When I recently applied subtitles to my novels, I gave Reports From Trump Country to Hometown News, even though the events in the story take place, by implication perhaps, during the Reagan years in a small industrial city out in the Rust Belt.
Now the August issue of Harper’s magazine has come out with “The Challenge of the Rust Belt: Can Biden pry it from Trump’s grip?” touted on the cover, and I’m feeling some vindication in the Trump connection in my subtitle.
Vindication? I hate to admit that the Vindicator was a big rival for me in a town that looked very much like Rehoboth, and it had entrenched strength against a small upstart like ours. We were responding quite well, until the larger economy turned against us.
The Vindicator’s home base already resembled a bombed-out German city, left with only several miles of steel mill shells, so we were well within the Rust Belt.
Many communities, especially in the Midwest, simply haven’t recovered from the sharp decline of American manufacturing in the ’70s and ’80s or from the blow to the myth that you’ll be rewarded if you just work hard enough. So much for the work ethic itself.
No wonder this is my dystopian novel.
Now, 40 or so years later, those things really haven’t improved. Let’s be honest. There really is a Groundhog Day surrealism in many locales. We really need a better end for the story – mine and Harper’s – than what I’m seeing.
Not that Cassandra had an easy time of it. either.
The transformation of the former newspaper plant downtown continues. What had been an essentially blank wall against the children’s museum and park is opening up to take advantage of its views that include the bend in the river.
The crown, common to the late 1800s buildings up the street, came as an unexpected but traditional touch.
I happen to love big windows with a corner view, as I imagine these have.
I glanced upon an article about the importance of a conservative party in governing a country, that it keeps a nation from spiraling into chaos, and I realized that’s the problem today.
For too long, America has had no conservative party.
Rather than upholding the institutions and values of the past, what we’ve instead had in recent decades is a growing assault akin to Huns and Visagoths.
Conservatives, by definition preserve. Barbarians, anarchists, and bullies destroy.
Before I go off on a long rant, I’ll just leave you with the question of just what, precisely, today’s so-called conservatives are saving for all of us, not just the privileged few. Racism? Inequality? Injustice?
You know the adage in real estate that location is everything, and you’ve no doubt seen spots where one failed restaurant is followed by the opening of another which also fails and then another. It might be a different kind of retailer but a similar pattern. Wrong location is the usual explanation, followed by the question of why anyone is foolish enough to repeat the disaster. Lightning may not strike the same place twice (though certain prominent heights would seem an obvious exception), but business traffic follows a different set of rules. Even one side of a busy thoroughfare might flourish while the same offering on the opposite side withers.
Now for the operation in practice.
A side street near us in our end of town has a charming carpenter-gothic style store we’ve watched undergo a similar sequence.
This unassuming delis sits on Ham Street (I’m not making that up) … two blocks from New York Street, at that. Well, there’s already a Katz’s New York Deli in Manhattan, and it’s famous. The refurbished Woodbury Mill rises behind the parking lot.
Back in the day before big supermarkets took over, such mom-and-pop groceries could do a lively small-scale business for a neighborhood trade. Send the kids off to pick up some milk, eggs, and maybe a head of cabbage or bag of flour. By the time we came along, this site was either struggling or posting a For Sale Or Lease sign, one owner after another. Just having bread, beer, and candy plus lottery tickets hardly made for a going enterprise, no matter how charming the setting. We wished them well, all the same, and actually lamented a bit when they went under. Something was obviously missing in the business mix.
And then, maybe five years ago, a new owner took over. We admired his low-cost, aggressive hustle – things like parking a pickup on a busy Central Avenue two blocks away and putting a big sign in its bed to alert passing traffic to his deli if they made a quick turn. It got our attention but not our business, we just weren’t ordering much food out and when we did, it was usually from a great Thai restaurant three more blocks away, a Lebanese takeout next to it, or a nearby pizza house. As for the milk-bread-beer-lottery tix, a chain convenience store sat next to the Dunkin’ Donuts on the big artery, though it too kept changing hands to a 7-Eleven at the moment.
Fast forward, it’s a Saturday afternoon my wife and I are both feeling too whatever to cook, we don’t want to spend much – and pizza is getting pricey – she suggests subs, I say fine but want something more satisfying than Subway.
That’s when she suggests Katz’s, where she had popped in a week earlier to grab a six-pack and was amazed by how great the place smelled. Good sign, trusting your nose. So we look up the menu online, see lots of tempting choices, and phone in an order. I trot off all of three blocks and am nibbling on amazing fries even before I get home. In short, we’re sold.
We can see why the place has taken hold and developed a loyal following. Sometimes we’re slow, OK?
It’s not a franchise chain, definite plus. The food is tasty, very, another plus. Some of the menu pays tribute to earlier occupants of the store, once the Busy Hill Market, local awareness. Breakfast is available all day, smart option, especially considering a lot of college students live in the neighborhood – well, they also likely go for the aforesaid beer cave. The prices are also affordable and the portions, generous.
Two sub orders later, we go for the pizza, and it more than lives up to our expectations. So we now have a new go-to pizza joint, unless we really want to splurge and go for Festa, another story.
Turns out the owner’s from Jersey, so he brings some deli savvy, and he has a great manager from all I see, and a skilled crew. None of these guarantee beating the odds, but we are impressed and definitely like the way it’s changed the neighborhood.
We wanted to give a local business a boost, so we went online to cast a vote in “Seacoast’s Best” polling. You’ve no doubt seen other places touting some similar honor.
We very quickly realized that for many of the designations, we had little or no awareness of most of the nominees. Like we knew the six women running for the region’s Best Nurse? Or we’d eaten at all six parlors in line for the Best Pizza? No, a vote went to the one you might already know, if you didn’t skip over it altogether.
Such results are bound to be quite different from those based on a few knowledgeable critics who evaluate on quality criteria and point us in unexpected directions.
Here we are a full six months into the year, and the surge of record-breaking goes unabated.
Racist police brutality is unmasked nationwide, along with the violent suppression of peaceful protests and free speech.
Russian bounties on American soldiers goes unchallenged in the White House.
Wall Street is living in a disconnect with the economy in general while new Covid-19 cases and deaths soar to their highest levels yet – and promise to rocket quickly.
The widespread resistance to public health measures, and then their lifting, threatens to turns the economic hit of the earlier self-quarantining into a wasted expense. Now brace for the truly hard impact when we see what a full outbreak adds up to in costs, including lifetime chronic health problems for many survivors.
And we thought toilet paper and chicken or pork shortages were big?
Already, a wave of evictions is hitting renters who suffered from the mandatory unemployment in April and May. Where can they go? Looks like a lot of vacancies for landlords, too, not that they get any sympathy.
Here where I live, state government revenue is down 20 percent. The next budget round will be a bloodbath.
Who knows what’s going to happen to the crucial election season. National conventions? Door-to-door campaigning? Rallies?
Gee, remember the Senate’s so-called trial of Trump on impeachment charges back in February?
Oh, yes, drought or near-drought in June.
Curing my lifetime of writing headlines, I often felt I’d already seen everything. Nothing could brace me for this.
And now there’s an outbreak of rabbit Ebola, fatal in 80 percent of the cases. Yes, that’s what they’re calling it. Seriously. Wild or domestic, they’re doomed. Bunnies!
Forget the MAGA hats, it’s time for the sackcloth and ashes, friends. We need to repent and be saved. How about some true leadership, based on hard facts and courage?
In reading others’ fiction about the late ’60s and early ’70s, my awareness of the span of hippie identity has only intensified. Each one seems to focus on a different identity. As I’ve long argued, hippies came in all varieties and styles, and still do. But these also show how little overlap there often was.
So much so that I no longer find the label useful. Period. It fails to convey the extent to which we differed within the rainbow.
As one friend insists, “I was never a hippie. I was a freak!”
To the straight world, of course, there was no difference.
For many, political activism was a central component, though not for all. And I’m thinking the evolution of that activism needs more exploration. It’s where we really failed the most.
For starters, too many saw protests as the route to pursue, rather than undertaking the hard work of holding office or attending meetings.
For another, we failed to clearly articulate our vision, other than tending to be left, as in what we called radical, rather than liberal, which seemed to support the Vietnam quagmire. We were reactionary, actually, at least against the military-industrial-financial-racist complex. The ’68 Democratic national convention in Chicago didn’t help anything, either.
Looking back, it seems that too much of our political expression was being domineered by the egotistical theatrics of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin and the like. (Correct me if I’m wrong.)
Woodstock seemed to shift everything. Yes, we had the Jackson State and Kent State shootings the following spring, along with the shutdown of college campuses and some big marches. But who were our avatars?
Or, put another way, why is the experience remembered more by the music than by the speeches?
~*~
Back to Woodstock.
Seems Hoffman wanted to be part of it, naturally, and demanded – get this – $10,000, 200 free tickets, tables for distributing literature, and the right to leaflet the audience. The event’s organizer, Michael Lang, initially refused but later relented.
But that wasn’t enough. High on acid, Hoffman took to the stage and started ranting. Never mind that it was in the wee hours of Sunday morning. After 20 minutes or so, he knocked over Peter Townshend’s microphone as The Who was coming onstage, and a miffed Townshend responded by whacking Hoffman with his guitar and shouting obscenities about getting “off of my fucking stage.”
That part’s well known.
The message, intentional or not, was that politics were not to interrupt the sanctity of art.
I sense the rift only grew after that.
The protest music I remember was by folksingers-songwriters, not rockers.
