activist Harry Chapin was killed in a car accident on the Long Island Expressway. He was 38 years old.

In addition to recording 12 Albums, and performing some 2000 concerts over a 10-year career, Chapin co-founded the International world hunger organization, WHYHunger, with former Catholic Priest and social justice advocate Bill Ayres

That really wasn’t too much of a surprise since Harry’s great aunt was Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Workers Movement, and a force in progressive social action going back to her opposition to the US involvement in WWI, and her being jailed and beaten for demanding voting rights for women.

Working with then-Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy and President Jimmy Carter, Harry Chapin pushed hard for the creation of the first — and only — Presidential Commission on Hunger in US History in 1980. It still stands as the only American Hunger Commission ever created.

With WHYHunger — 51 years after it’s founding — still fighting hunger and the broader issues of poverty and income inequality, and Harry Chapin Food Banks feeding tens of thousands of Americans across this nation each year — Chapin’s music, his messages of social justice, and his work for social change are more important and relevant today than they have ever been.

Six years ago, I had the privilege of working on a documentary film: “Harry Chapin: When In Doubt, Do Something.” The unique, socially conscious documentary, was produced, written and directed by Rick Korn, S.A. Baron and one of Harry’s sons, Jason Chapin. It has been viewed hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube, Amazon Video, Netflix and on airline flights nationwide, and is still available on streaming services.)

***

When Harry Chapin was killed in a motor vehicle accident on the Long Island Expressway, July 16, 1981, the news was slow to spread.

It wasn’t like when Elvis died four years earlier, nor when John Lennon was assassinated only seven months before, on December 9, 1980, just two days after Harry Chapin’s 38th and final birthday.

Then, the news of the deaths of those legends travelled at the speed of sound, like giant trees falling in the center of media forests. Everyone knew instantly. The whole world went dark for a time, as if someone pulled out the plug.

Despite their similarities of age, Elvis was 42, and Lennon, 40, Chapin’s musical career never came near those heights, with Cats in the Cradle being his only #1 top 40 hit, over a span of 10 years, 12 albums, and hundreds of poems and stories put to song.

Fellow Long Island musician, Billy Joel, who produced 33 top 40 hits, and performed before over 100 sell-out crowds at Madison Square Garden, recalled Harry’s many kindnesses toward him in the “dog eat dog business” of music.

“I was the opening act for him at the Kiel Opera House in St. Louis (now the Stifel Theatre) in 1973–74, “ Joel said in an interview at his Motorcycle shop and museum in Oyster Bay, Long Island, NY.

“He was the headliner. He plugged me to his own audience. ‘How about that Billy Joel,’ he said. That was so gentlemanly of him, and, I never forgot that.”

Years later when the five-time Grammy Award winning Joel’s star rose faster and higher than Chapin’s, Harry opened for him, and Billy made a point of saying “we worked together, and we always worked really well as a show.’

Harry Chapin was not in the rarified league of John Lennon, Elvis or even Billy Joel when it came to fame. Few musicians were. But, regarding humanitarian work, few celebrities came close to Chapin, nor did many try to follow his lead, until after he was gone. Harry had created a Humanitarian Hall of Fame for performers who could translate their popularity into a permanent public good, and there were few stars applying to get in.

“In Harry’s case, he was literally the only artist in those days doing great humanitarian work,” said the late Ken Kragen, Chapin’s manager from 1976 until his death.

“ That’s what really made him unique. He was the only artist getting something done on the issues of hunger and poverty. He was very, very committed.”

Kragen, who would, in the mid 1980’s organize two enormous events aimed at alleviating hunger and poverty — We Are The World, and Hands Across America — which raised tens of millions of dollars and global awareness about the urgency of alleviating human suffering, credited Harry Chapin with being the source of his inspiration.

“ I had this overwhelming feeling that Harry Chapin had crawled up inside me, and he was directing everything I was doing, “ Kragen said. “Suddenly, I became the doer of his will. It was one of the things that pushed me to keep going.”

Billy Joel, standing next to Cyndi Lauper among the dozens of major recording artists like Bruce Springsteen, Michael Jackson, Lionel Richie, Kenny Rogers, Quincy Jones, & Stevie Wonder participating in the 1985 recording of We Are The World which Kragen arranged, underscored that assessment of what made Harry Chapin stand out from everyone else in the music business a full decade earlier.

“He was inspiring how motivated he was to try to help others. He was like a saint to the point of being a martyr, “ said Joel, noting that Chapin, seven years older was like an older brother to him, and taught him the importance of giving back. “If there was a religious medal for musicians who helped other people, Harry’s face would be on it,” Joel said.

Harry’s unmistakable smiling face and lanky body were badly burned in a fiery car crash, when his tiny Volkswagen Rabbit with a flawed seat-belt mechanism, was rear-ended by a big truck bearing down on him.

Family members knew something was wrong when he was late for a significant meeting in NYC with his Business Manager, half-brother Jeb Hart, and top talent agent Shellie Schultz of ICM.

The meeting, blown-off the day before by Harry, had been rescheduled for July 16, by Jeb, who was now struggling to manage the day-to-day details of Harry’s musical career, out of sheer exasperation, to get Chapin to slow down a bit, concentrate more of his time and attention on his family and career, and devote less energy to the many social and political causes that were consuming him.

“Harry’s greatest quality, was his quality of inclusion, but he was just running, running on vapors, “ said Jeb, “and his career had become secondary. He was out of control. We were trying to get him to focus.”

In his decade of performing across the country, in venues that ranged from backyard barbeques to the Bottom Line Café, to big, sprawling concert halls, college campuses and the steps of the US Capitol Building, Harry Chapin did some 200 concerts per year, with nearly half of them being benefits for one non-profit or political cause or another, mostly fighting hunger and poverty.

From March, 1980 through July, 1981 — the final 16 months of his life — Harry Chapin juggled enough projects to fill a career: he finished his work on the nation’s first-ever Presidential Hunger Commission which he and Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont (D-VT) were instrumental in getting President Jimmy Carter to create; participated in unique Radio “HungerThons” with WPLJ-DJ and former Catholic priest Bill Ayres raising millions of dollars for the World Hunger Year (WHYHunger) organization they jointly established; founded Long Island Cares with his wife, partner, conscience and “one-person think tank” Sandy Chapin, who gave birth to the idea of a Presidential Hunger Commission; performed with Peter Yarrow and Mary Travers at the funeral of his assassinated political hero, Allard Lowenstein; relentlessly conducted fundraising benefits across the United States for progressive Democratic candidates courageously combating the Reagan landslide of 1980; and gave the 2,000th concert of his career at the Bottom Line Café, in Manhattan over one weekend in January, 1981.

“Harry just couldn’t say ‘no’,” said Jeb Hart. “He had so many people he was talking to across a spectrum of causes and issues. He’d be making commitments to all of these entities in the midst of doing all these concerts.”

Chapin was involved with “good people,” as he liked to say, quoting Pete Seeger, long a role model for him in how to integrate his music into living a life that mattered on the most important social issues of the time.

In Pete Seeger: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection (Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, 2019), author Jeff Place writes:

“Pete saw his music as a means to move mountains — to end racism, poverty, social injustice, political ineptitude and war. There was a reason behind every song Pete wrote or sang. They carried messages and taught lessons. They fostered hope or strength or both. Even the simply fun folksongs had a purpose: they made us feel happy and connected, which could lead to a respect for your fellows, or love for your neighbor, saving the earth from environmental disaster, or…”

Tom Chapin recalled a concert he, Harry and Pete did at Huntington High School, in early January, 1976, to benefit Huntington’s PAF Playhouse, the performing arts group which was a particular passion of Sandy Chapin’s, who was dedicated to arts and arts education.

“One of the students in the audience asked Pete if he thought that all of the benefits for good causes had made any difference, “Tom said. “Seeger responded with this trademark honesty. “ I don’t know,” he said to the student. “But, I do know this. I’ve met good people; people with live hearts, live eyes and live minds.”

“Such a perfect Pete answer,” Tom Chapin said. “Deflecting any credit, not putting down a young reporter’s slightly pushy question, and pointing out what the concerts had done for him personally. Harry and I never forgot it.”

(JFK, Jr., & Harry Chapin: Lovers of Life; Brothers in Death.)

They were always there, right in front of me: Harry Chapin, and John F. Kennedy, Jr., linked in death on the same exact date — July 16.

They died 18 years apart, their age difference, when they were both killed in terrible accidents at 38 years old.

Chapin’s brief, shooting-star-of-a-life ended on July 16, 1981—45 years ago— in the fiery crash of a small car on the Long Island Expressway; JFK, Jr.’s, in the crash of a small aircraft—on July 16, 1999— somewhere off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard.

They were lovers of life and brothers in death, but their families — guided by strong women — and their mutual lust for life were intertwined in ways that one of Harry Chapin’s five children, Jason, would come to experience first-hand, in his work directly with JFK, Jr. and his “Reaching Up” non-profit organization.

The son of President John F. Kennedy founded “Reaching Up” in 1989 — eight years after Harry Chapin died — to give greater access to higher education and training to healthcare givers working with individuals with disabilities.

The organization’s work not only enlarged the scope of the Special Olympics founded by JFK, Jr.’s Aunt Eunice Shriver, but it also shared the compassion and common sense of the life-saving work done by a national non-profit co-founded by singer/songwriter Harry Chapin at the peak of his fame — “WhyHunger’ — still tackling food insecurity in local communities 50+ years after it was formed, as well as providing job skills to lift people out of poverty. Chapin and Kennedy were answering similar calls to serve others.

Jason Chapin, who worked with Governor Mario M. Cuomo and was elected to two, four-year terms on the New Castle Town Council in Westchester, County, NY, has, along with his four siblings — Jono, Jaime, Jen and Josh, and their mother Sandy — carried on Harry Chapin’s work forWhyHunger and local food banks since 1975. He is the only Chapin to know JFK, Jr., and work with the “Reaching Up” organization and its City University of New York partner (CUNY) from 1995 to 2001.

“John was extremely passionate and dedicated to the organization, “ Jason Chapin said. “ I will always remember our Board Meetings which John chaired. He politely greeted everyone in the room when he arrived. He attended all of the annual Reaching Up Kennedy Fellows Convocations and was very friendly with the Fellows.”

It was precisely the same way JFK, Jr., greeted me 30 years ago, at a non-profit breakfast at New York’s Plaza Hotel , which I attended as a guest of Jason Chapin’s. I was representing Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn, where I was a Vice-President, and wearing a “We Believe in Brooklyn” button to boost Brooklyn’s visibility among the Manhattan political and media elite.

JFK, Jr., who sat a few seats away from me at the circular table, spotted my button as soon as we got seated. He leaned over to me and whispered

“My family believes in Brooklyn, too,” JFK, Jr. said.

“We still believe deeply in the Bed Stuy Redevelopment Project.”

The Bedford Stuyvesant Redevelopment Project was an important initiative started during the too short Senate term of his uncle, Robert F. Kennedy, when he was NY’s U.S. Senator, from 1965–68.

What JFK, Jr., did not know then was how important Jason Chapin’s grandfather, John Cashmore, was to his own father’s election as President of the United States in 1960. Cashmore, Brooklyn Borough President from 1940–1961, delivered 66% of Kings County’s vote to JFK, helping him beat Nixon in New York State by five percent, and win NY’s 45 electoral votes, giving Kennedy the 303 Electoral votes he needed to win the Presidency.

I mentioned to JFK, Jr. how important the Bed Stuy project was to Central Brooklyn, the community served by our public hospital, and how important his own father’s example of public service was to me in guiding my life’s work.

“You probably get tired of hearing that from so many people of my generation,” I said to JFK, Jr.

“I never get tired of hearing it,” he said. “It makes me proud to see how many people my father inspired.”

Over the four decades I’ve known Jason Chapin, I’ve heard him say, with unending politeness and grace, the exact same words about his father, when people tell him Harry Chapin inspired them to commit their lives to fighting poverty and hunger, or improving public health, or helping refugees find access to food or shelter.

“I’m always amazed by how many people my father reached, how many lives he touched,” Jason says again and again.

Harry Chapin, like many of the Kennedys (the glaring exception being Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Trump’s Secretary of HHS) was determined to use his celebrity to do good, performing 2000 concerts during his 10-year music career, with half of them as benefits, raising more than $6 million to fight hunger, and millions more on his radio “Hungerthons” with WhyHunger co-founder and radio host Bill Ayres.

Ayres was a former Catholic priest who Marched on Washington with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1963 — to pressure JFK, Jr’s father to enact Civil Rights and Voting Rights legislation. He had already played a part in changing the world before he met Harry Chapin.

As with JFK, Jr., Chapin was encouraged to take his activism, courage and compassion full-time to Washington, and run for the U.S. Senate from New York, which neither man lived long enough to do.

Harry recognized, as JFK, Jr., did with the creation of “Reaching Up” in 1989, that his name attached to any project could attract politicians, the media, the public and funding to the cause.

Chapin’s crusade against hunger and poverty, and his successful campaign to create a Presidential Hunger Commission —the only such Commission ever created in the United States—with the help of former United States Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT.) and President Jimmy Carter, exhibited the same instincts that propelled JFK, Jr., to launch “Reaching Up” and George Magazine : they both knew that politics and pop culture had merged, and that those in a position to use their fame to improve human existence, and to demonstrate their love for life, had an urgent responsibility to do so.

Now, 45 years after Harry Chapin’s death and 27 years after JFK, Jr’s — both on July 16 — their lessons of lending their celebrity, and giving their lives, to improving the lives of others, are more crucial than ever before. Kennedy & Chapin intuitively understood that fame and fortune carried with them a soaring social responsibility to be fearless in the selfless, public-spirited service of others struggling to survive each day.

(Risa Goldberger Gregory, center in red pants; Carol Jacobson Villano, right in yellow top, Risa’s college roommate; and me, in an “Immigrants” tee-shirt, on the Main Academic Podium—the main Quad— at SUNY Albany, where we graduated in 1971, 55 years ago. Risa, a source of life, love and laughter for all of us, died earlier this year. Her 77th birthday would have been this week, as well as her 50th Wedding Anniversary. Photo by Linden Gregory.)

There was so much more to Risa “Bessie” Goldberger Gregory than met the eye.

Gentle eyes of blue, five foot-two, Risa’s diminutive presence, her quick smile and contagious laugh, and her natural cuteness often disarmed people who met her, but didn’t really know her.

Her petite persona belied the steely determination behind each one of those 62 inches, just like they did in such historical figures as Joan of Arc, who was the same height; Golda Meir, two inches shorter than Risa; or, former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a towering 4 feet, 10 inches tall.

Risa would have loved the comparisons with women of valor in history, since she loved history. In fact, we became fast and lasting friends when we first met during our Freshman year of college at SUNY Albany, in Dr. Warren Roberts’ Western Civilization honors class, and learned we were both from Long Island, an incubator for much more than buffoons like Joey Buttafuoco, ghouls like the Gilgo Beach killer, or fabulist frauds like Georgie Porgie Santos.

We were mesmerized by the remarkable Dr. Roberts, who masterfully made world history into a Netflix series, some 12 years before any cable networks were invented. Risa Bessie and I hung on his every word, especially when Dr. Roberts explained his well-documented theory of the influence of sex upon history. After all, it was 1968.

I knew next-to-nothing about sex at that time, and chuckled quietly as Professor Roberts regaled us with tales of royal debauchery. Risa, on the other hand, whose sex eduction may not have been any more advanced than mine, laughed hilariously, and the rest of the class laughed with her, because….well, that’s just what you did when Risa laughed, and her smile flashed and her bright eyes twinkled. No one could be left behind.

Risa could talk about Warren Roberts and history in depth, or she could talk about clothing and make-up and music and art and feelings, with the best of us. Not shy, she was unafraid to challenge anything or anyone. If you met Anna Goldberger, her mother, to whom Risa was devoted for decades, you would understand her in-your-face fearlessness. Putting it all together, made Risa one of the first real Renaissance women from Freeport, LI, but she’d be the first one to roll her eyes and say “Oh, please,” if you called her that. Warren Roberts, a master of accomplished modesty, would be proud.

It was Junior Year of college, the Fall of 1969, when Risa and I, and my soon-to-be life-long love & partner Carol Jacobson, all became Resident Assistants or RA’s—24-hour on-call dorm counselors who received free room, board and tuition, for providing a little local, and loco, parental guidance to students in our dorms. Risa took to the job immediately, quickly interpreting RA to mean “Risa’s Authority.”

I got my earliest hint of “Risa’s Authority,” when I first visited the RA Suite which Risa and Carol shared in Eastman Tower, a 22-floor dormitory on State Quad. Carol’s side of the room was orderly and neat, but covered in dust—a condition which has lustily, and dustily, continued through our 54 years of marriage. Risa’s room-side, on the other hand, was a dust-free zone, where everything sparkled, for fear of running into the wrath of Risa, if as much as an errant speck of dust challenged her hegemony over her high-rise heaven.

The ability to make dust jump out of her way (“You’re not the boss of me!”) was a harbinger of Risa’s leadership ability to make college freshman move from where they were not supposed to be. With the end of curfew and limitations on conjugal college student visitations coming to an end on our watch—it was, after all, 1969, the year of Woodstock—a new form of unquestioned authority needed to be found, especially in times of fire drills, emergencies or rowdy crowds that got too loud.

The RA’s met; we explored other options; we searched for solutions; we discussed acceptable alternatives into the early-yawning hours. Suddenly, the sound of pulled fire alarms ricocheted around the Quad. Scantily clad students began pouring out of their dorms into the Quad, heeding the call of the sirens in the night to “PARTY.” Chaos threatened to consume us, until one sharp, clear, no-nonsense voice echoed throughout the Edward Durell Stone designed cement canyons of the State University’s Quad:

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa Bessie bellowed. “GET OFF THE QUAD!”

Students stopped in their tracks. Where did that command come from? There was no giant stomping over the Quad? No Big Brother loud-speaker. Was it a premonition of the ferocious voice forcing its’ way out of Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley in the not-yet made sci-fi horror movie “Alien?”

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa roared again, quickly taking control of what could have been an out-of-control circumstance.

“GET OFF THE QUAD,” Risa boomed once more into the darkness of the night, searing that life-saving directive into our memories for all of eternity.

Fast forward more than 50 years later, when parts of Risa’s memory began to leave her, that quintessential Risa quote—”GET OFF THE QUAD'“—could still cut through the fog of this night, and evoke her beautiful smile and contagious laugh, bringing us back into the same slice of time, back to our college years, back to our oldest and best friends, when we were sure that what we had would live forever.

(Photo by Steve Villano, at the National Memorial for Peace & Justice; Montgomery, Ala.)

I didn’t blow out any candles to celebrate the 250th birthday of the United States.

I spent the day quietly, the way I often like to put big celebrations in perspective: I read; I wrote; I sat outside in my garden and thought; I had breakfast with my best friend; got together for a shared dinner with our neighbors; and relished the joy in my youngest granddaughter’s eyes as she played with our next-door Pugs, declaring that the thing she liked best about the fireworks was the smoke trail they left behind in the night’s sky.

It was the perfect metaphor for what was important and lasting once all the hype, hysteria, flashes in the sky, and in the pan, were gone; that, and who remained, was what mattered.

For hours during the day I lost myself in the words and wisdom of Frederick Douglass and James Baldwin; in the clear, sharp observations of Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize winning writer, who escaped war and oppression at age 4, just before America’s Bicentennial; and, in the brilliant legal analysis of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in her powerful concurring opinion in the Birthright Citizenship case decided by the U.S. Supreme Court right before the July 4th holiday weekend began.

I sat and conferred with all of these geniuses to make some sense of the carnival-like cage match between totalitarianism and the truth being played out in Washington, DC, the latest demolition site for the destruction of Democracy by Donald Trump, the architect of anarchy, repression and greed.

Sometimes, the never ending deluge of demoralizing news, challenging our most fundamental rights and beliefs—and all that we’ve worked toward over the past 60 years—makes me want to say “enough,” throw up my hands, and live out my remaining days in peace somewhere else, like Costa Rica, Spain, Portugal, England or France. But then, I remember. I could no sooner walk away from my grandchildren than I could from the roiling world we are leaving for them.

We have been here many times before, I think, under far worse life and death circumstances. One such test came 160 years earlier, when the Civil Rights Act of 1866 was enacted to enshrine birthright citizenship into law, to erase racial inequality, and to move America closer to the universal equality ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. Two years later, and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution passed overwhelmingly with a Citizenship Clause, that extended US citizenship to any slave born on American soil, and to others. The cost of extending equality to “all men”, as Jefferson originally promised, was severe: up to 750,000 American deaths—slaves and free men— and 470,000 Americans wounded in 4 years of the Civil War, the deadliest conflict in US history, fought over the fulfillment of a sacred promise for fundamental human rights and dignity.

Fast forward to today, when masked White Supremacists waving Confederate flags and wearing neatly pressed Khaki slacks marched through the streets of our Nation’s Capitol on the 250 Anniversary of our Declaration of Independence—which declared that “all men were created equal,”— tried again to use terror to erase all of that history and suffering and death, and pretend that “citizenship” was, instead to be found in the “blood” of only certain people, instead of in the universal protections of the common law, or the soil of a special land. It’s the same diabolical web of blood libels the Nazis used against the Jews nearly 100 years ago, inspired in fact, by Jim Crow laws of some of the same Southern States that legalized slavery and flew the Confederate Flag.

Frederick Douglass, in his famous oration on July 5, 1852, entitled, “What, to the American Slave, is your 4th of July?,” forced White Americans nearly a decade before the Civil War began, to face the humanity and dignity of the Black population it ignored while celebrating “freedom & liberty” and pretending that, as Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence “all men were created equal and endowed by their creator with inalienable rights:”

“The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought life and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You may rejoice, I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony.”

Douglass never relented, nor gave up in the face of increasingly violent opposition to his position. Even after the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860 and the onset of the Civil War the following year, Frederick Douglass continued to fight for full-citizenship for America’s Black population. He took nothing for granted:

“Abraham Lincoln was not, in the fullest sense of the word, either our man, or our model…He was preeminently the white man’s president, entirely devoted to the welfare of white men. He was ready and willing at any time during the first years of his administration to deny, postpone, and sacrifice the rights of humanity in the colored people to promote the welfare of white people in this country. YOU are the children of Abraham Lincoln. We are, at best, only his step-children; children by adoption, children by forces of circumstances and necessity.”

Douglass was not just referring to Lincoln’s longstanding advocacy of Colonization—relocating American Blacks to either the West Indies or to Africa. He was directly referencing the North’s necessity of freeing the slaves in order to defeat the Confederacy and preserve the union. Whether by design or default, freeing the slaves had become an essential military tactic for the North to win the War. Following the announcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, thousands of freed black, enslaved persons left Southern plantations, and reinforced battered Union troops, instrumental in the Union’s victory over the Confederacy.

I looked to Douglass and James Baldwin to learn how to channel my fury over the systematic efforts by Trump, his troglodyte followers and their rebranded version of White Supremacy (Patriot Front? MAGA? Christian Nationalists?) and to strengthen my resolve to fight fatigue, or, worse, the temptation to walk away from the battle ahead.

I turned to James Baldwin, in his take-no-prisoners book, The Fire Next Time, first published in 1963, the year four little Black girls were murdered at Sunday School in a Birmingham Church; and Medgar Evers and President Kennedy were assassinated. Baldwin’s book was republished in 1964, the year that Civil Rights Freedom Riders, Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner were gunned down in Mississippi by the KKK working in collaboration with local law enforcement officials. The fire, the fury, was all around us; the following year, Malcolm X was assassinated; three years later, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr:

“One is, after all, emboldened by the spectacle of human history in general, and in American Negro history in particular, for it testifies to nothing less, than the achievement of the impossible.”

“If we—and now, I mean the relatively conscious Whites and the relatively conscious Blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

“If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, re-created from the Bible in a song by a slave, is upon us: ‘God gave Noah the rainbow sign, no more water, the fire next time!’

Baldwin, once again, helped me answer the questions I continually asked myself and friends: “Why do we stay? Why after 60 years of struggling for human rights in this century and the one before, do we continue to fight?”

The obvious answer was always: for our children, for my granddaughters, to repair this broken world and make it better, fairer, more just; to fight alongside others who should not face these fights alone. Fleeing to a saner, gun-less, more democratic, more egalitarian, less-hate filled, less cruel country— although we had the means to do it—was never really an option. We were compelled to stand our ground.

An essay published on Zeteo’s Substack by one of my favorite writers, Viet Thanh Nguyen, on July 3, 2026, entitled “250 Years of Cruelty: The American Empire and How to Save the US” riveted my attention with its’ opening sentence:

“The word I think of to describe the United States on its 250th anniversary is cruelty. There are other words, of course, that could describe a country of such size, power, and diversity.”

The author’s earlier works, particularly his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Sympathizer, had powerfully influenced my thinking and my own writing, as did his personal journey.

Born in South Vietnam in 1971, during the peak of the Vietnam War, Viet’s family fled to the US after the fall of Saigon in 1975. During the American Bicentennial, they wer were living in a Fort Indiantown Gap, a Lebanon County, Pennsylvania, refugee camp, where more than 32,000 Vietnamese and Cambodian war refugees were re-settled. It was a bitter irony that the same camp was used throughout the previous decade as a large ROTC training camp for US Army soldiers, heading off to fight in the American war in Southeast Asia.

Viet Thanh Nguyen goes on to raise the disconcerting possibility that the “arc of the moral universe,” of which Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so eloquently spoke, might not always turn toward justice, but:

“…the gravity of American history bends that arc towards something far worse than justice.”

He goes on to write that we may be witnessing:

“…the black hole of cruelty that has always been there from the very beginning of the United States, or “America,” or the “New World.”

He quotes the late anti-colonialist poet and politician Aime Cesaire, who described the age of American Imperialism this way:

“The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, conformism, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder.”

Viet goes on to write that “the persuasiveness of American propaganda about being the greatest country in the world has never worked on everyone, but increasingly that propaganda is failing to work for ever greater numbers of people.”

Linking the present US Government’s war against our own neighbors with the unending war against non-Whites around the globe, Viet Thanh Nguyen warns us that:

“American propaganda has always been about the spectacle of the city upon a hill on whom the world’s eyes are turned, a brightly lit extravaganza marked by Hollywood and lubricated with Coca-Cola. Now the spectacle is about the demonization of immigrants, the sickening rituals of hunting them down in the streets with masked government enforcers, the lurid punishments of inhuman detention that spur cheers and glee from a significant part of the American people, encouraged by the would-be American Nero and his fawning minions who take pleasure in their taunts and insults. The bullying of the weak and the desperate inside American borders is matched by the lobbing of missiles outside those borders, the flexing of admittedly enormous muscles that is not matched by intelligence.”

The author dispenses with the notion that this “American cruelty” is something new, or the result of a “declining empire:”

“The cruelty was always there, from the slaughter of Indians to the exploitation, murder, torture, and rape of Black African enslaved peoples to the abuse and mockery of Mexicans and Chinese, Latinos and Asians, who were forcibly incorporated into American empire or brought in as cheap labor. American empire was also erected on the labor, subservience, and silencing of women, and the suppression of sexual diversity. If some idea of American exceptionalism is to be saved – this idea that Freedom is the greatest American invention and export – then the liberation of all peoples inside American borders will have to be realized, regardless of race, gender, sex, religion, nationality, or any other feature that is used to single out elements of humanity.”

Too many Americans take delight in cruelty, he observes, since they “cannot take delight in generosity, hospitality and possibility.”

Just a few days before Viet’s message was published of how to mitigate future “American cruelty,” a great-great-great granddaughter of slaves schooled the nation on how the U.S. Constitution commands that we follow “the universal vision of belonging and citizenship,” and not the path of cruelty, exclusion & hate.

Writing what may be one of the most powerful, historically accurate and important concurring Judicial opinions of our time, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—the first Black women to serve as a Supreme Court Justice—issued a clarion call for clarity and primacy of the Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment, at a time when this core principle of the US Constitution is under its most severe attack since the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, 160 years ago.

Born in Washington, D.C, in 1970, and raised in Miami, Florida, by a father who was the Chief Attorney for the Miami Dade County School Board, and a mother who was a principal for an Arts High School in Miami, Justice Jackson brilliantly articulated the majority decision of five other Supreme Court justices of how the 14th Amendment was essential to the “Second Founding” of the United States, in 1868.

Justice Jackson, a champion for equal justice, demolishes the myopic, historically wrong and legally incorrect views of the Trump Administration—and of it’s unintelligible and unthinking mouthpiece on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas:

Justice Jackson writes: “By ignoring that our Constitution stands firmly against caste and subjugation—on all axes and in all manners—they deny the clear, universalist vision shared and proclaimed by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers: to “rebuild a shattered empire . . . to plant deep and solid the corner-stone of eternal justice, and to erect thereon a superstructure of perfect equality of every human being before the law.”

Thomas, jettisoning his own long-expressed, tone-deaf “racial blindness” test for the Constitution, makes the tortured claim that the 14th Amendment only applied to freed and enslaved Black men, in response to the dreadful Dred Scott decision of 1857, which denied citizenship to Black people because of their “blood,” regardless of their birth on American soil. Justice Jackson easily disposes of Thomas’ historically & legally empty arguments, and she exposes the bald-faced duplicity of Thomas’ overnight flip-flop of his decades-long insistence on “racial blindness.”

“Of course,” Justice Jackson writes, “ the ultimate irony is that for all the talk about the detestable Dred Scott decision, the Government and the principal dissent (Justice Thomas’) propose a return to its core tenet (of the Dred Scott decision).”

“Their bottom line is that, for certain people, being born on American soil will not suffice to confer citizenship. It is that odious conclusion that the Citizenship Clause plainly rejects, as the Court explains… I add only that the Fourteenth Amendment’s universalist aims should forever be the death knell for this kind of claim—one that seeks to make bloodline the marker of birthright. The America that was reborn from the rubble of the Civil War simply does not countenance that inequitable result. Thankfully, a majority of the Court remembered this today, and has dutifully preserved the most basic animating principle of our Nation’s founding—that all human beings are created equal— once more.”

I read and re-read Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s tour-de-force of an opinion over the course of the July 4th weekend, savoring every tightly reasoned phrase, zeroing in on her compelling case that, in fact, the US Constitution before the passage of the 14th Amendment, was anything but color-blind, since fundamental rights were denied to Blacks on the very basis of their skin color. Despite those racial restrictions written into the original Constitution, Justice Jackson noted that “freed Blacks who advocated for the 14th Amendment “fought for the shared humanity of all people.” It’s a concept of the universal rights of man that Clarence Thomas is incapable of comprehending.

I went back to Justice Jackson’s writing to hear once again, the call to history and memory articulated by Frederick Douglass, especially in the face of the Trump Administration’s jingoistic jihad against history it is hell-bent on hiding, and its’ frantic fanaticism to whitewash the truth:

“Douglass declared that his own aim was to “‘show that nations should have memories.’ In the time since Douglass’s prescient observation, Americans have come to learn that fading memories are not the only danger. The distortion of historical facts—retellings that reimagine and repurpose past events to lend credence to misbegotten aims—may be an even greater threat.”

I watched my youngest granddaughter follow the fire works across the night’s sky on the 250th Anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, marveling that once the lights had burned out, she carefully followed the trails of smoke that reminded us of what we just witnessed, and what we could be part of again.

I watched the wonder on her pure, cherubic face, and knew that I was exactly where I was meant to be for all the nights and days and challenges yet to come.

##

(Photo by Steve Villano, of the Statue of Sainte Jeanne D’Arc at the Cathedrale of Notre Dame de Paris, May, 2012, Paris, France.)

It took a tough, tenacious, courageous, intelligent and persistent 80-year old woman to teach this nation how to beat Donald Trump again and again, and how to make him pay for the consequences of his actions, in the only language he understands: costing him money.

Like Sainte Jeanne D’Arc of France, E. Jean Carroll on New York lighted the way to dignity and victory over abject evil, and schooled the bulbous, bellowing bully who has abused and stolen from all of us, is our new national symbol of freedom, independence, and courage, and a true symbol of this nation’s 250 Birthday celebration.

Thrice now, this lightening bolt for justice—E. Jean Carroll—stood up proudly against Donald Trump, an algae-sogged swampbeast of modern times, defying death threats and drubbed the dribbling Donald in courtroom after courtroom, including the highest court in America—the US Supreme Court—which the sputtering, spoiled Fatty Arbuckle of our century—believed he owned. In the end, which came this week, the Supreme Court wouldn’t even listen to the wild-eyed whines of the worst human being in recorded history to ever occupy ANY public office in the United States.

This latest Court decision in favor of E. Jean Carroll, like all of the other legal losses piled up by Trump and his soon-to-be disbarred band of ambulance-chasing lawyers, is yet another clarion call to everyone fighting Trump: never give up, never give in, never capitulate to pressure from a sexual predator, liar, grifter and amoral ghoul.

Saint Jean D’ Carroll showed the con man’s cowardly Christian supporters—who canonized the original Jeanne D’Arc some 500 years after they burned her at the stake— how pure guts, a strong sense of morality, a steel spine, persistence, and an unshakeable determination to never back down in the face of pure evil, will triumph.

This brave woman--sexually assaulted, abused and libeled on a huge scale by Trump--beat the lawless sexual abuser, liar, convicted libeler, and fraud in an arena he has always abused, the way he abuses women: the Courthouse.

Today, she stands astride him once again, sword of justice pointing toward the heavens, our new national shero. Oh, how Trump’s maggot supporters will despise the use of that term, since it represents diversity, and the triumph of right over might & money.

Trump never really saw Jean D’ Carroll’s slaying strikes coming, since she had a few time-tested weapons on her side whose existence Trump has never recognized and cannot comprehend: the law, the truth, and moral courage. In short, she and her kick-ass team of attorneys led by Roberta Kaplan, took no shit, which, in the end, is all Trump really is.

Acting more like Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Trump--who mistook E. Jean Carroll for one of his Epstein girls--also mistook his own lies for the truth.

That approach may work at MAGA cult covens, or or with corporate toadies willing to pay tithes of tributes to be in on the theft of billions of our tax dollars, but not before real, live judges and jurors. When Trump whines that “the courts are out of control,” what he means is that they are out of his control—even the Supreme Court justices he selected, who didn’t want to hear his losers’ voice anymore.

Outraged that he lost a $5 million sexual abuse and libel case to Carroll three years ago, Trump—never a financial nor legal genius with anything he could not steal— decided to double-down, multiplying his initial loss nearly 18 times (to a total of $88 million) by seeking “retribution” against his sex abuse victim in print, at his MAGA mosh pits, and on national television.

The crapulent, spoiled brat, chauffered to private school in his mother’s rose-colored Rolls Royce, just couldn’t stand the fact that years after he physically and emotionally abused her, Carroll--refusing to bow before him--continued to wield her sword of truth, law and moral courage against him, over and over again in Courtroom after courtroom. Each new Trump lie became a new cause of action, costing the financial failure more and more money every time he texted a libel, or opened his mouth—a sure sign that he’s lying.

There are historic implications for this case, which could open the floodgates in the other pending cases against Trump. Courage begets courage. It’s no wonder he’s pilfering billions of dollars of our taxpayer dollars and shaking down corporations down for billions more: he’s stuffing his pockets for the legal battles he knows face him and his family in the years ahead.

With a mostly white, mostly male, mostly middle-class jury finding that for repeatedly lying about the sexual assault Trump was found guilty of committing— an act, which, the following year was included in a new definition of rape under a new New York State Law—and for incessantly smearing the name and reputation of his victim, Donald Trump was punished over and over again. This week, not even his own appointed conservative Justices could stand to hear his whining words once again.

The jurors from urban and suburban counties in and around NYC, where Trump was born, refused to be intimidated by the threats of violence by Trump’s deranged supporters. Neither was the courageous Carroll—whose name, unlike the jurors’, could not be kept secret.

In Mary L. Trump’s Substack column on the day of the verdict in the Carroll case, Trump’s niece, a clinical psychologist, wrote:

“Donald is someone who has gone through his entire life without facing consequences—and I believe he thinks he can get away with everything. Today, that changed. It was one of the first times Donald has been made to answer for his egregious behavior.”

If only the same standards would be applied to the dozens of other sexual assault charges against Trump, brought by women—and young girls—alleged to be as young as 14 years old—when they were abused and assaulted. .

One of the most ominous statements which puts the Carroll verdict and its validation by the highest court in the United States this week in context for what may lie ahead for Trump, once out of office, came from one of Carroll’s attorneys, Shawn Crowley, to MSNBC, on the day of the jury’s decision:

“I believe very strongly after today, that the lesson is that actually, no one is above the law, and, that your behavior, and your statements, and your threats and your lies are gonna catch up to you someday.”

Even if that someday doesn’t come until after Democratic majorities win both houses of Congress later this year, or when Trump is finally out of office, hope is eternal that Crowley’s prediction will come true. It certainly did at the US Supreme Court on June 29, 2026, when they upheld the core Carroll verdict.

But, it was E. Jean Carroll herself, always bouyant and radiant in victory, head held high in the glow of justice achieved, who perfectly articulated the call to action for women just like her, and millions of others fed up with being abused by well-connected, people in power, and stuffed into the closets, dressing rooms and cages those ghouls construct to try to rob humans of fundamental dignity and rights:

“ This is a great victory for every woman who stands up when she’s been knocked down, and a huge defeat for every bully who has tried to keep women down.”

THIS week, even Trump’s hand-picked Justices on the Supreme Court reaffirmed that message once again, and they did it by silently telling Trump to shut the fuck up.

(Our family celebrating our last Christmas holidays together a few months before my father, Alphonse Villano (lower, right, seated) died in May, 1993. Seated next to my father (front, left) is my mother Margaret Julia Villano, and standing behind both of them (from right to left) are Carol Villano, our son Matthew Villano—now a father himself—and me.

My father died on my 21st wedding anniversary, and my first Fathers’ Day of being a son without a father came three weeks later. His death sent me reeling, spiraling out of control for months.

I watched my father die a painful, drawn-out death from a carnivorous cancer which started in his prostate and spread to his spine, paralyzing him.

I read him the sports section everyday for the last two weeks of his life, quoting every line of each Yankee box score, and telling him the horse-racing results from race-tracks around the country. In addition to his family, baseball and horse-racing were my father’s passions. He had watched Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio & Mantle play ball in the Bronx, and had winning tickets on other thoroughbreds named Affirmed, Secretariat, Native Dancer, and Seattle Slew.

Days after my father’s death, my friend Jim Morgo invited me to join him at Yankee Stadium on Father’s Day. He had prime box seats behind the Yankee dugout for a Yankees/Red Sox game. Jim knew I loved the Yankees as much as he adored his beloved Red Sox, especially watching them play at the Stadium. What better way to feel closer to my father, I thought, than to be in the surroundings where we spent our sweetest hours together.

At least once a year, every August since I was 10 years old, my father was given use of the field box owned by the Pershing Square Building Corporation, his employer. Six days a week, every week, for 35 years, my father labored in the bowels of their office building at 100 East 42nd Street, operating the old steam boilers, to make sure the wealthy lawyers and accountants who worked on the upper floors were always comfortable.

My father knew I loved watching double-headers, and that none of the corporate executives who had first dibs on the tickets, wanted to sit in the sweltering sun on an August Sunday to watch two baseball games. For me, six solid hours of baseball was a double treat. The world consisted of nothing but baseball all day, and I had my father all to myself.

The seats I sat in on my first fatherless Father’s Day were only a few rows behind where my father and I sat, year after year, inning after inning. I looked around the Stadium imagining I saw him everywhere. There he was, getting a beer, or mopping the sweat off his brow with a clean, white handkerchief. Each time I spotted an old guy with a beer belly, I thought of my father hauling his paunch up and down those flattened Stadium steps to “hit the ‘head,” as he said.

Maybe coming to Yankee Stadium so soon after my father’s death was not such a good idea, after all. I was grieving him deeply, but quietly. Being there, so close to where he and I shared so many perfect moments, made me melancholy. I was in the final months of my work in Mario Cuomo’s Administration, and was depressed over conversations I knew were going on between Cuomo, George Steinbrenner, Rupert Murdoch and NYS’ Commissioner of Economic Development Vincent Tese, to move the Stadium out of the Bronx and put it on the site of the West Side Rail Yards—where the Hudson Yards are today—in mid-town Manhattan. How dare they even think about doing that, I thought. My father is here.

I sat there, drinking in the Stadium’s atmosphere, memories swirling around me like one of those tiny dust tornadoes that swept across the infield every so often. I looked at the majestic white facades towering over right field and realized what a place of peace this was for us from an otherwise chaotic life. To remain silent while the old Stadium’s future was being decided would have been to commit a sacrilege against the memory of my father.

I knew how forcefully committed the Governor was to economic development, and how the sinister George Steinbrenner was threatening to move the Yankees to New Jersey if he didn’t get a brand new ballpark in Manhattan, where he could build high-priced skyboxes for corporate oligarchs. I knew that Rupert Murdoch was exploring the possibility of building a sprawling entertainment center, including TV studios, on the site of the new Stadium. And I knew that somehow, I had to find a way to stop this from happening.

That “way” came within days of my 1993 Father’s Day visit to Yankee Stadium. I came across a copy of a scheduled secret meeting between the Governor, Steinbrenner, Murdoch and Tese with a two-word topic: “Yankee Stadium.” I knew I had to act quickly to create a public outcry to save the old Ballpark. With the forces of money and political power in New York aligned against the original House that Ruth Built, I took the only route left open to me, in my low-key position where I had neither money nor power: I leaked the information about the “secret” Yankee Stadium meeting to New York Times Sportswriter, Richard Sandomir.

The following day, June 30, 1993, a front page story by the Times’ Ian Fisher carried a headline announcing: “Fearing Move by Yankees, Cuomo Explores Idea for a NewStadium.” The Governor was livid when the story dropped, and was convinced that Sandy Frucher, a former top official in the Administrations of both Gov. Hugh Carey and Mario Cuomo, was the source of the leak because Frucher worked for Olympia-York, a company with an interest in the Rail Yards. Sandy insisted it wasn’t him, and he was correct. I was the “source close to the Governor” the New York Times quoted throughout the story.

The uproar caused by the Times story stopped the proposed move of Yankee Stadium to Manhattan, literally, in its tracks. It bought the old Ballpark a reprieve of another 15 years, kept the Bronx Bombers in the Bronx, and enabled the spectacular Hudson Yards—without a new Manhattan Yankee Stadium—to be built.

For me, I wasn’t proud of betraying Mario Cuomo’s trust, nor of his betraying mine in believing he would always do the right thing. More importantly, I wasn’t about to let my pride, or politics, or anything or anyone else for that matter, get in the way of fulfilling a sacred promise I made to my father: to keep the old Ballpark alive, for as long as I could, after he was gone.

Over the next 15 years, I shared dozens of Yankee ballgames at “the old Ballpark” with my son, as we cheered on the historic Yankee teams of 1996 through 2001, with Dan McCourt and Sue Conroy and JoAnne DeCarlo, and firefighters and cops, and all the members of our new extended family in Section 622, who shepherded us through the terrible struggles following 9/11. The “old Ballpark,” helped all of us heal.

And, each time we entered the Stadium before a game, or stayed late to watch the field and the fans empty out, and heard the recording of Sinatra singing “New York, New York”, I could feel my father’s presence, and every once and a while I imagined that I saw him give a wink, to assure us that we’d be all right, and our world would be saved by beauty, and loyalty to each other, and love.

(New York Times photo of Hillary Clinton at the 92nd Street Y in NYC this week, being interviewed by the New Yorker Editor David Remnick, where she blamed Joe Biden’s late withdrawal from the 2024 Presidential Campaign as the reason for Trump’s election.”

If Hillary and Bill Clinton only understood the meaning of the word “grace” and slipped into the background, allowing time and perspective to be their just judge. But they are terrified of letting that happen, because what they allege of others, can easily be said of them.

Fearful of what a balanced, long-term evaluation of them would yield, the Clintons continue to blame everyone (the Russians, Bernie Sanders, a ‘vast right wing conspiracy,” and now Joe Biden) but themselves in order to temper history’s harsh decree of how they wrecked the Democratic Party and set the stage for the rise of a deranged White Supremacist, anti-democratic demagogue and soul-less grifter like Donald Trump.

From Bill Clinton’s refusal to step down and pass the torch of leadership to Al Gore in 1999 after Clinton was found to have abused his power and sexually abused Monica Lewinsky, to Hillary’s own refusal to step aside in the summer of 2016, in favor of a Biden/Booker ticket—as Party Chair Donna Brazile was suggesting— after her “abuse of her personal emails” destroyed her own candidacy for President, both Clintons wiped out the hard-fought working class work of the Democratic Party, delivering the Presidency first to George W. Bush, and then, 16-years later, to Trump.

Both Bill & Hillary’s narcissistic blindness to the grave political damage their arrogance directly caused 16 years apart, created the political conditions directly responsible for giving us another horrendous Bush presidency, a War in Iraq based upon false pretenses (which Hillary voted to support as a Senator), Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the U.S. Supreme Court, (to join Clarence Thomas, appointed by the first President Bush), and the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression, connected directly to Bill Clinton’s repeal of the Glass-Steagall banking regulation act in 1999.

The consequences of that economic catastrophe were suffered overwhelmingly by millions of working families who lost their homes and modest investments—and were never made financially whole again—while the large banks and financial institutions were bailed out of any losses by the new Democratic Administration of Barack Obama. (NOTE: This week, Barack Obama’s Presidential Library opens to the public, an $850 million fortress which writer David Sirota has tagged “an Oligarch funded shrine” because of the enormous private contributions from “the bankers who cratered the economy” which Obama refused to punish: https://www.levernews.com/the-obama-shrine-brought-to-you-by-wall-street/)

The latest self-serving, Clinton “blame game,” happened this week as reported in the New York Times, on June 16, 2026, in a story headlined: “ Hillary Clinton says Biden’s Re-Election Bid Was a Terrible Mistake.” In the story, Hillary Clinton—who ran an entitled, lackluster and terrible campaign against Donald Trump in 2016—reportedly told David Remnick of the New Yorker that:

“If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick, “whoever emerged from that contest — whether it was the vice president, or a governor, or a senator or anybody else — would have beaten Donald Trump.”

Lost on Hillary Clinton, of course, was the irony that the exact same thing was said by many of us Democratic activists who believed that if her husband stepped aside after his power and sexual abuse of Lewinsky and his impeachment, and opened up the Democratic nominating process in 2000 to either Vice-President Al Gore, or some other Democrat—a governor, or senator or anybody else— the outcome of the 2000 election may have been far different. And, the identical thing was said about Hillary’s own candidacy in 2016, crippled by her own arrogance about her emails, which she finally acknowledged to Remnick this week, undid her campaign and helped hand the Presidency to Trump. Anybody else but Hillary Clinton “would have beaten Donald Trump,” in 2016.

Equally suspect in the role elite establishment connections played in the 2024 election was when Kamala Harris’ first act was to call Hillary & Bill Clinton to discuss running to succeed Biden in 2024. Not surprisingly, establishment corporate Democrats running the 2024 Democratic National Convention gave prominent speaking roles to BOTH Hillary and Bill Clinton while many of us progressive Democratic activists—who didn’t want Joe Biden to serve more than one-term in the first place—screamed about how elevating the Clintons in the 2024 campaign would hand the election to Trump.

After having gone all-in for Kamala Harris’ election, I was so infuriated by the prominent appearance of the Clintons at the 2024 DNC that I complained about it in an August 18, 2024 piece on Substack entitled: “Why Are the Clintons STILL in the Spotlight? which I also circulated to members of the Democratic National Committee:

The pertinent section of that piece :

“If there’s an Achilles Heel in this moment—which should be all about Kamala Harris and our future—it is dregging up the ghosts of Clintons’ past, which, I suppose, was inevitable with the presence of John Podesta and Neera Tandem, lurking among Biden’s team, and the Zelig-like, power-sniffing appearance of Gene Sperling on the new Harris crew.

I’m sure some of the old Clintonistas on the DNC and involved with the convention planning who cannot escape the narrow-box thinking that gave us Donald Trump, argued that Bill “must” be featured as a former President, and Hillary must also speak because she almost broke the glass ceiling 8 years ago—although the visual of Podesta delivering Hillary’s campaign eulogy under the still-intact glass roof of NYC’s Javits Center still gives me night terrors.

I’d rather hear from Liz Cheney instead of Hillary—who ran an abominable campaign for President in 2016, utterly ignoring the Midwest, and enabling Trump to get elected—and from Laura or George W. Bush on the night when Bill Clinton is slated to bring his wax-museum presence to the podium. A double-dose of the Clintons is hardly the way to appeal to undecided voters in 2024 who only voted for Trump eight years earlier because they found the alternative not “like-able enough” as Barack Obama hoped Hillary would be.”

But they wouldn’t be the oligarch-loving, self-aggrandizing Clintons—whose minions are STILL trying to resist change and reject new leadership into the Democratic Party—if they didn’t maneuver for protecting the status quo, and the institutions which have supported them, and become ossified, like their supporters.

Ten years ago, after spending $3,000 of my own money to travel to North Carolina for a month and do Voter Protection in an open-carry, swing state for Hillary’s 2016 campaign, I saw the hollowness of Hillary’s own campaign for President from the inside and wrote about it 2-weeks following her loss to the most corrupt individual in the history of the United States to seek the Presidency:

Writing on Medium.com, my piece on November 23, 2016, was entitled “Can a Campaign that Lacked Courage Find it Now?” (https://medium.com/@stevevillano/can-a-presidential-campaign-that-lacked-courage-find-it-now-49be468881d5):

“I was going to wait longer than two weeks after the Presidential Election of 2016 to tell this insider’s story about Hillary Clinton’s campaign for President.

The looming deadline of this Friday, November 25, (2016) for Clinton supporters to step-up and challenge questionable vote tallies and voter suppression tactics in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania has compelled me to come forward now. Bold, legal actions on the part of the Clinton campaign — unlike the tepid response of Al Gore 16 years ago — hold the possibility of setting aside this year’s election results on the basis of constitutional and voting rights violations.

Whether or not the Clinton campaign has the courage to do it is another question entirely. What’s at stake is nothing less than American democracy, and the rights of free citizens to vote.

I experienced the campaign’s lack of courage first hand when I traveled to North Carolina to do Voter Protection for Hillary Clinton for the last four weeks before the election. As a Californian, with friends and former labor union colleagues in Raleigh, I chose to work in North Carolina — at my own expense — for two reasons: 1. The state’s history of voter suppression in the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Shelby; 2) the critical importance of North Carolina as a swing or “checkmate” state for the Clinton campaign.

The North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign knew I was an activist writer when they agreed to take me on as a full-time, unpaid volunteer at their Raleigh, NC, headquarters. I was assigned to do Voter Protection, because of my law degree and my expressed interest in the area.

During my first week of working with the campaign, I studied the State’s Election Law, the Federal Judge’s July decision overturning North Carolina’s Voter “suppression” law of 2013 as “surgical discrimination,” and sat in on two training sessions for citizens volunteering to participate in voter protection activities at the polls. I was impressed by the volunteers: law-abiding, fellow Baby Boomers, passionately devoted to protecting people’s right to vote, as their civic duty.

On Sunday, October 16, 2016, following a terrific Voter Protection training session in Wilmington, NC—a city with a history of White Supremacist violence against local Black leadership (not unlike the murder of hundreds of Black people on “Black Wall Street” in Tulsa, Oklahoma) I awoke to the news that a GOP campaign office in Hillsborough, Orange County, was firebombed during the night. The office was rarely used by GOP campaign workers, a local Republican operative told me, and the message and technique of the single Molotov cocktail bombing was suspicious. Within hours of the bombing, Donald Trump took to Twitter to pin the illegal act on “Hillary Clinton supporters” and “Democrats” with no evidence. Having worked with both of those groups, I knew those charges were patently false, and smacked of a too-quickly issued cover for a crime, still unsolved five weeks later.

So, I did what I do. I wrote about the incident as someone with first-hand knowledge of the decent people accused of a crime they did not commit. To me it smelled like the “Reichstag Fire,” of 1933, when the Nazi’s blamed the communists and Jews for starting a blaze in the German Parliament — a fire started by the Nazis themselves.

The National Memo, published my piece, and I circulated it on my blog and on medium.com. The piece was a powerful defense of the North Carolina Democrats and their respect for the rule of law and The National Memo’s headline reflected that: “Why North Carolina Democrats Would Never Bomb Orange County GOP Office.” Among the reasons I gave was that Orange County, NC — which contains the University of North Carolina — was one of the most reliably Democratic counties in the nation, giving Barack Obama over 70% of its vote each time he ran.

Monday morning, October 17, when the article was read by The National Memo’s 300,000 subscribers, the Clinton’s Campaign, was so upset by my article (particularly the paragraph where I wrote of the role the Reichstag Fire played in German political history) that they told me to either “take the piece down” or leave the campaign by the end of the day. The young, campaign operative who directed me to to “take down the piece” had no idea what the Reichstag Fire was.

I refused to “take down” the piece, citing my First Amendment Rights to write what I pleased, both as a professional writer and as a private citizen. I was an unpaid volunteer doing Voter Protection, who traveled from California to North Carolina on my own dime and the campaign could not censor me. The Clinton Campaign’s 20-something-year-old- paid staffer was officious and inflexible, fearing any fallout that could come from my article. He insisted that I “take it down”, or leave the campaign office immediately. Again, I refused to “take my article down” — a preposterous request, since the piece had already been circulated nationwide around the internet. I was physically escorted out of the campaign’s Raleigh office by mid-afternoon for being “too radical.”

I spent the rest of my four weeks in North Carolina extensively covering the elections across the state, interviewing Trump and Clinton voters, attending events from the State Fair to rallies with both Obamas, Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton, closely examining the history of voter suppression of African American voters in the state, and writing a half-dozen stories for various media outlets. I came away with an in-depth view of the kind of cautious, take-no-chances campaign waged by the Clinton team in North Carolina and across the nation, that made it possible for the hard-hitting, take-no-prisoners Trump campaign to prevail.”

Now, 10 years later, the attention-starved Clintons—knowing full well that an even more malleable and insatiable media STILL can’t resist anything they say—have focused on a new and easy target—Joe Biden— for their endless circle of blame that goes back at least two decades, and never, ever, ever includes themselves.

Who will be Hillary—or Bill’s —next target for blame? Bernie Sanders? Oh right, they attacked Bernie already. Graham Platner? The Maine Senatorial candidate that establishment Dems love to hate? AOC, when she primaries Chuck Schumer in New York State in 2028? Candidates rejecting AIPAC money, and calling Israel’s actions Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon? Candidates campaigning for a Wealth Tax on oligarchs in California and around the country?

Just go away, Hillary and Bill. No one wants to participate in your blame game anymore. It’s not now, nor has it ever been, productive. Stop wasting precious air, and internet (and print) time attacking us—the enemy is already within the gates, destroying the White House, and the nation, and taking a wrecking ball to every single human and constitutional right. Why are you still searching for others to blame? Accept your own responsibility and move on.

Fold up your large shadows, and let a thousand new flowers bloom. Your season under the kleig lights is over. Get out there and raise a ton of money for Voting Rights in local communities around the country or for Jamie Raskin’s Freedom Summer Initiative.

But, please: have the good sense to be anonymous about it, which according to Maimonides is the highest form of giving. Your day in the sun is done. Have the grace to know when it’s time to go.

Politics

(Dr. Christine Blasey Ford testifying under oath, before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018, concerning her sexual assault allegation against Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Despite Dr. Blasey-Ford’s compelling, credible, non-partison and under oath testimony, Maine Senator Susan Collins cast the deciding vote in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the US Supreme Court. Four years later, on June 24, 2022, Justice Kavanaugh—who told Senator Collins he believed Roe v. Wade was settled law, voted with the Court’s right-wing majority to overturn the 50-year old decision which gave women autonomy over their own health care decisions. It was the single most damaging blow to Women’s Rights in half-a-century in the United States. Contrast the sworn Congressional testimony—under penality of perjury—of Dr. Blasey-Ford, with the unfounded accusations made by GOP operative Lyndsey Fifield, a long-time employee of the Extreme Right Wing Heritage Foundation—the authors of Project 2025, a religious screed against Women’s Rights and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,—which crusaded for decades for the US Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Fifield also led a group of pro-Trump Republicans to support Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court in 2018, and campaigned for Susan Collins, Graham Platner’s opponent, for Senator from Maine. Fifield’s statements were politically motivated, extremely biased, and made on social media and to the press,, where she was not under oath, nor under penalty of perjury for false ore misleading statements.)

((In a column released on June 12 across multiple media platforms, the brilliant Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Melinda Henneberger, who has written for the Kansas City Star and the Sacremento Bee , presents her perspective of “The Platner Problem: When Principles Meet Power.”

The column, which is easily accessible on Substack or via Google, could just as well have been headlined: “The Platner Problem: When People of Principle Who Care Deeply About Women and Women’s Rights are Manipulated by Malevolent Forces Dedicated to Destroying What They Care About.”

Melinda Henneberger’s writing and perspectives on life and humanity are often superb, but in the case of her writing concerning Graham Platner—in the context of decades of blatant destruction of human rights, and women’s health care equity which have been central goals of the Heritage Foundation, the GOP, Christian Nationalists and the Trump Administration—Henneberger’s writing is woefully short of facts, and long on comparisons that are not based in the lived reality of what’s going on in this country regarding economic injustice and civil & human rights—the biggest victims of which are women, the poor, people of color and the LGBTQ community.

I posted a streamlined version of this rebuttal to Henneberger’s column on her Substack page, and offer my fuller response here for my own readers. Henneberger is an important voice for all to hear, and because of her great credibility in the past, it is imperative that those of us who respect her abilities & insights, but disagree with her conclusions, speak out loudly and clearly, while freedom of expression still exists in the United States.

Here is my response, expanded for my own social media:

**

“Melinda: This column is so unscrupulously foul on so many levels. First, let’s examine some fundamental elements of fairness I expect from a Pulitzer Prize winning writer/journalist:

1. Did you go to Maine? 2. Have you interviewed Platner? His wife? 3. Did you interview Hannah Pingree, the young, progressive Democrat running for Governor? 4. Did you interview Representative Chellie Pingree, the long time women’s right advocate whose family has deep roots in the State, and she has long been a leader of Progressives nationwide? 5) Did you interview in person the ethically challenged Lyndsey Fifield, long-time political operative for the Heritage Foundation and opponent of Women’s Rights?

I expect nothing less from a writer of your stature and ability, yet you tell us you divined this perspective from a retreat, not from speaking with Maine citizens. That’s like Trump saying he knows “cheating in elections,” just because he knows it. Where’s your testing of the credibility of your sources, and your information?

Secondly, your Nader comparison is not even close to reality and ripped apart from any historical context. Yes Nader, and Susan Sarandon, were wrong in 2000, especially because the public records of Gore and Bush on all fundamental questions of human rights , and the composition of the Judiciary, were miles apart. Even those of us activists who detested Bill Clinton, and his sexual abuse of Monica Lewinsky and sense of arrogant entitlement, saw the clear difference between the political and personal philosophies of Clinton (Bill) and Gore.

Many of us ripped into Nader for being so narrowly focused on corporate influence in both parties, and being blind to the difference between the two Presidential Candidates on social justice issues, human rights, environmental justice, and the composition of the nation’s Federal Courts. Your brief plane ride of epiphany next to Nader, ignores all nuance and the depth of those differences, as Nader did. And, to make matters worse, you are doing the same kind of shallow, out-of-context reasoning that Nader did, which gave us George W. Bush, the War in Iraq, Justice John Roberts Justice Samuel Alito, and the cratering of the US economy costing millions of people their homes and livelihoods..

Before we even get to Susan Collins sell out of women by enabling Brett Kavanaugh, an accused sex offender, to become a Supreme Court Justice, it’s important to note that It was George W. Bush, guided by Karl Rove, Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt, who gave us John Roberts and Sam Alito, two of the most destructive voices on Voting , Civil and Human rights since Justice Roger Taney and his decision on Dred Scott. Nicole Wallace, who now Podcasts on “The Best People,” along with Schmidt, a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing scold, led the campaign out of the White House to put both Roberts and Alito on the Supreme Court. I’m not even mentioning their cheerleading for Sarah Palin. They were merely doing what they were told by their boss—indefensible from a moral standpoint, especially when two decades later the extraordinary damage done by Roberts and Alito, has ripped apart the US Constitution and this country’s desultory attempt to civilize itself on Civil Rights.

Even such a civil rights advocate like Joe Biden bears responsibilty for enabling the Supreme Court to be poisoned by not giving Anita Hill’s testimoney enough credibility, nor giving her Congressional protection, and running away fron the false and performative “racism” claims pushed by Clarence Thomas—himself an enemy of civil rights for others— and the deeply cynical forces of racism in this country—not unlike what’s being done by the Heritage Foundation and Christian Nationalists on the matter of misogyny right now, in Maine. Those groups of trolls and troglodytes wrote the book on mistreating women, winked at rape and sexual harassment laws, undermined women’s economic equality, and are actively working to turn the clock back in this country to before the time women were granted the right to vote.

Some of us, going back 30 years, excoriated Biden for his abject failure as the then- Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Mario Cuomo, with whom I worked at the time, was furious over Biden’s failure to use his position to defend Anita Hill and her testimony, and his outrage of such terrible timidity on Biden’s part came close to pushing Cuomo to overcome his personal misgivings, and run for President.

You ignore all of this history going back some 30 years, which made Susan Collins support of Kavanaugh—even more egregious—despite her constant blathering of giving nothing but lip service to the urgency of maintaining the health care and human rights protections of Roe v. Wade.

Some of us who crusaded for a Women’s Right to choose going back over 50 years, to when New York State passed it’s liberalized abortion law in 1970—3 years before Roe. v. Wade—find Collins caving in to 50 years of women’s health care, and civil rights progress, unconscionable—not to mention her 90% voting record in concert with the most misogynistic federal administration in US history.

NONE of that forgives Platner’s stupid , offensive decisions about insensitive,, tough-guy tattoos, unacceptable sexting, and misognyistic comments. Yet, you repeatedly glide over the clear political motivation of his primary accuser, a GOP right wing operative, out of the Roger Stone school, who worked for the most anti-women GOP organization of the past 40 years, the Heritage Foundation.

I suggest you re-readProject 2025, it’s attacks on DEI, on women, people of color and the LGBTQ community. To write as much about Platner’s past—without examining precisely where his primary accuser is coming from, is not “victim blaming”—since her public support for Heritage, Kavanaugh and Collins make her far from an innocent victim. Fifield is a perpetrator of pernicious policies against women’s rights. She is no Virginia Roberts Giuffre, and Platner is no Jeffey Epstein, Donald Trump or any other of the malevolent misogynists and pedophile protectors who have changed laws and bastardized institutions—like the military—to flagrantly discriminate against women. How can you ignore those actual, practical, catastrophic consequences of Lyndsey Fifield’s well-funded political activity over the past decade?

NONE of this occurs in a vacuum, nor without historical and personal context, yet you continually bulldoze all of that concering Collins, and her political and financial cronies campaigning against Platner, under the guise of “misogyny” when their own actual enacted policies have caused grave harm and been violent to women’s rights These duiplicitous, cynical, abusers of fairness and justice gave us Thomas, Roberts, Alito and Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court; covered up the Epstein files and Trump’s involvement in them, ripped apart Roe. v. Wade protections at the federal level and in state after state, and are working hard bury women’s rights back to the Dark Ages, How can you ignore all this?

Finally, your writing fails to mention the other major source of opposition to Platner coming from AIPAC, because of his outspoken opposition to Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon, his strong statements about cutting off all US military aid to Israel, and his determination to lead the Democrats into taking a powerful anti-war position. With Susan Collins unblemished record of supporting the past four wars, and of unquestioningly doing AIPAC’s bidding on Israel, how can you not examine this as a motivation to bring Platner down, and disenfranchise the voters of Maine?

As a superb journalist, I am suprised you have not questioned the integrity of the New York Times assigning reporter Katie Glueck, a past “AIPAC Activist of the Year” to cover BOTH the NYC Mayoral Campaign of Zoran Mamdani—where support for Israel was a key issue—AND the campaign of Graham Platner for Senator from Maine, when his criticism of AIPAC and Israel—and Susan Collins slavish support— is very well known. How did that egregiouis violation of journalistic integrity escape your notice? Does it matter to you that the Times reporter has a political axe to grind against Platner, as does the Heritage Foundation operative whose unverified statements Glueck relies upon? How can the working women and men of Maine not feel that cultural elites outside of their own communities and billionaire-backed financial interests are working overtime to keep them down?

I challenge you to layout, side-by-side, what Platner has done and said about women, next to what Brett Kavanagugh (and Justices Thomas, Roberts & Alito) have done.

I challenge you to research and write about the extraordinary destruction of human and civil rights, of women’s health care, and economic justice, being implemented right before our eyes every single day by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025, Christian Nationalists, and the Trump Administration, and their enablers, like Senator Susan Collins.

(YouTube cover photo of the New York Times interview with Scott Pelley. Please click on the link BELOW these two introductory paragraphs to get direct access to the Interview.)

I struggled for days to write something that mattered about the Bari Weiss-driven “murder” of 60 Minutes, the flagrant $16 million bribe the old ownership of CBS paid Donald Trump to get the Paramount merger approved, and the importance of high-integrity journalists, like Scott Pelley, to the truth, to honest and fair jounalism, and to the very essence of dermocracy itself.

Then Pelley gave this video interview to the New York Times, answering all those questions, and making anything any of the rest of us have to say on the subject not relevant. So, I am making this full and remarkable interview available to all of my readers/viewers, right here. I urge you to spend the time viewing this incredibly important event in our country’s history, and consider it the final hour-long episode of a full, truthful, and no-holds barred episode of 60 Minutes with Scott Pelley:

(Mario Matthew Cuomo, r., speaks with my son, Matt Villano, following an exhibition basketball game in 1990; the inscription on the photo says “Matt, You make the shirt look good!” (photo by Ted Kaplan).

The brilliant Kunhardt Film Family—father Peter W, and sons Teddy & George—have produced the first, first-rate documentary about former New York State Governor Mario Cuomo debuting at the NYC Tribeca Film Festival on June 4, 2026, at the School of Visual Arts (SVA) in Manhattan.

The multiple Emmy Award winning family film team—which has made many HBO Original documentaries— has a long and superb track record of making movies that matter about individuals who have had a positive impact on improving our lives. Their filmography includes docs about transformational leaders like Barack Obama, John McCain, Gloria Steinem, and the Founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson. This new film, entitled “Mario” fits squarely into that genre.

“We are trying to make moral leadership the core of many of the films we do,” said Peter W. Kunhardt, now 73, who founded the Kunhardt Production Company in 1987 (now Kunhardt Films) with his father, Philip Kunhardt, Jr., and his brother, Philip Kunhardt, III.

The Kunhardt family, which dates back to Peter’s great-great-grandfather who was a Major in the Union Army in the Civil War; his great grandfather Historian Frederick Hill Meserve; and his grandmother Dorothy Meserve Kunhardt, who wrote the classic childrens’ book, Pat the Bunny, merits an HBO documentary about their own unique place in U.S. history. Peter Kunhardt himself—not to be confused with his son Peter, Jr., who has run the Gordon Parks Foundation for the past 15 years—worked on ABC News “20/20” for a decade before founding the family film company in 1987.

“What we are really after is the kernal of character who is universal, whom people can identify with, which is the driving force within someone,” Peter Kunhardt told Westchester Magazine (November 18, 2018, “Reel to Reel,” by Gale Ritterhoff').

The Kunhardts could not have found a more fitting person to apply their storytelling knack to for “moral leadership,” than Mario M. Cuomo, whose unshakeable sense of values, integrity, morality and personal purpose was the focus of my book “Tightrope: Balancing a Life Between Mario Cuomo & My Brother (Heliotrope Books, NY, 2017) I have since published many articles profiling Mario Cuomo as the “Anti-Trump.” One such story appeared in the Albany Times Union at the time of Trump’s first Inauguration in January, 2017. Link here: http://socialvisionproductions.com/2017/mario-cuomo-the-anti-trump/

I wrote the book (and many subsequent articles) because I became increasingly infuriated when I was asked at weddings, Bar Mitzvahs and every event where people knew I worked with Mario Cuomo, if it was true that Cuomo opted out of running for President because he had “mob connections.” Time after time, that thoughtless comment triggered me, and I transformed into the skunk at many “garden parties” by pugnaciously retorting “you wouldn’t ask that question if his name didn’t end in a vowel.”

I decided it was time for me to tell the story as only I could: that I knew from first hand experience that Cuomo had NO mob connections, because I did, and that my brother’s mob associates, considered Mario Cuomo “untouchable,” because of his impeccable integrity. Then, when people asked again, I could simply say, “Read my book,” and walk away from them, with my temper a bit more in check.

In Tightrope, (pages 118-120) I detailed my first-hand observations of the moment, in my judgement, that I knew Mario Cuomo would never run for President:

“ In early September, 1986, the Governor was already in a testy mood. His re-election, was never in doubt, but he was no longer having fun. The press, led by the New York Post, was pummeling (his son) Andrew’s law firm for allegedly doing business with State agencies, and for accepting clients who were seeking to curry favor with the Governor by hiring a law firm in which his son was a partner.

Halfway to the speaking event we were headed for (I sat in the unmarked State Trooper’s car directly behind the driver) the car phone rang. It was Andrew. I watched Mario Cuomo pick up the phone and listen quietly to his son for several minutes, deeply massaging his forehead with the large hand that wasn’t cradling the phone to his ear. Suddenly, the Governor started shouting into the receiver.

“What do you mean you’re a liability to me? What kind of talk is that? You’re tired, you’re working too hard on this campaign and you need some rest. Don’t let me hear you talking like that,” Mario Cuomo said to his oldest son, slamming down the car phone into its’ cradle.

There was complete silence in the car for a few moments. Finally, the Governor spoke, seething with anger.

“Imagine that. My own son, thinking he’s a liability to me. This is some god-damned business,” Mario Cuomo said. “You go into government because you try to do some good, and what do they do? They attack your kids. They spread rumors that somehow you must ne connected to the Mafia because your name ends in a vowel. And for what? All because you want to serve? At what price? And when did my kids ever agree to pay the price?”

I watched him look out of the passenger-side window of the black, unmarked State Police car, his anger barely contained and knew at that precise moment that Mario Cuomo would not run for President of the United States; he would never subject his children to the brutality of a Presidential campaign.

“Ah, the whole thing stinks,” Mario Cuomo said, waiving his right hand as if chasing away a fly, swatting his frustration into the air; brushing away the stench of stories which hurt his son and his family, and gagged him. With one wave of his large hand, he pushed aside any of the tightly reasoned arguments being advanced in favor of a “Cuomo for President” campaign in th next (1988) Presidential election.

“Mario Cuomo understood how news, rumor & innuendo worked better than any American politician of his time. He knew that a story, no matter how far-fetched, took on a life of its’ own, once reported and repeated. . .The damage was often subliminal, a mere suggestion to a jury quickly withdrawn, and it became impossible to erase from public consciousness despite detailed rebuttals or outright denials. All that was necessary for the phony charge to pass for fact, was for it to be repeated over and over again, until it became one with the Cuomo name, indivisible.

“Above all, he would not allow his children to be maligned by anyone or used as props in the no-holds barred media reality show which political campaigns were quickly becoming. His family had not asked for a life in public service; he had, and he would stand as a bulwark against their being bullied. I loved him for leaping to Andrew’s defense, and admired his certainity in being an unflinchingly protective father.”

In the Tribeca Film Festival synopsis that accompanies the information about the Kunhardt documentary “Mario,” one line jumps out and underscores the truth I observed first-hand over eight years:

“As he finally ends his political life and turns more deeply to family, Cuomo’s story is more than just one of leadership, but one of love, empathy and commitment to service that goes beyond a chronicle of political life.”

Only a multi-generational film-making family like Peter Kunhardt’s, with deep roots in American history, a passion for moral clarity, a track-record of uncovering universal “kernals of character” and with a fierce loyalty to those they love, could do justice to telling the story of the humanity of Mario Cuomo.