Why We Build The Wall

 A beautiful, painfully relevant, song by Anais Mitchell (Thanks to WUMB for this one.)

You Can't Buy a Newspaper in Harvard Square Anymore!

How about this shocking news -- you can't find a newspaper in Harvard Square anymore. It's true. Any my goodness, how is that for a strange turn of events? The newsstands are all gone, and the bookstores don't carry them anymore. Magazines either.

What does this mean? Feel free to comment below to share your thoughts.

Thoughts on January 6, 2021

The attack on the U.S. Capitol brings these thoughts to mind:

1. Conservatives spend so much time genuflecting before the shrine of Winston Churchill. Paradoxical that they've spent the last four years appeasing a fascist.
2. Does anyone remember the Republican outrage over the storming of the U.S. compound in Benghazi? 10 hearings. A House Select Committee created solely for the purpose of investigations.  The endless disparagement of Hillary Clinton. Well, we now wait for the remorseless Republican outrage over a Republican president who, along with his two Senate accomplices (see below), fomented an insurrection and the storming of the U.S. Capitol and the killing of a U.S. Capitol police officer.

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Here's my best go at a headline:

This is the face of American Fascism

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And here's my best perversion of T.S. Eliot ...

This is how America ends. Not with a bang but a whimper.

Meet John Doe in today's election

I didn't have a line at my local polling place this morning. The voting was easy, organized and painless. Hard to imagine who I might have voted for, but I'll give you a hint. His name was Joe Biden.

The other evening, ambling on YouTube as I often do, I ran into the film Meet John Doe, a 1941 Frank Capra gem of Americana starring Gary Cooper and Barbara Stanwyck. 

She's a wild, wise-talking journalist who upon getting fired from her newspaper pens one last column creating a character so distraught at the neglect of the little people, he's going to kill himself on Christmas Eve by jumping off of City Hall. His name is John Doe. It turns out, her story has struck a nerve. John Doe is popular, and newspapers are selling.  So her paper decides to keep her around and get a real John Doe to play the role. In walks Gary Cooper.

In the ensuing twists and turns, themes emerge -- the admiration of the little guy, the miseries of Depression-era men, the rapacious newspaper owner looking to turn a feel good story into political power, corruption in all its guises. And watching it, it didn't feel very far from today. Especially the love of the little guy, the downtrodden, forgotten soldier of decency in the American system. Get to know your neighbor, what's so hard about that?

As if to heighten the point, Capra culminates the film with a scene redolent with Christian crucifixion imagery. Determined to actually kill himself after he learns that he's been a pawn in a much larger scheme by newspaper owner Edward Arnold to take over the American political system, Cooper climbs City Hall tower on Christmas Eve. His persecutors and his supporters deduce that he may try to jump, so they climb the tower to meet him there. Stanwyck climbs the tower too, and in the snowy drifts of a cold night, she talks him down. John Doe does not have to die so that others might live.

Meet John Doe, thematically reminiscent of today.

Remembering Roz Springer

Roz Springer was a force of nature. Her laugh collapsed buildings and walls and her endless inquisitiveness made her a Socratic discussant. She was a Buddhist. She was beautiful and wore her hair up almost always. I can't remember not seeing it that way. 

Roz died this morning. 

I lost touch with her a few years ago. Hadn't seen her and couldn't find her. I worried what had happened to her. Asking around, I didn't find out much. 

Then finally I tracked her down through a friend a few months ago, only to find out she was in the final stages of her life. Thankfully, I got to spend some time with her this week and that meant that we caught up on things. What a gift.

Roz was from the Bronx, NY. That much I knew. As a young child, she lived on the Grand Concourse there. A relative (father, uncle, aunt?) owned an apartment building there. That much I think I knew. She lived in Cambridge at least 30 years. That much I think I knew. She told me once that she had a house and a life, and then she got an illness and had a house fire, and poof, like that, her life went up in smoke. That much I think I knew.

For the whole time I knew her, she lived in public housing here in Cambridge, at Newtowne Court. She was a tenant organizer there. I think I know that. She had a longstanding affiliation with the Margaret Fuller House.

Roz had a great idea for a book. Maybe it was just a book title. I tried from time to time to prompt her to write it. She would have called it The Poor Business and it would have been about all the ways in which the multibillion dollar human service industry -- including public housing and Social Security and all the different apparatuses of the state to help the poor -- are deeply entrenched systems that require poor people to continue to exist so that the system can continue to exist. Her point was that it all is so dehumanizing, to have to beg for housing, or income or healthcare. 

Roz was a force of a nature. She was loved. And she is missed. Already.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare

Always a harbinger of warmer weather and birds and bees and flowers and trees, Shakespeare's birthday also prompts the thought, what sense would the great playwright make of today?

Here's but a brief quote from Julius Caesar [II.i.] about power ... to whet the reader's appetite and wish the Bard a Happy Birthday,

Th’ abuse of greatness is when it disjoins remorse from power.

The Earth is 50 years old today. At least the Day.

It's been 50 years since the first Earth Day. We should pause to reflect and pause to learn in these most wicked of times.

A virus ravages our globe. Our urban centers are fully stressed, and it seems only a matter of time before our rural ones are too. The virus has put a stop to most human economic activity.

And yet, or because of, carbon in the atmosphere has fallen dramatically. The skies above some of the worlds smoggiest cities have cleared. The air even tastes better. Animals roam streets that belonged only to humans weeks ago.

What if there was no more, "business as usual." What if the usual became very unusual indeed?

We sit at that moment. We should figure out how to derive the good from this bad. To see our systems for what they truly are, a mixed bag of benefits and impacts.

Generalities only go so far. Specifics will be needed. For the moment though, let's remember the earth. She is bigger and more complex than us. Was. Is. Will be.

Angus McQuilken talks economic recovery in the 6th District

Angus McQuilken -- a health care executive and a friend of mine -- is challenging Seth Moulton in this fall's Democratic primary for the 6th Congressional District in Massachusetts. Last week, I talked with Angus via Zoom about his ideas for economic recovery in the district once we make it through the Covid era. 

Here is our conversation: