Where are the demonstrations, the protests, the angry outbursts, the furious gatherings, the outraged marches? Where are the acts of civil disobedience?

      Didn’t the disgraceful performance at the Oval Office the other day finally make something click? Didn’t the bizarre 90-minute speech to Congress, full of lies and craziness, do it? Haven’t we finally realized that our democracy is being stolen, our privacy is being ransacked, our national reputation is being ravaged, our judges are being intimidated, our American soul is being sold and … pretty much nothing?

      Well, some of our reps dressed in pink for the speech, and when one of them was escorted out of the chamber they angrily … held up paddles. And some of us decided the other day that to express our outrage, we wouldn’t shop at WalMart or Amazon. That’ll show ‘em!

      Look, I didn’t buy anything during the economic boycott. My only economic activity was I ate lunch with a friend at a locally owned place and paid in cash, my (very) little thumbing of my nose at the rapacious corporate oligarchy that had eliminated DEI practices. . . .

      My late mother, the former Carmela Casullo, whose family came from a dirt-poor southern Italian town in Puglia, instilled in me her sense of fairness with one word: honorable.

      “That wouldn’t be honorable,” she’d say. Or: “You have to do what’s honorable.”

      Even though I only was in grammar school, I knew that the word came fraught with more meaning than mere “right” or “wrong.”

      In Italian, it’s ‘Onorevole’ (‘Own-oh-RAY-vo-lay’), one of the highest compliments, meaning among other things: just, principled, respectable.

      Funny how her simple code for living has stayed with me for more than seven decades.

      Funny, too, how I thought of it again after our supposed president shamelessly, traitorously—and, of course, dishonorably—stabbed the president of Ukraine in the back . . . .

      When Donald Trump first took office, in 2016, I felt depressed and defeated. On that inauguration day, I began posting a series of opinion-driven quatrains on Facebook.

      On day 2, still unable to climb out of my funk, I wrote another, and then another, and another, eventually writing 365 doggerels for every day of Trump's first year in office (plus one for the anniversary). I published all of them eventually in a book, “Humpty Trumpty Hit A Brick Wall: Donald J. Trump's First White House Year in Verse.”

      Now, once again with Trump back in the White House, I'm writing a daily poem—call it doggerel, as that's what these are—on the new D. C. administration.  I didn't think I'd do the same this dreary time around but decided, okay, I'll write just one in (dis)honor of the first day.  

      I did so and then couldn't stop. . . .

Click here for the doggerels

      So read the headline in The Bulwark after the Trump administration eviscerated the US Agency for International Development. 

      Other massive cuts are on the horizon: Threats to eliminate two-thirds of EPA staffing, half of Social Security staffing, perhaps the entire Department of Education. Taken as a whole, it’s all starting to look like a bloodless coup, driven by one man who lied his way back into the White House and another elected by absolutely no one. Non-violent or not, the assault on our democracy is real, brutal and spreading rapidly.

      The crippling of USAID topped the cruelty index. The Supreme Court helped the administration carve out 2,000 more jobs late at night on a glide path that The New York Times reported ultimately will leave the agency with 290 jobs of an original 10,000. The administration froze 10,000 USAID and state department contracts and grants in their tracks, ranging from funds for the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief to funds for urban rescue teams who rush to countries struck by devastating earthquakes.

      The numbers are big. But big numbers too often leave us with a shrug and a sigh, before we move on to something else. Data doesn’t punch us in the gut.  For that we need stories and powerful images that move us. . . .

(This is a story from Jerry Lanson’s Substack blog: “From the Grass Roots.” It’s free and has a single goal: To share stories from across the country about those who’ve been hurt by, or are pushing back against, the chaotic and often cruel policies of this administration. We encourage you to subscribe.)

         Long-time arts editor, film critic and historian Bruce Dancis gives us his highly informed takes, decade by decade, on those films that have had the most impact.

      Here is the second in the series.

—The editors

By Bruce Dancis

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

      We began this series with the ‘40s, and continue now with the 1950s. . . .

      I have been trying to come up with an example in the history of the United States of a new president changing U.S. foreign policy as dramatically and significantly as President Trump seems to be doing on the Ukraine War.

      I have not found such an example.

•       Thomas Jefferson was less worried about the French and was more conciliatory toward them than his predecessor as president, John Adams. However, after Great Britain and France began interfering with American shipping, Jefferson’s Embargo Act restricted trade with both countries. No huge switch there.

•       The election of an abolitionist as president of the United States in 1860 had larger consequences than any other election in American history. But Abraham Lincoln did not bring a change in foreign policy, beyond a concern with making sure other nations did not recognize the Confederacy.

•       Jumping ahead a century, Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon promised that, if he was elected in 1968, he would end direct U.S. military involvement in Vietnam. . . .

Timothy Snyder, a history professor at Yale, has been among this country’s most eloquent and thoughtful defenders of human rights in recent decades. We found his concise response on video to the obscene performance in the Oval Office yesterday by the current president and his acolytes to be particularly important. It is taken from Prof. Snyder’s substack, to which you might consider subscribing. He encouraged people to share the video.

Click here to see Prof. Snyder’s video

      Many people I know—maybe most?—assume I did. They assume a nice middle class, well-read, generally articulate, reasonably knowledgeable professional writer (that’s me, I think) who has worked for major publications and published a dozen or so books surely graduated from college.

      But I never did, and nearing my 79^th birthday, I’m wondering if I should be regretting that.  

      I mean, I could have graduated from college. I was probably smart enough. I just … well, never showed up for many classes. Back in my day, you really had to actually be there to pass the course. None of today’s remote learning stuff.

      But instead of physically going to classes, I went to the college newspaper office. That became my education, my training ground, my obsession. I spent pretty much all my undergraduate time there, writing and editing and bullshitting and making friends for life. . . .

      The children who were pioneers in the attempt to desegregate public education and exercise their right to attend school, to realize the promise of Brown v Board of Education, were met with persistent, violent white resistance in all regions of the United States.

      This happened in our lifetime. Two centuries into the establishment of the republic, one century after the Emancipation Proclamation and 13th Amendment to the Constitution, six years after Brown, Black students in the latter half of the 20th century were subjected to collective disadvantage as schools and communities across America pretended to comply with the orders of courts at all levels of the judiciary.

      But at the personal level, young people of color entered environments that were overtly and dangerously hostile. These courageous pioneers attempted to learn in schools that made little or no effort to welcome them and support them in becoming educated.

      Here are some of their stories . . .

      Within 30 or so minutes of completing my first cataract operation last week, my wife Judy and I were enjoying a nice lunch—albeit sans alcohol, per post-op instructions.
      All went perfectly, said my doc, and I now am eager to get the second one done and out of the way in May (my in-demand surgeon’s next available time.) 

      It is, by far the most common surgery performed in the U.S. and most of the world—three million procedures done in the U.S. each year, out of 20 million worldwide. It is particularly common for our age group—because in the U.S., nearly 1 in 5 people age 65 to 74 have cataracts that affect their vision. By the time they’re 80 or above, more than 50 percent of Americans either have cataracts or had surgery to remove them. …

We seem to keep losing every battle. We have to keep believing we can still win the war.

      Yeah, things are bad and they do seem to be getting worse. Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, RFK Jr., Kash Patel, the Gaza travesty, the trashing of the Kennedy Center, the Ukraine sellout, the deportations, the indiscriminate firings, the cuts at the CDC and the NIH and on and on.

      One after another, we fought for rationality, legality and common sense and we’ve been defeated. And yet, the war isn’t over. The battle goes on. It must. …    

If rock ‘n’ roll is the soundtrack of our lives, movies are the screen on which our lives are reflected. They show us what we’ve been, who we are and imagined what we could be.

      But which movies playing on those screens have left the deepest impressions for our generation?

      We asked long-time arts editor and film critic and historian Bruce Dancis to give us his highly informed takes, decade by decade, on those films that have had the most impact.

      Here is the first in the series, on the 1940s.

—The editors

***

      My assignment: Choose a movie from each decade of my life that has had the most personal impact. And since I’ve had a relatively long life, my editors and I have decided to run this article as a weekly series over the next few months, decade-by-decade, starting with the 1940s and ending in the 2020s.

      These aren’t necessarily the “best” movies of the decade or the most innovative; they represent the films that resonated most with me, either from my initial viewing when they were released or when I first engaged with them in subsequent years.

      I was born in 1948, so I didn’t see any of the 1940s films or most of the ‘50s films until much later. I’ve also cheated a bit by including brief mentions of five additional movies per decade that were close behind my main selections, and citing five more “How could he leave out?” films. …

      This is my second visit to Costa Rica. On my first—a quarter century ago—I drove through the country without stopping for anything but gas, food and a huge backup on the Pan-American Highway (long story).   

      I now realize what a mistake that was. The people are wonderful. The animal life is as varied and unusual as anywhere I’ve been—besides, of course, Africa or the national park formally known as Denali. And, although while here in Costa Rica, I’ve only entered one of the available oceans—the larger one—the swimming has been perfect.

      However, as good a time as I’ve been having in Costa Rica, I realize there is a sense in which . . . I’m not here. (I hear those three words as The Zombies might have sung them.) I’m not here in the way that I might have been here had I been smart enough to get out of the car 25 years ago.

      For I dive significantly less deeply into foreign places now than then.

      For a bunch of reasons . . .

Part of our continuing series on regrets. Click here and here for previous stories.

Unlike so many younger people, I didn’t grow up knowing I was queer. It was less common to be aware of things like that in the 1950s. Also, although I knew I was different from other kids, our family was one of those with the wrong kind of secrets. That was enough reason to feel different. 

      I was a literate child—awkward, silent and always with my face in a book. I read indiscriminately, from my parents’ crammed bookshelves, the children’s section of the library and the regular fiction section. 

      After school, my sister and I would walk down the hill to the library. I would pick a book off the shelf, pretty much at random. We would take our books and sit in the heavy wooden chairs at the heavy wooden tables polished to a whisper, with the faint smell of bubblegum and paper like dried grass on a hillside, and the golden sunlight that streamed in the windows at a slant, crowded with dancing dust motes. A safe place, full of books. 

      I knew about sex. …

      Trump and his cronies don’t care about facts and science in their queer bashing, but we’ve always been here and we aren’t going anywhere.

      Science writer Josh L. Davis leads LGBTQ+ tours at the Natural History Museum in London. His charming and informative presentations have become popular on YouTube and they have inspired “A Little Queer Natural History” (University of Chicago Press, 128 page), a beautifully illustrated book celebrating the “non-heteronormative biology and behaviors that exist in the natural world.”

      Gorgeous photographs accompany stories of hermaphroditic fish, lesbian gulls and male swan couples raising chicks, as well as spotted hyenas in female-centric colonies. Davis provides evidence of the prevalence of homosexual activity among gorillas, giraffes and sheep. …

      Google the greatest inventions of our time, say the last 75 years, and you’ll find all sorts of wonderful, important techy stuff. Stuff like the Internet, of course, and the integrated circuit, the smartphone, the MRI scanner, the laser, the personal computer, the Global Positioning System.  

      All great, all important, all have significantly changed the world and our lives. Transformative, all of them. We use them, we depend on them, but of course we have absolutely no idea how they work.

      But what about the more mundane stuff that’s been invented during our lifetime, the simple things, the not-particularly-technical inventions that have simply made our day-to-day existence so much more pleasant? . . .

      As I head toward my 75^th year of life I have been thinking a lot about the “what ifs.” 

      What if my parents had divorced before I was born? What if my mother had not died when I was 12 but lived to be a grandmother?  What if I had been born a boy and been chosen to take over my father’s general contracting company? 

      What if I had drowned when I was three and had toddled into the ocean, fortuitously saved by my Auntie Peg? What if I had been a straight-lace instead of a hippie? What if I had married the first love of my life, or the second or the third? …

Part of our continuing series on regrets. Click here for previous story.

Occasionally we excerpt something we come upon that might be of interest to readers of this website. We had not previously seen the substack published by Don Moynihan, a political science professor at the University of Michigan. Here’s how he describes his work: “I spend a lot of time studying, teaching, and thinking about how governments function and how to make them better.”

Prof. Moynihan also has proven quite good at understanding how governments can be made much, much worse.

The post from which we took this excerpt, DOGE Mismanagement Principles, also contains sections headed: “Don’t fire the guys taking care of the nukes” and “Don’t fire employees, unfire them, and then fire them again.”

Don’t fire the guys collecting the money

      Governments can’t function without revenue, so ensuring that the agency that collects taxes can do its job is pretty fundamental to maintaining state capacity. . . .

      In some ways Kendrick Lamar last Sunday was dressed more like me and my buddies in the 1960s and 1970s than were any of the 58 previous Super-Bowl halftime-show performers (some of whom, in fairness, were in marching bands).

      Lamar was outfitted in blue-jean bellbottoms, sneakers, a black shirt, a baseball cap and a letter jacket. He had a raggedy, as best I could determine, beard.

      And the performance Lamar gave—with Samuel L. Jackson as a black Uncle Sam, supposedly tasked with asking him to tone it down—seemed more angry and more political than any previous Super Bowl halftime show, angrier and more political than we had thought the billionaires who own the NFL would allow. He referenced jazz-poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron’s line that the “revolution will not be televised” but insisted that it was about to be. At one point an American flag, formed by dancers, was split in half by Lamar. . . .

      The moral and ethical crater that the Trump-administration bulldozer has dug through the heart of our democracy isn’t likely to concern his voters. They long ago bought into the propaganda that the "Deep State" stole the 2020 election. Many, and possibly most U.S. voters, also have swallowed the lie that immigrants = criminals.

      Yet the resistance to Trump – Democrats, Independents and Never Trumpers -- must find a way to erode his less fervent support nationwide quickly if they hope to so much as slow this country’s march into autocracy and possibly worse.  I believe there’s a path, but time is short.

     And it’s a path requiring planning not righteousness, and it must be targeted to Republicans and Independents not just those already convinced of his malevolence. . . .

      Trump’s foes won’t succeed by rallying in front of Washington, D.C., buildings. They won’t succeed by claiming the moral high ground. They won’t succeed by standing up for health, science or human rights. This is sad, but it is true.

      However, those trying to stop the real steal – of our democracy – might succeed if they focus on what likely will be the growing economic pain of Republican voters in Red States. . . .