….a half-century memorial

1. Boy, the way Glenn Miller played,

Songs that made the Hit Parade,

Guys like us, we had it made,

Those were the days.

2. Didn’t need no welfare state,

Everybody pulled his weight,

Gee, our old LaSalle ran great,

Those were the days.

Chorus:

And you knew who you were then

Girls were girls and men were men,

Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again.

3. People seemed to be content.

Fifty dollars paid the rent.

Freaks were in a circus tent,

Those were the days.

….and Why We Need to Root it Out Through a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission

Imagine: you are an inquisitive little boy, six years old. You ask a million questions. One question for which you haven’t received a meaningful answer is this:

“Daddy, why do White people treat us bad, just because we’re Black? Is there something wrong with us?”

Countless times those questions have been asked, the querent only changing the color based on their own ethnicity.

At some point in a young Black child’s life, one (or both) of his/her parents will have to have “The Talk,” the…

If something goes wrong with our free press, the country will go straight to hell. — I.F. Stone

Newspapers are gossip printed on the backs of advertisements. — Donald E. Koch

Arguably, the most important of Americans’ rights is embodied in the First Amendment, which includes the right to a free press. Without a free press, the ability publicly examine, analyze, and, if necessary, criticize the words and deeds of our leaders would not exist, thus leading us into the abyss of kakistocracy. Such is what we had during the Trump Administration.

During the 1890s to the 1920s, in the…

Twice impeached, twice acquitted, Donald J. Trump dodged bullets twice in connection with his Presidency. Now that he’s out of office, and can no longer claim the protection of being a sitting president, what lies in store for him?

First, we have to realize that Trump absolutely lacks any sense of shame or a moral anchor. His megalomania and his extreme form of narcissistic personality disorder make clear that he only cares about himself. Having lived in a childhood with an emotionally-absent mother and a psychologically-abusive father, Trump was trained from birth to be an unaccountable, lying, sniveling rich brat…

In light of the failed American coup on January 6, 2021, a number of Republicans have stepped to the mic and asked us to “forgive and forget,” to “move forward and heal this nation.”

They almost invariably use this forgive-and-forget phrase whenever they want to move the conversation away from accountability, or punishment from wrongs they have committed.

It is certainly no coincidence that they take refuge in the religious underpinnings of their political base, who, typically, are from the South and whose evangelical pastors frequently cite Matthew 6:14 and Ephesians 4:32 as Biblical sources for the forgiveness refrain. …

…and a Senate-Cleaning, too

Some of us are life-long Democrats and have always distrusted Republicans, based on the fact that Republicans have typically been selfish, oriented towards White supremacy, and socially irresponsible. Their views have dramatically worsened since the advent of the Tea Party in 2009. Their “I’ve got mine, and to hell with you, Jack” attitude has taken traditional Republican notions of support for limited government and free enterprise and put them on steroids. …

As we all know by now, Donald J. Trump was never a conventional politician or leader. We all know that he was a megalomaniac with a psychotic narcissistic personality disorder.

Starting with his infamous escalator ride in Trump Tower in 2015, he captured the imagination of dozens of millions of American by saying things that the rest of us wouldn’t; by doing things the rest of us couldn’t; and by expressing ideas that the leader of American democracy shouldn’t.

For four years, Trump and his lackeys gave us constant misogynistic, racist, religiously-intolerant, homophobic bashing of all who weren’t straight, male…

David Hackett Fischer wrote Albion’s Seed in 1989. In it, he discussed in considerable detail the folkways of the settlers of the American Colonies who came from four distinct regions of Great Britain, and whose cultural traits are still deeply embedded in our county’s DNA.

The ones giving us the most trouble these days — the same as those who supported the Confederacy in 1860–1865 — were the so-called “English-Scots,” which gave rise to the Appalachian culture. These folks carried with them a culture forged in a thousand years of brutal conflict. …