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Snippets

“The unvaccinated are losers.” Ascribed to Aaron Rodgers.

“The unvaccinated just don’t play.” Ascribed to Novak Djokovic.

“The unvaccinated eat wherever.” Ascribed to Sarah Palin.

Ever since I learned the meaning of nescience about a decade ago, I have wished to use it but have not. If, however, I met Aaron, Novak, or Sarah, I would hope to have the opportunity to say, “I marvel at the extent of your nescience.”

Mitch McConnell recently said, “If you look at the statistics, African-American voters are voting in just as high a percentage as Americans.” The search, so far unsuccessful, began immediately to find a Trump supporter who found this offensive. And curiosity is now rampant as to how McConnell will describe Hispanic voting rates.

I just got on my computer an ad on how to block ads. You can make up a punchline.

The Lunar New Year began yesterday—the Year of the Tiger. I was happy to learn that I should not clean my place during the first few days of the New Year—“lest you want to sweep luck away.” I am pleased to report that I have much luck stored up. The dust bunnies look so fierce that this year I have anointed them dust tigers.

New York City had its first major winter storm of the season. During it, I did what I usually do during such an event. I turned to Wallace Stevens and read:

          It was evening all afternoon.

          It was snowing

          And it was going to snow.

          The blackbird sat

          In the cedar-limbs.

Now I have added “The Snow Man” to my ritual reading of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”:

          One must have a mind of winter

          To regard the frost and the boughs

          Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;  . . .

          For the listener, who listens in the snow,

          And, nothing himself, beholds

          Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

I wish I understood that.

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His Honor’s House (concluded)

A summary of Samuel Booth’s Brooklyn mayoralty asserted that it left no “especial mark,” but that conclusion was not completely accurate. Booth set in motion projects that are an integral part of Brooklyn today. As the Landmarks Commission noted, Booth “initiated a plan for a comprehensive park system.” The park commissioners appointed Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, designers of Central Park and Prospect Park, to the task of laying out the new parks, and the result of many of the Olmsted and Vaux plans can be seen today, including in the vicinity of our house. At the urgings of Walt Whitman, who was then editor of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a fort used in the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812, was turned into a park in the 1840s. By the end of the Civil War, it had deteriorated. After approval from the Brooklyn parks commission under Booth, one of the first projects of Olmsted and Vaux was to redesign what is now Fort Greene Park. The result today is an attractive, highly utilized thirty-three acres.

Even when not holding an official position, Booth remained active in civic affairs. His opinions were solicited about an elevated railroad, and the city obtained his testimony about the value of a church building that the municipality wanted. Perhaps most significantly he testified, giving our house as his address, before a commission investigating the Brooklyn Theatre calamity of December 5, 1876. In a hall with about 1,000 of the 1,500 seats occupied, a fire broke out on the side of the stage at about 11 P.M. between the fourth and fifth acts of The Two Orphans starring Kate Claxton. Booth described the narrow stairways, less than seven feet wide, with two right angle turns from the upper reaches. When an emergency exit was opened, patrons from the lower tiers fled into the stairs obstructing them even further. Although the fire department responded quickly, almost three hundred people died in the blaze. The testimony of Booth and others led to safer theaters in a movement headed by the New York Daily Mirror. (Until I read Booth’s testimony, I had never heard of the Brooklyn Theatre tragedy. On the other hand, I have read much about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of March 25, 1911, which was New York City’s deadliest NYC industrial disaster. That fire had 146 victims. The largest disaster in New York City before 9/11 was the sinking resulting from a fire of the “General Slocum,” a boat ferrying people to a church picnic on June 15, 1904. Of the 1342 people on board, 1021 died.)

While engaged in these various forms of public service and maintaining his own business, he was an active member of the Hanson Place Methodist Epicopal Church, which still exists. He was especially interested in young people and spearheaded that church’s and another church’s Sunday schools.

 Booth retired from active business in 1881. An article about him said that wealth was not his ambition, but he “acquired a comfortable competence.” Retirement gave him additional time to devote to young people. He went to the Elmira Reformatory in upstate New York to talk with the warden there, and as a result, he oversaw parolees from that institution who were from Brooklyn. On his death, one newspaper cited this activity as another example of Booth’s “strong sense of Christian duty.”

He died on October 19, 1894, in his then home a few blocks away from ours, where he lived with an unmarried sister, a niece, and her husband. He  did not die in obscurity. The next day a special meeting of the board of alderman presided over by the mayor resolved to attend his funeral and close city offices for a half day. Mayor Charles A. Schieren was quoted as saying, “If ever a man earned a seat in heaven, it was Samuel Booth, for he devoted his entire life to the uplifting of men.” Several aldermen and ex-aldermen also gave kind comments and words of praise.

In the following weeks, eulogies for Samuel Booth were given from pulpits around Brooklyn. Ten days after his death, The Rev. Louis Albert Banks, a famous man in his own right and a prolific author of “uplift” literature, who was then leading the Hanson Place Methodist Episcopal Church, said that Booth was “a man of genuine public spirit. He believed it was his duty, and the duty of all Christian men, to be as faithful to civic obligations as they were to the claims of the church.” Banks emphasized that Booth was Superintendent of the Sunday School and then said, in an unfortunate phrasing that might today bring snickers about the never-married man, “Samuel Booth believed in boys, indeed it might be said he had a passion for boys, and that is why I have called him the boys’ patron saint.”

It was a good life that Samuel Booth led. He was a decent person. Of course, often house owners leave problems for the subsequent owners—asbestos or mold, for example. On the other hand, what I hope is that anyone who enters our house—His Honor’s House—feels the sense of decency that Booth once brought into what is now our home.

And he built a damn fine house!

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His Honor’s House (continued)

Samuel Booth, the builder of our Brooklyn house erected in the 1870s, was born in England in 1818, supposedly (as a newspaper article said in December 1931 almost forty years after his death) “with foresight”—on the Fourth of July. (I am leery of those who claim the Fourth of July as their birthday ever since I learned that George M. Cohan, that Yankee Doodle Dandy Boy, said he was born on Independence Day, but his birth certificate said July 3. If anyone cares to look for Booth’s English birth records, let me know.) Booth did not stay in England long. With him in tow, his family imigrated to New York City three weeks after Samuel’s birth. They stayed there for the first ten years of his life and then moved to Brooklyn.

Booth stayed in school until he was fourteen when he began work as a clerk in a wholesale grocery business in Manhattan. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a joiner, and at twenty-five in 1843, he went into business for himself as a builder. His first successful building project was with John French, a frequent partner through the years, for a row of houses in Brooklyn on the north side of Remsen Street between Court and Clinton Streets, not far from the East River and Manhattan. This was a fast-developing area of Brooklyn. At that time the site of our current house was largely farmland. (While this country may have been one of general western expansion, Brooklyn was different. It was first settled on the western shore of the East River and then moved eastward.)

He was elected alderman in 1851 as a Whig, but shortly after the party was formed, he became a “staunch Republican.” He declined to run for another aldermanic term in 1855 but was elected supervisor in 1857 and reelected until 1865. In 1866, he was elected the sixteenth mayor of Brooklyn, but he only served one two-year term. The city was increasingly staunchly Democratic while he was not. (Brooklyn became a city in 1834, but much of what later became Brooklyn were independent townships. As population increased, the towns became incorporated into Brooklyn. This process continued for more than fifty years. In 1886, the Town of New Lots became part of Brooklyn followed by the incorporations of the Towns of Flatbush, New Utrecht, and Gravesend in 1894. The Town of Flatlands was the last incorporation making Brooklyn the land mass that now exists, which is contiguous with Kings County.)

His public service continued when President Grant appointed him Postmaster of Brooklyn in 1869, a position he held until 1873. And in 1878, he began a two-year term on the Board of Education.

While Booth held different positions as a public servant, a theme went throughout all of them: a devotion to public service with integrity. For example, as a Brooklyn Supervisor he headed up commissions that built a jail and courthouse “with no corruption”–an unusual circumstance then (and now) as a newspaper reported upon his death in October 1894.

During the Civil War he administered enlistment bounties in Brooklyn. Men were not drafted if a county filled its quota of enlistees. Brooklyn, as did many other places, raised money to entice men to join the army so that the draft could be avoided. Significant sums of money were often at stake and corruption frequently followed, but not in Brooklyn under Booth. As a newspaper article in December 1931 titled “Stories of Old Brooklyn” noted, Samuel Booth administered $3,800,000 of Civil War bounties, and “not a penny of it went astray,” something otherwise unheard of during the Civil War. Furthermore, as Postmaster, he did not seek to expand his domain; instead, he consolidated offices to save money.

Booth’s mayoralty was not flashy. An obituary said, “His administration as mayor did not leave any especial mark upon the history of the city,” noting that the Common Council was Democratic and pointing out, somewhat strangely, that the Council did not pass a single measure over Booth’s veto. The article also said that while Booth’s term produced no memorable results, “it was honest.”

(concluded January 31)

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His Honor’s House

                                           

(this is a continuation of posts from January 2, 2022, through January 9.)

          I had learned that our house had been built by Samuel Booth in the 1870s. The New York City Landmarks Commission report about our Brooklyn neighborhood said that our house is a “residence erected by real estate speculator and former Brooklyn mayor Samuel Booth sometime between 1872 when he acquired the land and 1883 when he sold it to Charles and Kate Glatz.” I thought, however, that maybe there was more to learn about the building of the house and its builder. Occasionally when I had some curiosity, some energy, and some time, I headed to the Brooklyn Historical Society to dip into nineteenth century materials.

          When I did this research, it was the Brooklyn Historical Society, but it has gone through several name changes since I have been in Brooklyn. First it was the Long Island Historical Society. It is easy to forget that Brooklyn is part of Long Island, but, of course, it is, but the LIHS had few materials about Long Island apart from Brooklyn, and apparently the name was changed to the BHS to reflect its mission more accurately. Recently, however, it has become the Center for Brooklyn History, and it is no longer the freestanding institution it was, but is now a division of the Brooklyn Public Library.

          Even though the name has changed, it has remained fundamentally the same institution in the same building with a gift shop/bookstore emphasizing Brooklyn products and history, galleries of art reflecting Brooklyn history, temporary galleries that have exhibits about Brooklyn, a lecture hall with speakers about many topics, and a library. The library is beautiful, with a heavy emphasis on wood. An upper gallery surrounding the main reading floor has made me feel as if I am stepping back in time—just the place to blow the dust off nineteenth century records.

          I started with Brooklyn atlases and city directories that listed residents’ business and home addresses. An atlas of 1870 said that Samuel Booth was the Postmaster and lived on our block, although another atlas had him living about a mile away. But atlases of 1871 through 1874, while listing him as Postmaster, had him living at an address across the street from our house. Things changed in 1875. His occupation was now listed as carpenter, and he lived in what is now our house. (Although the Landmarks Commission report labeled Booth a real estate speculator, I have found no other source that describes him that way.) I found a record that he bought the lot that now holds our house on January 23, 1872, from the City of Brooklyn. Being the sleuth that I am, I concluded that our house was built in 1874 or 1875. He also ceased being Postmaster at that time, although I have no reason to believe that these events were related. Having learned this, a good part of my curiosity was satisfied. I realized that to do the tedious research of learning who all the subsequent purchasers were until we bought the house did not interest me much. (We have owned the house for over forty years, and I would not be surprised if we are the longest owners of it.)

I found, however, that I still had some interest in learning more about Samuel Booth. I thought I might do some research into his life and background perhaps to write an article for some local history publication, but mostly to keep myself occupied. Then I got excited about this possibility when I found out that the Brooklyn Historical Society had an entire folder in its archives of materials relating to Samuel Booth. I put in my request for it and had to wait a week until it was available for me at the library. I wondered what was there. Perhaps extensive records from the time he was mayor that might lead to a book about Brooklyn after the Civil War. Or perhaps a diary or personal letters that would give insights into the man that were worth sharing.

My heart sank a bit when the librarian finally delivered the folder.  It did not look thick enough to be a source for a fun research project. The folder contained only four documents comprising seven pages, and two of the documents did not seem to relate to Booth at all but instead had been misfiled. That pair were incorporation papers of a church when Booth would have been about twelve. The third document did belong there. It was a letter to him when he was mayor commending him on some action he took, but the letter, handwritten of course, did not make clear what that action was, and the signature was not one I could decipher. Finally, there were papers indenturing Booth to a carpenter and joiner when Booth was sixteen. This seldom-accessed file was a bust that doused any enthusiasm for this new research and writing project.

Still, every so often, I continued to want to know more about Samuel Booth, and when more nineteenth century newspapers went online, I could do that. I learned from these forays into digitized New York Times, the Brooklyn Eagle, and other publications that while Booth was of only minor historical significance, he was a decent, worthy man who did good works throughout his life.

(continued January 28)

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Virginia Governor Thinks . . . But Not Critically (concluded)

The first executive order signed by Glenn Youngkin, the new Virginia governor, seeks to keep “inherently divisive concepts” and Critical Race Theory out of his state’s public schools. Surprisingly, however, while CRT is banned, it is not defined. Perhaps the governor thought that it did not need a definition because everybody knows what it is, like air, the moon, Santa Claus, or the ills of communism. Much more likely is that Critical Race Theory went without explication because the drafters and signer of the executive order did not know how to define it. Or perhaps faced with defining it, they realized that they did not know what it is other than it was something bad. Or perhaps they thought that they’d know it when they see it, but don’t know how to put that feeling into words, which is really just another way of saying they don’t know what it means.

If those behind the executive order are as attuned to history as they want us to believe, then they know that banning or punishing something without a definition of the infraction has been a tool of autocrats. Without a clear definition, the uncertainty of what is and is not allowed chills behavior. People can only know after acting if their behavior will bring censure. The safest way to avoid the censure, then, is to stay far away from any line that might demarcate the impermissible. Imagine you are a social studies teacher who knows that twentieth century federal housing policies aided white but not Blacks in buying houses, and that for most Americans, homes are their most important financial asset. Blacks as a group have accumulated less wealth today than whites partly because of these housing policies. This is the good and bad of American history. The federal government aided people to buy homes, but it expressly discriminated against Blacks in the process with consequences for wealth inequality today. Would you teach this to your eleventh-grade class? Would you be teaching something out of Critical Race Theory and get into trouble? Where would you look for an answer as to whether this information is permissible? You would not find it in the executive order. Without clear, definitive guidance as to what constitutes Critical Race Theory, the response of many teachers, understandably, would be to avoid the topic entirely. And the result is that Virginia students get a poorer education.

Critical Race Theory is not defined in the order or are the concepts and ideas related to CRT, which also are banned. On the other hand, the governor did define “inherently divisive concepts.” The executive order states:

“For the purposes of this Executive order ‘inherently divisive concepts’ means advancing any ideas in violation of Title IV and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, including, but not limited to of the following concepts (i) one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith; (ii) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, (iii) an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, (iv) members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith, (v) an individual’s moral character is inherently determined by his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, (vi) an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith, bears responsibility for actions committed in the past by other members of the same race, ethnicity, sex or faith, (vii) meritocracy or traits, such as a hard work ethic, are racist or sexist or were created by a particular race to oppress another race.”

Perhaps the reason that Governor Youngkin’s order defines inherently divisive concepts is because his education was thorough enough that he learned the value of cribbing. His definitions stem from an executive order of September 2020 by President Trump that prohibited federal governmental agencies and federal contractors from conducting any employment training that promoted “divisive concepts.” Nine concepts are listed with a catchall provision, and those have been slightly reworked and placed in the Virginia executive order. The major difference is that the federal order only referred to race or sex, but Virginia has expanded that to “race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith.” The addition of faith raises important issues.

An inherently divisive concept, according to the Virginia governor, is one that maintains that “an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her . . . faith.” However, faith, at least many believe, is not an immutable trait or characteristic that tells us nothing useful about a person’s character or merits, but a choice, and choices are worthy of judgment. Or at least that is what many religions profess. Whether one is baptized, goes to mass, keeps Kosher, prays five times a day to Allah…these things matter to those participating in such religious practices, and they affect both behavior and their feelings about non-practitioners.  In other words, Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order that labels churches as teaching inherently divisive concepts. The order, however, does not affect Sunday, Saturday, or Friday worship services. The order only tells schools not to teach the inherently divisive concepts, and that seems right. Schools should not suggest someone is a better or worse person because they are a Catholic or a Sunni Moslem.

On the other hand, religion is a tricky area. The order states that “we must provide our students with the facts and context necessary to understand” important historical events, and religion is often part of those facts and context. With this executive order in force, how should a teacher approach the Protestant Reformation or the Crusades or the role of religion in the Salem witch trials or the Inquisition or Mayan human sacrifice? Throughout history religion has often been an “inherently divisive concept.” Shouldn’t kids know that?

The order says that schools should teach about “the horrors of American slavery and segregation.” Imagine a student saying, “I have been reading how ministers in the pre-Civil War period preached that slavery was required by the Bible and that Blacks are inferior. I have also read how ministers in the 1950s and 1960s said that God requires segregation of the races.” What if, as would be appropriate, the student then asked, “Did religious people really believe that and do they believe that now?” What if the student goes on to suggest that someone’s moral character was lacking for holding such religious beliefs. What should the teacher do in response?

Or what should the teacher do during a discussion of the Holocaust when a student says, “But some religious people believed that Jews were Christ-killers.” If you were the teacher, might your thought be, “I am not going to teach anything that might lead to such provocative questions and comments. I want to keep my job.” And, of course, it is not just in history or social science classes where the inherently divisive concept of faith may come up. What should the biology teacher say when students flatly reject evolution because it contradicts the Bible?

I hope that no one in any Virginia public school is teaching “one race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith is inherently superior to another race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith.” (Of course, religions do teach that one faith is superior to another, and such teaching occurs in non-public schools.) I don’t want students to be taught that “an individual, by virtue of his or her race, skin color, ethnicity, sex or faith, is racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously,” but if I were to present materials that demonstrate that whites throughout American history have gained financial and social advantage from discrimination against other races, might I have been teaching an inherently divisive concept? Would it be worth the risk?

And then there is this definition of an inherently divisive concept: “members of one race, ethnicity, sex or faith cannot and should not attempt to treat others as individuals without respect to race, sex or faith.” Ok, call me stupid, or ignorant, or ill-educated, but I am not sure what that phrase means, even though I have read it several times. Could you explain it? Or is it just an example of sloppy thinking? If it does say something useful, couldn’t it be written more clearly? That it hasn’t been seems to say something disturbing about those who claim to know what is best for Virginia schoolkids.

Finally, go back and look at the entire definition of inherently divisive concepts. The phrase “race, skin color, ethnicity, sex, or faith” appears six times except that half the time there is a comma after sex and half the time there is not. In a legal document, as the executive order is, a change in punctuation should mean a change in meaning, but if sex with or without a comma signals different meanings, I don’t get it. The meaning seems to be the same in all the phrases. Then, I thought, perhaps there is a raging debate I am not aware of in Virginia over the use of the Oxford comma, and Glenn Youngkin, ever the politician, doesn’t want to take a stand on this issue and with his split comma use hoped to mollify both Oxonians and non-Oxonians. If that is not the case, however, the haphazard appearance of the comma is just another example of the sloppy thinking and sloppy writing throughout the executive order. But even though they cannot think or write well, they are confident, Virginians, that they know what good education for the state’s public schools is.

You can all sleep easier knowing that.

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Virginia Governor Thinks . . . But Not Critically

Shortly after taking office, Glenn Youngkin, the new Virginia governor, issued an executive order “on Day One to end the use of inherently divisive concepts, including Critical Race Theory” in K-12 public education. EO-1—ENDING-THE-USE-OF-INHERENTLY-DIVISIVE-CONCEPTS,-INCLUDING-CRITICAL-RACE-THEORY,-AND-RESTORING-EXCELLE[13856].pdf. (If on April 1, 2023, Youngkin signs another executive order, will it say that it was issued on Day Four-Hundred-Seventeen?) (Have you noticed how frequently politicians’ signatures are unreadable? Is that so that there can be plausible deniability later if they want to disown whatever they signed? Or maybe they really had wanted to be doctors? Or is it because their K-12 education did not reward good penmanship?)

As is frequent in such orders, the issuer first stated why the order is necessary and follows up with how the goals are to be accomplished. It seems almost impossible for politicians to escape platitudes in this portion of an executive order. In this one, for example: “Political indoctrination has no place in our classroom.” Our kids should not “be told what to think. Instead, the foundation of our education system should be built on teaching our students how to think for themselves. . . .We must equip our teachers to teach our students the entirety of our history—both good and bad.” Who could disagree?

A closer reading of this section headed “Importance of the Initiative,” however, raises questions about the order itself and the writing and thinking ability of its drafters and signer. The order says that “we must enable our students to take risks, to think differently, to imagine, and to see conversations regarding art, science, and history as a place where they have a voice.” How does the governor want students to think differently? Think differently from whom? From what? How does banning IDCs (inherently divisive concepts) accomplish this? In addition, the governor wants to enable students to imagine. Virginia kids now don’t have an imagination? That apparently makes them different from all children elsewhere, so perhaps Virginian small fry must be enabled to think differently.

The order seeks to improve the knowledge and thinking ability of Virginia students, but the order should make people wonder about how well its drafters and signer were educated. Should we take seriously pronouncements about education from someone who writes the phrase “to see conversations”? And doesn’t banning IDCs limit the ability of students to explore–think differently about–upsetting or inherently divisive concepts?

The order states what should be another platitude: “We must equip our teachers to teach our students the entirety of our history – both good and bad.” Okay. But it continues: “From the horrors of slavery, . . . [to] our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism, we must provide our students with facts and context necessary to understand these important events.” If Virginia schools teach such poor sentence construction, more than the mere banning of Critical Race Theory is needed for a good public education there. And I doubt the governor’s commitment to historical accuracy when he writes of our “defeat” of the Soviet Union.

Moreover, the clause states that schools should teach about “our country’s defeat of the Soviet Union and the ills of Communism.” Don’t the ills of Communism still exist even if the Soviet Union does not? Perhaps the goal is to teach about the ills of communism, but that is not what the order says, and, besides, it would conflict with the portion of the order that intones that political indoctrination has no place in Virginia’s classrooms and that students should not be told what to think. I doubt that Youngkin wants teachers to teach about the ills and shortcomings of capitalism; apparently, he would rather just indoctrinate them about the ills of communism.

The preamble concludes with sentences that are at best non sequiturs: the Virginia Constitution, it says, “provides a right to be free from any governmental discrimination upon the basis of religious conviction, race, color, sex, or national origin. Critical race theory and related concepts are teaching our children to engage in the very behavior the Constitution prohibits.” Did you follow that? The Virginia Constitution prohibits governmental discrimination. CRT teaches students to governmentally discriminate. Really? How does it do that? If that second assertion can, against all odds, make sense, surely there must be some intervening sentences to get there. As presented, the paragraph is gobbledygook. But it is presented by those who are going “to ensure excellence in K-12 public education” in Virginia.

Perhaps the sloppy thinking and writing in the “Importance of the Initiative” doesn’t matter much because it is the “Directive” portion of the executive order that contains the legally operative language. The thirteen numbered paragraphs make it clear that the Virginia governor is taking a strong stand against “inherently divisive concepts, including concepts or ideas related to Critical Race Theory.” They are to be rooted out of Department of Education policies and removed from DOE’s guidelines, websites, best practices, and training materials. Furthermore, the Superintendent of Public Instruction shall keep on the lookout for further executive or legislative actions that might be “needed to end use of all inherently divisive concepts in public education.”

Virginians can be proud that public school kids will no longer be polluted with these pernicious policies, or at least they will be kept safe once these offensive ideas can be identified. Good luck with that. The executive order does not even attempt a definition of Critical Race Theory, much less the “related concepts” associated with it.

(continued January 24)

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Snippets

I watched a few minutes of a TV travel show about the Alps. It showed street performers in a touristy town. There was yodeling. That evening while getting ready for bed, an NPR segment featured yodeling. I had heard yodeling twice in a day when I had not heard that art form for a long time. I used to hear it more because a lot of country singers once yodeled, and I thought that even my favorite of the singing cowboys, Roy Rogers, occasionally yodeled. The next day I went to YouTube and was pleased to find that some of my memories were still correct and that Roy Rogers did indeed yodel. (It does not seem right just to call him Rogers, but it would be ok to just say Roy.) That, as is my wont with YouTube, led me to other clips, and I heard more yodelers. I realized that during each of these yodeling encounters, I smiled while listening to the minute or two of the distinctive vocalizations. A whole hour of yodeling might be bad for mental health, but a few minutes can make you feel more lighthearted. Perhaps in these troubled times we all ought to take a break each day to listen to some yodeling.

I dreamt I was in a land where there was too much coffee. It was a fantasy.

Jonathan Alter reports in His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, A Life (2020) that after Jimmy Carter said that he would tell no lies as president, a reporter asked his mother Lillian Carter whether the Carters ever lied. Miss Lillian said that the family had told white lies. When asked for an example of a white lie, she said, “Remember how when you walked in here, I told you how sweet and pretty you were?”

Old joke: She said that she wanted to confess the sin of vanity because she always thought about how beautiful she was when she looked in the mirror. The priest replied, “My child that is not a sin. That is a mistake.”

“How hollow and insincere it sounds when someone says, ‘I am determined to be perfectly straightforward with you.’ The thing needs no prologue; it will declare itself.” Marcus Aurelius.

I was at first surprised that the Wisconsin Congressman on Fox News was not wearing a U.S. flag pin. Instead, on his lapel was a Green Bay Packers symbol. You might not think that he has his priorities right, but for a Wisconsin politician he does.

A reminder to everybody: This year I continue to be awards-eligible.

New York City pedestrians violate the traffic laws less than they did a generation ago. I was used to walkers coming to an intersection with the light against them and looking for a break in traffic in order to scamper across before they got the green. Now if people can’t cross when they get to the corner, they look not at the traffic but down and read, scroll, or text on their smartphones. They don’t look for an opening in the cars and trucks and often don’t even notice that the light has changed.

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Clothes Make the Man-Child (concluded)

NBP Guest Post

Because my school had outlawed sweatpants, to Macy’s we ventured for an all-new wardrobe for an all-new person. My mom and I had to compromise every time we shopped, from the first to the fiftieth time. We had a semi-amicable and fair shopping policy in place: we agreed that we would buy only those things that we both found acceptable. It was democratic, equal votes and equal veto rights. But things were much harder in practice particularly since I had rigid ideas about what was acceptable. The collar couldn’t be too big because that was girly! No shoulder pads either. The buttons couldn’t have any designs on them. And there definitely couldn’t be darts where boobs were supposed to go. No flair on the bottoms either. And the sleeves couldn’t be too short. If crossed by a stitch, hue, or cut that I perceived as too feminine, my jaw would set, my eyes would narrow, and a tiny piercing laser of death would shoot from my black raging pupils.

My mother, of course, had her own opinions, and was operating at a disadvantage since she was under the misconception that she was shopping for a girl, even though she acknowledged that I wasn’t a girly girl. While she tried to be sensitive to my stringent dressing restrictions, we still headed for the girls’ department where I headed straight for the boy-type clothes especially the collared polo shirts and sweatpants that I had become so fond of. But the girl version had more embellishments and gewgaws, was form-fitting, and was just plain stupid! Not only were we in the girls’ department, but my mom also wanted me to buy clothing that fit me (imagine!). I wanted to buy clothes that fit Andre the Giant. They were far more comfortable, and didn’t reveal the body underneath.

So we battled. I didn’t have eye-beams, but I sure mastered that piercing death ray. My mom, though, had her own weapons that rivaled mine (plus she was bigger and had the credit cards). If I was Cyclops, she was Banshee. My mother was keeper of “The Voice,” as I endearingly nicknamed it. Faster than a .223 Winchester, more powerful than the Acela, and able to leap the Freedom Tower in a single bound, it was not a sonic boom, scream or yell; quite the opposite. It was terse-to-kill, at a volume slightly elevated, but very eerily controlled. It is my Kryptonite, but when used against others for my protection, it was the ultimate in awesomeness! In Macy’s, though, it was deadly.

During much of the shopping experience, my mom, trying to be helpful, kept adding to the stack of things for me to try on. As she saw my eyes narrow and knew I was trying to vaporize her choices, the pitch of her voice lowered into the caustic zone. Meep! To the fitting room we went, loaded with all sorts of clothes that I loathed to try on. But on they went. I will admit, some were not as bad as I thought they would be, but on the other hand, some incited tears. This exercise was entirely too stressful. The main problem was that girls’ clothes—even clothes for little pre-pubescent girls—were cut to fit girls’ bodies, so even if they didn’t look overtly girly, they still whispered, “Girl, girl, girl!”

I wanted out of the fitting room like a lion wants out of his cage, but I was trapped in there until we found enough acceptable clothing that we wouldn’t have to endure this shopping nightmare for at least a few more months. When we finally got to the register, I was so happy not to be in the fitting room that I cared less about what we ultimately bought, than simply getting the hell outta there.

We were both battered and bruised and emotionally exhausted by the time we got home. Once the car ride was over, we could escape to our own corners to lick our wounds and calm our nerves. My go-to was obviously TV and Twinkies, and my mom’s was probably Tanqueray and a cigarette. So my mom and I went through these sparring rounds every season and every year, each hoping that the next trip would be a real mother-daughter bonding time, and each time realizing that we’d have to bond some other way.But there was one time when my mom was the clothes angel. For one agonizing celebratory event, my school actually mandated that all girls wear a skirt. Now. If shopping for regular every-day clothes was a boxing match, then shopping for dress-up clothes was an all-out UFC battle. For events such as these I had usually gotten away with wearing black pants and a kind of girlish silk blouse (ick, yes, I said the word “blouse,” but at least it had a collar, even though it probably also had shoulder pads), and some shoes that were clunky black flats that made me look like a ’90s doughty secretary. That wasn’t going to work for this one. I just couldn’t imagine myself in a dress or a skirt; it was an impossibility and went against every fiber of my being. To wear such clothes would have affirmed that I was a real girl. In my still mixed-up view of myself, I figured I could be a boy in a dress, but not a girl in a dress. My mother somehow understood this and came to the rescue.

This is the one and only time this phrase will ever make sense: culottes were the answer. Yes, I repeat, culottes, essentially giant shorts that can pass for skirts, but they do include that little cloth separation between the legs that makes all the difference. I could almost pretend that I was wearing uber baggy shorts. I wore them with my white silk blouse (still ick) and my ugly secretary shoes and advertised to anyone who would listen that I was NOT wearing a skirt. So while I was sort of trying to fit in as a girl, I essentially kept announcing, “I am NOT a girl, NOT a girl, but I guess I am a girl.”

            Clothing was, thus, the outward manifestation of my identity and gender struggle. In my Lands’ End uniform I got to camouflage myself as a little boy who was in fact a little girl. Post-uniform, I started to care about fitting in (pardon the pun)—that my quintessentially feminine name should match my clothing and appearance slightly more, but I still couldn’t stand wearing that clothing. I still had a lot of work to do in order to make a bespoke suit for whoever I was.

Posted on by rjonakait

Clothes Make the Man-Child

NBP Guest Post

As a little kid, I was always partial to boys’ clothes. My parents were fairly fashion liberal from the start and let me off the hook from forcing me to wear the uberest of girlish clothes…for the most part. Upon ability to communicate (which, as you know, was rather delayed), I made it clear that pink was not my color. Before I had any say in it, though, I did wear dresses—even pink frilly ones with tights (barf). There are even photographs of me in dresses (gross). But my hatred of dresses literally reared its ugly head at a very early age. I couldn’t have been more than three when a “lovely velvet smocked dress” arrived as a gift from one of my mother’s friends. “Just try it,” my mom cajoled. I acquiesced enough to let her place the dreaded garment over my head. The contorted face that emerged from the neck hole disturbed her so much that the devil-made garment was immediately ripped off me. My face relaxed and the dress photos became a thing of the past. Soon after there was nary a ruffle nor a hint of pink in sight.

I was then allowed to dress in little shirts with stripes and collars and matching running shorts or T-shirts, button-downs, and even sweater vests (think, like, total ‘80s). When I played dress-up, I wore my father’s clothes. I required only a button-down shirt and a vest—maybe a baseball cap to top it off. I liked to play dress-up so much that eventually I received my own little red tie that I would don to feel dapper. It was pre-tied and went around my neck with an elastic band. I wore that tie as much as possible until the elastic wore out.

By the time I was in school my mom and I had arrived at a uniform that was acceptable to us both. No more girly surprises for me and no more wretched faces for my mom. My uniform consisted of a striped rugby shirt and matching sweatpants. I had multiple sets in a range of primary colors. When I had worn out or outgrown one set, we could just open to the corresponding pages in the latest Lands’ End catalogue (in the boys’ section no less!) and pick out my new colors and sizes. On any given day, I could be seen sporting green sweatpants with a green and black striped rugby shirt or perhaps blue sweatpants with a blue and red rugby shirt or perhaps even red sweatpants with a red and yellow top! Oh, I was so eclectic and fashion-forward!

In these clothes, I could pass for a real boy (Pinocchio, eat your heart out!). But looking like a real boy had its own problems. The image I presented to strangers was of a little boy, but my name was clearly that of a little girl. Strangers—waiters, teachers, shopkeepers—all thought I was a boy…until they heard my name. Then sometimes they’d ask for confirmation. Their eyes surely didn’t deceive them. I did. They judged this book by its cover, and were oh so right, but technically oh so wrong.

My hairstyle added to this confusion. In kindergarten and early elementary school, it was cut short. I paid very little attention to it. It was there on my head, but it didn’t look girly, and it existed easily without being combed or brushed. It was perfect!

Those awful mandatory school pictures where each kid is individually posed sitting at a desk reveal the evolution of my hair. It’s boy-short in the styling of Sheldon Cooper on the Big Bang Theory in kindergarten and then gets progressively longer, so that by second grade I have become Kenneth Parcell of 30 Rock. By third grade it is longer still, mostly in the back. I won’t make you read between the lines. I was unwittingly cultivating a mullet (eeek and oops!). All I knew was that longer hair meant girl and shorter meant boy. My unconscious solution, I guess, was to have both. The mullet marked the beginning of gender conformity. It was the perfect allegory for me: I needed to be part male to match how I felt on the inside, but part female to match my anatomy outside and my name. Unfortunately, as most of you know, mullets should never be the solution. Sigh, I was trying so hard to live on both sides of the fence.

Biology though dictated that I was on the girls’ team whether I liked it or not. If I were to be truly accepted, I would need to act…and look like…a girl person, and this was going to require a conscious and concerted effort. In the early years, I had tried to dress in a way that would help me disappear into the woodwork. But those rugby shirts and sweatpants made me look like a nerdy little boy. Unfortunately, I realize now that particular outfit highlighted the fact that I was the weird girl who looked like a boy. I clearly had not yet learned the subtle art of tailoring the appropriate suit. And now, I had to; the school outlawed sweatpants! How could they?!? Change was coming, but it wasn’t going to be easy.

(concluded January 17)

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

My sneeze was delayed by a yawn. Did I have a snawn or was it a yeeze?

I would like to hear one of those religious athletes say, “I was playing a great game until God made me fumble.”

If the flower shop is robbed at gunpoint, you probably have a petrified florist.

I liked Chicago when I lived there. I have enjoyed visiting there. It is a city that has much to offer except for one thing: Deep dish “pizza.”

Watching television on Sunday, I once again had that question: How much do televangelists spend on hair care?

An ad beseeched me to send $5 or $10 to a political candidate. The candidate told me that it was essential so that he could fight to restore Donald Trump’s majority. I thought: Define “restore” and “majority.”

The Nonbinary Progeny is often more perspicacious than the spouse. The spouse spied some schmutz on my shirt and asked, “Is that blood?” I assured her it was not. I had not changed the clothing when a few hours later, the NBP asked, “Is that chocolate?” Hershey’s Special Dark Syrup to be more exact.

I watched the first half of the college football playoff game, but not caring about the outcome, I turned it off. I find more and more in my sports viewing, I don’t pull for a team to win. Instead, I increasingly find that there is a host of teams I don’t like, and I want them to lose no matter their opponent, but that often leads to situations where I want both to be defeated. There is something wrong with “college” football where coaches get paid up to $10 million, and I pull against all the big college football programs. I wanted both teams on Monday night to lose.

“I give the same halftime speech over and over. It works best when my players are better than the other coach’s players.” Chuck Mills

I might feel better if the officials and announcers for college football games cut out the redundancies such as “false start, offense,” and “true freshman.”

Jose was born in the Dominican Republic, but he was quick to say that his family roots were in Barcelona. Recently another person told me that he was born in the Dominican Republic but stressed that his family’s roots were in Italy. The many Puerto Ricans I have known have just said they were from PR and haven’t stated where their forebears were from before coming to the Western Hemisphere.

I met a couple on a trip.  He was six feet ten.  She was shy of five feet even.  What questions would you have liked to ask?