Wayward Landlubber

My mother used to tell us, "if you can't say something good about someone, don't say anything at all." Same with my father. Neither of them said anything bad about the other. It is how you raise small children to be tolerable adults. It hasn't worked for a number of reasons. None of them are because I have a hard time being silent.  Back in the 1930s, a philosopher named Karl Popper contributed to the long history of humanist essays, "The Parodox of Tolerance". At the time he wrote this, Fascism was stretching its muscles, in Italy, Germany, Spain-where it was actively taking the country, and Turkey. Concurrently Germany had been bribing US legislators to spread fascist propaganda through Congressional Franking Priveledges, free mail. Henry Ford was handing out free copies, with each car he sold, of The Learned Elders of Zion. The purpose of this influx of German influence peddling was to keep America out of the war Hitler was preparing for. Think about ...

There's an old telephone booth on the sidewalk outside Jake's Famous Crawfish in Portland, Oregon. It has been repurposed into a sidewalk library. The bookshelf is displayed on one glass wall. The other walls have been covered with dark glass so the occupant can't be seen. The books are all banned books, which the Homeland Security Secretary forced the Multnomah County library to get rid of. If the door's closed, don't bother knocking.   A furtive figure in a hoodie slid into the booth and closed the door. He searched the books until he found what he was looking for, Grapes of Wrath. One of Secretary Noem's aides had to tell her that that book is not about Oregon wine. He tipped the book toward him. The floor began sinking below sidewalk level and descended into the cavernous underground of Portland's streets. When it stopped, the man stepped out of the booth and sent the floor back to street-level. This is the place card-carrying ANTIFA in the know, with a ...

I have a hat. I have several hats. Simple workingman's hats. My favorite, my winter hat, is a black replica of a Greek Fisherman's cap. It has sentimental significance, my son sent it to me for a long ago birthday from NYC. He vaguely remembered that I had had a Greek Fisherman's hat many years earlier. It was wool and had an elongated button on it reading, SAVE THE WHALES under a humpback whale image. I purchased that hat at a thrift shop in Honolulu and wore it on a sailing sojourn across the Pacific, to Sausalito California. The button was a going away gift from a friend of mine who was a member of Greenpeace.  We wear hats for more than a way to keep our bald-spots dry. We wear a hat that represents an aspect of us. A wag in the 30s talked of the duality of hats; you wear a hat, or the hat wears you. My simulated Greek Fisherman's hat has a pin on it too. A round white pin with a red circle around the name TRUMP, and a red horizontal slash through it. The meaning is...

A mere 10 or so months ago there were people who wished to avoid the F word. Fascism. "We were prepared," they said, "with the Constitutional guarantees left us by our great fore-fathers." We had a legislature that would provide checks on the executive. And if they couldn't provide those checks, we have the Supreme Court. That checks and balances thing proved too damned weak when cheques were offered from accounts with unlimited balances. Fascism can be quantified. Measured by the written words of people who lived through it. From the fascism of Musilini, to 3rd Reich Fascism, to Spanish facism,  to Hungarian fascism practiced by Victor Orban, to the 22nd century fascism of the Trump stink. There will be nuances here and there but they have the same basic principles. You can find other descriptions, I prefer to use Umberto Eco's 14 characteristics. A writer who grew up at the confluence of Italian, Spanish, Turkish and German fascism, in what until recently ...