Our immigration policies allow temporary laborers into the country as “guest workers.” Isn’t “guest workers” an oxymoron?

I was disappointed by the quick dispatch of Anthony Scaramucci. I was hoping that his tenure would bring cult showings of the movie “Scaramouche” starring Stewart Granger and this would bring a revival of the author Rafael Sabatini, who, of course, wrote the marvelous book, Scaramouche as well as the equally delightful Captain Blood and this would lead to cult double features of Granger’s “Scaramouche” and Errol Flynn’s “Captain Blood” and all this would lead to a revival of Baroness Orczy and her novel The Scarlet Pimpernel and this would lead to cult showings of “The Scarlet Pimpernel” starring Leslie Howard. Right now we seem to need some swashbuckling heroes.

I was on the porch reading before the Fourth of July festivities. A father was talking to a son, perhaps three or four, as they walked by some angle-parked cars. “When you walk by cars like this you should  be careful. Look to see if there is a driver. Look to see if the car’s lights are on. Stop well away from the cars if there is a driver or lights. They can back up and not see you.” “Yes, Daddy.” Then I heard trucks coming down the little street and then the boy’s high voice an excited octave higher: “Daddy, Daddy, look fire trucks!” (The trucks were on their way to the tiny Independence Day parade’s staging area.) The boy’s excitement and pleasure made me smile. It also convinced me that he did not live in Brooklyn.

It was a remarkable sight, the man wearing sweatpants held up by suspenders.

Trump can do the impossible: He has almost made me feel sorry for Jeff Sessions.

When you see bikers with the big arms and leather vests on one of those three-wheelers, do you think “Cool,” or are you a little sad?

The announcer pompously intoned, “That was a wonderful golf shot he just hit.” The guy was playing golf. What other kind of shot was he going to hit?

Why isn’t the plural eggsplant?

After Trump, citing healthcare costs, announced a ban in the military on transgender people, we learned that the armed forces spends millions upon millions on erectile dysfunction drugs. Make up your own joke about military members.

The newspaper headline read: “Is There a Religious Way to Get Angry?” My reaction: “You’re goddamn right there is!”

“Though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures.” Paul Theroux, Deep South.

The very conservative are currently in control the national government. One of the reasons for this is that the very conservative control many state governments. The state domination did not happen overnight but came in increments. Religion and sex helped start it.

A generation ago fundamentalists were concerned with godless evolution being taught to their schoolchildren. That same group and others thought that schools should not have sex education, except perhaps for a curriculum that explained nothing useful about sex but also made it clear that teenagers should not have anything to do with it. The fundamentalists on evolution and sex sought to do something about these horrors by doing what few had done before—taking school board elections seriously. They organized and campaigned and ran for school boards to have evolution removed from the curriculum, and failing that, to have creationism taught along with evolution, and to eliminate any teaching about sex. Because only a small portion of the electorate vote in these elections, a committed group that actually voted could control the outcomes. The successes at these most local levels almost naturally expanded into elections for the state legislatures. Evangelicals may have only cared about one or two issues, but they were passionate about them. And they voted. And they learned that a committed group could often control the outcome of the elections.

At the same time, the NRA became a greater force. While more of a top-down movement than the anti-evolutionists, the NRA was similar in turning out voters who insisted that elected officials be uncompromising on certain narrow issues.

The evangelicals’ goal was to elect legislators who honored certain “values.” They have been successful,  and many states have made it increasingly difficult not only to get abortions, or even reliable family planning information. (It is a story for another day how some religious groups have turned from a strict separation of church and state towards having the government adopt their views.) And, of course, the NRA-influenced voters have elected not candidates that bloc new, and rollback existing,  gun control measures.

But the conservative movement in the states has been about more than sex, the Bible, and guns. As controls on election spending lessened or disappeared, business interests, often disguised within organizations not required to indicate the sources of their funds, could funnel more money into state elections.

The result has been that states increasingly passed conservative legislation on many fronts. Many of us pay less attention to what happens on the state than the national level. Thus, the conservatives often had had something of a free run in the state legislatures. Organizations such as the American Legislative Exchange Council drafted legislation which was adopted in many states, and ALEC is, as one of its leaders once said, very, very conservative. Few voters were aware of who truly initiated the bills.

As part of the state conservative legislation, conservatives passed laws that would further entrench conservative control. Thus, voter identification laws and other measures were passed that make voting more difficult for some. The groups most affected are, of course, not conservatives.

Conservatives passed legislation that would harm the already declining unions. This, of course, served business interests, but it simultaneously entrenched hard right power by helping to weaken forces that often opposed conservatives.

The conservative successes in the states does more than affect the states; it has also shaped our national politics. The country’s electorate has not become conservative, even though the composition of state legislatures might make it seem that way. National elections for President indicate that the country is not conservative.  In only one of the last seven Presidential elections has the more conservative candidate gotten the highest percentage of the popular vote. Conservative voters do not dominate the country as a whole, but conservatives have increasingly dominated the national legislature, Congress.

Part of the explanation for this anomaly  is that conservatives control more and more states, and states control the boundaries for congressional districts. This power, since the beginning of the Republic, has led to gerrymandering, but new data interpretation tools have made the skewing of districts easier and a brazenness has made it more common. With Republican control of state legislatures, gerrymandering today has overwhelmingly aided conservatives. You might think that with 435 seats in the House of Representatives, each party’s percentage of the seats in the house would be close to the percentage of votes it garnered in the country, but over the last four national elections for the House, the Republicans in each election have gotten a higher percentage of seats than votes nationwide. Thus, in 2012 Democrats got more than a million more votes for the House than Republicans did, but Republicans outnumbered Democrats in the House by 234 to 201. The “bonus” seats came from gerrymandering in the states. For example, in North Carolina the Democratic House candidates got 51% of the vote in 2012, but North Carolina was represented in the House by four Democrats and nine Republicans.  In 2016, Democratic candidates got 44% of the statewide vote for the House in North Carolina, but won only three, or 23%, of the seats.

My semi-conservative friend would say that both sides gerrymander. They may, but Republicans do it more and do it better. This has given them secure control of the House.

Republican domination in the states has led to more and more safe Republican seats in Congress. In such a district, a Republican has little concern about the general election. The candidate knows that if he or she has the Republican nomination, he or she will win the general election. He does not have to attract centrist or liberal voters. The important election is not the general election, but the primary. Give the evangelicals and the gun people and other hard righters their due: They vote in the primaries. Thus, all too often, the only way for a Republican to get in or to stay in Congress is to appeal to the hard right, and consequently, the Republican Party has been pushed further and further from the center. They have been pushed away from compromise. They have been pushed away from working with any but those who share hard right views.

If you care about national politics and don’t like their present trend, you can’t just put efforts and money into a Presidential election every four years. You need also to care about state and local politics, and by that I mean more than just a concern about the elections in your state for the House and the Senate. You need to be involved in the state legislative and local elections, not only because these races often breed candidates for higher office, but also because it is the states that set the election districts and can pass laws that make it more difficult for some people to vote.

But here’s a more radical suggestion: A movement should be started to have Democrats and Independents, especially in states and districts that are safely Republican, to change their registrations to Republican. The Republican primaries are where the action is in these places.  If liberals and centrists voted in these elections, more centrist Republicans candidates might emerge and win. Perhaps this could start to moderate the Republican Party.

The Republican Party will not change overnight. It has taken decades for that party to get where it is. If the conservative hold is going to be broken, it, too, has to be a long-term game. That game cannot be just to focus on Presidential elections; instead, a chief goal has to be to weaken conservative influence at the state and local level. So, if you are a Democrat or an Independent, be bold! Change your registration! Vote Republican!

I was walking in Manhattan miles from my home. A man approached me and in the friendliest fashion said hello. I nodded, thought “panhandler” even though he was not shabbily dressed, and continued on. He turned to walk with me and said with companionable incredulity, “You don’t remember me?” I perhaps took my first real look at him, pondered, and said no. “We met at your place.” I studied him again and hesitated. “My sister works for you, and we met when I came over to see her one day.” He almost sounded hurt. Perhaps I should have walked away at this point. I knew it was a con. A woman did work for us, but her siblings were sisters. I, however, was not hurrying anywhere and was intrigued. “Oh,” I said.

He then continued, “We met when you were coming home from work, I think.” I don’t remember my precise replies, but anything specific I said he would weave into his patter–not immediately, but after a sentence or two. If I had said that I usually got to Brooklyn about six, he would find a way to mention Brooklyn as my home as if he had always known that, and so on. Only when the talk lasted long enough to seem as if we were reunited long-lost buddies did the pitch come. This was the familiar one about the car trouble. Only rarely do I give money to panhandlers, but I did give him something. I often stop to watch street performers and drop a bill or two into their cap when I especially like them, and I thought this guy was a very good street performer of a sort. (I don’t remember the name he ascribed to himself, but he told me something as he sought mine trying to build a bond.)

Few street performers I have seen play on race, a troupe I have seen several times on the Central Park Mall does. They are six or so young black men who do tumbling and acrobatic passes to the background of music with a heavy beat coming from boom boxes. They ask a few of the audience members where they are from. The majority seem to be tourists, and what could be a better New York experience than to be in Central Park watching this group perform?  You don’t see that back home. They have a patter that is as honed as a vaudeville act, and it plays up race and subtly plays on racial fears. As one starts his run for a tumbling pass, another says, “That is as fast as you will see a black man run not being chased by a cop.” “If we weren’t here getting donations from you, we would be breaking into your homes.”

My guy who approached me, however, used race in a more subtle way. His incredulity at not being recognized was a great play on white guilt. Don’t many of us secretly worry that we fall into that group that think so many black men do look sort of alike? And not wanting to be rude to a black man then tends to make us stop and at least briefly hear what he has to say.

I wondered how often he had to approach men like me for his sister line to succeed. Does one of every five, ten, or twenty white men walking in a Manhattan neighborhood have a black woman working for him at home? Surely in five or ten minutes he could encounter some such person. And, of course, the odds would be good that this person would have a brother. In any event, probably few of the white men know much about the lives of the women that work in their home. (I was different from many because I worked at home for about half the time and chatted with people who cleaned or helped take care of the daughter.)

The guy, however, was good beyond getting me to stop and listen a bit. Besides the line about his sister, he said nothing that could seem wrong and send up flags. Instead he was skillful in trying to get me to say things that he could use to make it seem as if he already knew me. He was good at his craft.

After I gave him some money, I wanted to stop him and tell him I knew it was a con and ask him how he had developed his line, how often it worked, and how much he made. But, just like insisting on finding out how a magician does his tricks, it would have destroyed the moment.

“’I believe there is much happiness in people who are born where good wines are to be found,’ said Leonardo da Vinci.” Julian More, Views From a Tuscan Vineyard.

“The year I turned ninety, I wanted to give myself the gift of a night of wild love with an adolescent virgin.” Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Memories of My Melancholy Whores.

“Medical examiners are the only doctors whose patients are dead and therefore silent.” Michael M. Baden, M.D., Unnatural Death: Confessions of a Medical Examiner.

“This may be hard to believe, coming from a black man, but I’ve never stolen anything.” Paul Beatty, The Sellout.

“Amidst the grand panoply that is the English language, largest on this Earth, tongue of Shakespeare, Byron, and Melville, there are a puzzling number of words that mean ‘to spray with shit.’” Peter Novokatzky and Ammon Shea, Depraved and Insulting English.

“When August came, thick as dream of falling timbers, Dawes Williams and his mother would pick Simpson up at his office, and they would all drive west, all evening, the sun before them dying like the insides of a stone melon, split and watery, halving with blood.”  Dow Mossman, The Stones of Summer.

“That the word intelligence describes something real and that it varies from person to person is as universal and ancient as any understanding about the state of being human.” Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life.

“A person had to be pretty desperate to want to go on jury duty, Libby Winslow decided, but given the state of her life, it seemed like the best game in town.” Laura van Wormer, Jury Duty.

“It is often forgotten that the document which we know as the Declaration of Independence is not the official act by which the Continental Congress voted in favor of separation from Great Britain.” Carl Becker, The Declaration of Independence: A Study in the History of Political Ideas.

“I told you last night that I might be gone sometimes, and you said, Where, and I said, To be with the Good Lord, and you said, Why, and I said, Because I’m old, and you said, I don’t think you’re old.” Marilynne Robinson,  Gilead.

“I was born in the house I built myself with my own two hands.” Al Franken, Giant of the Senate.

“The village headman, a man of about fifty, sat cross-legged in the centre of the room, close to the coals burning in a hearth that was hollowed out of the floor; he was inspecting my violin.”  Dai Sijie, Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress.

“This whole Duct Shui thing started when our friend Roy Beckstrom lost his job as a pinsetter at Bob’s Beef and Bowl to automation.” Jim and Tim—The Duct Tape Guys, Duct Shui: A New Tape on an Ancient Philosophy

Miranda, who helped take care of the daughter, was upset, close to tears, visibly shaking when I got home. She started apologizing and apologizing. I barely held off the panic mode I felt closing in. Miranda then told me that it had nothing to do with the daughter. Instead, that afternoon someone rang the bell. When she answered, a young man asked for the ladder. He used my first name and stated that I had said he could borrow my ladder, an extra-tall one because of our high ceilings. Miranda hesitated. I had not told her that someone was going to use the ladder. He continued that he was working at a house under renovation, a few doors away. Miranda could see that its door was open. He repeated my name and said that he could get it from its storage space under the stoop where, indeed, it was kept. He said that he would bring it back in a half hour. She relented, and he dug out the ladder. She watched him carry it to the pointed-out house. The ladder was not returned in thirty minutes or even an hour. When an hour-and-a-half had elapsed, she went over to the neighbor’s house. Miranda asked about the man and the ladder. The workers there had no idea what she was talking about. They had plenty of their own ladders.

Miranda was, of course, upset because she had lost an employer’s property, but also because of the embarrassment we all have when we are taken. I was hardly concerned, however. I was relieved that it had nothing to do with the daughter, and I had a certain admiration for the con man. I had no idea who he might be. Somehow, however, he had learned my first name, which he could have heard sometime as I greeted a neighbor or workman, but he had also learned where I stored the ladder and that was more unusual and not easily-acquired knowledge.

I replaced the ladder. It may have cost $60 or $80, and I thought about that con man. I actually hoped that he had some use for the ladder–that he was renovating something or that he was doing work for others because I thought that if he had tried to sell it, he maybe got ten bucks for it. Hardly worth the risk, it would seem.

But by then, as Legal Aid attorney in New York City, I had represented many people charged with worse crimes, and seldom would I have thought that their risks were worth the rewards. I had represented many who had committed street corner robberies, muggers in other words. If they had a knife or a gun, this was an armed robbery with a potential punishment of twenty-five years in prison where routinely sentences were three, ten, fifteen years. Few people daring the streets where the muggers worked had much money and carried little of it. Seldom did the robbers get as much as $50. To make anything like real money, the mugger had to do it repeatedly with each robbery increasing the likelihood of an arrest until invariably prison resulted.

I learned that these were not really economic crimes. The mugger was not so much driven by the money as by the thrill of pulling a knife on a stranger on a darkened street corner with escape not entirely certain. It was about the adrenalin and the domination even more than about the dollars.

And for the con man who got my ladder, I am sure that it was more about the successful play and the feeling of superiority than it was about the object obtained.

Perhaps because I have little artistic creativity and even less performing talent, I am thrilled when I encounter genuine creative abilities. I am even more amazed when I find such talent in an obscure place. I should be a bit more blasé  about this because it happens with some regularity in New York.  I attend quite a few off-the-beaten-track plays when I am there in the winter. These tiny theaters in unlikely locations routinely display talented people and creative productions. For example, there was the ephemera trilogy, by Kimi Maeda.

This one-woman show was a cross between a performance piece and a play. The first two parts had shadow puppets moving to a recorded voiceover of Japanese fables that Maeda’s mother, an immigrant from Japan, told Maeda. The shadow puppets were cutouts through which a handheld light was projected casting shadows on a screen at the back of the performance space. I did not really follow the first fable, but I found the second, The Crane Wife, touching. A crane becomes a woman, and she, in isolation, weaves beautiful cloth. Her husband sells it to stave off the hunger that often stalks the family. But one night, although enjoined not to look in the weaving room, he does and sees not his wife, but a crane, which then disappears.  The story had interest, but the most touching part of this performance came when Maeda, who believed that this was an ancient tale, found out that the story was created or adapted during America’s post-World War II occupation of Japan, which gave new depths to the fable’s meaning.

The final part of the ephemera trilogy was about Maeda’s father, a Nissei, who at the age of nine was taken with his family to an Arizona detention camp during World War II. The screen from the first two acts remained, but now there were different kinds of images on it.  Sand was dribbled and dumped on the floor, and it was raked, swept, and spread about. This activity was projected onto the screen, and these images were interspersed with archival films and photos of the camp and other aspects of the father’s life, which ended in a battle against dementia. Kimi Maeda “painted” in the sand, creating faces and transforming them with hands and feet and various tools. She constructed villages with blocks and other pieces of wood in the sand. She rearranged the grains often, and I felt as if I were watching again and again the creation of a miniature zen garden.

This was creative. And touching. I was amazed by that and also that it was being performed for an audience of fourteen in a theater with a capacity of fifty. And that I had paid but $9.

Recently I saw another amazing talent, in a place obscure to most of us, as part of a small audience. I and some friends had gone to see Carole J. Bufford. (I don’t know what the “J” stands for, or why it is used. Are there other Carole Buffords I don’t know about?) I have seen Bufford before, most recently at 54 Below, which is not an obscure place, but one of the hottest music venues in Manhattan. This time, however, she was performing at The Deer Head Inn in Delaware Water Gap, Pennsylvania.

I, like most of you I am guessing, had never been to The Deer Head Inn, which has a reputation for presenting  high-quality jazz four nights a week. I have been told that many excellent jazz musicians live in the vicinity of Delaware Water Gap. This may come as a shock to you, but housing prices are apparently less there than New York City, and after a late night performance in midtown Manhattan, the drive to Water Gap, just over the Delaware River from New Jersey, is a relatively tolerable trip. Whatever the reasons, The Deer Head Inn has been presenting jazz for quite some time and many knowledgeable enthusiasts know it. But this summer it was branching out and presenting monthly performances of cabaret singers. Carole J. Bufford was the first.

We saw her perform three different sets over three hours. After the first one, she chatted with audience members and put on her playlist for the second set some songs suggested by us.  And she was good. Very good. Very, very good. Amazing. A friend of mine who was there and seeing Bufford for the first time told me that he has seen just about every fabled cabaret and saloon singer over the last fifty years, and she was the best of all.

But wait there’s more. She was accompanied by Jon Weber on the piano, who is the musical director for the monthly performances. His playing was breathtaking. The two of them had not performed together before, and in a break between sets I asked how they had rehearsed or prepared for the evening. He told me that was only done on the drive out from New York. And yet their coordination seemed effortless.

The three hours felt intimate because there were so few of us there, less than two dozen. After the first set, a man came over to our table, introduced himself—Rich Jenkins–and said that he was the producer of the monthly series. After working hard to publicize the event, he was disappointed in the turnout, and I was, too.  We know that in NYC Bufford has what you might call groupies, and we only found out about The Deer Head performance because one of them saw the performance listed on Bufford’s website. Those who have seen her become fans, but not that many people know about her. She is recording her first album, and until that is finished and gets play, she is largely dependent on word of mouth for her audiences. So here is my first suggestion: Get on her website. She is about to start a tour. Learn where she is performing. Go. CaroleJBufford.com.

Jon Weber was so good that I am guessing that if he is part of the performance, it will be outstanding. So my second suggestion is to go to his website: jonwebermusic.com.

Now the third suggestion. Check out The Deer Head Inn for music. Perhaps for the jazz. Rich Jenkins, I now know and have seen, has a quartet in which he plays a splendid guitar and does jazz vocals. But if our evening with Carole was any indication and you like singers doing the Great American Songbook, you should come out for the other two evenings this summer in the cabaret series, August 20 and September 17. The cover charge, not surprisingly, is about half of what you would pay in New York City. Moreover, while I expect bad or at least incredibly overpriced food and drink in a music venue, I had a $4 beer, the spouse an $8 martini, and we both had really good food.  (Robert, the chef, whom I met, cares about the food, and he is also quite the artist, as is thirteen-year old daughter, whose art blew me away.) The Deer Head is a beehive of creativity. Go and be amazed.

The day after O.J. Simpson was found not guilty of the double murders and the evidence was freshest in mind, polls showed that the majority of Americans, both white and nonwhite, believed that the verdicts were correct. Only later did public opinion change. You can check it out and try to figure out why.

Do you remember when “Close Cover before Striking” was the most printed phrase in the English language?

Each time I wear my specially-made tee shirt I feel a lot of eyes on it. It reads, “Trump: His Mother Did Not Have Him Tested.” I expect that many who read the legend won’t get it, but so far no stranger has asked me what it means. Still, the daughter, who helped get the shirt, has made me nervous about wearing it. She told me that a woman wearing something anti-Trump was hit in the face by a Trumpista while dining in a Brooklyn restaurant. But so far, in New York I have gotten the expected quizzical looks but also many smiles and nods of appreciation. Once I even got outright enthusiastic laughter from a woman sitting at a window table in an upscale establishment. A young man fell in step along side me when I was wearing the shirt , told me that he worked for a union, and asked if I had seen a Trump documentary that he said was hilarious with its clip of the President’s mother. The only time I was actually nervous wearing the shirt was when I came out of the subway at a construction site. Hardhats, all white, were leaning against a fence on a coffee break. The youngest-looking saw what I was wearing and quickly came towards me. A white construction worker and me with an anti-Trump shirt. I thought that I was in for an awkward time at the least. A few feet from me he smiled broadly and said, “You got it right.” He turned to the crew and said, “Look. Isn’t that great!” Some of the coworkers smiled; one laughed; and the rest looked dumbfounded. I realized that I, too, could fall victim to stereotypes. But I still haven’t worn the shirt outside of New York City.

I was driving midweek in central Pennsylvania. Signs seemed to be everywhere for a weekend church festival. I was sorry that I was not going to be there then because the festival offered not just the usual music and food, but something that I have never experienced and could not entirely imagine: A Polka Mass!

I would like some study to examine how, if at all, voter ID laws affected our last election. I am sure that it would be hard to do, but solid data on the number of people who were prevented from voting who were not entitled to vote and the number of people who were entitled to vote (except for the ID laws) but who did not vote because of those laws. Knowing this would help us to understand what we call a democracy.

How did it originate that baseball players throw the ball around the infield after the first and second outs with no runner on base? Why is the first baseman often excluded from the ritual? Why does the third baseman always throw the baseball to the pitcher?

A Mercedes Benz ad that I see frequently during sporting events shows families in a nice suburban neighborhood admiringly looking up as a fleet of red cars zoom past. Each time I wonder where is it that people barbeque in their front yard?

“Drinking the Kool-Aid” is an expression that I find distasteful. It now seems to be said humorously or ironically to mean adopting an idea or a practice after having given in to peer pressure. It is said almost lightheartedly, and when said this way, it seems to make obscene fun of its origins. The expression, of course, comes from a mass suicide-murder when over 900 followers of Jim Jones took a cyanide-laced drink, reported to be Kool-Aid, or were otherwise murdered. In fact, according to a new book, The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple by Jeff Guin, it was not Kool-Aid, rather a cheaper knock off, Flavor Aid, but “Drinking the Flavor Aid” never caught the popular mind.

I also learned from this book that Jim Jones was not merely a demagogue, who, for whatever his reasons, betrayed his followers. He hated racial and economic inequality and did much to fight segregation. He and his followers instituted successful programs to feed the hungry and fight addiction. Their scholarship programs aided many, and Jonestown in the Guyana jungle was a settlement that was close to being self-sustaining until Jones’ paranoia brought it down in that horrific way. Guin states, “Jim Jones was undeniably a man of great gifts, and one who for much of his life and ministry, achieved admirable results on behalf of the downtrodden.”

Guin posits that most demagogues appeal to selfish instincts to get followers—I will get you more or I will protect you from enemies. Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple, preaching socialism and racial justice, was different. “Jim Jones attracted followers by appealing to the best in their nature, a desire for everyone to share equally. . . . Most members sacrificed personal possessions, from clothing and checking accounts to cars and house for the privilege of helping others. They gave rather than got. . . . They hoped everyone would emulate them.”

The tragedy of Jonestown was, of course, shocking, seemingly unique, but in fact it was an extreme example of a theme in American history. Americans have been regularly attracted to movements that, to outsiders, have unusual beliefs and followers who often do bizarre things. New York’s burnt-over district in the early nineteenth century, for example, spawned many religious and social movements that had beliefs then seen as outlandish. Some had a lasting success and formed the roots of modern Mormonism and for Seventh Day Adventists, but there were many others largely or completely forgotten. Utopian communities were also formed. Perhaps the best remembered, because of its silverware and the city that bears its name, is the Oneida Community, which practiced communalism not only in property, but also in marriage and child rearing. (Some of my forebears may have been influenced by such a utopian movement. I know little about my ancestors, but an aunt once produced a family tree of my mother’s side of the family. I took it with a grain of salt—the chart had the family arriving on the second or third ship after the Mayflower. My reaction was that the passengers on the Mayflower have been well documented, but I had my doubts about the knowledge of who were on ships coming twenty or thirty years later. I also wondered about my relatives’ pride in this supposed fact. My reaction: “You mean the family is white, Anglo-Saxon (isn’t that redundant?) Protestant, been in this land of opportunity over 400 hundred years, and is still poor! What is the excuse?” But I became more interested when I saw the nineteenth-century entry for a family in upstate New York who had a daughter named “Freelove Dewey.”)

Western and upstate New York in the early 1800s was not the only era and locale to spawn cults. Certainly there were many in the second half of the twentieth century that produced Jim Jones. There was the Manson family, the Love Family, the Hare Krishnas, Reverend Moon’s Unification Church, fundamentalist and polygamous offshoots of Mormonism, Scientology, Transcendental Meditation, various New Age movements, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Black Panthers, white supremacist groups, the Michigan Militia, End Times people, Lyndon LaRouche and many, many others. Stories of mind control and brainwashing as well as other claims of atrocities by many of these movements led to the deprogramming movement, often involving kidnappings and imprisonments, to “rescue” sons and daughters from various cults.

I may not understand the appeal of many of these groups, but what are seen as fringe beliefs and ideologies clearly have had appeal throughout our history. These movements often seem to attract outsiders who feel that the larger societies disdain them. They feel that their group or their identity is under attack, and that, therefore, they need to protect themselves and withdraw from the rest of the world. But the withdrawal is seldom complete, and this often brings out some sort of need to lash out at society. Jim Jones’ movement had many of these characteristics as he encouraged paranoia about how others wished to prevent Peoples Temple members from living the way they wanted to.

Of course, we still have people today attracted to fringe beliefs for Americans. (Check out the pro- and anti-Sherry Shriner protagonists.) We have living in our country those who voice allegiance to al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Isis, and some of them do dastardly things. We don’t understand them. They are outsiders to us (we are reluctant to call them Americans). But aren’t they really a continuation of a long strain of our history? Should we really be surprised that some in this country, feeling estranged, have been attracted to an ideology that many of us think is dangerously alien and that a few of those people do despicable things? Hasn’t that always been the case?

I watch the Wimbledon awards, and I wonder about the tradition of making the loser participate in the ceremony. The Stanley Cup does have the line where the two teams shake hands, but the hockey players don’t have to talk about it in front of an audience of millions immediately after their loss. Tennis players do, and this must be especially hard in this one-on-one sport with its stark winner/loser dichotomy. I win; you lose. You win; I lose. I won and made you a loser. You won and made me a loser.

I don’t pretend to have been a superlative athlete, but I have played sports throughout my life, and I know that losing in a team game is much different from losing in an individual sport like tennis. I loved making a good play on the baseball field. I had taken a hit from someone else. The hitter was no doubt disappointed, but I never felt as if I had made that person a loser.  They had hit the ball well; they had done their job.  I was just lucky enough or in the right place to make a good play. And if I was on the losing side at the game’s completion, the personal, solitary feeling of being a loser at the end of a tennis match did not exist. I would recap the team game, sometimes obsessively, and think about the opportunities I had had where if I had done something different, the outcome might have been reversed, but I knew that my teammates who cared about winning or losing were having the same thoughts. I always knew that neither I nor a teammate had lost individually. We lost or won. If we had won, I liked, or hoped, that I had contributed to the win, but I never thought that I had made an individual on the other team a loser. They lost.

Of course, in losing there could be the bad feeling of not performing at a crucial time as I had wished, say, missing a key free throw, but part of me knew that the game was close as the result of many things that I and each of my teammates did that could have been different throughout the game. And, of course, even if I had not played well, I might still be on the winning side because of what my teammates had done.  Not true in tennis.

That said, I don’t pretend that I really had the mental makeup of a good athlete. To succeed, athletes have to be able to accept failure. Even the best batter knows he will make out most of the time. A tennis tournament ends up with all but one having lost their last match. To be a good athlete, you have to risk being a public failure. I can still remember playing in a softball tournament during a summer of my college years.  It was the last inning; we were down by a run, and I was at bat.  I remember my feeling; I did not want to look bad, and I rationalized that even if I hit a home run, the opposing team, in a high-scoring contest, would most likely still get the winning run at the bottom of the inning. I got into the batter’s box not wanting so much to win the game as to avoid embarrassing myself.  I hit a long fly ball that was caught with a slight jump at the fence for the final out, and we lost.  And I realized that I was relieved simply because I had not struck out or hit a weak popup.  I had wanted more not to be a washout than I had played to win, and I realized at that moment I did not truly have a winner’s mentality. In tennis terms, I feared more the embarrassment that would accompany a fluffed overhead than I cared about the step to winning that would accompany putting the ball away. And I walked away with even more respect for the top athletes.

[Note. The next posting after today’s will be on July 17, 2017]

“I had no father—at least, I never knew my father—but Zipper had one.” Joseph Roth, Zipper and his Father.

“Deceiving others is an essential part of everyday social interaction.” Aldert Vrij, Detecting Lies and Deceit: The Psychology of Lying and the Implications for Professional Practice.

“The courtship and remarriage of an old widower is always made more difficult when middle-aged children are involved—especially when there are unmarried daughters.” Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis.

“But, you may say, we asked you to speak about women and fiction—what has that got to do with a room of one’s own.” Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own.

“Who wouldn’t be skeptical when a man claims to have spent an entire weekend with God, in a shack no less?” William P. Young, The Shack.

“Plaquemines Parish is the end of the line—a narrow, fertile peninsula more than a hundred miles long, stretching out into the blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.” Glen Jeansonne, Leander Perez: Boss of the Delta.

“In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighborhood.” Toni Morrison, Sula.

“At my university, and doubtless others as well, there is a recurring, seasonal clash involving life and death, order and disorder—and lawn care.” Norman J. Finkel, Commonsense Justice: Jurors’ Notions of the Law.

“Even the smallest stone in a riverbed has the entire history of the universe inscribed upon it.” Hikaru Okuizumi, The Stones Cry Out.

“No one is left from the Glenn Valley, Pennsylvania, Bridge Club who can tell us precisely when or why the group broke up, even though its forty-odd members were still playing regularly as recently as 1990, just as they had done for more than half a century.” Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.”

“People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father’s blood, but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day.” Charles Portis, True Grit.

“Who was this man whose baby son had been taken from his crib and murdered?” Ludovic Kennedy, The Airman and the Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Richard Hauptmann.

“Either forswear fucking others or the affair is over.” Philip Roth, Sabbath’s Theater.