Way back last summer I started a Project.
I am a historian by trade and my main form of relaxation is reading. One of my favorite activities is to go to used book stores and see what I can find that looks interesting and costs me next to nothing. I tend to hang on to the things I acquire. And when you combine all of these things you end up at a place where my office is pretty much full to the brim with books, many of which I will never read again and which have no particular sentimental value.
They were standing in the way of further book acquisitions, and so they had to go. Plus, being on the clearing-out end of my parents’ stuff did sort of bring home the idea that perhaps I should do some of that while I am still healthy to spare my children from the same task. At least some of the same task, anyway.
So I went through the bookshelves and took out all of the ones that I didn’t see myself keeping. The “just in case” books. The “that might be useful someday” books. The “this wasn’t something I hated but neither was it something I plan to revisit” books. The “what the hell is this still doing on my shelves?” books. The “what was this book about again?” books. And then I took the books that I wanted to keep – many of which had been piled in corners or on the floor prior to this – and put them on the shelves, in a pleasing order.
This did require a few bookshelf purchases, but by the end of the summer – for the first time since we moved into this house in 1996 – all of my books were out of boxes, off the floor, and accessible to the casual browser.
The rest I put in boxes and stashed down in the basement. There were a lot of boxes. There they stayed while more pressing things occupied my time. Life is like that, I suppose.
This weekend, though, it was Time. A while back a friend had recommended a bookstore in Madison that does a lot of community literacy work, so I called and asked them if they still accepted donations. “Sure!” they said. “Is it a big collection?”
“Yeah, I suppose so.”
“Well, if it’s more than 50 books that would count.”
“Oh, my sweet summer child. This is 20 boxes of books.”
“…?”
“…!”
“…”
"If you took them out and repacked them there’s probably about 16 boxes worth that you can actually use,” I told them. “You can have them for free, but you have to take them all. That’s the deal. I just want them out of my house.”
Thus are bargains struck.
We drove up there on Sunday and eventually found the place – an unassuming brown building that looked more like a house than a shop – and wandered in. It seemed like a very nice place. If I hadn’t been dropping stuff off I’d have stayed to pick up more. Perhaps another time.
I let the much younger staff people handle getting the books out of the van and into their shop, and eventually it was done.
It felt pretty good, really. I hope they find new homes and new readers.
And now I can buy more books to replace them.
Tuesday, March 12, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
Standard Legal Boilerplate - A Family Story
I’ve been trying to unravel a family story for the last couple of weeks. It’s one of those stories that I didn’t know a whole lot about when I was a kid, then slowly pieced together over time, and eventually fleshed out most of the details when I was an adult to get something coherent.
And then it got weird.
-er.
Weirder. It was a pretty strange story right from the start in some ways.
All of the principals in this story are long gone now as are most of the people who were even tangentially connected to them when these events happened, so I figure it’s something I can put down here. And honestly I find myself sneakily proud of my grandmother, the main person in the story, for living her life the way she wanted to live it, as best she could.
So here you go.
My dad’s side of the family was pretty small when I was growing up. There was my dad, of course. There was my grandmother (his mother), who lived with us for the last dozen years or so of her life. And there was my great-grandmother (my grandmother’s mother), who died when I was eight, which was why my grandmother came to live with us. I don’t remember her much – she and my grandmother lived in the last rowhouse before you got to the 69th Street Terminal, in Millbourne which was at the time a gritty little suburb of Philadelphia tucked between the city and Upper Darby, and mostly what I remember is an old woman in a bed and the fact that the front door faced the train tracks behind the house, not the street, so you could watch from the doorstep as the Market-Frankfort El rumbled by on its way to and from the terminal. It was neither elevated nor underground at that stage of the ride, as it would be at different points for most of its route. It was just a light rail line at one end of its journey through the city.
That was it. That’s all of the people on that side of the family that I have ever met, even to this day.
My dad, as far as I knew growing up, was an only child. I had no evidence to the contrary and no reason to suppose otherwise. Only children are a fairly common and unremarkable occurrence, after all.
My grandmother was not married at any time that I knew her and I never met any grandfather on that side of the family. I didn’t even find out my grandfather’s name until I was in high school and it made so little impression on my mind that it took me years to remember it again after that. My grandmother had a brother who married maybe three or four times but never had any kids, and a sister who had a son that my dad once described as “a toad, just like his father” so the son and his father both fell off the family radar long before I was born. The sister died before my parents even got married, something my dad blamed squarely on the stress caused by her husband and son. The brother died about a month after my great-grandmother did, but he had been running a motel in Florida for years by that point and I never met him. My mom only met him once, ironically enough at his mother’s funeral a few weeks before he died, and she said he seemed like a decent guy.
My great-grandfather seems to have been created out of pixie dust and table scraps and even now I can find very little about him on the genealogical sites. Certainly no family came from his side that I ever met. I know he started life as a blacksmith and ended up working for a company that made railroad locomotives.
My great-grandmother was the third of nine girls, and one of maybe two or three who ever had children of their own. My dad would tell stories of some of his great-aunts – especially Aunt Bertha (“Birdie”) who apparently had a sharp sense of humor – but by and large it was not a tight-knit family. “They weren’t dysfunctional,” my dad once told me, “but they weren’t close.”
At some point in your life, as you get older, there is a little switch in the back of your head that flips over and you find yourself saying, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” I hit this point in my early 40s or so, and eventually I managed to flesh out my grandmother’s story and add to the pieces that I’d discovered growing up.
Just a note, though, before proceeding. My grandmother led a very interesting life in many ways, and only some of them appear in this story. You had to know her.
My grandmother, Beryl, married Russell in early 1929 and they would go on to have four children, not just the one. There was Robert, born later in 1929. There were James and Phyllis, born in the early 1930s, both of whom died very young from things that could easily be prevented or cured today. And there was my dad, born in 1939. Beryl and Russell divorced in 1940. Russell took the oldest kid, Beryl took the baby, and neither side spoke to the other again.
Ever.
Please understand that at no time in the ensuing eight decades before the last one died did any of the four of them live more than twenty miles from any of the others. They could easily have kept in touch. But they didn’t.
The closest they came to doing so that I know of was a story my maternal grandmother told my brother of a day when she and my dad were in a shop in West Philadelphia, before I was born. At some point my dad took her aside and pointed to a man paying for his things at the cash register, told her that the guy was his father, and then just watched him walk out. This of course implies that my dad knew him on sight at least two decades after he’d left, which further implies a lot more stories that we’ll never know now. Much later, in a very different context, I asked my dad if he had ever thought about contacting his father. “No,” he said. “Never. What would I have had to say to the man?” Which is a fair question. Neither my dad nor his mother were ever really bothered about the guy that I knew of. He simply wasn’t part of their lives anymore and that was that. Nor was his son.
Beryl remarried in 1942 to a man named Charles, and on those few occasions where my dad would tell stories about his dad, it was Charles he was talking about. Charles was the guy who was there for him when he was growing up, after all. My mom met him a couple of times when she and my dad first started dating in high school. She said he seemed nice and treated her well. Charles died in 1959, and my grandmother never remarried after that.
That’s the story as I pieced it together from childhood stories and adult research. It’s got its odd moments, granted, but it’s fairly straightforward for all that.
So far, so good.
If you are going to do genealogy in this modern digital age you will end up on one of two websites, and probably both at one point or another.
The big one of course is Ancestry.com, which is run by the Mormon Church. The Mormons have this interesting little theological quirk that says if you convert to the Church you have a spiritual obligation to go back and retroactively convert all of your ancestors. This occasionally gets them into trouble (such as when they repeatedly try to do this to all the Jews who died at Auschwitz, which is an arrogantly messed up thing to do to people who were murdered for the religion they already had) but it is also why they have the best genealogical records on the planet, bar none. It’s one of the things that the young Mormons can do for their missions when they reach adulthood – most of them go off to proselytize the heathens (i.e. us) but no small number of them go out and dredge the world for records that they copy and bring back to Salt Lake City. If you’re going to do genealogy online you’re going to work with the Mormon Church, and Ancestry is as close to a win/win as you get – you get access to all those records and can build your genealogy to your heart’s content, and they get access to more records that people upload on their own while paying for the privilege, which saves them on missionaries. I for one am perfectly happy to make this trade.
The other is FamilySearch.org, which is basically Ancestry Lite. It’s the free teaser version of Ancestry that they use to get you hooked so you’ll move up to the big site and pay them their subscription fees, which worked like a charm on me so kudos to them for their marketing strategy. They do know their audience.
So I dipped my toe into the genealogical pool and opened an account on FamilySearch, and it works pretty much like Ancestry does. You can put up a family tree that can be private or available for others to see, you can add documents and stories, and you can contact people who seem to be barking up the same trees you are.
I ended up talking with a guy named Mark, who was doing research on Russell’s side of the family. Mark is some kind of nth-degree cousin of mine – if you go back five or six generations there’s a pair of siblings and Mark comes down from one of them and I come down from the other – and he turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He had a lot of information that I hadn’t seen before and I had some things that were new to him as well, mostly because I had the physical documents in my possession and had scanned them. We had a good conversation.
At some point, though, he sent me a scan of a clipping from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. It’s pretty standard legal boilerplate, the kind of thing you’d see in the Public Notices section of newspapers back when newspapers were a thing, the sort of notice you’d have to publish for three consecutive weeks so your court case could go to trial. “Russell hereby notifies Beryl that he intends to sue for divorce, and if she does not respond by such and such a date judgement will be entered against her blah blah blah blah blah.” That sort of thing. Standard legal boilerplate, insert names and dates here.
Except that it’s from 1962.
Now, there are a lot of weird things about this, not least of which being that in 1962 Russell knew damn well where to find my grandmother. She was living with her parents, in the same house where she had been living in 1928 when she and Russell had started dating. Russell knew exactly how to get hold of her and advertised in the newspaper instead.
As for the underlying issue, though, there are three possible alternatives here, each one funnier than the next and all of them entirely plausible if you knew my grandmother.
First, Beryl and Russell really were divorced in 1940.
In this alternative, Beryl did the whole Public Notification thing as above, got no response, had judgement entered against Russell as promised in the Notification, and never bothered to tell him anything about it. In which case Russell’s lawyer is about to make a very expensive discovery. I can see this happening, really I can. “Why should I tell him anything?” my grandmother would have said. “To hell with him and good riddance.” I can, in fact, imagine this in her voice in my mind even now.
Second, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was married to two different men for seventeen years.
Again, entirely plausible. I come from a long line of people who had very little interest in or patience with bureaucratic niceties or legal requirements, and in an age where you had to do a fair amount of legwork to find records – physically going to the courthouse(s), searching through folders, locating paper documents, and so on – I can easily see my grandmother just cutting Russell out of her life, forgetting entirely or simply ignoring the entire issue of whether they were still married or not, and then going on to get married to Charles. Russell was over as far as she was concerned, paperwork or no. If Charles wanted to get married, why not?
For corroboration of this basic attitude, consider that one of the first things that Mark did after we connected on FamilySearch was to send me all the information he had on my grandmother and ask me to check it for accuracy. I looked it over and said it was all correct except that he had her birthday wrong – it was August 9th, not August 10th. “But her birth certificate says the 10th,” he replied. “I’m sure it does,” I told him. “But I lived with the woman for a dozen years and her birthday was the 9th.” I’m pretty sure I know what happened. Either my great-grandparents filled out the form incorrectly because they couldn’t remember the date (it was a big day, after all) or just made a mistake, or they forgot about the form entirely and had to go back later to fill it out because some humorless official demanded they do so and then got the date wrong, and either way they couldn’t be arsed to change it. Beryl’s here, isn’t she? What does it matter what the form says?
Also, this is the same family where my dad had to take three weeks of shore leave from the United States Navy to sort out who owned the family house in West Philadelphia. It had been in the family for generations by that point. The original owners had bought it in the 1870s or 80s, and then they died and passed it down and those people died and passed it down and no one ever bothered to change the title so it was still legally owned by people who had died several decades and at least two generations of residents ago. The taxes were paid and the property was well maintained, so what did the title matter? Sorting that out with the city was an experience, my dad said.
So yeah, my grandmother being legally married to two different men and not giving a damn about it is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
Third, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was just shacking up with Charles. For almost two decades. In the 1940s and 1950s, when such things Simply Were Not Done.
And yes, this too is entirely plausible. My grandmother was not terribly concerned with what other people thought of her life choices and by “not terribly concerned” I mean "not concerned at all." She could in fact be rather contrary about them. She was a pack-a-day smoker from the time she was 17, during the Harding Administration, to the day she died in 1986. She smoked Benson & Hedges Gold, which she would send me down to the local pharmacy to buy for her and which, this being the 1970s, they’d happily sell to a 9-year-old boy, and she once told my brother that the entire reason she started smoking was because someone told her not to. Also, she worked outside the home for her entire adult life, she went by her middle name and hated her first name enough that she somehow managed to avoid having it appear on her Social Security records, and she had a very clear moral code that did not involve her getting too worried about other people’s choices or understanding why they should care about hers. Seven years into her marriage to Russell she got hit by a trolley in West Philadelphia and, according to the newspaper story that appeared the next day, when questioned by the police she gave them her own last name (not Russell’s), an age that was several years younger than she actually was, and an address that turned out to be a greenhouse. What business of theirs was any of that? She was who she was, and I have to admit I have always admired her for that.
The idea that she would decide that her personal life was not someone else’s to regulate or comment upon would have been entirely within character for her.
I first discovered all this when Lauren was about sixteen, and her immediate reaction to it was “Wow. Grandmom was a playa!” And I suppose she was, in her time. She had game. She did what she felt was right by her standards, and if that wasn’t the usual practice of the day well that could easily be defined as Someone Else’s Problem.
This story has percolated in the back of my mind for a number of years now, but for some reason I have recently been spending some time trying to get to the bottom of it. What actually happened? Which of these three alternatives is the one that they lived through?
There’s nobody left to ask, though.
Russell died in 1978 and Robert in 2019 or 2020 without any contact with us at all. My brother and I did look into finding Robert at one point – it’s astonishing what information you can find online if you care to search – but on further consideration it didn’t seem like a great idea (“What would we have to say to the man?”) and we let it drop. Beryl died in 1986. Both of my maternal grandparents died in 2000. My dad died in 2016 and my mom in 2021. They’re all gone and the web of stories and relationships in which they lived is gone with them. All that is left are the documents and photographs.
None of these people made much of an impression on the genealogical websites that I can find. Some, but not much. There are census records, for example, but those stop at 1950. I have Charles’ death certificate, which does list my grandmother as his wife, but I have not yet found any marriage record for them nor any divorce records for her and Russell, not even in 1962. You can’t prove something by absence, of course, and it is always possible that the records are there and I’ll find them eventually. But all of these people remain to this degree elusive, confined to a time that has long since passed. My dad and my grandmother (and to some extent my great-grandmother) live on in my memories, of course, but the documents remain an as yet unexplored territory.
So for now it’s a story, or rather a set of possible stories, and there is something to be said for that as well.
And then it got weird.
-er.
Weirder. It was a pretty strange story right from the start in some ways.
All of the principals in this story are long gone now as are most of the people who were even tangentially connected to them when these events happened, so I figure it’s something I can put down here. And honestly I find myself sneakily proud of my grandmother, the main person in the story, for living her life the way she wanted to live it, as best she could.
So here you go.
My dad’s side of the family was pretty small when I was growing up. There was my dad, of course. There was my grandmother (his mother), who lived with us for the last dozen years or so of her life. And there was my great-grandmother (my grandmother’s mother), who died when I was eight, which was why my grandmother came to live with us. I don’t remember her much – she and my grandmother lived in the last rowhouse before you got to the 69th Street Terminal, in Millbourne which was at the time a gritty little suburb of Philadelphia tucked between the city and Upper Darby, and mostly what I remember is an old woman in a bed and the fact that the front door faced the train tracks behind the house, not the street, so you could watch from the doorstep as the Market-Frankfort El rumbled by on its way to and from the terminal. It was neither elevated nor underground at that stage of the ride, as it would be at different points for most of its route. It was just a light rail line at one end of its journey through the city.
That was it. That’s all of the people on that side of the family that I have ever met, even to this day.
My dad, as far as I knew growing up, was an only child. I had no evidence to the contrary and no reason to suppose otherwise. Only children are a fairly common and unremarkable occurrence, after all.
My grandmother was not married at any time that I knew her and I never met any grandfather on that side of the family. I didn’t even find out my grandfather’s name until I was in high school and it made so little impression on my mind that it took me years to remember it again after that. My grandmother had a brother who married maybe three or four times but never had any kids, and a sister who had a son that my dad once described as “a toad, just like his father” so the son and his father both fell off the family radar long before I was born. The sister died before my parents even got married, something my dad blamed squarely on the stress caused by her husband and son. The brother died about a month after my great-grandmother did, but he had been running a motel in Florida for years by that point and I never met him. My mom only met him once, ironically enough at his mother’s funeral a few weeks before he died, and she said he seemed like a decent guy.
My great-grandfather seems to have been created out of pixie dust and table scraps and even now I can find very little about him on the genealogical sites. Certainly no family came from his side that I ever met. I know he started life as a blacksmith and ended up working for a company that made railroad locomotives.
My great-grandmother was the third of nine girls, and one of maybe two or three who ever had children of their own. My dad would tell stories of some of his great-aunts – especially Aunt Bertha (“Birdie”) who apparently had a sharp sense of humor – but by and large it was not a tight-knit family. “They weren’t dysfunctional,” my dad once told me, “but they weren’t close.”
At some point in your life, as you get older, there is a little switch in the back of your head that flips over and you find yourself saying, “Huh. Genealogy. That sounds like fun.” I hit this point in my early 40s or so, and eventually I managed to flesh out my grandmother’s story and add to the pieces that I’d discovered growing up.
Just a note, though, before proceeding. My grandmother led a very interesting life in many ways, and only some of them appear in this story. You had to know her.
My grandmother, Beryl, married Russell in early 1929 and they would go on to have four children, not just the one. There was Robert, born later in 1929. There were James and Phyllis, born in the early 1930s, both of whom died very young from things that could easily be prevented or cured today. And there was my dad, born in 1939. Beryl and Russell divorced in 1940. Russell took the oldest kid, Beryl took the baby, and neither side spoke to the other again.
Ever.
Please understand that at no time in the ensuing eight decades before the last one died did any of the four of them live more than twenty miles from any of the others. They could easily have kept in touch. But they didn’t.
The closest they came to doing so that I know of was a story my maternal grandmother told my brother of a day when she and my dad were in a shop in West Philadelphia, before I was born. At some point my dad took her aside and pointed to a man paying for his things at the cash register, told her that the guy was his father, and then just watched him walk out. This of course implies that my dad knew him on sight at least two decades after he’d left, which further implies a lot more stories that we’ll never know now. Much later, in a very different context, I asked my dad if he had ever thought about contacting his father. “No,” he said. “Never. What would I have had to say to the man?” Which is a fair question. Neither my dad nor his mother were ever really bothered about the guy that I knew of. He simply wasn’t part of their lives anymore and that was that. Nor was his son.
Beryl remarried in 1942 to a man named Charles, and on those few occasions where my dad would tell stories about his dad, it was Charles he was talking about. Charles was the guy who was there for him when he was growing up, after all. My mom met him a couple of times when she and my dad first started dating in high school. She said he seemed nice and treated her well. Charles died in 1959, and my grandmother never remarried after that.
That’s the story as I pieced it together from childhood stories and adult research. It’s got its odd moments, granted, but it’s fairly straightforward for all that.
So far, so good.
If you are going to do genealogy in this modern digital age you will end up on one of two websites, and probably both at one point or another.
The big one of course is Ancestry.com, which is run by the Mormon Church. The Mormons have this interesting little theological quirk that says if you convert to the Church you have a spiritual obligation to go back and retroactively convert all of your ancestors. This occasionally gets them into trouble (such as when they repeatedly try to do this to all the Jews who died at Auschwitz, which is an arrogantly messed up thing to do to people who were murdered for the religion they already had) but it is also why they have the best genealogical records on the planet, bar none. It’s one of the things that the young Mormons can do for their missions when they reach adulthood – most of them go off to proselytize the heathens (i.e. us) but no small number of them go out and dredge the world for records that they copy and bring back to Salt Lake City. If you’re going to do genealogy online you’re going to work with the Mormon Church, and Ancestry is as close to a win/win as you get – you get access to all those records and can build your genealogy to your heart’s content, and they get access to more records that people upload on their own while paying for the privilege, which saves them on missionaries. I for one am perfectly happy to make this trade.
The other is FamilySearch.org, which is basically Ancestry Lite. It’s the free teaser version of Ancestry that they use to get you hooked so you’ll move up to the big site and pay them their subscription fees, which worked like a charm on me so kudos to them for their marketing strategy. They do know their audience.
So I dipped my toe into the genealogical pool and opened an account on FamilySearch, and it works pretty much like Ancestry does. You can put up a family tree that can be private or available for others to see, you can add documents and stories, and you can contact people who seem to be barking up the same trees you are.
I ended up talking with a guy named Mark, who was doing research on Russell’s side of the family. Mark is some kind of nth-degree cousin of mine – if you go back five or six generations there’s a pair of siblings and Mark comes down from one of them and I come down from the other – and he turned out to be a pretty nice guy. He had a lot of information that I hadn’t seen before and I had some things that were new to him as well, mostly because I had the physical documents in my possession and had scanned them. We had a good conversation.
At some point, though, he sent me a scan of a clipping from one of the Philadelphia newspapers. It’s pretty standard legal boilerplate, the kind of thing you’d see in the Public Notices section of newspapers back when newspapers were a thing, the sort of notice you’d have to publish for three consecutive weeks so your court case could go to trial. “Russell hereby notifies Beryl that he intends to sue for divorce, and if she does not respond by such and such a date judgement will be entered against her blah blah blah blah blah.” That sort of thing. Standard legal boilerplate, insert names and dates here.
Except that it’s from 1962.
Now, there are a lot of weird things about this, not least of which being that in 1962 Russell knew damn well where to find my grandmother. She was living with her parents, in the same house where she had been living in 1928 when she and Russell had started dating. Russell knew exactly how to get hold of her and advertised in the newspaper instead.
As for the underlying issue, though, there are three possible alternatives here, each one funnier than the next and all of them entirely plausible if you knew my grandmother.
First, Beryl and Russell really were divorced in 1940.
In this alternative, Beryl did the whole Public Notification thing as above, got no response, had judgement entered against Russell as promised in the Notification, and never bothered to tell him anything about it. In which case Russell’s lawyer is about to make a very expensive discovery. I can see this happening, really I can. “Why should I tell him anything?” my grandmother would have said. “To hell with him and good riddance.” I can, in fact, imagine this in her voice in my mind even now.
Second, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was married to two different men for seventeen years.
Again, entirely plausible. I come from a long line of people who had very little interest in or patience with bureaucratic niceties or legal requirements, and in an age where you had to do a fair amount of legwork to find records – physically going to the courthouse(s), searching through folders, locating paper documents, and so on – I can easily see my grandmother just cutting Russell out of her life, forgetting entirely or simply ignoring the entire issue of whether they were still married or not, and then going on to get married to Charles. Russell was over as far as she was concerned, paperwork or no. If Charles wanted to get married, why not?
For corroboration of this basic attitude, consider that one of the first things that Mark did after we connected on FamilySearch was to send me all the information he had on my grandmother and ask me to check it for accuracy. I looked it over and said it was all correct except that he had her birthday wrong – it was August 9th, not August 10th. “But her birth certificate says the 10th,” he replied. “I’m sure it does,” I told him. “But I lived with the woman for a dozen years and her birthday was the 9th.” I’m pretty sure I know what happened. Either my great-grandparents filled out the form incorrectly because they couldn’t remember the date (it was a big day, after all) or just made a mistake, or they forgot about the form entirely and had to go back later to fill it out because some humorless official demanded they do so and then got the date wrong, and either way they couldn’t be arsed to change it. Beryl’s here, isn’t she? What does it matter what the form says?
Also, this is the same family where my dad had to take three weeks of shore leave from the United States Navy to sort out who owned the family house in West Philadelphia. It had been in the family for generations by that point. The original owners had bought it in the 1870s or 80s, and then they died and passed it down and those people died and passed it down and no one ever bothered to change the title so it was still legally owned by people who had died several decades and at least two generations of residents ago. The taxes were paid and the property was well maintained, so what did the title matter? Sorting that out with the city was an experience, my dad said.
So yeah, my grandmother being legally married to two different men and not giving a damn about it is absolutely within the realm of possibility.
Third, Beryl and Russell were not actually divorced in 1940 and my grandmother was just shacking up with Charles. For almost two decades. In the 1940s and 1950s, when such things Simply Were Not Done.
And yes, this too is entirely plausible. My grandmother was not terribly concerned with what other people thought of her life choices and by “not terribly concerned” I mean "not concerned at all." She could in fact be rather contrary about them. She was a pack-a-day smoker from the time she was 17, during the Harding Administration, to the day she died in 1986. She smoked Benson & Hedges Gold, which she would send me down to the local pharmacy to buy for her and which, this being the 1970s, they’d happily sell to a 9-year-old boy, and she once told my brother that the entire reason she started smoking was because someone told her not to. Also, she worked outside the home for her entire adult life, she went by her middle name and hated her first name enough that she somehow managed to avoid having it appear on her Social Security records, and she had a very clear moral code that did not involve her getting too worried about other people’s choices or understanding why they should care about hers. Seven years into her marriage to Russell she got hit by a trolley in West Philadelphia and, according to the newspaper story that appeared the next day, when questioned by the police she gave them her own last name (not Russell’s), an age that was several years younger than she actually was, and an address that turned out to be a greenhouse. What business of theirs was any of that? She was who she was, and I have to admit I have always admired her for that.
The idea that she would decide that her personal life was not someone else’s to regulate or comment upon would have been entirely within character for her.
I first discovered all this when Lauren was about sixteen, and her immediate reaction to it was “Wow. Grandmom was a playa!” And I suppose she was, in her time. She had game. She did what she felt was right by her standards, and if that wasn’t the usual practice of the day well that could easily be defined as Someone Else’s Problem.
This story has percolated in the back of my mind for a number of years now, but for some reason I have recently been spending some time trying to get to the bottom of it. What actually happened? Which of these three alternatives is the one that they lived through?
There’s nobody left to ask, though.
Russell died in 1978 and Robert in 2019 or 2020 without any contact with us at all. My brother and I did look into finding Robert at one point – it’s astonishing what information you can find online if you care to search – but on further consideration it didn’t seem like a great idea (“What would we have to say to the man?”) and we let it drop. Beryl died in 1986. Both of my maternal grandparents died in 2000. My dad died in 2016 and my mom in 2021. They’re all gone and the web of stories and relationships in which they lived is gone with them. All that is left are the documents and photographs.
None of these people made much of an impression on the genealogical websites that I can find. Some, but not much. There are census records, for example, but those stop at 1950. I have Charles’ death certificate, which does list my grandmother as his wife, but I have not yet found any marriage record for them nor any divorce records for her and Russell, not even in 1962. You can’t prove something by absence, of course, and it is always possible that the records are there and I’ll find them eventually. But all of these people remain to this degree elusive, confined to a time that has long since passed. My dad and my grandmother (and to some extent my great-grandmother) live on in my memories, of course, but the documents remain an as yet unexplored territory.
So for now it’s a story, or rather a set of possible stories, and there is something to be said for that as well.
Sunday, March 3, 2024
News and Updates
1. Just in case you were wondering whether the climate isn’t what it used to be, in the last few weeks here in Our Little Town we were narrowly missed by the first tornado in Wisconsin’s history, then saw the temperature hit 73F (23C) before plunging to 13F (-11C) in less than 18 hours, the largest temperature swing ever recorded in that short a time in this state. We had about two weeks of winter back in mid-January and since then it’s been spring. Currently we’re back up to around 73F again – a temperature we normally see in May rather than the first weekend in March. We put the rabbits outside and opened up all the windows. Folks, the climate isn’t changing. The climate has changed. All we’re doing now is trying to figure out what happens next and mitigate the damages.
2. I hope those third-quarter profit statements and the thrill of Owning The Libs was worth it to all the right-wing fools who made sure that nothing would be done to prevent this back when we had the time to do so, because there is no going back.
3. In less critical news, I now have a lovely new work mug for my tea. For a long time I had one with the best line from Game of Thrones on it (“There is only one god and his name is death, and there is only one thing that we say to death: not today”) and I do still have it, but my brother gave me a new mug for my birthday back in December. It has a bright colorful design and underneath that it says “Joey No-Nuts” in cheerful letters. The fact that it is advertising an allergen-free bakery in Hoboken NJ rather than some doomed side character in in a 1970s Mafia film makes it just that much better. So far nobody has commented on it, but the year is young.
4. This may well be the year where I don’t even get to a dozen books for my annual list. I’m currently about halfway through my third book – a mark I usually hit by MLK Day – and honestly it just doesn’t look like it will get any better anytime soon. We’ll see. At least they’re good books.
5. On the plus side, we did finally send out the Christmas letters. Before March, even! One takes one’s victories where one finds them.
6. It always grievously bothers me when I screw up as an advisor, because it’s someone else’s life path at stake. It happens – you can’t avoid it, in the long run, as we are fallible creatures we humans. But it bothers me. I try to do what I can to fix things, but still. It does keep me up at night.
7. One of my students recently turned in an essay on the 1920s that spent a fair amount of time discussing the Ku Klutz Klan and that is the only way I will refer to that organization from now on. I have this mental image now of all those hateful little bigots with their pointy little costumes flapping behind them as they scurry about colliding with trees and falling down embankments trying to avoid the retribution of the just, and I treasure this, I really do.
8. Every few weeks I get yet another nastygram from yet another account we have about them not being paid because we had to get new credit cards in December thanks to a fraudulent charge that appeared there and I’d forgotten to make the changes for them. Everything is so linked now. So I go to their website or call the number and get everything verified that yes indeed this is the proper procedure and not a pathway to yet more fraudulent charges and then I cross that one off the list until the next one appears.
9. I have been trying to find information on an ancestor of mine to see if I can get to the bottom of a story that has at least three alternative narratives for what might have happened – each funnier than the next, really, and all of them absolutely plausible if you knew the people involved – but so far there is surprisingly little on the usual websites. Honestly, this is also absolutely plausible given the people involved.
10. On top of everything else my cousin and I are now working on another Long Term Family Project and we’re having a grand time of it even though neither of us really has the time for it at all but that’s the nature of these projects I suppose. We’ll see how it turns out!
2. I hope those third-quarter profit statements and the thrill of Owning The Libs was worth it to all the right-wing fools who made sure that nothing would be done to prevent this back when we had the time to do so, because there is no going back.
3. In less critical news, I now have a lovely new work mug for my tea. For a long time I had one with the best line from Game of Thrones on it (“There is only one god and his name is death, and there is only one thing that we say to death: not today”) and I do still have it, but my brother gave me a new mug for my birthday back in December. It has a bright colorful design and underneath that it says “Joey No-Nuts” in cheerful letters. The fact that it is advertising an allergen-free bakery in Hoboken NJ rather than some doomed side character in in a 1970s Mafia film makes it just that much better. So far nobody has commented on it, but the year is young.
4. This may well be the year where I don’t even get to a dozen books for my annual list. I’m currently about halfway through my third book – a mark I usually hit by MLK Day – and honestly it just doesn’t look like it will get any better anytime soon. We’ll see. At least they’re good books.
5. On the plus side, we did finally send out the Christmas letters. Before March, even! One takes one’s victories where one finds them.
6. It always grievously bothers me when I screw up as an advisor, because it’s someone else’s life path at stake. It happens – you can’t avoid it, in the long run, as we are fallible creatures we humans. But it bothers me. I try to do what I can to fix things, but still. It does keep me up at night.
7. One of my students recently turned in an essay on the 1920s that spent a fair amount of time discussing the Ku Klutz Klan and that is the only way I will refer to that organization from now on. I have this mental image now of all those hateful little bigots with their pointy little costumes flapping behind them as they scurry about colliding with trees and falling down embankments trying to avoid the retribution of the just, and I treasure this, I really do.
8. Every few weeks I get yet another nastygram from yet another account we have about them not being paid because we had to get new credit cards in December thanks to a fraudulent charge that appeared there and I’d forgotten to make the changes for them. Everything is so linked now. So I go to their website or call the number and get everything verified that yes indeed this is the proper procedure and not a pathway to yet more fraudulent charges and then I cross that one off the list until the next one appears.
9. I have been trying to find information on an ancestor of mine to see if I can get to the bottom of a story that has at least three alternative narratives for what might have happened – each funnier than the next, really, and all of them absolutely plausible if you knew the people involved – but so far there is surprisingly little on the usual websites. Honestly, this is also absolutely plausible given the people involved.
10. On top of everything else my cousin and I are now working on another Long Term Family Project and we’re having a grand time of it even though neither of us really has the time for it at all but that’s the nature of these projects I suppose. We’ll see how it turns out!
Sunday, February 25, 2024
A Birthday in February
Friday was my father-in-law’s 70th birthday, which we ignored.
There was a plan. Don’t fret.
I’m not sure how much Daniel really noticed that we’d kind of skipped over the actual day, as we have celebrated his birthday as late as Labor Day. Holidays happen when you have time for them, after all. I’m sure he knew that something was up and was just waiting for it to snap into place, though. He knows us well.
Because there was in fact a plan, as noted above, and for a number of reasons it couldn’t happen on Friday but it could on Saturday so Saturday it was.
As always with our plans, it involved food. All the best plans do.
In particular, these plans involved having Kim’s mom take him to dinner at one of those classic Wisconsin supper club places (you’ll recognize them immediately if you’ve ever been in one) not too far from their house by midwestern standards, and then we’d all surprise him there and Feast and Celebrate.
Lauren couldn’t make it because it’s the middle of the semester and two family events in one week is pushing hard on the limits of what can be wedged in between homework and exams, but Kim, Oliver, and I drove up to the supper club, stopping at Costco because we’re addicts that way and of course we did. Justin and Chris were already there, and Rory and Amy joined us not long after that.
And then we waited. They put us in a little back room where people were clearly expected to sit for dinner later – and, in fact, several people did filter in while we were there, which is why it was a bit puzzling that the lights would randomly dip every few minutes. Mood, I guess.
There was a plan. Don’t fret.
I’m not sure how much Daniel really noticed that we’d kind of skipped over the actual day, as we have celebrated his birthday as late as Labor Day. Holidays happen when you have time for them, after all. I’m sure he knew that something was up and was just waiting for it to snap into place, though. He knows us well.
Because there was in fact a plan, as noted above, and for a number of reasons it couldn’t happen on Friday but it could on Saturday so Saturday it was.
As always with our plans, it involved food. All the best plans do.
In particular, these plans involved having Kim’s mom take him to dinner at one of those classic Wisconsin supper club places (you’ll recognize them immediately if you’ve ever been in one) not too far from their house by midwestern standards, and then we’d all surprise him there and Feast and Celebrate.
Lauren couldn’t make it because it’s the middle of the semester and two family events in one week is pushing hard on the limits of what can be wedged in between homework and exams, but Kim, Oliver, and I drove up to the supper club, stopping at Costco because we’re addicts that way and of course we did. Justin and Chris were already there, and Rory and Amy joined us not long after that.
And then we waited. They put us in a little back room where people were clearly expected to sit for dinner later – and, in fact, several people did filter in while we were there, which is why it was a bit puzzling that the lights would randomly dip every few minutes. Mood, I guess.
Eventually the guest of honor arrived and we headed into the main dining room – a cavernous place specifically designed to make it impossible to speak with anyone except whomever you’re sitting next to, which enforces a certain intimacy if you think about it.
We chose this place because it served lobster and this is what Daniel wanted, and according to those who also had it it was in fact quite good. But you go to these places for the prime rib, which came out in a plate-concealing-sized portion and was also deemed tasty by those partaking. I’m not sure what possessed me to have chicken parmigiana in a Wisconsin supper club, but we’ll chalk that up as a lesson learned.
Everything came with a soup and salad bar because of course it did. Quite rightly. Kim pointed out that you know you’re in a real Wisconsin supper club when the salad bar has bacon bits in a tub that you can just spoon out in whatever quantity you desire. Life is good that way.
We had a lovely time, sharing a meal and wishing Daniel a happy birthday. You only get these big round numbers so often, and you might as well make it a party.
If you go on your birthday and let them know, they’ll give you a very nice slice of cheesecake and your family can put candles in it and then sing Happy Birthday to you, and if you do that it is very likely that the entire restaurant will sing along and clap at the end, and of such small things are communities made.
Happy Birthday, Daniel!
Thursday, February 22, 2024
Merry Grittmas!
It’s almost the end of February and we’re still celebrating Christmas around here. Not that I am complaining in the least, though the people who are still waiting for our Christmas cards have probably given up on us by now. Fear not! All will be made whole, possibly by summer.
Back on the Actual Christmas, Lauren and Oliver combined my Christmas present with my birthday present and got us all tickets to see my hometown Philadelphia Flyers play the Chicago Blackhawks, and a most lovely and fine gift that was!
Of course having all of us go together was part of the gift. Why would I have wanted to go by myself? I genuinely love the fact that we enjoy spending time and doing things together.
Yesterday was the game.
This of course took some planning. Oliver, Kim, and I had to leave work early and get the car ready. Lauren took the bus down to Our Little Town after her chemistry exam ended and we picked her up at the station before jumping onto the interstate and heading down to Chicago. We didn’t run into too much traffic, oddly enough – rush hour in Chicago generally starts at 6am and lasts for 23 hours, in my experience – but between the getting ready and the finding of a meal that all of us could actually eat (i.e. not something that would likely be served at the United Center, however fine their offerings might be) we got into the building about two minutes after the game had started, and then when we got to our level I made a wrong turn that ended up with us walking about 90% of the way around the stadium to get to our seats, but eventually we found our spots and settled in.
Back on the Actual Christmas, Lauren and Oliver combined my Christmas present with my birthday present and got us all tickets to see my hometown Philadelphia Flyers play the Chicago Blackhawks, and a most lovely and fine gift that was!
Of course having all of us go together was part of the gift. Why would I have wanted to go by myself? I genuinely love the fact that we enjoy spending time and doing things together.
Yesterday was the game.
This of course took some planning. Oliver, Kim, and I had to leave work early and get the car ready. Lauren took the bus down to Our Little Town after her chemistry exam ended and we picked her up at the station before jumping onto the interstate and heading down to Chicago. We didn’t run into too much traffic, oddly enough – rush hour in Chicago generally starts at 6am and lasts for 23 hours, in my experience – but between the getting ready and the finding of a meal that all of us could actually eat (i.e. not something that would likely be served at the United Center, however fine their offerings might be) we got into the building about two minutes after the game had started, and then when we got to our level I made a wrong turn that ended up with us walking about 90% of the way around the stadium to get to our seats, but eventually we found our spots and settled in.
We were literally in the last row of seating, way up top, and the view was magnificent. Plus this way we could stand up without worrying about blocking anyone else’s view, which is more than could be said for some of the people in front of us. I’m looking at you, Beer Sales Guy. I know it’s your job and all, but yeah. Down in front.
The Flyers already had a 1-0 lead at that point – we heard them score about halfway through our walk around the stadium – but in the end it was a well-played game and we didn’t miss much.
We were, of course, decked out in our Black And Orange finery because you have to rep your team after all. You always wonder how you will be received by the home fans under those circumstances, but it has to be said that everyone was fine. It’s a game. You’re supposed to have fun. The Blackhawk fan next to us was happy to take our picture, which was nice of him.
The first period saw the Blackhawks get some quality breakaway chances and tie it up at 1, but the Flyers dominated the second period, scoring twice to take a 3-1 lead.
Perhaps the most interesting hockey move of the night actually came from Connor Bedard, the Next Young Phenom who plays for Chicago and is perhaps the only bright spot in their dismal season this year. There’s a move you see in soccer when a player has the ball down by the opponent’s goal and he’s trying to fake out the defender with dazzling footwork while not actually touching the ball at all, and Bedard tried that with his stick on a rush up the ice before finally pulling the puck back between his skates and then shooting. If Flyers goalie Sam Ersson hadn’t made a spectacular save it would have been on the highlight reels all night.
It’s always fun to see these things live. I’ve now been to four NHL games in my life as well as a few college and minor league games, and the energy in the building is something that never really translates to a small screen. Plus they play all sorts of silly games during the intermissions and timeouts. They had kids racing around the ice at one point and shooting pucks at tiny holes in a board in front of the goal at another. There was a song contest that ended up with the entire crowd singing Living On a Prayer long after the recorded music stopped. At one point they got someone to try to name all the NHL cities faster than a player could, which obviously didn’t work but the whole point was to get the rest of us to say that clearly we could have done that and to be honest that did work.
Of course not everyone found the intermissions so interesting.
The third period got a bit chippy as it became more obvious that the Flyers were going to win and Chicago tried to shake things up, but that's to be expected. As Garrison Keillor once noted, “The rules in hockey don’t say you can’t fight. They just say you have to sit down for a while when you’re done.” On the way out Lauren volunteered to take a photo for some Blackhawk fans who then returned the favor for us, and that was a very nice thing.
It took a while to get out of the stadium from where we were, but again we got lucky with the traffic and made it home pretty quickly, all things considered. Today was a very tired sort of day, but it was worth it.
Merry Grittmas!
Sunday, February 11, 2024
Let the Game Begin
We spent much of our Super Bowl Sunday at a bookstore because that’s just how we roll.
I’m surprisingly easy to shop for, really. I have a list of books that I hope to read in the near future, and if that isn’t enough there are always gift cards that can be exchanged for books. Last Christmas Kim got me such a gift card, and today was the day we decided to go spend it.
And then some.
We made a good haul, actually. I got a couple of books that were on my list and a couple of others that weren’t but looked interesting. My reading pace has slowed over the last couple of years as my working pace has sped up and the rest of the world has gone mad – it’s a bit of a distraction to watch your country spiral into overt Fascism, barely avoid a coup, and then to have an entire political party actively work to subvert everything that is good about your country while voting for the guilty bastard in the primaries. Takes up some energy watching that, really. I’d rather be reading, but there you go.
So now I have some new books to try to take my mind off things.
We did watch the game, though. You kind of have to. I’ve been slowly losing interest in American football for over a decade now – temporary bumps as my hometown Eagles did well now and then notwithstanding – and I really didn’t have much of a dog in this fight. Dynasties are boring and both teams could plausibly be labeled as such, Kansas City most recently and San Francisco over the long haul. I liked the fact that the San Francisco quarterback was the Mr. Irrelevant of his draft year (i.e. the very last player chosen) and I’ve got family in San Francisco, so I had a slight preference for the 49ers, but having the Travis Kelce And Taylor Swift Show on the Kansas City sidelines meant that if they won then the same right-wing halfwits who think treason is acceptable as long as it’s their guy doing it would freak right the fuck out, and for that reason alone I couldn’t really cheer against the Chiefs either. I could approach the game as a neutral and just enjoy it for whatever happened.
Plus the ads are always fun.
Super Bowl Sunday is also the day that no diet applies. According to the American Medical Association you’re legally allowed to eat anything you want on this day no matter what is on your MyChart, and you might as well take advantage of that fact. We had a festival of salt and fat and it was marvelous, but now it’s over and tomorrow there will be Nutrition again. I’ve reached the age where a significant percentage of what I eat is consumed for medicinal purposes. If I make it to the magical age of 80 I will live on aged cheese, Buffalo wings, and whiskey, but for now one must enjoy such things sparingly.
It turned out to be a good game from a neutral’s perspective, closely fought and with any number of interesting plays, and if the Kansas City victory means we’ve got another year of Dynasty reruns in American football at least I’ll get to sit back and watch the fragile dudebros melt down over Taylor Swift and the vacuous conspiracy theories they’ve invented about her and that has to count for something.
Merry Super Bowl to all who celebrate!
I’m surprisingly easy to shop for, really. I have a list of books that I hope to read in the near future, and if that isn’t enough there are always gift cards that can be exchanged for books. Last Christmas Kim got me such a gift card, and today was the day we decided to go spend it.
And then some.
We made a good haul, actually. I got a couple of books that were on my list and a couple of others that weren’t but looked interesting. My reading pace has slowed over the last couple of years as my working pace has sped up and the rest of the world has gone mad – it’s a bit of a distraction to watch your country spiral into overt Fascism, barely avoid a coup, and then to have an entire political party actively work to subvert everything that is good about your country while voting for the guilty bastard in the primaries. Takes up some energy watching that, really. I’d rather be reading, but there you go.
So now I have some new books to try to take my mind off things.
We did watch the game, though. You kind of have to. I’ve been slowly losing interest in American football for over a decade now – temporary bumps as my hometown Eagles did well now and then notwithstanding – and I really didn’t have much of a dog in this fight. Dynasties are boring and both teams could plausibly be labeled as such, Kansas City most recently and San Francisco over the long haul. I liked the fact that the San Francisco quarterback was the Mr. Irrelevant of his draft year (i.e. the very last player chosen) and I’ve got family in San Francisco, so I had a slight preference for the 49ers, but having the Travis Kelce And Taylor Swift Show on the Kansas City sidelines meant that if they won then the same right-wing halfwits who think treason is acceptable as long as it’s their guy doing it would freak right the fuck out, and for that reason alone I couldn’t really cheer against the Chiefs either. I could approach the game as a neutral and just enjoy it for whatever happened.
Plus the ads are always fun.
Super Bowl Sunday is also the day that no diet applies. According to the American Medical Association you’re legally allowed to eat anything you want on this day no matter what is on your MyChart, and you might as well take advantage of that fact. We had a festival of salt and fat and it was marvelous, but now it’s over and tomorrow there will be Nutrition again. I’ve reached the age where a significant percentage of what I eat is consumed for medicinal purposes. If I make it to the magical age of 80 I will live on aged cheese, Buffalo wings, and whiskey, but for now one must enjoy such things sparingly.
It turned out to be a good game from a neutral’s perspective, closely fought and with any number of interesting plays, and if the Kansas City victory means we’ve got another year of Dynasty reruns in American football at least I’ll get to sit back and watch the fragile dudebros melt down over Taylor Swift and the vacuous conspiracy theories they’ve invented about her and that has to count for something.
Merry Super Bowl to all who celebrate!
Wednesday, February 7, 2024
A Good Week for Pie
This has been a good week to enjoy big old piece of Schadenfreude Pie. Don’t mind if I do.
For one thing, watching all the Fragile Dudebros melt down in puddles of impotent rage every time Taylor Swift’s name comes up on any form of media has been the funniest thing I’ve seen in months. The sheer volume of whinging complaints about two consenting adults having a relationship and one of them – the most popular recording artist in the world right now, as measured in tour revenue, and therefore an obvious focus of attention for any advertisement-driven entertainment industry such as professional sports – occasionally showing up on television during American football games beggars the imagination and delights the senses. The fact that this week was the Grammy Awards ceremony, where Swift set an all-time record for wins in her category, is just icing on the cake. Or whipped cream on the pie, I suppose.
Dudebros! News flash: nobody outside of your self-reinforcing little circles is taking you seriously right now. Not a single person! And every time you complain you look that much more pathetic, that much more weak, and that much more like the cringeworthy poseurs that you are.
Look. Dudebros. Guys. I’m having a great deal of fun right now at your expense, really I am, and I thank you for it, but you might want to consider being quiet now. It’s getting embarrassing. Not that I will stop being entertained by it for as long as you choose to keep it up, just that you should consider re-evaluating your life choices at this point.
We’ve still got four days before the Super Bowl and it’s only going to get worse for you and more fun for the rest of us. Just saying, is all.
Speaking of re-evaluating life choices, yesterday der Sturmtrumper’s argument that he is above the law and should never be held accountable for anything he does no matter how wretched, vile, or stupid it might be ran into a judicial brick wall when a bipartisan 3-judge panel unanimously told him to go pound sand with a definitiveness that one rarely finds in legal decisions.
Yes, indeed, fifty-seven pages of Sit Down And Shut Up, delivered by the US criminal justice system to its most famous criminal. It was the best thing I’ve read in weeks. Seriously – they should make a miniseries out of it.
Of course der Sturmtrumper has already launched into his inevitable temper tantrum over the decision, flatly stating on social media that any attempt to hold him accountable to the law is (in his view) problematic, though he did not use that word, possibly because it has more the three syllables. His explicit position is a poisonous combination of “it’s not illegal if the President does it” and “I need to do crime in order to do the job how I want,” which is of course exactly the combination you need to produce tyranny. Speaking as someone who literally has a PhD in the Founding Fathers, this is precisely what the Constitution was written and ratified to prevent. Somewhere right now whatever is left of James Madison is spinning so fast in his grave that you could use him to generate electricity.
I’m quite sure there is a Category-10 meltdown going on in his corner of the world even as I type, and really all I can say is that I wish every scrambled word-salad sentence and every misfiring condiment-throwing moment of it were being recorded for posterity because we’ve all had a very hard decade and we need something to cheer us up.
Der Sturmtrumper has been treated with incredible and unwarranted leniency by the law all his life and even more so in the last few years, but slowly, and with any luck with increasing momentum as his world crumbles around him, the walls are closing in. Will this be the time where at last he can’t slither out of it unscathed? Possibly! One can only watch and hope, fork in one hand and pie in the other.
Meanwhile the House GOP has ably demonstrated to anyone outside of their own self-reinforcing little circle (lotta overlap with the Fragile Dudebros on this one, just pointing that out) that they are both incapable of serious government and not at all interested in changing that fact. First, their attempt to impeach a sitting cabinet member for not adhering to an impossible standard of job performance that their own cabinet member in der Sturmtrumper’s administration couldn’t achieve either ignominiously failed. Given that the House GOP leadership went forward with this impeachment vote while openly admitting that they had no evidence whatsoever for high crimes and misdemeanors or indeed criminal conduct of any kind and that they knew very well this was an empty political stunt designed to rile up their base but would be dead on arrival in the Senate, this is of course the only responsible outcome. The fact that it got as far as it did is a damning indictment of the current state of the Republican Party as at best a lightweight irritant and at worst a subversive threat to the American republic. I already know that substantive policy is beyond them, but as a political move if you can’t even pull of your own empty stunt you really need to consider alternate employment.
For good measure, they also rejected the immigration bill that the Senate wrote to the House GOP’s specifications and passed with a bipartisan majority. The Senate basically called their bluff, and the House GOP panicked. On the one hand, this bill was a Nativist nightmare designed to coddle right-wing white fears of Other People and it should never have been suggested in the first place. On the other hand, it meant that the GOP also rejected aid for Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russian invaders, which should tell you whose side the GOP is on. It’s not the American people’s side – overwhelming bipartisan majorities of Americans favor strong and continuing aid to the Ukrainians, after all, but the right-wing extremists who have taken over the GOP do not. Ever since der Sturmtrumper kowtowed before Putin at Helsinki it’s been clear that the Republican Party leadership favors Russian interests over those of the United States. Poor Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – born too soon. As a historian I know where appeasing dictators leads. Hint: get ready for a larger war that could have been prevented now but wasn’t.
But for the moment the House GOP is left trying to justify rejecting their own bill without mentioning their current owners, and I hope they choke on it.
Not enough popcorn in the world.
Or pie.
For one thing, watching all the Fragile Dudebros melt down in puddles of impotent rage every time Taylor Swift’s name comes up on any form of media has been the funniest thing I’ve seen in months. The sheer volume of whinging complaints about two consenting adults having a relationship and one of them – the most popular recording artist in the world right now, as measured in tour revenue, and therefore an obvious focus of attention for any advertisement-driven entertainment industry such as professional sports – occasionally showing up on television during American football games beggars the imagination and delights the senses. The fact that this week was the Grammy Awards ceremony, where Swift set an all-time record for wins in her category, is just icing on the cake. Or whipped cream on the pie, I suppose.
Dudebros! News flash: nobody outside of your self-reinforcing little circles is taking you seriously right now. Not a single person! And every time you complain you look that much more pathetic, that much more weak, and that much more like the cringeworthy poseurs that you are.
Look. Dudebros. Guys. I’m having a great deal of fun right now at your expense, really I am, and I thank you for it, but you might want to consider being quiet now. It’s getting embarrassing. Not that I will stop being entertained by it for as long as you choose to keep it up, just that you should consider re-evaluating your life choices at this point.
We’ve still got four days before the Super Bowl and it’s only going to get worse for you and more fun for the rest of us. Just saying, is all.
Speaking of re-evaluating life choices, yesterday der Sturmtrumper’s argument that he is above the law and should never be held accountable for anything he does no matter how wretched, vile, or stupid it might be ran into a judicial brick wall when a bipartisan 3-judge panel unanimously told him to go pound sand with a definitiveness that one rarely finds in legal decisions.
Yes, indeed, fifty-seven pages of Sit Down And Shut Up, delivered by the US criminal justice system to its most famous criminal. It was the best thing I’ve read in weeks. Seriously – they should make a miniseries out of it.
Of course der Sturmtrumper has already launched into his inevitable temper tantrum over the decision, flatly stating on social media that any attempt to hold him accountable to the law is (in his view) problematic, though he did not use that word, possibly because it has more the three syllables. His explicit position is a poisonous combination of “it’s not illegal if the President does it” and “I need to do crime in order to do the job how I want,” which is of course exactly the combination you need to produce tyranny. Speaking as someone who literally has a PhD in the Founding Fathers, this is precisely what the Constitution was written and ratified to prevent. Somewhere right now whatever is left of James Madison is spinning so fast in his grave that you could use him to generate electricity.
I’m quite sure there is a Category-10 meltdown going on in his corner of the world even as I type, and really all I can say is that I wish every scrambled word-salad sentence and every misfiring condiment-throwing moment of it were being recorded for posterity because we’ve all had a very hard decade and we need something to cheer us up.
Der Sturmtrumper has been treated with incredible and unwarranted leniency by the law all his life and even more so in the last few years, but slowly, and with any luck with increasing momentum as his world crumbles around him, the walls are closing in. Will this be the time where at last he can’t slither out of it unscathed? Possibly! One can only watch and hope, fork in one hand and pie in the other.
Meanwhile the House GOP has ably demonstrated to anyone outside of their own self-reinforcing little circle (lotta overlap with the Fragile Dudebros on this one, just pointing that out) that they are both incapable of serious government and not at all interested in changing that fact. First, their attempt to impeach a sitting cabinet member for not adhering to an impossible standard of job performance that their own cabinet member in der Sturmtrumper’s administration couldn’t achieve either ignominiously failed. Given that the House GOP leadership went forward with this impeachment vote while openly admitting that they had no evidence whatsoever for high crimes and misdemeanors or indeed criminal conduct of any kind and that they knew very well this was an empty political stunt designed to rile up their base but would be dead on arrival in the Senate, this is of course the only responsible outcome. The fact that it got as far as it did is a damning indictment of the current state of the Republican Party as at best a lightweight irritant and at worst a subversive threat to the American republic. I already know that substantive policy is beyond them, but as a political move if you can’t even pull of your own empty stunt you really need to consider alternate employment.
For good measure, they also rejected the immigration bill that the Senate wrote to the House GOP’s specifications and passed with a bipartisan majority. The Senate basically called their bluff, and the House GOP panicked. On the one hand, this bill was a Nativist nightmare designed to coddle right-wing white fears of Other People and it should never have been suggested in the first place. On the other hand, it meant that the GOP also rejected aid for Ukraine in its heroic fight against Russian invaders, which should tell you whose side the GOP is on. It’s not the American people’s side – overwhelming bipartisan majorities of Americans favor strong and continuing aid to the Ukrainians, after all, but the right-wing extremists who have taken over the GOP do not. Ever since der Sturmtrumper kowtowed before Putin at Helsinki it’s been clear that the Republican Party leadership favors Russian interests over those of the United States. Poor Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – born too soon. As a historian I know where appeasing dictators leads. Hint: get ready for a larger war that could have been prevented now but wasn’t.
But for the moment the House GOP is left trying to justify rejecting their own bill without mentioning their current owners, and I hope they choke on it.
Not enough popcorn in the world.
Or pie.
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