Daddy-o

I generally have high standards in my choice of entertainment, but occasionally I get sucked into certain unpardonable indulgences.  One in particular is a very popular streaming show of a sci-fi nature* with no particular redeeming value-- not even a personal one I could point to, like, "It's so bad it's good" ... or "It fills some cultural void in me" ... or "I like it".  This show is actually not good at all and it's not even not good in an interesting way.  It's not a show I would necessarily want to participate in discussions about.  With one exception.  One of the main characters on the show is a singularly average looking small town police chief.  He's paunchy, balding and middle aged.  He's got a mustache-- not a stylish job, just hair on the lip.  He also has, not a beard, but several days of beard growth.  He's got a big fat head that his Smokey-the-bear police hat is too small for.  I. Hate. Him.  The average looks are not the problem-- the non-Hollywood casting is one of the few things I admire about the show.  What gets me is the flavorlessness of the role in combination with the cockiness of the performance.  There's a swirl of picky little things I contend with every time the character shows up:   His touch with comedy is not light.  There's not a tremendous amount of intelligence shining from within.  He's not merely crabby, he oozes entitlement to be crabby.  While he's called upon to mete out justice without a lot of formality, Dirty Harry style, he's not particularly deft with the tough guy act. Most galling of all, for some reason this guy with the sex appeal of a turnip is called upon to parade his half-naked dad-bod around in one context or another every other show it seems.  I haven't taken the trouble of remembering the character's name but in my mind it's Dad (even though I couldn't tell you whether the character actually has children.  It's not the children that makes him Dad.  It's the mustache.).

On principle, I don't fast forward through shows I'm watching-- not even the not particularly good ones.  It's a solidarity move.  It doesn't seem fair to people who actually watch the shows. But the antipathy I feel for this character has tempted me to make an exception in his case.  On the other hand, I have to admit to a certain fascination about how this vacuum of charisma continues to be a center of the show.  It's like a kind-of-near train wreck that didn't-actually-happen.  I can't take my eyes away from it even though there's not really anything I could point to to look at.

My daughter, who does not watch the show, tells me that she hears that this character has a fan base among her cohort, the millenials.  What could they possibly see in him, I wonder.  She tells me it's exactly what I hate: that he's just a big dumb Dad.  They like him because he's a Dad??!  Ugh!  I suppose it should have been obvious to me since there is literally nothing else going on with this guy.

What is it with young people and their capacity to be entertained by Dad figures?  Someone my daughters' age enthusiastically recommended I watch a Bert Kreischer comedy special.   I'm going to give them one more chance at a recommendation to redeem themself.  I've also learned from my daughter about a popular video "dating game" released not too long ago in which the object is for the protagonist, a new-Dad-in-town, to choose a "date" from among a selection of other Dads in the neighborhood.  What!?  You're kidding me.  Is it a horror game?  No!  Is it political education disguised as discomfiting social satire?  No!  You mean, it's just supposed to be fun?  Yes. And young people actually buy and play this game?!  Yes, they do.  I'm not at all worried about this up and coming generation, until I hear about shit like this.

Always on the cutting edge of music I noticed in my YouTube recommendations not long ago new videos from Soccer Mommy and Hockey Dad.  Something is really terribly wrong when college students are naming their bands after their parents.†  This indicates to me a failure of parenting.

We're supposed to be progressing, but instead we're indulging in stale, dad-aged obsessions like racism and misogyny again.

Kids!  Dad is not cute!  Dad is not cool!  Dad is Donald Trump.  Jordan Peterson will not save you.  Joe Biden will not save you.§  You're not supposed to like Dads, you're supposed to resent them.    You're supposed to rebel against them.  They are the enemy!  They are old, they are overweight (and if they’re not overweight, they’re vain), they are angry, they have terrible taste in music.  They watch Fox News.  They criticize you for no reason.  They laugh at cruelty. They have stopped learning.  They don't understand you!  What's more, they made this world that you're inheriting.  They could have done something about global warming but they only made it worse.  They could have made this a safer, fairer world but instead they acquiesced to the most evil systems of politics and economics in the world and a devotion to or at least an okayness with a bullshit concept called the free market.  And now we're enslaved to it. You want to fix it and they're telling you what they always say about anything that could make your life better: We can't afford that!   This is a lie.  It's just a reflex with them.  They don't know what they're talking about, but they do know that you can't have what you want.  They have ruined your future.  And they did it accidentally on purpose because it was more fun for them, it was easier for them, and they could get away with it because nobody could tell them what to do.  They are selfish. They are uninformed and proud of it. They are complacent and they have taught you to be complacent too.

So drop the obsession with the old man, kids!   When it's time for Fathers' Day, just remember this:  Every day is Fathers' Day...

~~~~~~~~~~~~
* It's the one where all the originally pre-teen characters still wear rugby shirts and beanies and socks with shorts even though the actors portraying them are by now beyond puberty.

† It really pains me to report that Soccer Mommy is actually pretty good.  I refuse to listen to Hockey Dad.

§ Bernie Sanders will save you.

Pwease no steppy!

When we see the scurvy, morally decrepit Reprobate-in-Chief literally hugging the American flag for the cameras like the perverted weirdo that he is and spouting inane platitudes about the US of A it's not difficult to understand what Samuel Johnson meant when he called patriotism "the last refuge of a scoundrel."  But is that all that patriotism is?  In the relative halcyon days of the early 1960's when life was somewhat sweet; when our commonality was celebrated and we were engaged actively (if not always unanimously) in the broadening of it to include Americans of all types, backgrounds and walks of life; and when the memory of our collective successful struggle to defeat Hitler and fascism in World War II-- the last defensible international endeavor undertaken by our military-- was still rather fresh in our minds, it was assumed that Patriotism was a virtue shared by (or available to) all Americans.  I confess, when I see Trump mugging like a dope, the impulse to want to slap the flag out of his filthy mouth is probably as close to that classical ideal of patriotism as I ever get.  But I was witness to the absconding of the concept of Patriotism by the jingoistic scoundrels of the right when Presidents Johnson and Nixon's escalation of the dubiously conducted Vietnam war turned popular opinion against it, and it became difficult to see it as anything other than a veil behind which the worst impulses, deprivations and policy impositions of the ruling class were routinely masked.  They must have thought we were idiots.  Given their successes and the way they translate to our tribulations, they may have been right.

Still it is not correct to say that "the last refuge of a scoundrel" is all that patriotism is.  When you see it manifested in spontaneous expressions of gratitude for the service of those suddenly revealed to have served in the military, or in the ubiquitous square flag decals and slogans that have become de rigueur decorations of the back of dump trucks and semis, or in the flag pins that had better adorn the lapels of our elected representatives, it's clearly also a kind of obsessive compulsive disorder, a manic escalation of the competition to display one's unbridled devotion to the country-- even though no one asked or particularly cares unless reminded to, and certainly not to an extent that merits the shameless exhibitionism.  The gratitude is backhanded-- it's really an assertion of ownership.  In the service of their overseas adventures, in response to the emergencies that arise from their clumsy lack of neighborliness in the world, you give your life and limbs.  As thanks to you for your willingness to proxy in person for their aggressions, they wear a pin.

Ostensibly, patriotism according to Merriam-Webster is "love for or devotion to one's country."  Given the arbitrariness of the circumstances of one's country and the many ways it could have gone differently, I can see how the patriotic impulse could be considered nothing more than an adaptive behavioral tic to the situation you find yourself in, but a virtue?  This is one of those things that survival sense dictates we should probably not probe too deeply (because challenges to it engender such inchoate and hot emotions in those who think with their fists), but it withers under any kind of honest rational scrutiny.   It's telling that the usage samples in the Webster definition reveal nothing but pathology about the meaning of the word:

Although poles apart ideologically, they are both unashamed of their patriotism.
— Christopher Hemphill

 You may not agree with him politically, but no one can question his patriotism.

They supported the war with a fierce patriotism.

As Voltaire noted, "It is lamentable, that to be a good patriot one must become the enemy of the rest of mankind."  Patriotism, being based on the accident of one's birth, or at best fanaticism about one's chosen home, is the sort of thing that is both indefensible and something to be used usually in its least defined and most undefended state as an instrument to cast aspersion on the integrity of one's adversaries.  While it shares this feature with much of religion, at least religion is codified to an extent that it can be argued with.  Still my lack of religion and basic disdain for patriotism if disclosed publicly would disqualify me from public office and from the trust and basic respect of a good majority of the country.  If you wanted to impugn my character on the basis of my lack of patriotism, you could absolutely do it; I'd only be consoled that at least the feeling is mutual.

I'll grant that my experience of patriotism as on balance a pathology causes me to disfavor it, but is there anything to redeem the concept for me?  Am I the pathological one for having such animosity to it?    No one defends the patriotism of citizens of other countries; likewise it is only American patriotism that I as an American am qualified to consider.  It seems to have been a useful quality for the American revolutionaries who sought to divorce the territory from Great Britain, since it seized them with an image of something worth defending.  I'd be loath to argue that the enlightenment ideals of the original patriots were not something to be patriotic about and it would have done them no good to dwell on how far their own behavior and lifestyles deviated from it.  That our nation would then go on and wield patriotism as an excuse to persist in enslaving humans to perform our labor for free and to engage in genocide against the original inhabitants of the continent as we expanded our borders exemplifies the type of mischief that it can accomplish.

The problem with Patriotism is that it's usually either isolationism, nationalism, imperialism or war-mongering pretending to be a virtue.  The masquerade becomes a reflex.  The mindless devotion becomes the point, and through the lens of Patriotism, those who point out the widening gap between the ideal of America and the reality can appear as opponents rather than champions of an America worthy of devotion.  I've been encouraged by a proliferation of the champions recently, maybe best exemplified by the freshman class of Congress, but I'm not ready to let go of the sense that their challenge to the status quo could be met as usual by the masterfully practiced enemies of progress at any turn.

The idiosyncrasy of one nation's patriotism over another's raises an obvious point.  The US did not always exist and there is no reason to think it will exist in perpetuity.  Perhaps a revolution may some day come out of the observation that the dysfunction of a place is directly proportional to its size.  Perhaps the world will for instance one day reject the tyranny of beholdenness to a few primarily unjustly advantaged super-powers and the elites that prop them up, favoring instead a return to an organization along the line of mutually cooperative and peaceable micro-states,  the concept of empire having been relegated to the dustbin of history.  In this case, the memory of patriotism toward the former empire will be exposed as vanity.  Why wait?  Be skeptical now.

The logical endpoint of organization of the world into micro-states  (Burj Al Babas, Turkey)

Trouble brewing

The president is on a roll lately.

The recent ugliness surrounding The Squad is a case in point.  Frustrated by the continued string of off-the-script attention garnered by freshman Congresswomen Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rasheda Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley (known collectively as "The Squad"), Nancy Pelosi groused publicly about them a while back, mustering as much condescension as she could.  A back-and-forth continued for days as the Squad was not prepared to take the digs lying down. Seizing on the moment, the president jumped on Pelosi's bandwagon, commandeering it until it went careening down a hill of flaming bigotry and racism to the delight of Trump's base and forcing Pelosi to attempt a backpedal in defense of the women she had been trying to tarnish.

But you have to wonder who Pelosi is defending them to?  She has no influence over Trump's base, and her recalcitrant refusal to hold Trump accountable for his abuse of office -- her preference to run out the clock on his first term, thereby in effect doing her part to keep Trump's agenda in motion -- is destroying any credibility she may have once had with the vast and nebulous multitude of potential democratic voters who needed no help in supporting the Squad to begin with.  That leaves her true constituency, the Democratic establishment and their corporate donors, a well-heeled group who will have no guarantee of success in defeating the Know-Nothing Trump in 2020 on their own, and whose tenuous grip on what motivates voters in these times shows no sign of tightening, a predicament that spells continued, and by now all-too-familiar trouble for the coming election.  In this case, it was clearly trouble of Pelosi's own making.  And it's no trouble for Trump.

The answer for Pelosi and these types always seems to be to tone it down, stay the course, hold the middle.  It's really no mystery why the sexless, featureless, flavorless center that voters understandably reject-- and after all, why not reject it since what has it done for them lately?-- is so seductive to the Dem establishment: it's the Benjamins, baby!  Come on!  This is exactly what their donors are paying for.  That glazed look in Nancy Pelosi's eyes that you observe whenever she is explaining herself for the cameras is the 100 yard stare at her true audience, the donors watching the show from their skyboxes.

That show is going to continue for as long as it has sponsors.  Sponsorship seems to have little to do with popularity as measured by the count of heartbeats, nor with effectiveness-- although we can almost certainly rest assured that it is having whatever effect the sponsors are after.  What really concerns me is the sway that it seems to continue to have on a certain segment of the electorate that votes Democratic.  These are the voters who if you polled them would state as their first priority for 2020, defeating Donald Trump.  According to a Harris Poll taken in May, 65% of voters who identify as Democrats say the top characteristic they are looking for in a candidate is his or her ability to defeat Trump, above any policies that they may agree with.  This singular focus no doubt accounts for Biden's enduring support in the face of public airings of his superhero origins in States Rights, advocacy of amped-up privatized incarceration, credit card company favoritism and the propounding of anti-busing legislation, which support we can expect to endure as long as the mysterious perception that Biden stands a good chance against Trump survives.  It's hardly worth constructing an argument against, given Biden's pattern of imploding on his own.

I am the first to say that Trump has got to go.  That's obvious.  But obviousness is exactly the problem with investing all of one's hopes and dreams on that one anti-goal at this stage of the game.  Defeating Republicans is what Democrats exist for -- obviously!-- but it cannot be everything that they exist for, or they will lose again.

Until there is only one Democrat left in the race, it should be the mission of democratic voters to define the alternative future that their candidate is going to represent.  Trump has clearly laid out the future we do not want to have. If Democrats don't sell us a better future, Trump's may continue to be the dystopian one we live in.

Spells

Ellie Davies gets me

Do you ever get an itch in a place you can't reach?  Please tell me it's not just me.  There are a couple of options when this happens.  A person can ignore the itch, but I am not that person.  There is sometimes the option of finding (or declaring some existing feature of one's available environment) a scratching post to scratch yourself against, but this is not always practical or appropriate given the social situation or the location of the itch.  One could overcome one's reticence and ask someone in the immediate vicinity to find the compassion within their heart and the communal ape within their bosom to act as an extension of one's mind and perform the scratch for one, but in these too divided yet too apathetic times, success in the quest for a volunteer is not always assured.

For me, the answer to this, and to so many other quandaries, is witchcraft.  It so happens that regardless of what ails you, no matter what plagues you, for whatever you lack, there is a spell for that.  For instance:

Skay-brus scab-rous
Abracadabrus
Pepsi Free and Classic Tab-rus
Hey there hi there ho there hee
Itchiness fly away from me!

Saying the above, spin anti-clockwise 3 times until you're facing east, now click the heels seven times and --- Ahhh!  Doesn't that feel a whole lot better? 

Indeed, witchcraft serves me in traditional ways as well for my more typical venal urges.  To get a refund at tax time, I prepare a tincture of owl whiskers boiled in the sweat of a toad, dab a spot the size of a hedgehog's freckle behind each ear and intone the following:

Apis Avis
Pops and Mavis
Lay some on me, Ossie Davis.

But the true function of magic is to coordinate the wills of mortals who would otherwise stand in one's path.  Quite literally sometimes:

Hocus Pocus
Big Fat Dokus
Hee-nuss Hay-nuss
Podilliokus
Land of Nod and Land of Goshen
Set this traffic lane in motion!

You'll need a branch cut from the north side of a yew tree on a full moon at midnight whilst a raven calls.  Now say the above while waving the branch three times over your head in a counterclockwise direction and you'll soon be on your way.

I am not above using my powers for good from time to time especially in these times. For instance when I'm nearing my limit watching the news, I sometimes direct my magic on the Durwood-in-Chief.  In preparation I procure the blood of a gnat, the sighs of a sparrow and the tears of a shrew.  I pour these into a vat and bring to a boil.  Add the eye of a fly and 3 warts from a whip-poor-will's knee and stir until viscous.  Now sprinkle the potion on the soul of a salamander while speaking the following:

Flea nut Peanut
Flipperty pan
Kangaroo Bangaroo
Fast as you can
Kiss me a kinkajou
Son of a monkey!
Resist these words
With the will of a junkie!
Video Radio Vo-dee-o-doh!
Who shall to the rodeo go?
Easy peasy, dopey sneezy
Bashful rashful,
Enough with the sleazy!

The one obvious question is, given the unmagical state of the world why doesn't magic work?  I think I know the answer to this:  We're all practicing it at the same time.  My good magic is being cancelled out by your sucky magic.  I'm working on a spell for this.  I'll keep you posted.

Take that!

As a youngster transplanted to the deep American Northeast in the 1960's I became invested in the fates of sports teams from the nearest metropolis to the south, Boston.  When I was young, the Red Sox had not won a world series since 1918.  They had not been in a world series since 1948.  They had not even made it to the playoffs since before I was born.  So when they took the American League pennant in the Impossible Dream season of 1967 it was a huge deal for me along with everyone else in New England.  They lost to Saint Louis in seven games.  When they returned to the World Series in 1975 (losing to the Reds 4-3), I was too deep into becoming the renegade that I am to be bothered; but in 1986, living at the time in a landlocked state in the American South, I got wrapped up in Boston’s next World Series appearance through a lens of irony-tinged nostalgia, and my heart skipped a beat along with everyone else watching Mookie Wilson's line drive to single roll between Bill Buckner's legs in Game 6, allowing the Mets to score, and tying the series which the Mets would go on to win in Game 7.

Some years later, I am back on the east coast, happily working for an outfit that merges with a firm from Boston.  My initial excitement at the prospect of reconnecting a bit with my roots is immediately squashed by my experience of dealing with my instant colleagues.  A trip to Boston which I had eagerly anticipated in order to get acquainted with the other firm's business practices does nothing to mellow the impression I'm getting.   It seems that in spite of the transaction being touted as a "merger of equals" every accommodation, every sacrifice, every ditched plan, every lost benefit, every draconian policy adoption is being made by us.  "You can't think of it as us versus them!  We're all us now!"  Easy for them to say.  Suddenly the association I have with Boston is "interloping assholes."  Now the chip on its shoulder that I always thought was Boston's due is annoying the crap out of me.  It is 2004, the first World Series the Red Sox have been in since 1986, what could be their first World Series win in 86 years, a rematch of 1967 with Saint Louis, and this time I'm praying for the Cardinals to kick Boston's ass again.

My prayers fell on deaf ears, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I've moved on to greener pastures leaving the "Bostards" as I came to call them behind me, and have even had a pleasant time or two in the city since those days,  but my feelings about Boston have hardly changed.  What I'm dealing with is a grudge-- a debt owed me that Boston can never repay. I don't know what to do about it.  Even knowing that I come from a long line of grudge holders whose lop-sided beefs with neighbors, politicians, tv stars, car manufacturers-- food products, for the gods's sake-- sometimes looked ridiculous to me; even knowing a grudge is pointless, silly, petty, counterproductive, I can't deny that it's deeply, deeply satisfying.

I  mention grudges because I believe I've tapped into it as a volunteer for the presidential campaign of a certain Vermont senator.  As one of my contributions, it has been my pleasure (if you can call abject terror and trepidation "pleasure") to cold call supporters of the candidate in 2016 who have been mostly thrilled to hear from me, sometimes less than pleased, but occasionally shocking in the venom they can't contain in telling me to piss off.  I'm no fan of unsolicited phone calls, so I'm surprised (and a little dismayed, truth be told) when anyone picks up at all, but I have to admit, I was really puzzled at first by the hate that filled some of these former supporters who could not tell me fast enough that they had jettisoned the revolution in the three years since the last primaries.  When this happens, as the script dictates, I politely thank them for their time and wish them a great day and move on.  I'm reading from a script and they are merely reacting to my self-identification as a Bernie Sanders supporter, so I don't think it's anything I've said.  Bernie Sanders has not changed a bit from what I can tell.  If anything his consistency -- utterly uncharacteristic for a politician in my experience-- is a great deal of his appeal.   He's consistent because he's never really been on the wrong side of an issue in 40 years of public service.  There's nothing for him to waffle about.  What appealed to his 2016 supporters I presumed is still there today, so I was puzzled by the fury of some of the folks, until I pondered possible reasons.  

What I came up with is something I can easily relate to, because I've written about it myself from time to time.  It's not Bernie Sanders per se that they're reacting to, I think, but to a tiny handful of his 2016 supporters who rather than following Bernie's lead after the primaries in supporting Hillary Clinton to avoid the certain disaster of a Trump presidency, took their balls and went if not into the Trump camp then to frivolous support of a third party or merely home after the primaries, often extremely loudly, making clear that they would have no part in supporting Hillary, even at the risk of Trump winning.  Given the hostility toward Bernie by the mainstream media and establishment Dems, some of these "Bernie Bros'" anger was understandable, but some of it was abjectly absurd, petulant, arrogant, some of it bordering on ugly misogyny, and as anyone with consciousness knows reckless as hell.  

People do forget (or simply do not know) that the contingent of "Bernie Bros" was smaller and on the whole less objectionable than the Party-Unity-My-Ass former Hillary supporters, the PUMA's who flocked to support John McCain after Barack Obama defeated Hillary for the Democratic nomination in 2008 and especially after McCain cynically inflicted the clueless Sarah Palin on the culture by selecting her as his running mate, a move precisely calculated to attract disgruntled Hillary supporters.  Nevertheless the contingent of Bernie Bros in 2016, although not as decisive as Hillary Clinton's poor campaigning in losing the election, were a convenient place to hang blame for Trump's victory.  Not content to harangue Clinton supporters for their "support of the Neo-liberal status quo" before the election, if you lived somewhat online as you tried to work through your grief over the election results you could not avoid many of them gloating at you afterward.  

It's difficult today to recall Trump's obscenely racist performance following the Nazi march on Charlottesville, to see the plight of immigrants as we speak on the southern border, to contemplate the portent for reproductive, worker's and voting rights of the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, to behold the tattered state of the Iranian Nuclear deal,  to come to grips with the trillions of dollars starved from the public treasury in order to enrich the billionaire class even more, or to consider any number of other Trumpian outrages and not see the arrogant rebellion of Bernie Bros in 2016 as an extremely myopic and privileged response to Bernie's defeat in the primaries.  But Bernie was not himself a Bernie Bro!  He did not fade away or even shirk after Hillary's nomination, but rather held 39 rallies for her in 13 states (including the ones she badly needed to win but did not herself visit) by election day. 

It's not the nature of a grudge to be fully transparent and revelatory about the perceived crimes against the grudge holder that instigate it.  Once formed, grudges admit no new knowledge. Nothing feeds them, and yet they grow.   So I think I understand how the grudge of a Bernie Bro against Hillary Clinton and her supporters in 2016 might find itself engendering a reactionary if completely misdirected grudge against Bernie Sanders in the heart of even someone who like a grownup transferred support from Bernie to Hillary in 2016 when it was clear that she was the last, best hope against the election of Donald Trump.  Grudge holder that I am, I somehow avoided the trap, first by voting for Hillary in 2016, and then simply picking back up my support for Bernie in 2019.   But if I'm right that this explains the hostility to him felt by some former supporters even though if anything we need the revolution now more than ever, I recognize the pull of it.  And my quandary is familiar: I just don't know what to do about it.

Moon Song

It was cloudy and windy but a mild 60°F in Carrabassett Valley Maine that Monday, October 5, 1981.  Jud Strunk was on the airfield at Sugarloaf Regional Airport, at the controls of the 1941 Fairchild M62-A he had bought and restored, and was preparing to take his new plaything on a test flight.  His passenger was Dick Ayotte, a friend of many years.  With Dick strapped in to the tandem seat behind him, Jud called "Clear prop!" and pushed the starter.  While the propeller on the nose worked up a spin, he checked the controls and instruments, adjusted the fuel mixture to rich, and began taxiing to the runway.  At the end of the runway, with the all clear from the control tower, Jud took a visual of the airspace, opened up the throttle and accelerated.  His focus was on the take-off, so he ignored a numbness in his left arm, but as the nose of the plane lifted, taking the wheels with it, was he imagining his life flashing before his eyes?

*****
There must have been something in the Chadakoin River water to account for it. Jamestown, New York, the birthplace or residence of giants of comedy:  the incomparable Lucille Ball (August 6, 1911);  Brad Anderson, creator of the Marmaduke comic strip, (May 14, 1924); the loony oversexed Mormon apostate and sworn enemy of Joseph Smith, Doctor Philastus Hurlbut (February 3, 1809).  But none epitomized the show business life in quite the way that Jud Strunk did. Born in Jamestown, June 11, 1936, Jud was raised in Buffalo, an hour away to the north on Lake Erie.  He showed an early aptitude for performance.  Having learned the banjo and piano, he performed for local audiences before heading off to Virginia Military Institute for college.

After graduation, his passion for skiing no doubt brought him to Farmington, Maine in his early 20s.  Within a short time he expertly adopted the linguistic tics and dry wit of his adoptive state,  incorporating the shtick into his country flavored act to the delight of local audiences.  From the base of his farm in Eustis,  Maine he took his act on the road, touring for the US Armed Forces with a one-man show.  From there, he was called by the folk music revolution to begin making regular trips to New York to perform his comedy and compositions in coffeehouses and clubs.

In late 1960, his big break came just Off Broadway at the Madison Avenue Playhouse.  The show, by William Engvick, was Beautiful Dreamer, a biography about and featuring the songs of Stephen Foster in which Jud (appearing as Jud Bartlett) played the banjo and is credited with the parts of Turk and Bob.  The New York Times' Harold Taubman raved that the show was "well intentioned."  After its three week run, there was no turning back from life in the public eye for Jud.   By all accounts, his next stop was Colorado where he served as spokesman for the United States Ski Association, making several paragraphs in another New York Times story in 1966 about a ski conference in Stowe, Vermont promoting New England as a ski destination to rival the resorts of the West.

While it's true that corporate spokesmanship is the epitome of razzle dazzle, actual show biz itself was never expunged from Jud's bloodstream, and his next frontier was the music industry and television.   In 1969, he went to the logical place, Rockland, Maine to record the Christmas classics Santa's Got a Moto-Ski and A Special Christmas Tree for the Moto-Ski Corporation.  At the dawn of the Nixon era, Jud began to make his mark elsewhere in country music starting with the album Downeast Viewpoint in 1970, a critical and modest commercial success.  Singles and other albums followed including the mildly racy novelty hit The Biggest Parakeets in Town, and the sophomore LP Jones' General Store.

The next frontier was television.  In conquering it, he had the help of an enthusiatic early fan-- the powerful and influential producer of television and broadway, Pierre Cosette-- who caught his act in an out of the way venue in San Diego.  Cosette knew a star when he saw one even if no else had seemed to notice. First came a CBS television special, unprecedented for such an unknown.  From there, almost as Cosette predicted, Jud's face became ubiquitous in the wallpaper of American TV comedy.  In 1970, Samantha Stephens and the second Darren,  along with their wacky relatives and colleagues spent several episodes of the ABC Situation Comedy Bewitched in Salem, Massachusetts.  For 2 of those (Paul Revere Rides Again and Darrin on a Pedestal),  Jud portrayed comically bemused hospitality industry employees (Bellhop and Maitre D' respectively).   Throughout the period, there were appearances on variety shows hosted by the likes of Bobby Goldsboro -- as sure a sign of arrival as there was at the time

Elsewhere on the tube, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in, the groundbreaking comedy variety show on NBC that had done the unthinkable by going up against  the formidable institution of Gunsmoke on CBS on Monday nights and beating it in the ratings, in the process churning out such catchphrases as "Sock it to me", "You bet your sweet bippy" and "Verrrry interesting" and introducing America to the talents of Goldie Hawn, Lily Tomlin, Henry Gibson and Tiny Tim among many others, was in its 6th and final season in 1972.  In search of something different,  the producer George Schlatter hired a rash of new talent, including  Moosie Drier, Patti Deutsch, ventriloquist Willie Tyler, and Donna Jean Young.  Rounding out the cast was none other than Jud Strunk.

Around this same time, the twice married Jud found his biggest and arguably most enduring success, with a song about a guy who falls in love with a girl in his youth and demonstrates his enduring love for her with the bestowal of a simple gift, a gesture that continues each day throughout both of their lifetimes, and beyond:

With its high concept simplicity and quintessential country flavor, Daisy a Day was a hit not only for Jud.  It was recorded as well by Ernest Tubb, Glen Campbell, Roy Clark, Hank Snow (who named an album after it), Patsy Montana, and by Dutch star Conny Vandenbos (as Ik geef je een Roosje mijn Roosje).  The Malaysian singer Kamahl had a hit with it in Australia. As seen above, Jud performed it himself on Johnny Carson in 1973.  As an indication of its importance at the time, it received the Spike Jones, Jr. treatment in a never released rendition, that was played on Dr Demento's radio show several times.

The most unique honor for the song came in December 1972, when in the course of the Apollo 17 mission it became the first song to be played on the Moon in a specially designed player for the lunar lander, along with 4 other Jud Strunk tunes.  Apollo 17 (Dec 7-19 1972), was the last lunar mission, ensuring that Jud Strunk's distinction as the only Earth composer to have received playtime on the surface of the moon may stand forever.

The article that appeared in Cash Box about it appears to have conflated the lunar orbiting command module with the lunar module— I.e., the lander.  By several accounts the player was on the lander.

*****

It wouldn't be show biz or country music if there weren't alcohol and brushes with the law involved.  Jud had his share of problems with both following his success.   Dick Stacey, owner of a motel lounge Jud played frequently with his band Copeland Kitchen in the late 70's reminisced that as payment for an appearance, Jud asked if Stacey wouldn't mind making a check payable to the Maine District Court System for $500 and delivering it to the cashier in Bangor.  For Jud, not a problem.  On another occasion, Jud requested a place his horse could stay for the night.  He was on his way to Augusta on horseback to protest nuclear power and demonstrate for alternative energy sources, but first had to spend the night at the facilities of the local jail for another public drinking offense.  Stacey put the horse up by the pool.  The hard living inspired Jud's philosophically titled fourth and final album, A Semi-Reformed Tequila Crazed Gypsy Looks Back, in 1977.

Jud's passion for alternative, renewable energy in the midst of the energy crisis of the 1970's earned him yet another mention in the New York Times on March 16, 1975 ('Re‐Inventing the Windmill—And Selling It', Page F15 of the New York Edition)

What's the latest in energy for the home—nuclear, solar, atomic, gasified coal?

Well, no, it's air power, according to William Gillette and Alan Lishness, two former aerial photographers in Maine whose Zephyr Wind Dynamo Company introduced last week a wind‐powered electrical generator otherwise known as — you guessed it—a windmill.

The Zephyr windmill, which can store energy and provide for about half the space and “water heating needs of an average 2,500‐sq.‐ft. house, has no gears, belts or chains and is expected to last up to 40 years.

What's so new about a windmill? The developers say theirs is different because of a slow, direct‐drive generator for which they have a patent pending. The generator, which produces 7½ kilowatts in a brisk, 28 mile per hour wind, has propellers hooked directly to it.

Zephyr, which can build the units in 40 hours, has completed three of them, one of which is used to help heat its plant in Brunswick. The windmill, easily shipped, is asserted to be the largest production wind‐power generator in the world and a worthy competitor for European models that cost nearly twice as much as the $4,600 fully‐installed Zephyr.

Within two days of the windmill's introduction, Jud Strunk, the country‐music singer, purchased one for his new “alternate” energy house planned for Eustis Ridge, Me.

His environmental involvement inspired him to open  a new chapter in his varied life.  In 1980 he ran for the Maine state senate, and according to the lore, lost by one vote.

*****

And this is where we find him October 5, 1981, preparing for takeoff in his 941 Fairchild M62-A at the Sugarloaf Regional Airport in Carrabassett Valley, Maine.  As the plane reached 300 feet, the pain in Jud's arm spread to his chest.  Struggling with the aircraft, he suddenly lost control of it.  The aircraft banked, rolled and fell back to earth killing Jud and his passenger Dick Ayotte in the wreckage.  The cause of Jud's death was determined to be congestive heart failure.  

At 45,  Jud's meteoric rise had come to a meteoric end.  For Jud Strunk, downhill skier, one-time corporate spokesperson, windmill pioneer and author of a poem called ‘Bury Me on the Wind’, it might have been a fulfillment that he also died on the wind.  It's reported that his sons have been shopping Jud's story around Hollywood, hoping to interest someone in a biopic.  If they succeed, could there be any more fitting conclusion to the story?

Meet the Rebuke

Every now and then one of those stooges of mainstream media provides such a glistening example of toolery that it causes jaws to involuntarily drop and brainwaves to momentarily pause as a means of staving off combustion from sudden overheating.  Chuck Todd of NBC is such a stooge and the video above is such toolery.

Meet the Press, which Todd hosts and from which the above is taken, is one of those institutions of mainstream media that has always inspired platitudinous reverence from the bought-in and the easily cowed.  Todd's forebear on the show Tim Russert epitomized the fictional premise in his day - newsmakers' feet were to be held to the fire by the probing grillings of the elite press. But with a radically centrist viewpoint that has always been as pleasing to its corporate owners and sponsors as the messages of the newsmakers themselves, many of them similarly purchased on their way to the polls, the "grilling" has always been for centrist politicians and those to the right of them a bit more like a warm oil foot massage than a pig's foot barbecue.  The flame is usually reserved for the feet of progressives, and Chuck Todd's "one reporter's view" performance above is a classic example of it.

The inspiration for the outburst was an Instagram post and tweet by Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in which her subject is US treatment of refugees along the Mexican border.

In a rapidly spurted editorial that aired a day after Todd "grilled" Trump in part on this very topic, Todd begins his commentary by saying, "Tonight I'm obsessed with what's happening at our Southern Border."  He soon makes clear his obsession is not with the inhumanity with which US Agents are treating people whose desire to make supplication for entry to the US breaks no laws, a cause pursued as a means of escaping violence and desperate conditions in their home countries (often as the result of policies of our government and consequences of our corporate devastation of the planet).  Rather it's a semantic quibble with language Ocasio-Cortez is using to describe the situation.

According to language arbiter Todd, you can call the detention of immigrants, epitomized by the separation of children as young as infants form their parents and confinement in caged cells a "stain on our nation" or you can call it a "necessary evil [to] deal with an untenable situation "

"But you know what you can't call it?" Todd snidely asks, and lets a clip from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's instagram chat for constituent answer:

The forbidden phrase: "The United States is running concentration camps on our Southern border."  

The full text of Todd's editorial is worth study for its perfect disingenuous sanctimony  [Bracketed insertions are mine]:

After being criticized, Ocasio-Cortez tried to make a distinction between concentration camps and Nazi death camps, where the industrialized mass slaughter of the Holocaust occurred. Fair enough, but congresswoman tens of thousands were also brutalized, tortured, starved and ultimately died in . . . concentration camps.  Camps like Dachau. [Huh?]  If you want to criticize the shameful treatment of people at our southern border, fine. You'll have plenty of company.  But be careful comparing them to Nazi concentration camps, because they are not at all comparable. In the slightest. 

Here's where it's upsetting as her comments [sic].  Some Democrats have been reluctant to condemn her remarks. They don't want to get criticized on Twitter. Congressman Jerry Nadler tweeted in response, "One of the lessons from the Holocaust is 'Never Again'... We fail to learn that lesson when we don't callout such inhumanity right in front of us."  Jerry Nadler surely knows detention camps are not the same as concentration camps.  In the interim the crux of what's really at stake is lost.  [Again, what?]

We see Todd's odd maneuver of inserting Nazi Death camps into the conversation after acknowledging that Rep. Ocasio-Cortez herself made the distinction in response to the by now expected knee-jerk attacks on her from the right and center.  But have you heard a rationale yet for Todd's assertion that the permissibly arguable "stain on our nation" along the border with Mexico is not a concentration of one group of people, in this case Central American refugees, by a militarized dominant group that is through separation, deprivation and abuse actively containing and dehumanizing them?  Todd has not bothered to define what it is he disallows Rep. Ocasio-Cortez from calling it, let alone dealt with the conditions the congresswoman is effectively describing.  "Surely knows" is not an argument. 

The climax of Todd's editorial is a truly repulsive exposure of his true motive -- obfuscation about the gravity of the Trump administration's atrocious policy toward refugees from Latin America and its execution in the detention centers at the border:

What is this country going to do about what's happening at the border and this humanitarian crisis?  We'll get to that at some point I guess, after we have this debate [about words].  No doubt AOC cares deeply about what's happening at the border.  But she just did the people there a tremendous disservice by distracting from their plight.  She said she didn't use those words lightly.  Well neither did I.

In a nutshell, Todd is saying, "Maybe we'll someday get to condemnation of the travesty after you tone it down, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez.  Your truth telling is forcing my single focus spotlight on your word choice alone to the exclusion of what's actually wrong with US policy at the border, apparently.  Shame on you."

Since he apparently doesn't have time to be explicit in his rebuke, what exactly is Todd insinuating about the use of the words Concentration Camp to describe the situation at the border, especially considering his pronouncement that "concentration camp" is not permissible while "necessary evil" is?  The subtext of Todd's condemnatory blitz of words is if the United States does it-- and Trump, as president is after all still a duly elected executive of American laws and policy-- it can't be evil.   If it walks like a duck, talks like a duck, but is the American ruling class, it can't be a duck.  But can't it?  Listen (at the link) to this eyewitness account from an observer at a detention center for children in Texas for a taste of conditions there.

In a recent Esquire article, Andrea Pitzer, who has written a history of concentration camps weighs in on the question of whether the American camps qualify.

There have been concentration camps in France, South Africa, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and—with Japanese internment—the United States. In fact, she contends we are operating such a system right now in response to a very real spike in arrivals at our southern border.

“We have what I would call a concentration camp system,” Pitzer says, “and the definition of that in my book is, mass detention of civilians without trial.”

Waitman Wade Beorn, an historian of the Holocaust and genocide at the University of Virginia offers this:

"What's required is a little bit of demystification of it ... Things can be concentration camps without being Dachau or Auschwitz. Concentration camps in general have always been designed—at the most basic level—to separate one group of people from another group. Usually, because the majority group, or the creators of the camp, deem the people they're putting in it to be dangerous or undesirable in some way."

The article proceeds to say:

Not every concentration camp is a death camp—in fact, their primary purpose is rarely extermination, and never in the beginning. Often, much of the death and suffering is a result of insufficient resources, overcrowding, and deteriorating conditions. So far, 24 people have died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the Trump administration, while six children have died in the care of other agencies since September. 

In her book, Pitzer describes camps as “a deliberate choice to inject the framework of war into society itself." These kinds of detention camps are a military endeavor: they are defensible in wartime, when enemy combatants must be detained, often for long periods without trial. They were a hallmark of World War I Europe. But inserting them into civil society, and using them to house civilians, is a materially different proposition. You are revoking the human and civil rights of non-combatants without legal justification.

On multiple viewings of Todd's hissy fit, I don't think I'm imagining the hesitation and lack of commitment in his manner as he delivers what could only be called a perfunctory and reflexive centrist scolding.  The chiding of Representative Jerry Nadler for his "reluctance to criticize" Ocasio-Cortez is undermined by Nadler's own words which do more in one tweet to enlighten on the issue than Todd could dream of doing in an entire career, again from the top and in full this time:

One of the lessons from the Holocaust is ‘Never Again’ - not only to mass murder, but also to the dehumanization of people, violations of basic rights, and assaults on our common morality. We fail to learn that lesson when we don’t callout such inhumanity right in front of us.

It's useful to remember that the ranks of the mainstream media are graduates of our finest educational institutions, where they undoubtedly once pursued their careers with some sense of idealism and awareness of the world around them.  So why is so much of media today so clueless about issues that matter.   When they are not obsessed with the concerns of their class on horrifying distractions such as when and with what force and if we can manage to frame a case for it, why, to pre-emptively rain retribution on Iran, they are studiously obtuse on issues that affect real people's lives.   I used to think mainstream media's centrist posturing was for the rubes.  I still think it's done largely for their benefit, but the impetus is twice removed.  The authors of this posturing are not the journalists themselves but the class that owns them.