Before, some of the States wanted to change the name. They went to war to do it. It was a little more than that because they also sought to have a new nation for themselves. Not happy with the word united, they wanted to be confederated. That is another word for united or for banding together. We saw how that worked out. There were 600,000 deaths before that matter was settled.
That was over 160 years ago but for many the desire still lingers for the separation and name change. We know how much people rue or celebrate old events. If we forget we will be reminded of that next month when the hundreds of Orange Parades take place in Northern Ireland, mostly on July 12th, which celebrated the 1690 victory of William of Orange at the battle of Boyne.
Now the proposal is to change the name of the country without having such a big war. Rather than using the word united, we will now call the country the Independent States of America. In truth, that is what we became since the beginning of this year when we were first attacked. If you want good reasons to change the name there are right now 116,130 people who if they could would raise their hands giving us the reason. They can not raise their hands They are dead.
Most need not have been killed by Covid-19. They would not have been if we had a leader who would have acted like an adult and taken command. Unfortunately, that did not happen.
That leader passed the buck to the governors of each state. There were no national mandates. In some states people were told to do one thing, in another they were asked to do some things, and in another they were left to do whatever they wanted. That might be all right if each state had control over its borders but that does not exist. If one state has no restrictions and the adjoining state has none there is nothing that prevent people from traveling between the states defeating the purpose of the restrictions.
We know it is important to wear masks. The doctors at the center in charge of health recommended it. The person in charge recommended it. But it was not mandated. It is important to keep social distancing. It too was recommended by these people but was not mandated. Unlike New Zealand or Greece or other countries with real leaders where these mandatory steps were required, the independent states could do what they wished.
The leader of the I.S.A. recently proclaimed: “Don’t forget, we have more cases than anybody in the world. But why? We do more testing. When you test, you have a case. When you test, you find something is wrong with people. If we didn’t do any testing we would have very few cases. They don’t want to write that. It’s just common sense.”
Will this leader next say: “We have more deaths than anybody in the world. But why? We count the dead by issuing death certificates. If we didn’t count the deaths we would have very few deaths. They don’t want to write that. It’s just common sense.”
We also heard this person say that he did not take responsibility for things that went wrong or are going wrong. He puts it on the governors as well he should if they are the leaders of the independent states. The bottom line though is in this most advanced countries we are doing a horrible job fighting back against Covid-19 and we are abetted by the leader who encourages and urges unsafe practices.
Just in case you think we are over the hump, I read the words of Erika Crisp a 40-year-old health care worker from Jacksonville, who after months of quarantining said she regrets going out for the first time with friends to Lynch’s Irish Pub in Jacksonville Beach, Florida. Up to that time she and her friends had been careful with social distancing and had stayed indoors for months “doing everything the right way.”
She said: “I think we were careless and we went out into a public place when we should not have. And we were not wearing masks. I think we had a whole ‘Out of sight, out of mind’ mentality. The state opens back up and said everybody was fine, so we took advantage of that.” She went on: “We should be wearing masks. We should be social distancing. It was too soon to open everything back up.”
She’s been sick for eight days, and 15 of her friends have also tested positive for COVID-19. It was not only her, seven of 49 Lynch’s employees tested positive.
That we have a leader who is incapable of leading we might as well be independent.
Once again, and par for the course, I wholeheartedly disagree with MSFREEH’s opinions. See my comments after hers and other comments below on today’s subject matter.
Just got off the phone with Rob Shetterly and he
alerted me to the publication of his new essay.
Just think of it as a prose……ing of the group herd
In the middle of a COVID 19 Haiku
https://www.commondreams.org/views/2020/06/17/alchemy-turning-protest-affirmation
Published on
Wednesday, June 17, 2020
by Common Dreams
The Alchemy of Turning Protest to Affirmation
In order for this country and people in this country to perform reprehensible acts, it has to deny its own professed values and laws while pretending to uphold them. Coming to grips with this is not easy, but it must be done.
byRobert Shetterly
1 Comments
Demonstrators march on Constitution Avenue near the Dirksen Senate Office Building during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Demonstrators march on Constitution Avenue near the Dirksen Senate Office Building during a protest against police brutality and racism on June 6, 2020 in Washington, D.C. (Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
When I try to describe how it feels to be alienated—from a country, a group, a partner, an idea, the past, a culture, an identity—lots of emotions surface. Alienation generates anger and sorrow, confusion and loneliness. Yearning and weariness. Despair. Often that which one feels alienated from and the feelings generated are multiple. If my experience and beliefs estrange me from the unrealized values of my country, I feel alienated from the abstract notion of the country, its facade, its citizens, friends who disagree with me, and from the self who felt morally grounded being identified with those values. Each estrangement, like a planet, accumulates a cluster of painful emotions in orbit around it.
What surprises me is how long alienation may persist without resolution. Two people may remain in a marriage for decades while both are alienated from the love, respect, and companionship which brought them together. Or, far more dramatically, think of the many generations of indigenous people and people of color who persist in the United States in spite of brutal personal and systemic racism, genocide. It’s one thing to be loyal to a country which seems to support you, far different to be loyal to one that is actively hostile to you, generation after generation, callously exploiting and diminishing, making you the target of white supremacy.
“If we jettison the past, we betray the past… Only by examining that history together, can we move into the future together. The true story is humbling, but it’s the only one that unites us.” Of course, it can be hard to cut one’s ties—family, habit, home, job and the hope of unrealized dreams hold one in place. Of these, perhaps the most interesting and complex is hope. Frequently, alienated people, because they are excluded, believe more deeply in the values of the country than the majority who take those values for granted, accept the window dressing, and easily ignore that the practice of the rhetoric is not equitably distributed. The hope of the marginalized that those values will one day be theirs may be a more compelling anchor than actually having them. Eyes on the prize.
For people of color—as well as for those white people who are acutely aware and ashamed of America’s alienation from its purported values—2020 presents an opportunity to fully integrate this country’s values with its behavior—to come in from our own cold, to match talk with walk. If we can say that a country in some sense possesses, or can possess a soul, we can now ask our alienated soul to inhabit our prodigal history. The curious combination of pandemic, recession, racist police violence, and the perseverance of the Black Lives Matter demonstrators is performing the role of neuro- and cardiac surgeons, cutting open the memory and heart of the body politic, bypassing the clotted ideas and myths, false narratives and prejudices, with arteries of truth. What a relief! Will we have the perseverance and courage to complete the operation? Will the patient survive? If this operation is not performed successfully, stroke and heart attack are imminent.
Somewhere in the midst of the protests, an alchemy has taken place. As the protests matured, they were no longer protests; they transformed from lead to gold. At the beginning they shouted, accurately, I’m angry! I demand to be treated with dignity! I’m here to call out the systemic violence and hypocrisy of your racism! This country’s long and despicable history has got to change! If the protests had been a one time expression of outrage, that would have been the sum of the message. But because they persisted, because they are inclusive, because they had time to expand and grow into a deeper understanding of their own message—because they were right!—they shapeshifted into affirmations of the people we want to be, from rage into vision, a people who acknowledge together the bloody journey of this country’s true history, who share the identity of its crucible, and who together want to embark on a new journey, want to tell a new story, a story of justice, compassion, peace and love. The story we claimed in 1776, but have betrayed again and again ever since.
“The truth is a heavy, awkward, irritating burden in a society which doesn’t acknowledge it.”Too often when the streets fill with righteous protest of people alienated and outraged by this culture’s violence—which is to say, alienated by its materialism, greed, racism, sexism, domination, and the implicit militarism of capitalism—too often the only message communicated by the media is spectacle and anger of a mob. The protesters, who march to rescue this culture from its habitual injustices, end by being further alienated by a status quo media which describes them en masse as marginal. Nothing pleases power more. American power is inhospitable and antagonistic to people who insist on reminding it of its hypocrisy, its real motives, and its many crimes.
However, if the protests that go on day after day are composed of a genuine cross section of people, the protesters are much harder to brand and dismiss. They are us. We begin to ask, first, What are they saying? And then: What are we saying? What values are we affirming?
That’s not lead but gold running in the streets.
Something deeper is going on, though, and in that deeper nature of alienation is a painful realization. In order for this country and people in this country to perform reprehensible acts, it has to deny its own professed values and laws while pretending to uphold them. It calls on its citizens to also deny those values, turn them inside out, deny basic humanity so majorities can participate willingly in atrocity and call it necessary and good. The inside-out values say police killing unarmed black people enhances security for whites; drones killing civilians protects us from terrorists; mass incarceration is a good use of law; unequal distribution of wealth, health care, quality education, jobs and housing is a fair economy; stealing voting rights from minorities is democracy. If we allow our silence to condone such practices, we alienate ourselves from human decency, from respect for other people’s lives, from any hope of participatory democracy. We characterize others as enemies and judge them unfit to live or have the opportunities that make full life possible. We murder our own dream.
Our identities can sometimes be fabricated more easily out of lies than from truths. The mainstream culture prefers to move on, choosing to forget rather than examine, live in myth rather than compassion. The alienated people feel responsible to hold on to the truth. The truth is a heavy, awkward, irritating burden in a society which doesn’t acknowledge it. Sometimes it seems that carrying the truth of history is like pulling a very long freight train as it struggles for miles and miles on an uphill grade. The engine labors, overheats. The engineer is tempted to uncouple 400 years of overloaded boxcars. Who cares? Certainly not the perpetrators of the injustices. They say, Just let it go; dragging all that history is slowing progress. They mean profit.
That’s why these ongoing affirmations are so important. If we jettison the past, we betray the past. All those boxcars shunted off to oblivion tell us who we are. Not who we think we’d like to be, but who we really are. Only by examining that history together, can we move into the future together. The true story is humbling, but it’s the only one that unites us.
Stay in the streets.
Robert Shetterly
Robert Shetterly is a writer and artist who lives in Brooksville, Maine and the author of the book, “Americans Who Tell the Truth.” Please visit the Americans Who Tell the Truth project’s website, where posters of Howard Zinn, Rachel Carson, Edward Snowden, and scores of others are now available. Send Rob an email here.
I disagree in substantial part. I could write a compelling retort, but I’ll spare you, the readers. I’ll say two things: My view of American History on racial matters comports more with the views of HUD Secretary “Ben Carson”, Shelby Steele, Walter Williams and the former U.S. Marine and brilliant scholar, Thomas Sowell, one of my all time favorite intellects along with Bill Buckley. They agree our racist history cannot be denied, but they insist we’ve come a long way from Slavery, Segregation and Jim Crow, and that the vast majority of Americans, over these last sixty or seventy years, have made great progress in forming a “more perfect union” and have nothing to apologize for.
The second thing I’ll say is Mr. Bob S.’s “Truths” are not the same as mine: We have different views of history, ethics, society, et cetera. Who said this best was Pilot in Jesus Christ Superstar when he asked Jesus if His truths were the same as Pilot’s. Unlike some, I do not flay or crucify America for overcoming slavery, segregation and Jim Crow, nor chastise nor crucify all Americans for the sins of a few racist haters, white or black. I celebrate the vast majority of Americans’ of every race, religion and ethnic group for their continuing struggle, striving and success in forming a more just, more equal, more fair society.
Let’s recall the superb lyrics from Jesus Christ Superstar.
PILATE
And so the king is once again my guest.
And why is this? Was Herod unimpressed?
CAIAPHAS
We turn to Rome to sentence Nazareth.
We have no law to put a man to death.
We need him crucified.
It’s all you have to do.
We need him crucified.
It’s all you have to do.
PILATE
Talk to me Jesus Christ.
You have been brought here
Manacled, beaten by your own people.
Do you have the first idea why you deserve it?
Listen King of the Jews,
Where is your kingdom?
Look at me. Am I a Jew?
JESUS
I have no kingdom in this world.
I’m through.
There may be a kingdom for me somewhere.
If you only knew.
PILATE
Then you are a king?
JESUS
It’s you that say I am.
I look for truth and find that I get damned.
PILATE
But what is truth?
Is truth a changing law?
We both have truths.
Are mine the same as yours?
source: https://www.lyricsondemand.com/soundtracks/j/jesuschristsuperstarlyrics/trialbeforepilatelyrics.htmlthis,
And remember Judas’s words:
Voice of Judas:
Every time I look at you
I don’t understand
Why you let the things you did
Get so out of hand
You’d have managed better
If you’d had it planned
Now why’d you choose such a backward time
And such a strange land?
If you’d come today
You could have reached the whole nation
Israel in 4 BC had no mass communication
Jesus Christ
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ
Superstar
Do you think you’re what they say you are?
Tell me what you think
About your friends at the top
Now who d’you think besides yourself
Was the pick of the crop?
Buddah was he where it’s at?
Is he where you are?
Could Muhammmed move a mountain
Or was that just PR?
Did you mean to die like that?
Was that a mistake or
Did you know your messy death
Would be a record breaker?
Jesus Christ
Who are you? What have you sacrificed?
Jesus Christ
Superstar
Do you think you’re what they say you are?
Jesus Christ
AS SAID, WE ALL HAVE TRUTHS, and AS A CHRISTIAN-IRISH-CATHOLIC-AMERICAN, the grandson of four Irish immigrants, I SAY THERE is ONE TRUTH, JESUS CHRIST . . . .THE REST , BOB ‘S VIEWS AND MINE INCLUDED, ARE OPINIONS.
I wonder why Rayshawn Brooks snapped? Some guys just can’t deal with the bracelets. I knew a dude on the pile at Greenville who could brake cuffs by sheer strength. If they had to move him around in SHU, the hacks would use at least two, and, sometimes, three, sets of cuffs to secure him. Dude did not like restraints. Brooks sure gave those doughnut boys a tussle’ I think he was killed, because, he had beaten down the cops to the point of being able to run. The guy who shot Brooks had taken a couple of good licks from Rayshawn, and, wasn’t about to let him escape.
I was glad in addition to my many years of education, that I grew up the city, played lots of sports, got in scuffles, boxed and wrestled with friends and other local kids, and walked on the wild side, too. I was also glad to drop out of the academic worlds for years at a time and do things like drive a truck, work as a laborer on construction, or paint houses and chop down trees (a lumberjack with my friend Charlie W.) for a few years. I was glad too that I experimented with different forms of music, different ways of thinking and living, too, as a young man. I was glad I married a beautiful young women, and sad to get divorced. I’m glad I experienced the good, the bad and the ugly in life.
My friend, Bobby C., Marine Corps, football player, gentleman, and good fighter, and I have one thing in common with many of my lifelong friends: a kind of claustrophobia, where we don’t like being strapped down, held down, in cuffs, constrained or even slid under that machine that takes body scans (CT or PET or computerized axial chromatography or whatever) so we naturally rebel. Bobby C and I have walked out of CAT scan rooms . . . Many of my friends and I have rebelled, resisted when put in cuffs . . .I had a wild past, like Mark and Donnie Wahlberg (also of Savin Hill) and because of struggles with alcohol ended up with 16 arrests between 20 and 30: all alcohol-related. Every time they tried to put the cuffs on, I resisted; I lost every time; they cuffed me and brought me for an overnight stay in a local jail in the Boston area, Cape Cod or down the Washington D.C.-Maryland area. By the age of 34, I finally saw the light and sobered up. I share this in part because the captain of our high school football team (I was the MVP, but any one of a dozen seniors could have been given that award; I got it I think because the assistant coach, Jimmy Cotter, a former B.C. football player was from Savin Hill and the other assistant Paul Hunter (the freshman coach) used to hang around with my older sister in Southie (Old Harbor Village federally funded housing project, one of three projects in Southie.) I remember when Skip and I were at B.C. High we practiced at Columbia Park and one pre-season day, when the temperature hit 95 degrees, our head coach, Ted Galligan, a former WWII navy officer, had us do “double sessions”, full contact, full uniforms, and Ted’s rule back then was “no water” during the 1.5 to 2 hour sessions (morning and afternoon). We sweated. We became good football players.
Skip Sviokla went on to play football at Harvard, and so did Mike Annanis and Steve Ranere (juniors when Skip and I and Jack Gurry were seniors) and sophomore Paul Saba. Mike, Steve and Paul were on the same team with movie star from Texas Tommy Lee Jones (Skip had graduated) on the Harvard team that “beat” Yale 29-29. You remember the headlines: Harvard beats Yale, 29-29.
Anyway, I mention all this to cite Skip Sviokla (Harvard Medical Doctor) and his book: From Harvard to Hell and Back, A Doctor’s Struggle with Addiction. Skip today is a practicing psychiatrist in Rhode Island, but he had his courage to fully disclose how drugs and alcohol nearly broke him. His public disclosure of his struggles helped me to more fully disclose my own. Perhaps others will identify. Alcoholism and drug addiction/drug abuse land many folks in jail . . .Alcoholism and Drug Addiction are DISEASES from a medical viewpoint, and as readers here know I once worked with the USPHS/N.I.H. in the National Institutes of Drug Abuse which was a part of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse and Mental Health Administration.
My lifelong friend, Brian F., a Boston homicide detective (at one time about six of Boston’s homicide detectives had grown up in or still lived in Savin Hill) told me “Everyone resists arrests.” Human beings don’t like being locked up . . .nor locked down. We like being free.
Of course I guy like me, a middleweight, 165-175 pounds when younger, is easier for the police to subdue than a heavyweight like Bobby C. or a super heavyweight like George. So my struggles were futile. A bigger guy can fend off two cops.
The issue is did the police officer fear for his life when George Floyd turned and pointed a taser gun at him? I heard that before the incident, the chief of police declared a taser gun a deadly weapon. That complicated and sheds a different light on the incident.
I offer my humble opinion, however, that to shoot someone in the back who is running away . . .I don’t see how you can justify that, under any circumstances, unless the fugitive has turned and pointed a real gun at you.
Great post, Bill, from Savin Hill. Quite a similar life we have lived. I too was a good multi sport athlete and pretty wild as a kid. Also got into drinking but not a drop until I was 21. Then it was 21 years as a drinker or a drunk. I do not consider it a disease. People ask if I am a recovering alcoholic and I say no, I’m an ex drunk. I also boxed and was a tree guy for 19 years. Nine on the ground and ten in the tree. Construction and mainly roofing all led up to me changing over to being a cabinet maker. Also married a beautiful woman but am still married. Those Red-headed, Irish Catholic girls put a spell on you.
I have been handling guns for a long time. Since I was 10. I am good at putting bullets where I want them to end up. I don’t understand why qualified cops, and they are all suppose to be gun qualified, can’t shoot people that close to them in the legs. In DC around 1994 a homeless man was standing in front of the White House with a large hunting knife and he was ranting. Not jumping around, just ranting. The police were all around him and after several times asking him to drop the knife one of them shot the man in the chest several times. The cop that killed him was six feet away from him. Why not the thigh or the calf or even the foot? He isn’t going anywhere after that.
I agree with you 100% that there is no need to shoot a fleeing suspect that is that drunk in the center mass from the back.
And, Bill, I would like to apologize for insulting you last week. There was no need for me to act that way and I hope you receive this apology with the sincerity with which I deliver it. I am truly sorry.
wa-llahi! There’s no problem a gun can’t make worse.
Kind of a lightweight comment for a revolutionary. Oh, sorry. I’m dyslexic. I thought you said ‘a gnu can’t make worse’.
Thought is more dangerous than guns. Come the Revo, gunmen will be plentiful. Organizers will be scarce. Parallel institutions are more valuable than bullets. All power to the dialectic.
Abe, apology accepted, but I don’t mean the epithets because I see them as someone letting off steam, and as both our backgrounds indicate, we know how to take a punch, even a low blow once in a while, and I’m sure we both know how to throw a few. My lifelong friend and the spiritual guru of our gang growing up was Danny Ryan who has helped 10,000 people in his lifetime . . .Dan was a good athlete, too, and the unofficial coach of our YMCA champ team (we had no coach; the Hyde Park team we beat had about 20 kids and three coaches, whereas we had six Savie guys, aged 16 and under. Dan played all sports and was a great poker player or seven card stud player, too. He was brilliant, too, but especially he was a moral leader, always fair and forthright and always sticking up for the underdog and standing up to bullies.
Dan used to say (in response to any of us reacting too negatively to insults or epithets or curse words directed at us) “Hey, if you can’t take a joke . . .” He did not have to finish the sentence with a word such as “screw” . . .So, we all learned growing up in our neighborhoods, that sometimes Jimmy Costello will break my nose playing basketball . . .his cousin Eddie also broke my nose playing basketball (rough housing, fouls were rarely called; you know that Abe.) . . .and sometimes someone will throw a punch at you . . .and sometimes someone (another Dorchester kid, or Southie Kid, or Brighton-Alston kid, or Hyde-Park-Mattapan kid) will hit you hard or knock you down or curse you out or make fun of you (I jokingly tell my friends from Oak Square, Brighton, and Allston, that from the beginning they all HATED ME because I was from SAVIN HILL; and they just laugh . . .knowing we might have been neighborhood rivals in high school or up to our early twenties, but we all became family, because we worked together, lived together and married each others’ sisters, and as Danny Ryan, Redskin used to say, “If you can’t take a joke . . . ”
You know, Abe, that Irish playwright who wrote, “I can resist anything but temptation” applied to me growing up, and I certainly was drawn to the lovely young women of all our neighborhoods. My dear wife was Irish-English-German and one-sixteenth Native American (Cherokee) and was born in D.C. and raised in Oxon Hill, Maryland. She was, as they say, “the apple of my eye.”
So, one last thought: I think I’ve learned more in life from those who challenged me or disagreed with me or with whom I’ve had fights (physical, athletic in sports, or verbal sparring matches, including those who’ve written dissenting/opposing views from mine). So, Abe, keep on punching, stick to your guns, march to whatever music you hear, however measured or far-away, and follow your own conscience, and do good and fear no man, and have a good day.
Peace
Here’s how I end some writings: Peace to those of good will; to those not of good will, Special Forces.
And here’s what I’ve written before: All four of my grandparents were immigrants from Ireland; Irish-Catholics we called ourselves; my uncle, godfather, Billy Rogers married an Italian girl (Irene); my uncle Bobby Rogers married a Protestant girl (Helen) and since then, within my lifetime and within two generations of those Irish-Catholic immigrants coming to America, I am now related by blood and/or marriage to persons of every race, religion, ethnic group, sexual orientation, political persuasion and musical proclivity. When someone asked, “What about a Hindu from India?” I used to say, Not yet, but now I say, Not yet, but one of my best friends in graduate school was a Muslin, Buddhist, Hindu from Sri Lanka (Ceylon) Saha Amasingham, and he was married to an All-American white girl of European descent, and my wife and I had dinner at his house (we ate with our fingers some delicious Indian-type cooking) and my other best friend in graduate school who I had a few beers with at Travers Tavern in Mission Hill and who took me and my wife along with his wife to dinner in Chinatown was Peter Vardi, chief pediatrician, Haifa, Israel, and on this note I must mention, another friend I had a few beers at Travers (spelling?)Tavern one day, was a physician from India, and recall a snippet of our conversation, when I said, “You know, when I was growing up, being a young rebel, I always had problems with SUPERIORS” And he replied, “Bill, when I was growing up, I always had problems with INFERIORS.” And we both smiled and laughed, because we instantaneously recognized the ignorance behind our misconceptions: All men and women are created equal, and all should be viewed and treated as equals. As MLK said he awaited the day when one and all will be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, MLK would have also added, as Thomas Sowell has taught us, too, that we should judge men and women by the content of their character, by their actions, not by the accidents of their birth, rich or poor, Southie or Savie, Allston or Brighton, Beacon Hill or Pope’s Hill.
I’m thinking we first need to rename this bog
not to be confused with blog:
The Rorschach Riverdance Live at the Hillbilly Ranch….
Until they come out with the sequel to THE GUARD
where Brendan Gleeson plays Don Cheadle…..
In other newsy….
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/boy-hides-from-police-car-george-floyd-lebron-james-connecticut/
A 10-year-old boy was shooting hoops in his driveway when a cop car drove by. Video captured him hiding until it passed.
That famous Hill Billy Lounge near Park Square? The Hill Billy lounge between the Combat Zone and Park Square’s Teddy Bear Lounge (Hammond B-3 Organ plus the Saxophone player was the barber from Andrew Square in South Boston; plus the Las Vegas Review of lovely dancing girls). That Hill Billy Lounge was a favorite hangout of the Savin Hill Billys, and one memorable night their, our Savin Hill friend Chicky D., stoop up, took the microphone and did his “animal imitations”, which he debuted in the summer of ’66 at our Marshfield Cottage (20 guys chipped in to rent it, on the Mashpee River, for the summer) and Chicky’s Animal Imitations included “the rooster at five in the morning” and “the cat and dog fight” and Chicky was great . . .BUT, this is a big BUT . . . the following year when the Beatles released their earth-shaking, revolutionary, hip, SERGEANT PEPPERS album, lo and behold, you can clearly hear between A Day in the Life and The End, an exact rendition of those two of Chicky’s imitations, the Rooster at five in the morning and the Cat and Dog fight . . .True . . .and I’ve written/published this before . . .and told this true story many times before . . .at several venues downtown in the Fall-Winter of ’66-’67 Chicky D. from Savin Hill, an amateur entertainer, would take his mike and do these Animal Imitations, which reminded me of Orwell’s Animal Farm, because the name of our Cape Cod Mashpee cottage in the summer of ’66 was THE FARM
To round this out, believe it or not, the two men from West Roxbury who made a fortune dealing grass, actually purchased the Beatles White Piano for a million dollars or so . . .well before they became rich, both young lads, about twenty-one or twenty-two years old, were at the Savin Hill guys 1967 cottage on Lake Shore Drive, Falmouth (at Jenkins pond/lake) and both those young men I witnessed dancing in the middle of the living room floor of our cottage to the music of Sergeant Peppers . . .the song they danced to, as I recall, was When I’m Sixty Four . . . .now the name of our 67 cottage was “Dope’s Inn” and Brian F, future homicide detective in Boston, masterfully carved and painted the sign we nailed over the cottage’s entrance: It had the words DOPE’S INN, and also two images, carved/painted into the wood . . .Brian had carpenter’s skills . . .the two images were, as I recall, a bag of grass and lit joint, and a hypodermic needle. Now only one or two guys were shooting anything up in 67, but by the end of that summer, half the guys had Zig Zag papers.
To round this story out; One day Hutch and I were down the Quincy Market, an afternoon, in the 1990s or late 1980s, as I recall, and we were having bit to eat and a soda at an outdoor cafe, so to speak, and as we left the restaurant, we noticed a film crew. Well, lo and behold, we months later saw a documentary on PBS or BBC, and the documentary was about the two men from Boston who had purchased the Beatles’, John Lennon’s White Piano, and there was footage of both Hutch and I, Billy C., just another Savin Hill Billy, walking through Quincy Market.
Someone was starting to put the pieces together . . .
You must be a few hairs older than me. The scenes you describe right down to The Farm are out of my past as well. And your broken noses remind me that I have broken mine four times. Twice playing ice hockey, once playing softball and once when my best friend flung a freezer door open and at the same time I looked his direction to get that door edge off the left side of my honker. The really painful one was the first time on the ice. (Both hockey noses were accidental. Not fights. After probably 1000 games on ponds and rinks I have never seen a fight on the ice. In the stands and after the game, yes. But never during the game. That was strictly pro stuff.) After that the pain was lesser as the nose took more punishment. Now if my wife playfully whaps me on the nose I feel nothing. And if I grab it and move it left and right it cracks loudly. That really puts people off, like nails on a blackboard.
The Combat Zone was also on our agenda back then. The Naked Eye had a dancer, was it Princess Cheyanne, that drew in the boys. And of course we had to go see Chesty Morgan and her two midget bearers. Extremely funny times.
Matt, you have raised some compelling issues. As a lawyer, you know that our body politic is FEDERALISTIC. The FEDs are supreme, but the STATES are independent and co-equal in power, EXCEPT when there is a clash between Federal Law and State Law.
Have I stated that concisely enough and accurately enough.
Now, you know we have a TRIPARTITE system of government; three branches: Legislative, Executive and Judicial. Both the FEDs and independent STATES are tripartite, triune, three-branched: three branches from ONE TRUNK = the United States Constitution, the Supreme Law, and the Supreme interpreter of that law is SCOTUS, the Supreme Court of the United States. STATES’ have their own Constitutions which are viable so long as they don’t clash with the U.S. Constitution. And the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the SCOTUS is THE SUPREME LAW OF THE LAND.
We’ve seen SCOTUS run amok with many decisions, in my humble opinion (as freemen we can express our displeasures, the First Amendment’s free speech clause says we can even expressly disagree with and condemn SCOTUS majority decisions.
So, I, as a United States citizen have criticized Roe v. Wade, the Gay Marriage decision, the sex-orientation-transexual decision that held that the word SEX in 1960s Anti-Discrimination Laws was not intended to mean, man or women, but was intended to mean 54 different genders, transexuals and “sexual orientation” so that it would be discriminatory if your employer found out you were publicly admitting your addiction to some embarrassing fetish or you publicly admitted frequenting strip-clubs on a bi-weekly basis, your employer could not fire or discipline you for your after work hours”orientations” or “piccadilloes” (sp?) however embarrassing to the school, church or business that employed you; Nor could a college restrict female athletics to women, because a man who self-identified as a woman (transvestite orientation; transgender person) must be allowed to run track with the girls, or a girl who was transitioning to me a man, no matter how many performance enhancing, male testosterone drugs she was taking, must be allowed to continue on the women’s track team. It is unconstitutional, SCOTUS, tells us to discriminate based on “sexual orientation” as it is unconstitutional do discriminate on the basis of sex, male or female. Now, its absurd for SCOTUS to tell us the 1965 or 1970 Civil Rights Acts which used the term “sex” meant it to apply to transexuals and sexual orientation (concepts barely articulated or discussed when enacting these Statutes) but SCOTUS decrees is, and now we United people of these United States must accept it as the Supreme Law of the Land.
It’s the perennial problem since the 1900 lochner case and since Roe V. Wade of “substantive due process”, judicial activism, courts legislating not interpreting the law, courts seeing “halos” and “specters” and “ghosts” emanating from written words; Courts debasing language for politically correct outcomes; all part of the continuing WAR OF THE WORLD’S WORDS: see Mac the Dog, the novel, and Three Billboards outside Boston, the revolutionary 100 page pamphlet which warns of such abuses of language, and abuses of power, by the Courts and by such corrupt power-drunk Federal Prosecutors as Fred Wyshak. The rot runs deep.
As far as Doctor Fauci, Covid-19 and the young ladies who visited the Irish Pub in Jacksonville, Florida (home of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Free Bird, Sweet Home Alabama)), please see Robert Kennedy, Jr.’s youtube 2.5 hour criticism of the CDC, NIH, Dr. Fauci . . .
Basically, RFK, Jr., agrees with me about the abuse of power by the NIH, CDC and Fauci, in particular, who for months has been telling us of the dire consequences of catching Covid, but has never told us of the deaths which have ensued from the lockdown: from unemployment (every one percent rise in unemployment is associated with 35,000 deaths nationally in these united states) from isolation (suicides, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction) from folks missing their routine cancer-screenings (cervical, breast, colon) from folks having difficulty getting food and medicines from pharmacies. In short, Fauci, a virologist and infectious disease specialists, knows NOTHING about PUBLIC HEALTH and RELATIVE RISK ANALYSES. he has rarely even mentioned them, insisting on lockdowns only until some unprovable vaccine is unleashed on the people of these United States. Why not a voluntary vaccine only for the elderly, is a good question.
Now, the Irish pub: seven employees and six of the young lady patrons have tested positive for Covid-19. SO WHAT? How many will take sick, have mild symptoms and now be relatively immune> Probably all. How many will die or be hospitalized. Probably None.
But the Power Drunk FEDs and the power drunk STATE public health dictators TELL US, ORDER US: No swimming, no beach, stay inside and get no Vitamin D from the sun, isolate, stay jobless, and suffer the health consequence of joblessness.
As far as the SCIENCE of masks goes. There’s still great scientific debate. Doctor Adams, an anesthesiologist and Surgeon General (head) of the United States Public Health Service, a uniformed branch of the United States (in which I once proudly served from 1975 to 1976, sworn in in 1975 but actually told I was accepted into the USPHS in 1974. There was a delay in getting sworn in, I was told, because if sworn in before about April of 1975, I would have been a VIETNAM WAR-ERA VETERAN and entitled to all benefits as such, which would not have been fair, so I was sworn in a few days after Congress declared an end to the Vietnam War Era, and so I became just an ordinary Veteran of Uncle Sam’s Uniform Services, five military and two non-military the USPHS (doctors, nurses, sociologists, public-health guys) and the Oceanographic-Geologic-
Service (Marine biologists, geologists, physicists, et cetera.)
The point is sometimes SCOTUS gets it wrong; sometimes the NIH, CDC, USPHS get it wrong; sometimes Congress gets in wrong.
The USPHS was correct to advise folks wear masks whenever they could not keep six feet separation; the masks do not protect the wearer; the masks protect others from the wearer; masks were not required at first because Scientists knew that for most viruses and other coronoviruses (SARS, ex.) infectiousness occurred mainly from the SYMPTOMATIC. The USPHS advised folks who were symptomatic simply to stay home, isolate for two weeks, until your risk of infecting others had passed. WHAT CHANGED? Studies showed Covid-19 was infectious during the INCUBATION period, pre-symptoms. So, to protect others Surgeon General Adams all to wear masks when within six feet; in groceries, in pharmacies, at doctors’ offices. If you can assure you are beyond six feet, there is no need to wear a mask; at beach, at park, outdoors walking, even in-doors if everyone can maintain six feet separation. Still, if you have symptoms, don’t go outside, isolate. Moreover, some studies show that viral particles can be transmitted beyond six feet if you sneeze, cough or if you’re breathing heavy, so the ANSWER: The FEDs and STATES public health authorities taught people how to cover their mouths and noses when they cough/sneeze and advised runners to cover their mouths/noses if they come within lets’ say 10 feet of others.
An example: Boston College will open its football season with a stadium one-third full, 15,000 spectators. All will be required to wear masks and gloves. For a virus that some believe is still highly transmissable during the incubation period (the WHO seemingly now disagrees about the riskiness of that) it makes sense that everyone wear masks because even with mandatory spacing, it is likely many will come within six feet of each other momentarily . . .in passing. Moreover, think of this: When Public Health Officials do CONTACT TRACING, they don’t hunt down everyone the infected person passed on the street or at the museum; they trace, track, seek, hunt down and test those individuals who were within six feet for more than let’s say fifteen minutes. Why? Because their concerned about REAL RISKS of infection not REMOTE RISKS, de minimis risks.
CONCLUSION: PRESIDENT TRUMP has made the right decisions. The States, co-equals, Governors and Mayors, were a bit too late in ordering lockdowns; Reopenings are proceeding wisely and necessarily so because of the deadly adverse health effects of the Lockdown, joblessness, isolation, et cetera, and WHEN AND IF a vaccine is developed, MY HUMBLE RECOMMENDATION is that it only be administered to THE ELDERLY and maybe only to THE ELDERLY WITH CO-MORBIDITIES, who are at high risk of dying.
For the rest of We the People of these United States, those without comorbidities (obesity, asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, lung diseases) and especially those under sixty years of age, NO VACCINE IS NEEDED……especially so if we have not carefully done the animal studies and human doubly blind case-control (placebo) studies to assess the RELATIVE RISKS of giving the vaccine or not giving it, just as Drs. Fauci and company at the NIH never informed the public of the RELATIVE RISKS of the LOCKDOWN versus the VIRUS. How many will have died from the LOCKDOWN versus the VIRUS? How many will have died or been disabled by THE VACCINE versus those not taking the vaccine? We know 95% plus of Americans infected by Covid-19 have survived without long term adversity. The vast majority have mild symptoms or are asymptomatic. Our bodies already know how to handle this bug, naturally; at least the bodies of the young and healthy have immune systems which know how to defeat this virus, already, without a vaccine.