Roundabout

 "I’ll be the roundabout

The words will make you go out ‘n’ out”

 YES from 1971 “Fragile” album

A British progressive rock group known to be a drug band, members of YES, including frontman Jon Anderson, may well have been high on LSD when recording “Roundabout,” whose lyrics make no sense unless high.  I wasn’t much into progressive rock bands other than Steely Dan until Terry Jenkins turned me on to YES.  At a fantastic Holiday Star concert YES played for almost three hours without a break except for individual musicians exiting the stage during drum, guitar and keyboard solos.  They kicked ass on “Roundabout.”  Both George Sladic and Fred McColly recalled memorable YES concerts they attended, Freddy at Hawthorne Raceway with Peter Frampton and Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Roundabouts are proliferating in Valparaiso and other region suburbs.  When first introduced the Post-Tribune’s Quickly column was filled with criticisms.  Once experienced a few times, however, I found they are easy to maneuver and highly efficient. East Coast roundabouts, called traffic circles, have been around for at least three generations. On the way to the Jersey shore vacationers encountered at least a half-dozen.  When Toni and I visited New Zealand 30 years ago, we drove on counter-clockwise roundabouts, as New Zealanders, like Brits, drive on the left (in common parlance, “wrong”) side of the road.

In “A Fist Full of Fig Newtons” Region Rat Jean Shepherd wrote about first encountering a New Jersey roundabout:

    After a lifetime of driving in other parts of the country with conventional staid overpasses, viaducts, crossroads, stop-lights, etc., etc., suddenly I found myself going round and round, surrounded by hordes of blue-haired ladies piloting violet-colored Gremlins.  In and out they wove.  I passed my turnoff four times before I got control of my mind and was hurled out of the traffic circle by centrifugal force, back in the direction I had come.  Good grief!

Liz Wuerffel, who ran for Valpo city council, noted that so many people complained about roundabouts that she probably would have won the election had she gone on record against them.

George Van Til, surprised to read of my long softball career, wrote that he played for a team in the Bethlehem Steel Chesterton league and that teammates often gathered afterwards in a Chesterton watering hole across from the gazebo.  He was so impressed that when on the Highland Town Board, he pressed for the park department to construct one on land that came under its control when Main School was torn down.  The gazebo has been a popular success, site of concerts, weddings, and theatrical productions such as “Music Man” starring longtime clerk/treasurer Michael Griffin, an IUN grad.  I told George that son Dave was in a production of “Music through the Ages.”  One performance was curtailed shortly after one of Dave’s solos by a severe thunder and lightning storm. On Facebook yesterday Dave performed Simon and Garfunkel’s “Me and Julio Down by the School Yard” and “The Boxer.”

I got a call from Gary native Jim Muldoon (Lew Wallace, Class of 1956), like me a Maryland grad and CEO of METCOR.  A subscriber, he praised my latest Steel Shavings and mentioned how his school raised $2,000 in a single day selling peanuts in a campaign to fight polio, a postwar scourge.  We reminisced about the day we spend together at the Archives and touring Gary, and he invited Toni and me to his estate on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

Philip Potempa’s Post-Tribune column dealt with the history of Valparaiso, mentioning a virtual audio tour Porter County Museum director Kevin Pazour put together from a 1987 architectural guide developed by members of VU’s Art department. Sites include the courthouse, jail, opera house, two banks, and Lowenstine’s Department Store, in existence between 1916 and 1988, which included a vacuum tube system. Since World War II Valpo’s downtown flourished for 30 years, then suffered downturns during the 1980s and twenty years later followed by resurgences, primarily due to restaurants.  In addition to Lowenstine’s, Potempa lamented other retail casualties such as Linkimer’s Shoes, shuttered in 1994 after 45 years, David’s Men’s haberdashery, closed in 2014 after three decades, and Piper’s Children’s Boutique, which recently went out of business after 37 years.

An obit for Fae Elaine Wewe, 92, who lived in Gary’s Miller Beach neighborhood most her life, noted her culinary skills and that she donated baked goods and homemade jellies and jams to Lutheran church fundraisers.  She and husband Dick, a steelworker, adopted daughter Jeanette in 1959. Fae Wewe’s obit concluded: “Though she grew up in a time that relegated women and others to second-class status, Fae understood that all people deserved equal treatment, no matter their gender, race, ethnicity or ability. Those values formed the core of her life. Though she lacked much formal education, she taught her daughter to read before she started kindergarten.” Jeanette McVicker is presently a professor of English and Women’s Studies at SUNY Fredonia and an expert on Virginia Woolf. 

Right Place, Wrong Time

I been in the right place but it must have been the wrong time
I'd have said the right thing but I must have used the wrong line

    “Right Place, Wrong Time,” Dr. John

New Orleans legend Dr. John (Malcolm John Rebennack) succumbed to heart failure at age 77.  The piano man, keyboardist and guitar player combined blues and psychedelic rock with traces of voodoo mysticism and Mardi Gras jazz.  Dr. John toured with the Grateful Dead, the Rolling Stones, the Band, and many others.  The Rock and Roll inductee had a 1973 Top Ten hit with “Right Place, Wrong Time.” “CBS Sunday Morning” paid tribute to the ultra-cool Dr. John and commemorated the 1969 Greenwich Village Stonewall riots with a feature on gay rights pioneer Frank Kameny (1925-2011), dismissed from the U.S. Army’s Map Service in 1957 for being openly gay. In 1965 Kameny and other members of the Mattachine Society and Daughters of Bilitis picketed the White House to protest discrimination based on sexual orientation.

 Frank Kameny at 2010 Gay Pride parade

After an ABC camera recorded a D-Day survivor finding his buddy’s gravesite at Normandy American Cemetery, the deceased G.I.s family in Syracuse, New York saw the feature on TV and was able to talk with him via Skype.

Among the many tributes to World War II veterans on the seventy-fifth anniversary of D-Day was a Post-Tribunearticle about Ernie Pyle’s dispatches from Normandy that contained an interview with Phil Hess of the Ernie Pyle World War II Museum in Dana, Indiana, the war correspondent’s home town.  Pyle’s stories of those who fought, Hess stated, “are necessary to really understanding the magnitude of the invasion and the indescribable toll it took on America’s young men.”  In a dispatch titled “A Pure Miracle” Pyle wrote of the killing field

 For some of our units it [the landing] was easy, but in this [Omaha Beach] special sector where I am now our troops face such odds that our getting ashore was like whipping Joe Louis to a pulp. Our men simply could not get past the beach.  They were pinned down right on the water’s edge by an inhuman wall of fire from the bluff. Our first wave were on the beach for hours before they could begin working inland.

A subsequent dispatch described the terrible human toll in the immediate aftermath of the landing.  Walking along the beach, Pyle saw bodies washing out to sea and then in again.  He stepped over what he presumed to be driftwood until recognizing the foot of a soldier half-buried in the sand. Noting that “soldiers carry strange things with them,”he not only found packs of Lucky Strike cigarettes and photos of loved ones but, a banjo and a tennis racket, the latter lying “lonesomely in the sand, clamped in its rack, not a string broken.” A dog was whimpering pitifully “looking for his masters.”

 Ernie Pyle at Anzio with G.I.s

Captain Waskow

Ray Boomhower devoted two chapters to Ernie Pyle in “Indiana Originals,” the only Hoosier so honored.  The first described his years as a roving reporter for Scripps-Howard newspaper chain traveling all over the country (and Western hemisphere) between 1935 and 1942 by car, train, plane, and occasionally horseback in search of human-interest stories.  The second highlighted his most widely reprinted column, “The Death of Captain [Henry T.] Waskow” on Mount Sammurco in Italy in January 1944, five months before the D-Day landing.  I was already familiar with the piece, having read it in my World War II class.  A shell fragrant had pierced his heart while Waskow was trying to shield another soldier.  Waskow had been dead for four days before his body could be retrieved and brought back to camp lashed to the back of a mule on a moonlit night. Pyle wrote:

    Two men unlashed his body from the mule and lifted it off and laid it in the shadow beside the low stone wall. Other men took the other bodies off. Finally there were five lying end to end in a long row, alongside the road. You don’t cover up dead men in the combat zone. They just lie there in the shadows until somebody else comes after them.

   The unburdened mules moved off to their olive orchard. The men in the road seemed reluctant to leave. They stood around, and gradually one by one I could sense them moving close to Capt. Waskow’s body. Not so much to look, I think, as to say something in finality to him, and to themselves. I stood close by and I could hear.

   One soldier came and looked down, and he said out loud, “God damn it.”    That’s all he said, and then he walked away. Another one came. He said, “God damn it to hell anyway.”He looked down for a few last moments, and then he turned and left.

   Another man came; I think he was an officer. It was hard to tell officers from men in the half light, for all were bearded and grimy dirty. The man looked down into the dead captain’s face, and then he spoke directly to him, as though he were alive. He said: “I’m sorry, old man.”

   Then a soldier came and stood beside the officer, and bent over, and he too spoke to his dead captain, not in a whisper but awfully tenderly, and he said: “I sure am sorry, sir.”

   Then the first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the dead hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes, holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face, and he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.

   And finally he put the hand down, and then reached up and gently straightened the points of the captain’s shirt collar, and then he sort of rearranged the tattered edges of his uniform around the wound. And then he got up and walked away down the road in the moonlight, all alone.

   After that the rest of us went back into the cowshed, leaving the five dead men lying in a line, end to end, in the shadow of the low stone wall. We lay down on the straw in the cowshed, and pretty soon we were all asleep.

 Patrick O'Rourke of the Hammond Federation of Teachers

At Asparagus Restaurant in Merrillville I met lifelong Hammond resident and teachers union leader Patrick O’Rourke, who has taught Labor Studies and Education courses at IUN.  When he mentioned former Gary teachers union leader Charles Smith, I mentioned playing poker at his home and that Chas, as I called him, introduced a seven-card stud, high-low game that he called AFT, after the American Federation of Teachers. Charles would put out a sumptuous spread and we’d all chip in five bucks, hardly enough to cover it.  Lefty stalwarts Al Samter and Fred Gaboury were regulars. That evening Miranda arrived, and we celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday. 

Kaitlyn and Miranda

Lights

Saturday Toni and I attended a wedding at the Miller Aquatorium. Kaitlyn, a friend of Miranda’s from Grand Rapids, was marrying a Syrian Muslim named Albaraa.  They apparently met at a rave, and he was very friendly when we chatted briefly.  Before the ceremony began, a bunch of the groom’s friends came in singing, clapping, dancing, and making squealing sounds.  Impressive. Phil, Kaitlyn’s soccer coach for several years, attended with Delia, as did three young ladies – Samantha, Niki, and Ann (a Warren, Michigan, police officer) who stayed at the condo with Miranda. We sat with Albaraa’s friend Hassan, who had just arrived from Saskatchewan, Canada, grew up in Toronto, and was a big Raptors fan. I told him that the capital of Saskatchewan, Regina, was a recent “Final Jeopardy”answer.  

I asked a young, tattooed woman with multi-colored hair whose portrait was adorning her upper leg and found out it was a Canadian singer Lights Poxleitner-Bokan, who goes by the name Lights. Most of her videos seem to be about intimate relationships.  “Skydiving contains these lyrics:

You pull me in
I'm doing things I never would do
My pulse, racing
I'm coming alive with you

After enjoying a Middle eastern meal sans alcohol, we attended Mike Chirich’s seventy-fifth birthday bash at Miller’s Gardner Center.  At one table were Bobby, Henry, and Joe Farag as well as several other family members.  I chatted with Danna Conklin, whose late husband audited several of my classes after he retired and became a friend and whose son was killed by a random bullet fired from near the Miller South Shore station as he was in his car near Lake Stereet and Route 20.  I gave Mike and Celeste tie-dye t-shirts with “Miller Beachcomber” inscribed on the front and “CHIRICH” on the back.   

 Michael Chirich

Fred McColly and Jimbo

Former student Fred McColly posted a decade-old photo taken on the day I retired and Dave’s band, Voodoo Chili, put on a mini-concert in front of IUN’s Hawthorn Hall.  I have on a dress shirt that Clark Metz had outgrown.  I thought of my old partner in crime while at Mike Chirich’s party since it was Clark who first introduced us.  On the way to Marquette Park for the wedding we passed his house on Oak Avenue, where we spent many afternoons joking around and looking out onto the lake.

Junedale concession stand

Sunday prior to James’s graduation from Portage, there was a family party that Dave missed due to East Chicago Central’s commencement.  He was able to be at the Portage ceremony on time, however.  Tamiya’s friend Charles and I shared Little League stories.  He played on a Junedale field in Glen Park that a half-century ago hosted the Senior League World Series, thanks to Joe Eckert, known as “Mr. Little league.”  Learning Charles was a Thea Bowman grad, I brought up former boys basketball coach Marvin Ray, who guided his 2010 team to the 2010 Class A championship.  Charles said that Rea falsely accused him of stealing a pair of shorts similar to those worn by the players that he’d had permission to take from the Lost and Found.

Cedar Lake Museum curator Scott Bocock sent clippings about boxing and wrestling matches staged at Lassen’s Resort in 1935.  One featured Gary’s Jack Kranz, who the year before had gone the distance in an 8-rounder against Joe Louis at Marigold Gardens in Chicago. According to Eye on the Ring,Kranz won the first three rounds and Louis the final five.  A 1942 Post-Tribunearticle reported on a wrestling match between Cedar lake native Am (Ambrose) Rascher and a seven-foot Swede named Hans Steinke.  As yet, Bocock has found no tangible evidence that Louis appeared at Lassen’s resort, as commonly thought according to local lore.  Steve McShane located a May 4, 1953 Post-Tribune clipping announcing Rascher’s appointment as an Indiana AAU commissioner that included his photo (below).

Traces

“The monuments of the nations are all protests against nothingness after death; so are statues and inscriptions; so is history.” 

    Lew Wallace, “Ben Hur” 

 Lew Wallace

Writing about Lew Wallace (1827-1905) in the Spring 2018 issue of Traces of Indiana and Midwestern History,editor Ray Boomhower in “One Writer’s Beginning” noted that the nineteenth-century Civil War general and novelist credited teacher Samuel K. Hoshour with passing on to him at a young age this invaluable advice:“In writing, everything is to be sacrificed to clearness of expression – everything.”  After a diplomatic career that culminated in his service as U.S. Minister to the Ottoman Empire, Wallace became independently wealthy man as a result of the novel Ben Hur: A Tale of the Christ(1880) becoming a best-seller.  Wallace subsequently turned his attention to designing a study on his Crawfordsville estate and later a seven-story apartment building in Indianapolis, The Blachern, that is still occupied. 

The once-grand Gary unit school named for the soldier-scholar and designed to implement progressive educator William A. Wirt’s work-study-play system closed in 2014, but a Lew Wallace elementary school in Hammond is still in use.  The 2018 Gary Preservation Tour included a visit to Glen’s Park Morningside neighborhood, located just blocks from boarded-up Lew Wallace School. An effort is underway to sell over 30 abandoned Gary schools, including Franklin Elementary along Thirty-Fifth, but the asking prices so far are unrealistic, given their sad state.

Mari Evans 

On the Tracescover is a mural of longtime Indianapolis community activist Mari Evans (1919-2017), poet, novelist, and a founder of the Black Arts Movement.  David Hoppe’s “The Radical Clarity of Mari Evans” contains this quote from one of her essays: “From the time I was five I was aware that color was an issue over which society and I would war.”  Near the end of her life Evans resisted efforts of well-intentioned acquaintances to persuade her to relocate from the ghetto to a safer neighborhood, arguing that moving all her books was impractical and, besides, she had a firearm for protection.

 Rev. Jim Jones

Tracesalso contains Dan Carpenter’s “Countdown to Armageddon: The Reverend Jim Jones and Indiana.”  The megalomaniacal cult leader responsible for the mass suicide (and, in some cases, murder) of over 900 people in a South American jungle, many of them children, started Peoples Temple in Indianapolis prior to relocating his ministry to California and ultimately Guyana.  While in Indianapolis Jones led crusades to desegregate public facilities and personally integrated  Methodist Hospital after being placed in a black ward by mistake because his physician was African American, then refusing to be moved.  He and wife Marceline adopted a black child, James Warren Jones, Jr. and three Koreans.  When daughter Stephanie died in a 1959 car accident, Carpenter claimed that “no Indianapolis cemetery would allow the child, a Korean-American, to be buried alongside whites; only a black mortician would prepare the body, and she was interred in a weedy section set aside for African Americans in a cemetery whose name is lost.”  Could this be true?  Unbelievable! Emulating black spiritual leader Father M.J. Divine, whom he came to know personally, Jones had a voracious appetite for hard work, sex, and power. 

While cleaning my teeth, and with WXRT apparently playing in the background, Dr. John Sikora revealed that he had been pulling for Croatia in the World Cup because his father had been Croatian.  Ditto Chuck Logan, whose maternal grandparents had emigrated from that small nation. Upon returning to Zagrab, the silver medalists received a hero’s welcome despite having lost to France due to two fluke goals.

Fred McColly and Liliya

Former student Fred McColly likes to refer to himself as the last of the Region’s industrial workers. After working at Atco-Gary Metals Technology for almost 40 years, the company ceased operations. A year shy of being eligible for social security, McColly has applied for unemployment compensation and is looking for employment.  Visiting the Archives, he dropped off the 39th and apparently final volume of his journal documenting his experiences at Atco-Gary Metals, titled “The Zone of Alienation” as well as a special supplement, “the brutal saga of a rat hole’s demise,”covering his final week, ending April 27.  Ten days later, the company bookkeeper called to ask how many hours he put in that week because somebody had stolen all the computers plus the main drive that included work files.  Fred commented: “Why would someone want something so obsolescent?  Sounds like an inside job to me.” A typed epilogue contains these observations:

    It has been 36 days since my ‘career’ ground to a halt.  I have had time to let it percolate through my subconscious and bubble up again, and what I have come up with is pretty much one word: waste. Even the failure of the company was marked by an incredible waste.  We basically threw everything in the basement into the scrap dumpster or the garbage dumpster – shelves, fittings, and skid after skid of paper that was probably recyclable.  One surmises that we threw away millions of dollars of value – probably worth more than the company wants for the building.

 skids of paper by Fred McColly

Jodi and Gary Biederer

Barbara Walczak’s Newsletter contained a photo of Jodi and Gary Biederer along with this caption: “Jodi and Gary came all the way from Deerfield, Illinois to play in one of Diane martin’s games at the Highland Elks Club.  They met her at several tournaments and wanted to visit her at one of her games – a 120-mile round trip going back home in a torrential rain storm.  Jodi and gary started their bridge playing about 35 years ago, and then they took a 25-year break, returning about a year ago. We hope to meet these delightful people again, perhaps at some future tournament.”

Dancing bear and Bulgarian owner, circa 1970

Witold Szablowski’s “Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny” compares Eastern Europeans who lived under communism to animals rescued from captivity and presently kept at Belitsa Dancing Bears Park in Bulgaria.  New York Reviewessayist Orlando Figes noted that for centuries young bears captured in the wild had been trained to dance “by attaching chains to rings driven through their noses and forcing them to step on red-hot sheets of metal.” Most had survived on a steady diet of bread and beer.  Figes stated:

  Some of the bears are so infected with the prisoner mentality that for years they start to dance when they see a human being.  “They stand up on their hind legs and start rocking from side to side,” Szablowski writes. “As if they were begging, as in the past, for bread, candy, a sip of beer, a caress, or to be free of pain. Pain that nobody has been inflicting on them for years.”

Ray Smock wrote:

President Trump is a lot like Captain Queeg, the character in Herman Wauk’s The Caine Mutiny,the 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel about the commander of a World War II destroyer who is incompetent at running his ship, displays disturbing mental quirks, is extremely paranoid, and drives his crew to hate him. The crew loses confidence in their commander, become disloyal, and eventually mutiny and take over the ship during a typhoon at sea, when the commander proved incapable of acting to save his own vessel.

 I visited Fred Chary, recovering from a medical setback, at Avalon Springs Health Campus. The facility’s physical therapists are pushing him hard to exercise.  He’s anxious to get back to revising a novel he recently completed about seventeenth-century Russia and, like me, is still writing book reviews. We talked about Philadelphia sports teams, and he invited me to watch Eagles games at his place once football season starts (he’s got a special NFL package).  

Home alone since Toni’s in Canada at a Shakespeare festival with Alissa and Beth, I stopped at MacDonald’s and asked if I could have the girl (Edna) in Incredibles 2as a three-dollar Happy Meal prize and ended up with Frozone as well.  

Day of Mourning

 “Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing,” George Orwell

So often in American history backlash has followed progress.  It happened after the Civil War, with civil rights legislation leading to Nixon, Bush following Clinton, and now Trump following Obama.  At the top of the greasy pole, alas, is a glass ceiling. A former friend sent me an email stating only, “Ding Dong the witch is dead.  The wicked witch is dead.” I want nothing to do with such mean-spirited people.

Confounding most polls and pundits, Donald J. Trump is President-elect of the U.S.  Watching most rustbelt states turning red was disheartening and cause for mourning.  I thought of 1980, when Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter, and 1986, when Kurt Waldheim was elected president of Austria despite his having been complicit in Nazi atrocities. The American system is designed to put checks and balances on would-be tyrants, but with Republicans controlling both houses of Congress I shudder to think what mischief is in store for the nation and the environment.  Someone close to me wrote: “It's crazy to think that the parents and family that raised me are actively working to harm all that I fight for. It's a feeling millions of us will feel. It's surreal.”

Brady Wade, who spent the past two months working for Democrats in North Carolina, wrote:

  Tomorrow we'll have to look in the eyes of those burdened with regrets, and rabid with hate. Throughout all this, we'll be looked on with inevitably sadistic glee by those enjoying our fall.

Tomorrow we face the America we've discovered ourselves wallowing in.

Tonight...all I can say is i tried. In all ways I knew how, and quite a few I didn't.  I spent the last few months fighting a tidal wave of hate and misinformation, that I and many others underestimated. And this night is the night it washes over us.

Tomorrow we will stand, strong, with love in our hearts. Tomorrow we will continue fighting for a better life for all. For now...I tried. A lot of us did. And humanity as a whole just came up short.

Rather than watch early returns, I played duplicate bridge as Charlie Halberstadt’s partner.  We finished second.  The final hand, I had 20 points and no five-card suit so opened one Diamond.  When Charlie bid one No-Trump, I jumped to 3 No-Trump.  He made game on the nose despite losing two finesses.  When I saw that someone made four No-Trump, I realized I should have opened two No-Trump; that way, the partner (me) with the stronger hand would have been playing the contract.  When I left Chesterton Y at 9:30, I expected Hillary to be on her way to victory.  What a reality check.  Indiana was especially disappointing.  Senate candidate Evan Bayh did virtually no campaigning in Northwest Indiana; it was almost like he did not wish to return to Congress.

In the Huffington Post educator Ali Michael wrote an essay entitled, “What Do We Tell the Children.”  Here are excerpts:

  Tell them that you will honor the outcome of the election, but that you will fight bigotry. Tell them bigotry is not a democratic value, and that it will not be tolerated at your school. Tell them you stand by your Muslim families. Your same-sex parent families. Your gay students. Your Black families. Your female students. Your Mexican families. Your disabled students. Your immigrant families. Your trans students. Your Native students. Tell them you won’t let anyone hurt them or deport them or threaten them without having to contend with you first. Say that you will stand united as a school community, and that you will protect one another. Say that silence is dangerous, and teach them how to speak up when something is wrong. Then teach them how to speak up, how to love one another, how to understand each other, how to solve conflicts, how to live with diverse and sometimes conflicting ideologies, and give them the skills to enter a world that doesn’t know how to do this. 

  Remind them ― to ease their minds ― that not everyone who voted for Donald Trump did so because they believe the bigoted things that he has said this year. Many of them voted for him because they feel frustrated with the economy, they feel socially left behind, and they are exercising the one power they have. We need to challenge Trump and his supporters to differentiate between their fears and the bigotry catalyzed by those fears.

The New Yorker’s David Remnick wrote:

  The election of Donald Trump to the Presidency is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism. Trump’s shocking victory, his ascension to the Presidency, is a sickening event in the history of the United States and liberal democracy. On January 20, 2017, we will bid farewell to the first African-American President—a man of integrity, dignity, and generous spirit—and witness the inauguration of a con who did little to spurn endorsement by forces of xenophobia and white supremacy. It is impossible to react to this moment with anything less than revulsion and profound anxiety.

  The commentators, in their attempt to normalize this tragedy, will also find ways to discount the bumbling and destructive behavior of the F.B.I., the malign interference of Russian intelligence, the free pass—the hours of uninterrupted, unmediated coverage of his rallies—provided to Trump by cable television, particularly in the early months of his campaign. We will be asked to count on the stability of American institutions, the tendency of even the most radical politicians to rein themselves in when admitted to office. Liberals will be admonished as smug, disconnected from suffering, as if so many Democratic voters were unacquainted with poverty, struggle, and misfortune. There is no reason to believe this palaver. There is no reason to believe that Trump and his band of associates—Chris Christie, Rudolph Giuliani, Mike Pence, and, yes, Paul Ryan—are in any mood to govern as Republicans within the traditional boundaries of decency. Trump was not elected on a platform of decency, fairness, moderation, compromise, and the rule of law; he was elected, in the main, on a platform of resentment. Fascism is not our future—it cannot be; we cannot allow it to be so—but this is surely the way fascism can begin.

In “Divided We Stand” Ray Smock concluded:

  President Obama will be gracious and escort Trump to his inauguration next January, and the new administration will begin. It is important that it play out this way. I have no idea how bad a Trump administration it will be.  Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised that he and his associates will form a fair government. Or perhaps he will wreck the one we have now.

It is vital that the nation accept the results of this election and give it a chance to work. Our election process has never been perfect but it is all we have that stands between legitimate government and anarchy.  Having said this, however, this does not mean that any American of either political party, or no party at all, gives up the right to protest against actions of the government and to redress the government for any grievances we have with it. It will be important for all Americans to be vigilant with any president, but especially with one who has no experience in governance.

The nation remains split down the middle on so many issues. We must keep looking for ways to come together and make government and the private sector work for the betterment of all the people in our country and to remain a beacon of freedom to the world.

Before speaking at IUN’s gallery about Woody Guthrie and 1930s folk music, Ron Cohen declared that it was a day for mourning. He made reference to anti-red witch-hunts that occurred beginning in the late-1930s, both at the national level (HUAC) and in Oklahoma and New York.  I insisted on introducing Ron even though everyone present knew him well.

Fred McColly brought three volumes of his journal to the Archives and posted a “Solidarity” cartoon as well as the statement, “It will be a long four years.”

Garrison Keillor (above) wrote:

              So he won. The nation takes a deep breath. Raw ego and proud illiteracy have won out and a severely learning-disabled man with a real character problem will be president. We are so exhausted from thinking about this election, millions of people will take up leaf-raking and garage cleaning with intense pleasure. We liberal elitists are wrecks. The Trumpers had a whale of a good time, waving their signs, jeering at the media, beating up protesters, chanting "Lock her up" -- we elitists just stood and clapped. Nobody chanted "Stronger Together." It just doesn't chant.

The Trumpers never expected their guy to actually win the thing, and that's their problem now. They only wanted to whoop and yell, boo at the H-word, wear profane T-shirts, maybe grab a crotch or two, jump in the RV with a couple six-packs and go out and shoot some spotted owls. It was pleasure enough for them just to know that they were driving us wild with dismay -- by "us," I mean librarians, children's authors, yoga practitioners, Unitarians, birdwatchers, people who make their own pasta, opera goers, the grammar police, people who keep books on their shelves, that bunch. The Trumpers exulted in knowing we were tearing our hair out. They had our number, like a bratty kid who knows exactly how to make you grit your teeth and froth at the mouth.

Alas for the Trump voters, the disasters he will bring on this country will fall more heavily on them than anyone else. The uneducated white males who elected him are the vulnerable ones and they will not like what happens next.