Footnotes To History

Since we no longer have a president but a quasi-monarch instead, it wouldn’t hurt to resurrect some of our least-known occupants of the White House. I nominate John Tyler, our tenth president,  for this honor, and with good reason. It is better to die virtually unknown than it is to live in infamy as will be the fate of the present occupant.

In spite of his undistinguished legacy of achievements, Tyler holds several records that will never be matched. 

Most astonishing is the fact that he is the only person to have been born in the 18^th century (1790) , and have a grandson in the 21^st century. The offspring, aged 97, passed away last summer, ending a link spanning four centuries.

Tyler was the father of 15 children; one short of a football plus a basketball team. He is the answer to the question: Who is the only president to have married during his presidency?

Tyler’s first wife died on a ship in the Potomac when a new cannon went off killing her and a prominent orator. Who do you suppose married the daughter of that speaker? You betcha. She gave birth to his last 8 children.

Perhaps fathering babies distracted him from bending the country toward justice and equality. In fact, he was disowned by his own Whig Party. However he gave new meaning to the notion of a more perfect union.

Tyler took office in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died one month after taking the oath as our newly elected President. The campaign slogan of the day was: Tippecanoe and Tyler Too. Harrison was a national hero for having killed the Indian chief Tecumseh in the War of 1812. It seems that genocide was a popular pastime in the 19th century.

Tecumseh was a brilliant orator, himself, who fought, in vain, to unite the Native American tribes in resistance to U.S. expansion. Another footnote to history is the fact that Gen. Wm. T. Sherman, whose decisive march through Atlanta ending the Civil War, was given Tecumseh as his middle name.   

History is a continuum and all this is part of our national fabric. Ten of our first twelve presidents, including Tyler, were slaveholders; the exceptions being the two Adams. Our tapestry is woven with many ignoble threads. History ignored, invites the peril we now endure. 

Names

I have always had a knack for remembering names. I can recite all our presidents in order, everybody in my elementary school class including all the teachers I’ve ever had, plus the entire roster of the 1941 Brooklyn Dodgers. Hold down the applause; it is just a quirk from my formative years. We don't get to choose what fluff has stuck to the marrow.

However, nomenclature is not my strong suit. I don’t know the names of trees or birds, a birch from a beech or a swallow from a sparrow. Nor can I repeat lines from Shakespeare. I have squandered my faculty. 

Now I am beginning to drop names; not in the sense of impressing anyone, but I’m losing my access to caption certain faces. Yesterday I lost David Foster Wallace and Angela Lansbury. They return to me in 5-10 minutes, but that lapse is disquieting.

Aging is a bumpy road; that one never taken before. Some days I’m an intrepid traveler heading into an imagined safe unknown. Giggling over the all of it and grateful for having been fully met. 

Other times, I feel my architecture withering, long out of warranty and beyond its shelf life. Now I wonder if I’m losing a marble or two, and what potholes are around the corner? No severe tire damage yet.

Can I blame it all on Trump? Only if I regarded him as an inspirational leader. Instead, I’ve been witness to a certifiably failed human being. It’s a rare moment in history when such mindlessness is on full display.

This is my own journey, rounding third on the way home. It can take years; baseball has no clock. We arrive where we started, weary but wiser or, at least, experienced having circled the bases with stories to be told.  

Perhaps I am a knight-errant like that man from La Mancha tilting windmills, lost in time. Are Spencer Tracy and Greer Garson still dead? Why can't I vote for Gregory Peck as President? 

Settle down, Norm, the doctor will be in to see you in a few minutes. What's his name again?

Surviving Donald

I'm writing this from inside my bubble where I live with my closest friends and family striving for enhanced normalcy. We daily supply oxygen for each other which keeps us from going numb.

During this seismic reign of terror tectonic plates have shifted. Uttering his name has me gagging so much I require three Heimlich maneuvers to expel the syllables. It feels as if we, along with seventy-five million others, have been locked inside the trunk of car as it is going over a cliff in slo-mo.

Universities have been pillaged. Laboratories, shuttered. Language, degraded. Civility, mocked. Founding documents, scraped.

Yet outside the window I'm blessed with many non-deciduous trees. Green leaves are clinging with the same tenacity my circle of friends hold to a belief that the mind of spring will return us to saner times.

Here I am at the breakfast table enjoying the yellow-orange tulips bursting their incandescence as the dry bulbs are quenched by Handel’s Water Music.

The table is filled with glass and bowl, cup and plate, grains and berries with boxes in a spectrum of colors. Rembrandt might find a pattern in the jumble the way Rauschenberg would see it as collage or Pollack might give it a splatter with a yellow streak. It was all invisible to me until just now. Thank you for that, Donald.

In my Trump-free state I am listening to a Julian Barnes book being read via Audible from the library, but interest is waning over Flaubert's Parrot. 

I should also know the names of birds. Then I could report which one it was that just chased away a crow four times its size. I suppose the natural state of Nature is strife. The hummingbird is constantly darting away from predators. Does the cut worm forgive the plow? Adversity drives adaptation. The bough struggles for a sliver of sun, not unlike us in the bubble, listening hard for that sweet sound of grace.

At the same time, I bow to those at the barricades. Resistance is exhausting but so is it exhilarating and sometimes, as now, necessary. They are my proxy as I write. This page is written on my perch not far from the fray.

Youth, Enlightenment and the Whole Damn Thing

Is it true that history seems to be the subject young Americans find most irrelevant as if anything that happened before the internet is prehistory? Not so, my daughter says.

Am I wrong to think that a generation is being brought up thinking that Blacks were happily jamming in cotton fields and indigenous people all ran casinos while Aristotle was in Lincoln's cabinet and Joan of Arc married Noah? 

In fact, Gen Z and Millennials do care, in broad terms, about getting the chronicle right, so I'm told. I am heartened to be corrected. 

With this in mind, I spin the great wheel, and it lands on 1688. No, that wasn't the number of cheeseburgers sold in the first hour of the newest McDonald's or the combined I.Q. of any 20 red state senators.                           

1688 is the year Holland invaded England with 400 ships including a new King and Queen and 20,000 of their closest friends. Strong winds sped their journey across the Channel while the British fleet was stuck in the Thames estuary by that same gust. William & Mary deposed James II and that ended the Papist rule in England forever.

The Brits call the whole takeover The Glorious Revolution. To be sure the new monarchs were welcomed by most. William of Orange brought significant changes into Britain, but oranges were not one of them. They were introduced a century before. 

Under his reign, the stock market was established. He made innovations in horticulture, encouraged scientific inquiry (optics and astronomy), philosophy and the Arts. The reign of William and Mary triggered the Age of Enlightenment which led to our Democracy.

It is a fact that the rate of illiteracy is much higher in Southern Europe than in Northern Europe. This has been true since the Protestant Reformation which took hold in Great Britain, Germany, The Netherlands and Scandinavia. Bible reading was encouraged, while Portugal, Spain and Italy discouraged literacy under the grip of the Vatican.  

A case could be made that governments then (as now) are instruments of business interests. The British East India Co. swapped with the Dutch East India Co. In one of the great swindles of history the Dutch, under duress, traded Manhattan for Suriname in South America.

It was John Locke, the 17th century British philosopher, whose ideas about a social contract directly found their way into our Declaration of Independence. What evolved into our unique Democracy has always been dependent on some measure of participation. These days we are witness to its fragility due, in part, to a misinformed public, all the more ironic in this age of so-called connectivity. The slumbering masses are distributed among all age groups but there was a surge to the right among first time voters in 2024.

I must learn not to paint with such a broad brush, however if history and civics were valued now as they were in decades past, our electorate would hold candidates to a higher standard and understand that legislation affects their well-being. It just might dawn on low-information voters that their health care and Social Security are more important than conspiracy theories or empty panaceas directed against an imagined enemy. 

Perhaps a massive reawakening is happening. The significant turnout under harsh weather in Minneapolis, including young people, is proof enough that I have wrongly consigned a generation to a shared dunce cap. They have shown up to register the defense of the 1st amendment guaranteeing their right to assemblage and dissent. 

The dictatorship we fought against in 1776, again in WWII and now in our midst must be defeated at the polls in November. The dissolution of our Democracy would be a betrayal of our Founders.

  

Masked

Five years ago they mocked the masked,

those of us covered and vaxxed 

from Covid and its variants,

while doubters shouted, 

It's a hoax and damn the woke,

their final blurt.

Now, with brains below zero,

ICE beats, drags and shoots

from behind their masks,

with eyes crazed, virulent

as mutant microbes let loose

like pardoned thugs.

 

 

Car Talk

My first memory of a car, indeed my very earliest memory, was the time, at age 3 or 4, I was looking out of a window at a car below on fire. I hung on to this image until recently when it dawned on me that I had a picture book of a little red fire engine and I probably fantasized that it extinguished the flames of a car on the street. The book was real and the car was real, but the scene owes its life to the spark it ignited in my imagination.  

Again, my first drive in a car is an enduring memory, possibly because it also never happened. I was six years old at the 1939 World’s Fair. The big attraction was the Futurama exhibit by General Motors. I could have sworn we got into a car, and it drove itself around a series of what we now know as highways and cloverleaf looking down at the City of Tomorrow. No traffic. No horns or road rage. The vehicles were driverless and set apart at reasonable intervals from each other. Yet when I now Google the experience, it seems to be a model of a city we were looking down upon from a revolving chair.

Growing up in the 1930's and 40's, my third parent was the movies where I got to see the real world. I learned that most men wore tuxedos and there were three kinds of cars. Bank robbers always drove black sedans as in, Follow that car and step on it. Young people drove convertibles and parked on lover's lane. Then there were taxi cabs where babies were born.

Driving in reality could not live up to that early encounter at the World's Fair. Cars have never gotten much love from me. I couldn’t tell a Studebaker from a De Soto and I marveled how my friends identified the make from the grillwork alone, when I blindfolded them. I missed the art of their evolution and distinct designs. Just as I didn't bother knowing the names of trees. My loss, of course. I've since taken remedial action, at least with trees.

As a kid in NYC, cars were that hulk intruding on our stickball game in the street. With a subway stop around the corner, my family didn’t own a car until I was in college. To me, it was a horizontal elevator wheeling me from A to B. I learned to add water to the radiator and oil to whatever it is one adds oil to… but I didn’t know a gasket from a flywheel.

One day while driving in the slow lane, a driver in lane two suddenly decided he needed the off-ramp and cut in front of me. To avoid a collision, I swerved up the embankment into the landscaping. Better to go up the greenery than down into it. This was to be my ten minutes of fame, as a helicopter flew overhead, I was the morning’s Sig Alert.  

A few years ago, I backed up in a parking lot and nicked another car. In the course of an amicable interchange, the two of us became lunch buddies. There must be better ways to make new friends besides running into one another.

My present car is the color of duct tape. If it weren’t for the license plate, I’d never be able to find it in a parking lot. When a marine layer of on-shore flow rolls in, my old Toyota vanishes altogether. It has a pre-existing condition of being a salvage car and I’ve already added a few scratches to its pedigree. Past cars I’ve owned were named Burgess, Consuelo, Trevor and Fred. This one remains nameless, though it might answer to Foggy. 

I have another powerful memory of that World’s Fair. I was walking along holding on tight to my father’s coat when I looked up and saw it wasn’t my father. I was lost in the crush of human sardines in the enormous plaza. If this were Dickensian times I might have ended up in a workhouse begging for more gruel or rescued by some real estate magnate and sent to a private school full of little Donald Trumps. But, alas, my real father plucked me from such a fate.

Any freeway in L.A. after 2 P.M. is a ribbon of chrome, devoutly to be avoided. On their exodus home from daily bondage, the red sea does not part. 

If driverless, electric cars take over I would be returned to the Futurama as promised by General Motors. I might sit in the back catching up on my sleep or contemplate the meaning of life in a godless world.

Greenland

Ever since it was announced as Trump’s wet dream, Greenland has become one of the most Googled countries in the world. Maybe Donald saw a map in which it looked larger than Africa and thought, why not a golf course with hotels?

In fact, it is about three times the size of Texas or equal to Denmark, Belgium and Norway, put together. Greenland is the least densely populated country in the world but that could change with the U.S. claim of Lebenstraum. (living space).

At the rate we are warming the biosphere, chunks of Greenland might soon be seen floating down the Hudson River. But why wait for that since the administration has designated it as essential for our security. This is a shorthand message to China and Russia. You take yours and we’ll take ours.

400,000 years ago, give or take a week, an asteroid cratered NW Greenland and the forested country became a tundra in a blink of a muskoxen. The change was not incremental; it was sudden. Scientists know this because leaves of willow and spruce have been found under the ice.

Forget about plant life, gold and platinum are calling. Think of all the toilet seats. Of course, grabbing Greenland might mean diverting the Caribbean fleet from its mission of vengeance against bad actors, as opposed to good dictators.

On our way to Greenland, we might as well annex Labrador. You don’t hear much about Labrador these days. Google it and you get eleven pages on Labrador retrievers and two articles about the country.  In fact, it isn’t a country. It isn’t even a province. Labrador is part of the Canadian province known as Newfoundland-Labrador. Labrador is twice the size of the island but has only 8% of the population. Most folks live in Happy Valley-Goose Bay.    

Labrador could fit inside Nevada but might also be deemed essential to our security. The climate varies from polar to sub-arctic, not a choice spot for beach volleyball or even a frozen yogurt store though the views are spectacular. It is probably a great place for an immigrant-detention program and a certain destination if you are a polar bear. There are currently 28,000 people living there and 100,000 moose.

Moose are the most dangerous animal in North America. Why? Because they are taller than cars, drawn to headlights and if you should hit one expect 1,100 pounds to fall through your windshield. I would also expect word travels fast among the moose population that another human predator is loose.

Indeed, we have become world-class predators. Cartographers are working through the night redrawing maps.