Category Archives: race

George 

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I’ve written about George Will before in these entries, a conservative columnist I admired for his thinking in a time when many on both sides don’t, for his eloquence at a time when many merely shout and curse, his insight when many prefer not looking below an ugly surface. Earlier this week, he used something odd from FOX News as the springboard for a powerful essay about an obviously deteriorating, clearly fearful, increasingly worried about how he will be remembered and his efforts to erase history, particularly history of black people. George Will turns 85 on May 4 and unlike our President, he is very much still all there.

If you are a dyed in the wool Trump fan, you won’t make it to the end. If you are a Republican who still believes in service to the country rather than a country serving a President, you might find yourself surprised by how much you agree. If you are a Democrat, you’ll think George nailed it.

From our hilltop, we will not argue with him.  Even when we have disagreed with him, we would not want to debate him. Here’s George with our Friday bonus: (1800) 1 Minute Ago: Trump Falls Apart Staff Handling Him Legacy Panic & Black History Erasure |George Will – YouTube

(We just checked a few minutes ago and saw that the video has been taken down. However, Cockatoo has provided a transcript.  The video ran about 23 minutes.  We’ve adjusted some of the time cues in the interest of complete sentences.)

Something very unusual happened this week. Donald Trump held a cabinet meeting, the kind of organized event where he sits at a very long table, surrounded by people who just agree with everything he says. But this time, things went differently. In the middle of his unclear remarks about trade deals and made up economic wins, Fox News did something they almost never do. They stopped showing it. They just cut away, went to a commercial break, and came back talking about something else entirely.

0:38

When your own supportive news channel, the one that spent years defending everything you said, explaining away every mistake and cleaning up every power grab, decides they can no longer show you to their viewers. That tells you everything you need to know. This wasn’t Fox News protecting Trump. This was Fox News protecting their audience from Trump.

1:02

Because what they saw in that cabinet room was a man clearly falling apart mentally and physically. Even they knew there was no way to put a positive spin on what everyone could plainly see. Let’s look at what actually happened in that meeting, because the clips that got out are truly disturbing. Trump tried to explain recent economic numbers, and I say tried very generously. What he really did was throw out random figures, confuse countries with companies, and at one point completely forgot what he was saying in the middle of a sentence. He said, and these are his exact words, we’re bringing back $400 billion, maybe $500 billion, some say $600 billion from China, from Canada, from the European Union, which is basically Germany if you think about it. And nobody has ever seen numbers like this, the biggest numbers in history.

1:59

None of that means anything. Those aren’t policy ideas. That’s not even a twisted version of the truth. That’s a man reaching for numbers he thinks sound impressive while having no clue what he’s actually talking about. But it’s not just what he said. Look at how he looked physically. The way he gripped the table. The way he leaned forward like he needed the furniture to hold himself up, the way his staff, Carolyn Levitt, Stephen Miller, whoever was there, watched him, the way nurses watch a patient ready to jump in if something went wrong. And afterward, he didn’t take any questions. He didn’t walk over to the reporters. His team rushed him out of there as fast as his weakening body could go. Because they know. Every single one of them knows. Here’s what has become completely obvious.

2:58

Donald Trump’s staff isn’t serving him anymore. They’re handling him. There’s a big difference. Compare how much he appears in public now to his first term. Back then, whether you liked him or not, the man was everywhere. Daily press briefings, hour-long unplanned rants. He would stand in front of his helicopter and just talk.

3:22

It was stream of consciousness, sure, but he was alert and present. Now he barely shows up. When he does, everything is carefully planned. He uses a teleprompter for remarks that he would have made off the top of his head in 2017. Only pre-approved questions are allowed. Media access is limited. And the moment anything goes off script, they pull him away.

3:50

Why? Because the people around him, Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, JD Vance, are no longer working to advance Donald Trump’s goals. They’re pushing their own. While he falls apart in front of everyone.

4:06

There were recent reports that Miller runs a separate private communication line with Trump, feeding him information all day long, basically creating an unofficial power structure that goes around the official White House chain of command. That’s not loyal staff work. That’s a power grab. That’s someone making themselves the real decision-maker, while the president, in name only, gets worse and worse. Elon Musk has openly disagreed with Trump’s own policy statements.

4:44

J.D. Vance is already doing his own interviews, presenting himself as the calm, reliable leader of the administration. These people aren’t serving Trump. They’re using him. They’re getting rich, pushing their own plans, playing the stock market with inside information, and just waiting for the unavoidable moment when he’s too far gone to stop them. Donald Trump has become a figurehead in his own White House, and everyone around him knows it. But here’s where it gets really telling. Here’s where Trump’s mental state becomes impossible to look away from.

5:20 You may have heard about this already. Donald Trump is currently holding up federal infrastructure money, specifically funding for the Gateway Project, which is vital transportation infrastructure for the Northeast, unless he gets his name put on Dallas Airport and Penn Station in New York. Read that one more time. The President of the United States is using blackmail against a sitting senator, Chuck Schumer, to get public buildings renamed after himself. On the surface, this is just sad. It’s the behavior of a deeply insecure narcissist who never got enough attention growing up.

5:43

But it goes deeper than that. Because when you look at the pattern of what Trump has been doing over the past few months, a clear picture forms. And that picture is of a man in total panic about how he’ll be remembered. He renamed the Kennedy Center to include his own name, making it the John F. Kennedy and Donald J. Trump Center for the Performing Arts. He couldn’t even let JFK have that one thing to himself. He’s ordered the construction of a huge arch in Washington DC, a literal monument to himself that historians have compared to the kind of ego-driven projects built by Saddam Hussein and Stalin in their final years. He’s trying to rename military bases, government buildings, any structure that has federal money attached to it. Why?

Why this sudden obsession with monuments? Because history shows us that when dictators sense the end is near, whether that’s political, physical, or both, they speed up their monument building. Saddam Hussein’s palace construction went into overdrive in the late 1990s when international sanctions had him isolated. Stalin’s worship of his own image grew stronger as his paranoia and health got worse in his last years. It’s a pattern. When authoritarian leaders know their time is running out, they try to lock themselves into stone because they understand something basic.

They’ve lost control of their own story. And Trump knows he’s lost control. You can see it in his social media posts. You can hear it in the way he’s been talking lately. He started this week, and I’m not making this up, talking about whether he’s going to get into heaven. He just posted it out of nowhere. He wrote something like, the nasty fake news keeps reporting that I said I’m not going to heaven. It was a joke, but they reported seriously because they’re terrible people who want to make me look bad. First of all, nobody was reporting that. He brought it up on his own. He’s the one who can’t stop thinking about it.

8:13

Second, Donald Trump, a man who never talked about God except to win over religious voters, who couldn’t name a single Bible verse when asked, who famously said he’s never asked God for forgiveness, is now fixated on whether God will judge him. That’s not politics. That’s psychology. That’s a man facing the reality of his own death and realizing that no amount of spin can change what’s coming. There are reports from inside Mar-a-Lago that he’s been having conversations about his funeral, about how people will remember him, about what will be said about him after he’s gone. He’s trying to negotiate with history in real time, and he’s losing that negotiation.

You want to know the most perfect symbol of Trump’s panic about his legacy? The Kennedy Center situation. After Trump forced his name onto the building, after he held a big renaming ceremony, after he stood there smiling like he’d done something meaningful, the Kennedy Center shut down. Just closed, with no set date to reopen.

Officially, they said it was for renovations and reorganization. But let’s be honest about what really happened. Donald Trump couldn’t stand the idea that his name would be next to the legacy of a real president. A president remembered for his vision, his way with words, and his sacrifice. So rather than let that comparison exist, rather than risk the building not getting the worship he demanded, he just closed it. He took his ball and went home. And here’s my prediction. Write it down and come back to it.

In 10 years, every monument Trump is building right now will be a source of embarrassment. Hotels will remove the Trump name to avoid being boycotted and some already have. Buildings will be given new names. The arch will be torn down or turned into something else. His own children will try to distance themselves from the brand and some already are. The monuments he’s so desperately trying to build won’t protect his legacy.

10:27

They’ll become places people visit to laugh. People will go see Trump’s folly, the way they visit Confederate monuments, not to honor them, but to remember what we got past. Donald Trump senses this. He knows this, and it’s destroying him inside.

10:46

But here’s the thing. This isn’t just about one aging man’s vanity. This obsession with monuments, this panic about his legacy, it’s connected to something much more dangerous. It’s connected to what his administration is trying to cover up. Because at the exact same time Trump is trying to build monuments to himself, his administration is systematically wiping out other people’s history, specifically black history.

11:17

It started right away, from day one of this administration. The rollback of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. The removal of materials from the Smithsonian. The changes to school curriculum, forcing schools to take out discussions of slavery, Jim Crow laws, and the civil rights movement from American history classes. Remember the Enola Gay situation? They ran a computer search for the word gay in federal museum records and just started deleting things. They removed an entire exhibit about the plane that dropped the atomic bomb because the word gay appeared in its name. That’s the level of foolishness we’re dealing with. But it’s foolishness in service of a very specific goal, which is erasing history.

12:11

Now a lot of people rightly said, of course Trump wants to erase black history. He’s a racist. His administration is full of white supremacists. They don’t want those stories to be told. That’s true. But it’s not the whole truth. Because the reason they’re erasing black history isn’t just hatred.

12:32

It’s a deliberate strategy. Fascism needs people to forget history. Authoritarian rule cannot survive if people remember how it works, what it looks like, who it targets, and how it has been fought before. There was a podcast conversation recently between Andrew Schultz and Charlemagne the God that captured this perfectly. Schultz, who, let’s remember, defended Trump, made excuses for Trump, told people they were overreacting about Trump, was now expressing shock at what he was seeing. I never thought I’d see this in America, he said. People being shot in the streets by federal agents, families being ripped apart, armed thugs with badges hunting people down for no reason. And Charlemagne said something so simple, so obvious, and so powerful in response. He said, you never thought it would happen to white people. Because here’s the reality. This is American history. This has always been American history. Where do you think policing in America came from? Slave patrols. That’s it.

13:46

That’s the origin. Armed men given power by the government to hunt down black people, return them to slavery, and terrorize communities into obedience. That’s where American policing started.

14:01

The ICE raids happening right now—agents breaking into homes without warrants, tearing families apart, making people disappear into detention centers. That’s not new. That’s a copy of the Fugitive Slave Laws, where federal agents were given the power to hunt human beings across state lines and drag them back into bondage. The heavily armed police beating protesters in the streets, the government surveillance tracking activists, The criminalization of people helping each other. Black Americans have been living through this for 400 years. Indigenous Americans wrote the book on it with their own blood. What’s happening now isn’t Trump inventing American authoritarianism.

14:48

It’s American authoritarianism finally reaching everyone. And that’s exactly why they need to erase black history. Because if Americans knew that history, if they truly understood it, they would immediately recognize what’s happening right now. If we knew Frederick Douglass, we would know how to speak truth to power. If we knew Harriet Tubman, we would know how to build secret networks of resistance. If we knew Ida B. Wells, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to document terrible acts and force the country to face them. If we knew Fannie Lou Hamer, we would know how to organize at the local level and fight corrupt systems. If we knew about the Black Panther Party’s free breakfast program, we would know how to build community support networks that make us less dependent on a government that wants us helpless.

15:44

If we knew about the labor movements led by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, we would know how to shut down the economy when those in power refuse to listen. They’re not erasing history because they hate the past. They’re erasing it because they’re afraid of a well-informed future. They’re terrified that if you knew how black Americans resisted slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration, you would know exactly how to resist them. That’s why Trump’s monument-building and history-erasing are two sides of the same authoritarian coin. Build monuments to the regime. Erase monuments to resistance. Control the past. Control the future. Except it’s not going to work. Because here’s what Donald Trump can’t seem to grasp. His legacy is already written. It’s done. It’s finished. No amount of marble or fancy stone or renamed airports is going to change it.

16:56

January 6th will be studies for centuries, not as a patriotic uprising, not as a protest that got out of hand, but as a fascist attempt to overthrow the government by a president who refused to accept that he lost an election. His face will be next to the word insurrection in history textbooks forever. His COVID response, telling people to inject bleach, holding packed rallies while hundreds of thousands of people died, tearing apart pandemic preparedness systems because Obama built them. That’s his legacy. His family separation policy, children locked in cages, toddlers forced to represent themselves in immigration court, thousands of families permanently broken apart. That’s his legacy.

17:46

His two impeachments, his 34 felony convictions, his being found liable for sexual assault, his fraud convictions, his theft of classified documents. That’s his legacy. Future generations aren’t going to ask, was Trump a great president? They’re going to ask, how on earth did Americans fall for this twice? His name isn’t going to stand for greatness.

18:14

It’s going to stand for American decline, the weakening of democracy, and the conman who nearly destroyed the republic. Every monument he builds is one more thing to tear down. Every name he puts on a building is one more name to scrub off. Every arch he orders is one more structure future generations will demolish. That’s his real legacy, and he can’t change it. But you wanna know what the real monument to this era will be? It’s not going to be his arch. It’s not going to be his renamed airport. It’s going to be the resistance. The millions of women who marched the day after his inauguration and kept marching. The sanctuary cities that refused to become part of his deportation machine, the election workers who protected democracy while he sent a mob after them, the journalists he called enemies of the people who kept reporting the truth anyway, the lawyers who filed lawsuit after lawsuit to block his worst actions, the mutual aid networks that fed people when his government shut down. The young people organizing climate protests while he gutted environmental protections.

19:35

The families torn apart by ice who are fighting to be brought back together. The trans kids he tried to erase who refused to disappear. That’s the monument. That’s what will be taught. Not his buildings, not his speeches, but the fact that millions of Americans looked at his authoritarianism and said, no, not here, not us, not ever. The monument to this era is every person who resisted.

20:06

And that monument is being built right now, in real time, by all of us. Which brings me back to Chuck Schumer and that airport naming deal. Senator Schumer, you have one job right now, one very simple job. Do not negotiate with someone using threats. Do not build monuments to tyrants. Do not give this man one more piece of legacy preservation while he’s actively tearing apart American democracy. The answer to Trump’s blackmail should be simple. No. Build the Gateway Project because it’s critical infrastructure and name it after the workers who built it, not the would-be dictator who held it hostage.

20:55

This is a test not just for Schumer, but for every Democrat who claims to be part of the opposition. Are you actually going to push back? Or are you going to make deals with fascism because it’s the easier path?

21:11

But more than that, this is a test for all of us, because Trump’s team is counting on us being worn out. They’re counting on us forgetting. They’re counting on us not remembering how we got here and who showed us the way out. So here’s what we do.

21:27

We write down everything. Every abuse, every lie, every crime. We create the record they’re trying to destroy. We learn the history they’re trying to hide. Read Frederick Douglass, read James Baldwin, read Ida B. Wells, read the scholars they’re removing from universities.

21:48

Learn the strategies of resistance they don’t want you to know about. And we build the other side of the story right now while they’re still in power, so that when this era ends, and it will end, the history that gets taught is the true one. Not Trump’s fantasy, not his monuments, but the real story of what happened and how we made it through. They want us to forget. Our job is to remember everything. If you’ve read this far, you’re part of the resistance. You’re part of that counter-monument we’re building, and I hope you’ll keep building it with me.

Chuck Schumer, do the right thing. No airports, no monuments, no deals with autocrats. And to everyone else, keep fighting. Keep writing things down. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. Keep learning the history they’re trying to erase. They’re counting on your silence. Don’t give it to them.

 

Waiting For Names

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It is early on a Friday morning.  No longer dark and not quite light and I have been driven to my keyboard by a brief conversation with an unidentified friend that came to my mind in that strange time between sleep and wakefulness.

The cats have been fed to keep them at bay while I sit here in pajamas and robe to write this before it fades away into the day’s life.

I have told Nancy from time to time that writers sometimes must write when the muse demands no matter when it is.

A friend (I’m sure it was a friend although I recall no face, just a voice) in that in-between time this morning asked me a question and I am motivated to answer it here.

“I want to name my son Jesus,” he said. “What do you think?”

He pronounced it with the “J.”

I answered,  “Sure, go ahead.  But think about pronouncing it “Hay-soos.”

And a few seconds later, I thought, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to give him the middle name of Nguyen?”

I am fascinated by names and what they say about our national culture.  As I was talking to myself, or maybe with my dream friend, I began to wonder how many babies might be born to White families like mine (where the children have good white names such as Robert and Elizabeth) in Minneapolis this year with first names such as Abdi, Bashir, Dahir, or Wasame—-popular Somali surnames meaning, in order, servant or worshiper, bringer of good news, light or sun, and glad tidings.

It is not uncommon for names to be tied to events or to challenging times that highlight parts of our cultural stew.

(I prefer “stew” to a reference to our cultural soup that suggests we all blend together into a single entity.  Stews are made of different elements that retrain their identities —carrots, potatoes, meat, and sometimes little bitty onions and peas—to provide a tasty flavor.)

Jesus Nguyen Jones.   Lara Solis Smith (Mexican surnames for a place of laurel trees and sunny).

Names of African-Americans such as James Washington that stem from the slave era, are giving way to some wonderful and fascinating new names—-just look at the wide variety of names on the back of some sports uniforms for examples.

I am waiting for the first white athlete named Jamar.

What is happening seems to this observer to be a quiet but growing form of new cultural recognition  that in time will create a nutritious national stew.  The elements are becoming more self-identified. But with time, we will see the Jesus Nguyens and the Lara Solises, and the Robert Jamals and Elizabeth Githinjis (Kenyan for “one who is blessed or fortunate”).

A century from now, the face and faces of America are most likely to be much different from today’s American culture and, we hope, the irrational fears of “others” will be relegated to history. We do not fear that time for it speaks of a recognition that all are children of a creator known by different names in different places within a single world.

(Picture Credit: The Golden Rule, Norman Rockwell Museum)

The Air We Breathe 

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I’d reading Sam Kean’s Caesar’s Last Breath, a book with the subtitle of “Decoding the Secrets of the Air Around Us.”  I’m not far into it. I’m reading about the creation of the world  and with it the creation of the atmosphere that sustains our life.

Kean hooks the reader with a question— the death of Julius Caeser and his dying question, “You too, Brutus?” Imagine, he says, the air escaping your body as you breath. “How much do you really know about this air?  Feel your lungs deflate and sag inside your chest (as you breathe YOUR last breath). What’s really going on inside there?”

“Imagine you can feel the individual molecules of gas pinging your fingertips, impossibly tine dumbbells caroming off into the air around you? How many are there, and where do these molecules go?”

Our molecules, he says, blend in with the molecules of everyone on earth and all of us are re-breathing the molecules of others. And they do not disappear. Kean maintains that “our breaths entangle us with the historical past….Is it possible that your next breath…might include some of the same air that Julius Caesar exhaled when he died?” We won’t know it, of course but it’s possible because most of the air we breathe is in a ten-mile thick belt of atmosphere all around the world and the air we breathe is air someone else, somewhere else, some other time breathed.

Ten miles. That’s a lot of air.  It means you and I in our lives likely breathed some of Caser’s last breath, or the breath Moses used to announce the Ten Commandments, and—if you believe they actually existed—some of the Molecules of Adam and Eve’s breath.

We breathe the same air of Thomas Jefferson, of Jesse James, of Adolf Hitler, of long-dead friends and relatives—molecules of their breaths.  For some it is sobering and for others it is exhilarating to know that we are breathing some of President Trump’s breath.

It’s an intriguing suggestion.  It reminds us of something Maine Senator  Ed Muskie say at a 1972 Jackson Day dinner in Springfield in 1972, four years after he had been Hubert Humphrey’s running mate for the presidency. His remarks at the end of his speech were so profound that I listened back to my tape and typed them.  I don’t know what happened to that recording. I wish very much that I had it so I could hear again that great voice talking about “the nature of the balance that must be struck between man and man’s environment.”

He told the audience that balance had been “put most eloquently recently in a book translated from the Swedish by the University of Alabama Press.

“This point was made:  that every human being carries within him 100,000 genes.  These genes have given him his entire inheritance from the past; his personality, his character, intelligence, talents and skills.

“If all the genes of the two and one-half billion human beings on this planet were backed together, they would form a ball, a small ball, one millimeter in diameter.  That small ball is all that holds us together, as a species.

“It is all we own, as human beings.

“And what sustains its life?

“A thin crust which so far as we know is the only place in the whole part of the whole cosmos which can sustain this kind of life.  In order to portray on a desk size globe the portion of its diameter which will sustain organic life including the atmosphere, there is not a lacquer thin enough to indicate the proportions. 

“All inside that coat of lacquer is the black death of the inner planet, while all outside it is the black death of outer space.  We’ve not yet discovered anything duplicating this coat of lacquer anywhere within range of the technology we have developed to date.

“If it exists anywhere, it exists outside the range of anyone, any human being within his lifetime, using the most advanced technology of which we’re capable.

“This then is the dimension of our existence in this universe.  The numbers of people cannot expect to endlessly exploit that think coat of lacquer and survive.

“And it is poisoned today not only by the insults we make upon our physical resources, but by the poisons which divide us against each other.  We cannot survive unless we deal with both.

“I think the genius of our political system is that notwithstanding all of the evidence to the contrary today, we have demonstrated that a free people can rise to such a challenge, and I choose to believe that we were destined to develop our capacity to do so.  And whether or not we will must still be the result of our own deliberate intent, and intelligence, and work.

“That is the nature of the challenge.”

 The remarks have something of a contemporary ring to them and they underline some simple questions for which humans struggle to answer.

If we breathe the same air as our ancestors breathed all the way back to the beginning of humanity and before, and we live in a large but common atmosphere, why do we insist that some are more privileged to exist than others do?  Why do we spend so much effort trying to prove that some of us are better than others and deserve more for ourselves at a time when we all share  those molecules 17,000-29,000 in a day? We do not separate the molecules of our lives according to our differences?

Why do we waste so much of our time ignoring these basic similarities that unite us as a species?

What good does it do?

The breaths of Adam and Eve, if you believe in that origin story, or the breaths of the first protohumans are yet in our lungs.  Why do we waste so many of those breaths trying to define our differences?

As I live and breathe (as my grandmother used to exclaim), I don’t know.

Three Celebration 

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A few days ago we had a joint celebration at Lincoln University, the school on the hill at Lafayette and Dunklin Streets in Jefferson City.  The combination Black History Month observance, the celebration of the school’s 160th birthday, and the observance of our nation’s 250th birth anniversary also created a unique moment for local author Michelle Brooks.

Michelle has become a prolific author of nine books about Jefferson City’s history, including he one that debuted that evening, February 5 (another anniversary: the 115th of the burning of the Capitol that led to the construction of the magnificent building we have today). First to Freedom; Cole County U.S. Colored Troops, is a tribute to several of the Jefferson City black soldiers who were in the 62nd and 65th Colored Infancy of the Union Army whose financial contributions led to the creation of Lincoln.

One of the officers of the 62nd noted in his farewell speech that 99 of the 4312 men had learned to “read, write and cipher.”  In all, he noted “200 read and write understandingly, 284 can read, 377 can spell in words of two syllables and are learning to read.”

Jefferson City offered a ramshackle school building for the new institution. Classes began in the fall of 1866, nineteen year after Missouri passed a law making it illegal for black people to be taught to read and write.

I was asked to emcee the event that included an Abraham Lincoln reenactor reading the “Proposition 95—Regrading the status of slaves in states engaged in rebellion against the United States.”  Most people speak of it as the Emancipation Proclamation—which I believe should be pronounced with emphasis on the first word: EMANCIPATION proclamation—and another reenactor portraying Robert Foster, the founding officer. Missouri became the first slave state to have its own EMANCIPATION Proclamation. By the end of the war, one-in-ten Union soldiers was black—179-thousand in the army and another 19-thousand in the Navy.

Part of my remarks between presentations and to end the evening said:

“We have many great statues and bronze tableaus in and at our Capitol, but I think the finest, and most inspirational one in Jefferson City is just up the hill, the “Soldier’s Memorial Plaza” tableau.  It recalls the sacrifices made by members of the 62nd and 65th United States Colored Infantries, men who knew full well a way of life they fought to leave behind.

“They are symbolized in bronze now.  But they were symbols FOR millions of people in their time and remain in bronze as symbols of hope for all of us today and tomorrow—-life and freedom are only a hand-grasp away, and they are a reminder that an open hand  is always better than a closed fist in maintaining the nation whose 250th birth anniversary we celebrate this year.

“The first slaves were brought to Missouri to help mine lead in the 1720s.

“When Lewis and Clark went upstream past the bluff that is now the site of our city, a black man named York was part of the group, the slave of William Clark. When they came back from the Pacific Ocean in 1806, a black man was part of the explorers. His name was York. York was William Clark’s slave. He endured with them all of the dangerous times, saw all of the glories of the great mountains, and was the equal of all on that perilous trip. He  believed he would become a free man on the return and could not adjust to being nothing more than a slave again.   Eventually Clark shipped him off to Louisville Kentucky where he was reunited with his enslaved wife.

“If York and his wife had children, they would have been part of the freedom movement after the Civil War.  We don’t know what happened to him. History seems to have obscured him. But the Emancipation Proclamation and the 13th Amendment gave his descendants the freedom he dreamed of.

“When the first black member of the legislature, Representative Walthall Moore of St. Louis took office in 1921, almost sixty years after the proclamation, he had to room in Jefferson City with a black family, had to eat at a black restaurant, travel in black-owned taxis, and drink from water fountains for the colored.

“But it was Moore who got the half-million dollar appropriation that transformed Lincoln Institute into Lincoln University. .

“Forty-seven years later, I watched as the Jefferson City council, in 1968, passed an ordinance that said black legislators no loner had to stay in Lincoln University dormitory rooms and private homes, and that black people could live anywhere in the city where they could afford to live.

“One-hundred-and-sixty years after the founding of Lincoln University, many people of color still struggle to be considered “people” and there are those who judge some to be unequal only because of their color, their faith, their identities—-and the country where they were born.

“In this year when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of a document that proclaimed that all men are created equal, we again find ourselves wondering meaning the meaning of those words. Some interpreters believe Jefferson meant that all of us are BORN equal in nature.  It is in nurture that divisions are made, distrust develops, and hate can take hold.

“We learn these lessons through the honest study of history and if we are free to learn that history, we can be the ones who bend the arc of the moral universe a little more toward justice.

“Let us go forth from this good evening in the hope that history gives us for peace.”

The event concluded with a fine prayer from Rev. Dr. Adrian Hendricks II of the Joshua House Church in Jefferson City.

Heavenly Father: Tonight as we take a moment and pause to celebrate the history of African Americans, we pause to celebrate American history, giving you thanks and praise, O God, for this nation; giving you thanks and praise or i’s foundation and for its forefathers and for its Declaration to uphold the high ideals of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

And yet In this hour, even as this nation struggles to uphold its identity, we give you thanks and praise for its potential, a potential that still has the opportunity to demonstrate love for our fellow man, a potential that still has the opportunity to pick up the poor and stabilize the impoverished, a potential that still has the opportunity to right historical wrongs, heal historical wounds, and to be the first global power that’s unafraid to let freedom ring!

Lord, go before us, as WE navigate a new pathway. Stand beside us, as we rediscover our moral compass and move within us as we continue to define what it means to be an American.

It’s in your mighty and matchless name that we pray,

Hallelujah & AMEN!

Amen, in deed.

(Photo credits: Jefferson City Convention and Visitors Bureau; Lincoln University)

From the Front Lines in Minneapolis—III

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Our friends in Minneapolis who are among the thousands who are not on the streets, but who are deeply involved in resisting Trump’s war on the city, have shared a letter being circulated in their neighborhood from David McNally, an internationally known motivational speaker and author of six books. He’s Australian although he was bornin east end London.

This is the life we don’t see on television:

Dear Friends,

I am compelled to write to you after listening to the president of Risen Christ School, Michael Rogers, speak at the 9am mass this morning at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church in South Minneapolis. The purpose of Michael being invited was to bring parishioners up to date with the impact of the unrest in Minneapolis specifically related to the behavior of federal agents. I bring this information to you fully aware that our politics may differ, but what we do have in common for many on this list, is our support over the years of Risen Christ both financially and through volunteering. On that note, if you ever attended a Risen Christ fundraiser you will never forget people paying thousands of dollars to have the inimitable Father Forliti host them for one of his famous Italian dinners.

As you know, and for those who don’t know, the school caters mostly to the poorer members of the Latino community.  96% of the student tuition is subsidized. Yet Risen Christ is an amazing success story. Historically, the school has 92% daily attendance, a100% high school graduation rate, 100% of the students speak both English and Spanish, and 81% enroll in college.

Here then are the current “conditions on the ground” if I may use that term.

  1. The approximately 300 students now live in fear. This is not an exaggeration. Let us be clear-we are talking about innocent children who are afraid.
  2. For this reason, an average of 50 students a day are now not turning up for class. This has never happened before in the history of Risen Christ.
  3. Several students have had a parent disappear with no knowledge of where they are and no resource to find out.
  4. Families are not leaving their homes even to buy food. The fear is real.
  5. Risen Christ teachers who come from Spanish speaking countries are living in fear even though their documents are in order. They do not trust the federal agents because of what they have witnessed.  They are being picked up at their homes and taken to work by their white colleagues. The statement that if you are in the United States legally you have nothing to fear is being proven wrong every day.
  6. St Joan of Arc parishioners are picking up children and taking them to Risen Christ so that they can continue their studies. They are then picked up and taken home.
  7. St Joan of Arc parishioners are also delivering food to those families who are afraid to leave their homes. This ministry is one for which I have now volunteered.

When I became an American citizen in 2019, it was with significant pride. I gave a brief speech following the ceremony in which I stated that the United States was the most amazing human experiment in history. That so many people from so many cultures could live in relative harmony was incredible. I proudly pled my allegiance. I still believe what I said. The situation at Risen Christ, however, clearly demonstrates that something is radically wrong. A child or adult who is doing no harm should not live in fear. Dignity for all is a value with which we should all be aligned.

“Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”
— Matthew 25:40 (NIV)

David McNally

E-mail: david@davidmcnally.com
http://www.davidmcnally.com

In sending me this letter from David, our friend Denny added: Most of our friends are ferrying food and supplies to our brown friends and neighbors. My cleaning team, a Mexican family of 5 (I have degenerative spinal disease), who help me once/month, will be here Wed. I’ve asked for a list of needs, especially feminine products, of which is a seriously underrated international need in times of crisis. That was first on her list…3 of her workers are teen girls…all are women. Last month when she was here she informed them they are not allowed to leave their apartments except for work.

Jeff stayed late at his church yesterday to take training guided by the Handbook for Constitutional Observers produced by the Immigrant Defense Network (www.copalm.org). His church sponsors a Latino school across their street and sits in the eye of this storm.

This is how we now roll…please tell your world.

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To conclude, and in response to those who think these entries represent Trump Derangement Syndrome, we wonder—-as we ponder David’s Bible verse—which side do you think the Disciple Matthew would be on in Minneapolis today—the followers, or tools, of Trump or those serving and protecting his potential victims?

To which we add one our favorite verses and one that a dear friend lived by until his last day a few months ago, from the Old Testament book of Micah:

And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly and to love mercy
and to walk humbly[a] with your God.

If being on the side of Matthew and Micah, and the Dennys and Davids and Jeffs of Minneapolis is Trump Derangement Syndrome, I joyously plead guilty.

(We’ll have a bonus entry Friday)

Notes from the Minnesota War Zone II

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A warning—do not rise to the bait. Unfortunately, a lot of people didn’t get the memo.  They sent their own message.

This memo was sent to at least some state employees and people at the University of Minnesota last Thursday.

The Cedar Riverside area of Minneapolis is described as a historic “point of entry for immigrants since Swedes, Germans, and Bohemians began arriving in large numbers during the late 19th century.” Today it is sometimes called “Little Mogadishu” because it has become the largest concentration of Somali-born residents in the twin cities.

A key figure in the anti-Muslim protest was Jake Lang, a January 6th participant who served four years in prison before President Trump pardoned him. Some of his rally colleagues dragged him away from the scene at Minneapolis City Hall, bleeding from the back of his head.

Reports indicate he was leading the Americans Against Islamification’s “Crusader March on ‘Little Somalia.’” One report says he intended to burn a copy of the Quran during the rally. Lang was dragged away to safety by one of his group after about ninety minutes of yelling back and forth and when the chaos that he sought to stoke went after him.

Another report says a member of the group was chased into a parking garage and struck with a flagpole. During the chaos, one of those protesting the presence of Lang’s group noticed the man was bleeding from a head wound and was heard shouting into a megaphone, “This guy needs medical help. He needs mental help. The bleeding is natural for Nazis, but he needs mental help.” When another woman, a protestor, asked the man if he needed help, he replied, “No, I’m good. Thank you, though. I appreciate you.”

It’s not clear if the two reports are referring to Lang or if there was a second man. Later, Lang texted on X from a hospital that he “was just literally LYNCHED by anti-white mob of liberal and illegal immigrants…PRESIDENT TRUMP SEND IN THE NATIONAL GUARD They are lynching White Christian Americans!!!!!”

Some will say he asked for what he got. Some who have studied contemporary accounts of lynchings will say that what happened to him is nowhere near a lynching.  And some will question whether there is anything at all Christian in his words and actions and President Trump’s roundup up of Somalis there.   .

On one hand, the worst thing that can happen is for people to give the Langs of our country the attention and reaction they provoke. On the other hand, what happened at that rally is a clear statement that good people will not stand for Trump’s ongoing ethnic cleansing campaign.

We aren’t in Minneapolis but we all should wonder how we would react if it was OUR city and OUR state being put through these experiences because they didn’t vote for Trump and don’t kiss his political ring.

Sometime the best protest is a silent, glowering presence, bristling with danger for the provocateurs but not giving them the violence they want.

But it’s easy to say that when it’s not your city and it’s not your people, your neighbors, who are endangered by someone who is really, just a petty, pitiful vengeful little man who misguidedly believes he is more than just a President of the United States.

—when he is, in fact, so much less a President and a man, and a disgrace to the office.

On the Minneapolis Front Lines

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Minnesota—a state of Lutherans, loons, lutefisk, and Lake Wobegon—is suddenly a war zone.  To hear the Trump administration describe it, it is filled with dangerous Somali fraudsters, and as HHS Secretary Kristi Noem put it, a “domestic terrorist” got what she deserved, a woman that Vice-President Vance claimed was influenced by a vaporous “left wing network,” and that President Trump accused of “violently, willfully, and viciously” running over ICE agent Jonathan Ross—characterizations all quickly issued with absolutely no knowledge of what happened to Renee Nicole Good, a recent Kansas City resident who had moved to Minneapolis about a year ago. Her wife, Rebecca, said in a statement, “We were raising our son to believe that no matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness.”

A recent editorial by the Wall Street Journal disputed the fulminations from Trump, Noem, Nance and their associates: “Minnesota’s Fraud Problem Isn’t Immigrants: It’s the vast size of the welfare state that corrupts them,” suggesting that generous benefits and numerous programs so large that comprehensive oversight is rendered impossible create opportunities for fraudsters. The Journal blamed both political parties for the situation.

When we were organizing the Missourinet in 1974, the first person I wanted on the my news staff was Jeff Smith who had worked with me at the now defunct KLIK radio station in Jefferson City right after he left Indiana University. Jeff was a terrific reporter whose career path took him into marketing and management. He and his wife Denny remain among our most cherished friends.

Jeff retired as a VP with Northwest Airlines and now is heavily engaged in non-profit work in Minneapolis. Among his colleagues are Somalis. Last week, just as the significance of the killing of Renee Good was starting to sink in, I asked Jeff and Denny to share some of their thoughts. Denny in particular has an interesting perspective on the immigrant situation, which became the focus of their comments.

Here is what they sent:

ICE Storm in Minnesota –

from Jeff and Denise (Denny) Smith

Four days ago, as we write this, Renee Good was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis. Depending on which account you believe, she was either a hero or a domestic terrorist. There’s no doubt that the event sparked a storm of outrage on our cold, wet streets.

Unfortunately, we may never get a neutral account of what happened. The Federal government is acting as the sole investigator following its role as executioner. It’s the latest trauma our community has endured in the last seven months, including a fatal school shooting and the assassination of a State Representative.

Renee Good’s death is an outcome of the Trump administration’s decision to send more than 2,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to Minnesota. Trump is clearly ratcheting up his determination to punish Minnesota for being blue.

As a white woman, born in the U.S., Renee Good wasn’t the chief target of these agents’ attention. Those would be people who are brown or black.

Minnesota has been home to us for forty years, since we migrated from Missouri for a career opportunity. Thank God we didn’t move from Mogadishu. If we had migrated from Mogadishu, the capital of Somalia, we now would be labeled “garbage” by President Trump. If we wore a hijab or had brown skin, we would likely be afraid to leave our home, fearing an ICE agent’s impulsive imprisonment.

Somalis in Minnesota are neighbors and co-workers. They comprise the largest population outside of Mogadishu and our communities depend on them every day. Somali Americans have become integral parts of all aspects of a diverse Minnesota that ranks in the top ten states for health, education, our business environment and other measures.

Quoting the Sahan Journal, a local newspaper serving Somalis, “The vast majority of Somalis here and across the United States are U.S. citizens, and most who are not have legal permanent residency.” Among many professions, they provide needed services for people at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. They care for older adults living in our communities for seniors. They work in our food processing plants. But, according to Trump, they’re not “legitimate” Americans.

By that definition, most likely, neither are you.

Only indigenous Americans have non-immigrant roots. The Twin Cities are home to more than 8,000 tribal members. But that population also does not feel safe. Last week, ICE detained four members of the Oglala Sioux Tribe because they could not provide proof of citizenship. They were unhoused and living under a bridge.

And they are not white.

Unless you are a Native American, you too are connected to an immigrant. Did your forebearers come from Poland, or Ireland, or Italy or, involuntarily, from Africa? If so, your ancestors knew what it’s like to be labeled “garbage,” or worse.

As a second-generation Sicilian, Denny’s grandparents and their families were vilified by white Americans as the new “Niggers” and were recruited to replace black cotton field workers during the great migration north by southern former slaves.

There’s always the “other” and they usually have dark skin.

We acknowledge that a few Somali Americans are at the center of the documented fraud in some Minnesota social service agencies. However, we trust that the fraudsters will receive swift justice and that the bureaucrats who allowed it will be held responsible.

We are alarmed by the Trump administration’s broad-brush judgements, especially of non-white Americans. We should not be so quick to judge entire populations. We should not be so quick to judge, period.

Our move introduced us to a region shaped by both harsh winters and remarkable cultural diversity.  Over the decades, we’ve witnessed how new waves of immigrants, from all corners of the globe, have been welcomed to the fabric of Minnesota, bringing fresh perspectives, food, traditions, and resilience. This blend of backgrounds has enriched our state and broadened our understanding of the world.

We’re glad we migrated to Minnesota and we pray for our city.

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For the record: Native Americans were not recognized as general citizens of this country, not even by the Fourteenth Amendment,  until June 2, 1924 but were not guaranteed the right to vote in every state until 1948.

It’s important to hear from people such as you and me in America’s occupied areas—-because ICE is among us, too. And so are immigrants.

The death of Renee Good is a case filled with complications and Minnesota authorities are not ceding the investigation and prosecution of the case to Trump’s FBI or any other federal agency whose trustworthiness is as limited as our President’s honesty.

But the basic point to remember is this:  The “domestic terrorists” in Minneapolis are the ones sent there by President Trump to punish a state that is not in his political column. His justification that people from those places he calls a “sh—hole countries” are committing massive fraud is a blatant slander of thousands of good people and a craven excuse for his abuse of power.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board disputes Trump’s singling out of Minnesota and its Somali immigrants: “Minnesota’s Fraud Problem Isn’t Immigrants: It’s the vast size of the welfare state that corrupts them—not immigrants or a particular culture.” Others have noted the billions of dollars poured into Pandemic relief programs have led to massive systemic nationwide fraud, suggesting that Trump’s singling out Minnesota and its Somali residents for military intervention is far beyond the limits of reality.

None of us deserves what is happening in Minneapolis and in too many other places in our country today. As Renee Good put it, “No matter where you come from or what you look like, all of us deserve compassion and kindness.”

Compassion and kindness are two of the many things grievously missing in our national dialogue and particularly from our national leadership.

Maybe we’ll ask Jeff and Denny to report from the front lines of our president’s war on his own country again as the ICE campaign and the killing of a 37-year old poet simmer in this frigid time.

A DEI Christmas Hymn

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This is a night I look forward to every year—the Christmas Eve service at our church, an evening we are drawn together in peace and in awe. We’ll probably hear the choir sing a song or two from our Christmas cantata the Sunday before last, and we’ll join in congregational singing of familiar hymns, hear the Great Story told again, and head out in the inspired quiet that follows.  Maybe we’ll drive around a little bit and take in yard decorations—a trip down a street long known as “Christmas Tree Lane” perhaps. Some years it’s cold and some years there’s snow and it looks and feels like Christmas. But it’s Christmas regardless of weather, regardless of neighborhood, regardless of culture.

I love the magnificence of some of the traditional Christmas music but I think the hymn that carries a special Christmas message, particularly in these times, is my favorite or at least very close to the top of my list of favorites.

It is music written in 1951 by Alfred Burt, a minister who died much too young, with lyrics by his church’s secretary, Wihla Hutson—who provide lyrics for music the Burts, senior and junior, wrote for their cards each year.  The Burt hymns are gentle and lovely.  The Jimmy Joyce Singers put out an album of them more than fifty years ago. It’s on Youtube and the CD is still available.

Here’s a hymn that’s probably unacceptable to some. But I think it needs to be played, sung, and heard by everybody—because it’s about everybody.

We have several videos at the end to let you hear how various people and groups perform this universal song.

Some Children See Him   (Wihla Hutson and Alfred S. Burt  1951)

Some children see him lily white,                                                                                    The baby Jesus born this night.                                                                                      Some children see him lily white                                                                                      With tresses soft and fair.

Some children see him bronzed and brown,                                                                  The Lord of Heaven to earth come down.                                                                      Some children see him bronzed and brown                                                                    With dark and heavy hair.

Some children see Him almond-eyed,                                                                            This savior here we kneel beside.                                                                                  Some children see him almond-eyed                                                                              With skin of yellow hue.

Some children see Him dark as they,                                                                            Sweet Mary’s son to whom we pray.                                                                              Some children see Him dark as they,                                                                              And Ah! They love Him too.

The children in each different place                                                                                 Will see the baby Jesus’ face                                                                                         Like theirs, but bright with heavenly grace                                                                       And filled with holy light.

Oh, lay aside each earthly thing                                                                                      And with thy heart as offering                                                                                        Come worship now the infant king                                                                                  ‘Tis love that’s born tonight.

Carolyn Mawbry Chorale Some Children See Him arr. Jay Rouse

Bebe Williams sings: (1325) Some Children See Him (feat. Bebe Winans) – YouTube

Tennessee Ernie Ford: Some Children See Him

John Williams with the Boston Pops, the Boston Children’s Choir, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus: John Williams: The Carols of Alfred Burt

The complete album:

Jimmy Joyce – This Is Christmas: The Complete Collection Of Alfred S. Burt Carols in 4k (1964)

Preserving the Truth of History

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A few days ago, I went to Springfield to speak at the annual meeting of the National Trail of Tears Association.

The Association represents the volunteers who preserve the heritage of the trail and of the forced removal, 1831-1838, of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Seminole and the Muscogee (Creek) Nations from their ancestral homes in the southeast to what is now eastern Oklahoma.

Various sources indicate 55,400-64,275 people were removed. Before the caravans reached athe place that President Jackson said would let them “cast off their savage habits and become an interesting, civilized, and Christian community,” ten to 12,800 had died.

This is how the speech concluded:

It has been an honor to speak to this group at this time in our history when a concerted effort is underway to treat a lot of things as if they never happened —and when a 21st Century Trail of Tears is tragically underway, another time when people who are considered “as unqualified residents near civilized communities” are being sent off to uncertain futures in strange lands.

I wonder, as we look back 200 years to commemorate the Trail of Tears and to honor those who were forced to travel it, as well as those who showed those travelers mercy, if our descendants 200 years from now will look at the mass deportation program the same way we look at the Trail of Tears. Or the Trail of Death*.

As Chief Hoskin** noted last night, on March 27th, President Trump signed an executive order he called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History” by ordering the rewriting of it so that embarrassing moments would be wiped from the public telling of our heritage.

It appears no historic site will be immune to his efforts to, as he put it, “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity, and human flourishing.”  

Have no doubt about what this is.  It is more than an executive order. It is a declaration of cultural war on the people of this nation, and the nations within this nation.

I am not sure that reminding Americans “of our extraordinary heritage” is consistent with effort to whitewash reality.

He also referred to “ideological indoctrination of divisive narratives that distort our shared history,” or, at least, his warped view of it. He appears not to understand that truth is not “ideological indoctrination.”

He complained that “the widespread effort to rewrite history deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame, disregarding the progress America has made and the ideals that continue to inspire millions around the globe.” 

He is right…but he is right about himself.

The danger is that such rewriting of history can be little more than returning to a past where societal divides were deeper, where acts of national shame were more acceptable, and the progress we have made that inspires millions around the world is wiped out.

I want to hear how he and his enablers can sanitize the smallpox blanket.

I want to hear how the destruction of the friendly Wampanoags and King Phillip’s War is “ideological indoctrination.

I want to hear how they can describe Sand Creek, Washita, and Wounded Knee as “consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect union.”

I want to know how the subjugation of the Apaches, the story of Chief Joseph, and the betrayal of Red Cloud is an “unmatched record of advancing liberty.”

How did the Indian Boarding School lead to “human flourishing.”

How the markers of the Trail of Tears are “uplifting public moments.”

I want to know which is more sacred: The Chinese-published Trump Bible with the lyrics of “Proud to be an American,” or Black Elk’s prayer on Harney Peak to the Great Mysterious One.***

That is why we cannot allow stories such as the Trail of Tears to be rewritten, with truth being excised by a person with limited or no appreciation for the work this organization does and what it stands for.

A President who threatens actions against professional sports teams unless they start calling themselves Redskins and Indians again will never understand the nobility of the kind of cause this group advocates..

Some politicians only seek the truth to distort it for their own ends. Greatness does not flow from distorted truth that hides our flaws, but—instead—flows from protecting the truth so we may grow beyond those flaws.

That is what museums are for. That is what historic sites and parks are for and that is what historical organizations are for—to remind us that this country is not a finished work, that it does not become better, let alone greater, by ignoring our past mistakes, our nation’s wrongs, and those who lived them and worked to correct them.

One reason to study history is to understand that greatness is created by today’s honesty about yesterday facts—and understanding that truth, not the obscuring  of it, builds a stronger people.  And a stronger people are a free-er people than demagogues and despots want us to be. 

A nation that hides its truths will not become great. REVEALING the truth is what gives a nation the opportunity to be better than before.

That is our responsibility, our challenge, as historians.

Others might fear us because of that. But we must never fear them.

We must never allow ourselves to be silenced—-for history is the nation’s conscience and we must never abandon the search for the truth in it.

We cannot escape history.  Indeed, our challenge today is to save it, to fight those who would rewrite it for their own benefit.

Reveal the truth, preserve the truth, speak the truth, BE the truth—and our nation will remain free.

*The Trail of Death crosses north Missouri, the path the Potawatomi Nation followed to what became Kansas when they were removed from their ancestral lands in Indiana and Illinois. It was a much smaller group but an estimated 40 of the 859 participants died en route.

**Chuck Hoskin Jr., is the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, the largest Native American Nation, with 45,000 citizens.

***You can learn about each of these issues with internet searches.  I recommend a YouTube video of the speech of Black Elk, described by narrator John G. Neihardt, a personal friend and biographer who described Black Elk as the “last of the great Sioux Indian Holy Men.”)

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 We are Victims of Trump’s Absurd Tariffs

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—-and I am furious.

(My monthly guest column on the editorial page of the Jefferson City News-Tribune addressed this topic yesterday but of necessity it was much shorter and somewhat less candid, perhaps because I had lowered the steam pressure after starting on this version.)

There must be a reason why the highly-praised Wharton School that President Trump attended has never invited him back as a speaker. I wonder if anyone has investigated to find out who wrote his papers for him or even took tests for him.

His favorite course must have been Bankruptcy 101 and he must have slept through class every day the word “tariff” came up. The graduation program for his class does not list him for any honors and just has his name among all of the other graduates.

Stop me before I tell you what I really think.

Here is a story some nice people in a gentle English town. Stay with us. By the time we are finished the story will be about a person in a big American town who puts the “bully” into the ;political phrase “bully pulpit.”

(The phrase began with Theodore Roosevelt, one of the four faces on Mt. Rushmore, a monument he thinks he should—something even less possible than him winning the Nobel Price for Peace.)  TR used the word “bully” as an adjective for “wonderful” or “superb.”

Sorry about that. We have wandered off the path.

Grasmere, a village of about 4,500 people in England’s Lake District, has been known for decades as the home of numerous poets, writers, artists, philosophers and other notables.

Poets William and sister Dorothy Wordsworth described it as “the loveliest spot that man hath ever found.”

William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner) are considered the founders of English Literature’s “Romantic Age.” Coleridge is said to have “muttered stanzas” of the Rime” while walking about the countryside nearby. The Wordsworths lived for a few years in Dove Cottage, where Coleridge also lodged for a time.

The Dove Cottage is still there as is The Swan, an inn where William sometimes dined with the famous poet Walter Scott.

More recently, Gordon Matthews Thomas Sumner had a home there. The world knows him better as the musical artist, Sting.

Perhaps better known than the poets, philosophers, and other notables who have lived there is Beatrix Potter, who gave the world Peter Rabbit and his friends. She also lived in the Lake District.

It was a coolish, dampish English day when we were there and we didn’t get to spend as much time as we wished, but that’s a penalty we paid for trying to hit some of the highlights of three countries—England, Wales, and Scotland in two weeks.

We had our lunch at the Grasmere Tea Room, ate outside on that pleasantly cool afternoon. I think we had Paninis, having a desire to break from fish and chips (we call them French Fries here). But we had been warned of interlopers that we were told were particularly aggressive that day—Jackdaws, a relative of crows and ravens. They liked to snatch food from tables.

Grasmere is, as is the case with many European communities, an old place, one where a 200-year old building is still relatively new.  We have avoided describing it as “picturesque” because we imagine the locals have heard their town referred to that way and it has become cloying to them.

And “quaint” is a condescending word, too, so we didn’t use it.  We liked Grasmere. It’s one of several small places we visited that we’d like to return to, despite the Jackdaws.

To the ancient Celts, Jackdaws were sacred birds that nested in church steeples, symbolic church guards. Like their Crow and Raven relatives, they are considered quite intelligent. We kind of thought the one perched on the back of a chair about twenty feet from our table was scheming to poach some of our lunch. But we kept a sharp eye on it and never let it have a chance.

What has all of this to do with Trump’s politically silly and nationally-damaging tariffs? We have vented about this in earlier posts but this time it’s personal.

Our excellent tour guide, Charlie Reader, gave us something else for which Grasmere is widely known.

We each got a couple of hand-wrapped gingerbreads. And we loved them.

More than 170 years ago, Victorian Cook Sarah Nelson began making gingerbreads in her 17th century home, using her “secret recipe” (that is still secret).  Grasmere Gingerbreads are a cross between a cake and what the English call a biscuit—a cracker to us.

Sarah’s secret recipe now is guarded by Joanne and Andrew Hunter, third generation owners of the business which still operates from Sarah’s house. I wish we had known of the gingerbread house before we left the town—and had the time to visit it.  But bus tours being bus tours, we had to be on our way after lunch.

The BBC has provided some looks at Sarah’s story and the wonderful products she created.

Bing Videos

Bing Videos

When we got home, I decided to secretly order a dozen of these gingerbreads to be delivered to our home each month. It was going to be a surprise Christmas present for Nancy but the surprise fell though when Diane Gallagher (probably) called from Grasmere and Nancy answered the phone. “There’s a lady from Grasmere on the phone asking for you,” she announced before listening to the conversation. Diane was calling to confirm the order.  The first order came in the tin you see here. Subsequent orders have come in hand-wrapped paper packaging and are refills for the tin.

Each month we have looked forward to finding our little package by our front door about the 10th of each month.  But on September 5, we received a note from Diane announcing the package had been shipped three days earlier but she understood “there have been delays at Customs and your parcel is due for delivery today.”

Then she wrote:

We believe the delays are because the US Government has now abolished the exemption for any parcel under a value of $800 from import duties.  This may mean that you will be liable for import duties on delivery of the parcel.  We are still trying to find out exactly what this will mean in monetary terms, but have reason to believe that for the next six months there will be a flat fee of $80 per parcel being sent from the UK. 

Eighty dollars on a $30 package!!!

This is the results of Donald Trump’s ill-advised removal of the “de minimis” exemption for small packages from foreign countries. Packages worth less than $800 were exempt from tariffs until August 29 when he decided even the smallest item would cost a lot more.

The Universal Postal Union says postal deliveries from around the world to the United States dropped by EIGHTY PERCENT within two weeks after our economic genius President scribbled his name on the bottom of his executive order.

We were supposed to take delivery on Wednesday, September 10. Instead we got a “reschedule” notice from UPS telling us, “UPS is preparing your package for clearance. We will notify you if additional information is needed.”

Diane told us it would be okay to refuse to pay the duties. Afterward the company could tell the UPS to destroy the parcel and the amount remaining on our order would be refunded.

The order from Grasmere was held up for the better part of a week before it cleared customs in Louisville, Kentucky (why Louisville, we don’t know), and was to arrive at our house on Wednesday, September 10.

We decided to pay the duty because the folks in Grasmere had produced the gingerbreads and had shipped them to us in good faith but we decided to have them hold onto the rest of our funds until our country regained this small part of its sanity and allows something so benign as Grasmere Gingerbread to be shipped to Missouri without a duty or a tariff that our President is unable to admit punishes his own citizens.

Trump says his tariffs will force foreign manufacturers to build factories in this country. I am quite sure that Joann and Andrew Hunter are not going to establish a gingerbread manufacturing plant in this country because of this petty policy.

But if you are accumulating evidence of how idiotic Trump’s tariff policy is working, we offer this observation as a good example.

We are puzzled by the whole tariff/duty business even more because while we were waiting for our gingerbreads to trickle through the customs bureaucracy, we found a book on our doorstep that we had ordered from a company in Delhi, India.  It took only ten days from the day I ordered it for it to arrive. I ordered the book on September 5. The company in Delhi gave it to FedEx on the tenth and five days later it was on my doorstep. Clearly, somebody in the customs office was asleep at the switch.

The gingerbreads?  They were mailed on September 2, three days before the book was ordered and eight days before the book was shipped.

On Friday, September 25, we got a notice from UPS:

The status of your package has changed.

Exception Reason: The customs clearance has failed and the shipment is abandoned

UPS told us on September 10 that the package was being prepared for clearance. We were to be notified if more information was needed.  We were not notified of anything until the message that Grasmere Gingerbread package apparently is such a threat to our national security that it would be dangerous for it to be shipped from Louisville, Kentucky where it has been losing its freshness for three weeks.

We got a new note from from Diane;

On 18th September we asked UPS to destroy the parcels that had not cleared Customs, but it appears that this has not yet happened for all parcels.  As well as the severe delays through Customs, it appears that parcels valued at less than £20 are incurring import duties of just under $70, which is just not viable.  For these reasons, our directors have taken the decision to suspend shipping to the US and Canada temporarily. 

I am very sorry about this. 

UPS told us:

Exception Reason: Package cannot clear due to customs delay or missing info. Attempt to contact sender made. Package has been disposed of.

Amazing. After all these months, UPS told us the reason UPS apparently could not get a straight answer from the customs people about the reason—it’s either “customs delay” or it’s “missing info.”  What missing info?   We are unlikely to ever learn why there was a delay and what information was missing in this shipment that wasn’t a problem earlier.

It’s a little package of a dozen Gingerbreads, for God’s sake!!!

It’s disgusting. But our president has taken “disgusting” to unprecedented levels in so many things.

I have notified Diane of our sincere apologies for the embarrassment this administration is. I wish we could go back to that beautiful part of our world to do it in person—-

—because he is creating so many things to apologize to the world for.

Is it too late for Wharton to ask for its diploma back?

(photos by BP. Gingerbread by the Grasmere Gingerbread Co., videos from the BBC)