“He was a bold man that ate the first oyster.”

— Jonathan Swift

I eat just about everything by the way but please, just no wax beans!

We all know about “writer’s block”. I have had “cartoonist’s block” but it’s not like I haven’t come up with ideas and created some. I just haven’t felt they were worth publishing or that I could write anything to go with them that wasn’t depressing.

Today is Labor Day and I just read an article that claimed that labor unions are in vogue and making a comeback in the United States. Joe Biden is being called the most pro-labor president since FDR. But union membership in America is half of what it was 40 years ago and I found this chart…

The U.S. ranking doesn’t seem to me to justify that much excitement over labor unions’ resurgence or standing in America.

President Grover Cleveland declared making the first Monday in September a national holiday in 1894. He did so because of rising protests against abusive work practices by owners of factories and businesses– 70 hour weeks with no days off or vacations and certainly no health insurance or pensions. That was when the first workers’ unions were formed in America.

In my lifetime Labor Day has pretty much meant the end of summer and going back to school when I was a kid and three day weekends and gatherings with friends as an adult. 

There are 12 federal holidays in America. A number of them, like Labor Day, have become merely long weekends. “Happy Memorial Day” is the salutation that irks me the most.

So, maybe it’s necessary to rename some of them and let’s start with Labor Day.  How about if we were to call it “Income Inequality Day.” That might get people’s attention.

And notice another thing on the chart above. Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Norway are the countries with the highest percentage of unionized workers. Is it a coincidence that they also rank among the happiest countries as well?

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“For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic,

bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.” 

–Robert W. Welch, Jr.

When I was a kid I liked candy and had the cavities to prove it. I had so many fillings that when I was drafted into the Israeli army the person examining all the silver in my mouth was taken aback and after a few seconds told the assistant recording my dental chart that he was starting over.

“I’m only going to read off the teeth that have no fillings.”

One of my favorite treats was called a Sugar Daddy, a chewy caramel lollipop that stuck in your teeth and no doubt helped dentists of that era put their kids through college. So, what does this have to do with anything?

Robert W. Welch, Jr. and his brother ran the candy company that made Sugar Daddies as well as Junior Mints and Bob Welch had a sweet tooth for something beyond candy that he didn’t sugarcoat. He loved conspiracy theories and was the founder of the John Birch Society. He ran for public office once– Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts — and lost but if he were alive today, he’d likely stand a good chance of being elected the father of the radical right in America.

The John Birch Society was founded in 1958 and Welch claimed he expanded it from an original 11 members to 100,000. He had no internet to help with that but of course today we do and I’m not sure it’s turning out to be a net positive for our country or the world.

Can an epiphany happen when it’s just something you remember? If so, I had one years later that put me back in Santa Barbara in the early 1990s when I found a book I had been looking for without success. There it was on a shelf in a second hand bookstore. The book was titled Championship Ball and was one of a series of 24 books written about an athlete named Chip Hilton.

Chip played football, basketball and baseball and each book was about a season of each sport and took Chip from high school through college in an America that was wholesome, carefree and aside from a few characters with names like Biggie Cohen who had “ham hocks” for hands and Jimmy Chung, who at one point left the team to help run his family’s restaurant– just guessing it was Chinese –was entirely white.

I hoped my son would love these books as much as I had, but on the very first page of the one I had rediscovered we ran across the word jalopy and I realized that time had moved on semantically from Chip Hilton’s world.

Thirty years ago Chip Hilton books were hard to find. Today on my own bookshelf I have all 24 of them. The internet made finding and buying them easy.

And although I’ve perhaps taken a long way round to get here, my point is simple. The internet has made it so much easier for us to find niche things as well as people who share our interests or points of view. Today’s Robert Welchs can discover and connect with their soulmates in the nether regions of cyberspace as fast as you can type.

When I was growing up in Reading, Pennsylvania a man named Roy Frankhouser also lived there. Frankhouser was a Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan and a member of the American Nazi Party. In the 1980s he had his own programs on local public access television. One was called “Race and Reason” and the other “White Forum”. There wasn’t a big viewership for public access TV then but that was before there was an internet. 

It’s been said that hate groups are a thread that runs through American history. In the age of the internet that thread is sewing together so many more haters than was ever possible before. We should all be worried.

“For not only every democracy, but certainly every republic,

bears within itself the seeds of its own destruction.” 

–Robert W. Welch, Jr.

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Far-right Republicans tell McCarthy impeachment inquiry won’t soften their spending cut demands

You might have to be my age to get the reference. Charlie McCarthy was Edgar Bergen’s famed ventriloquist dummy partner.  Charlie was so well known that his popularity exceeded that of the man who opened and closed his mouth.

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Will the multipolar world we are becomingsave the polar bears? 

“You can run but you can’t hide.”

Sometime ago I read an article about the ultra rich building doomsday compounds in New Zealand to escape to and not just in the event of a nuclear holocaust. No, their fears are broader today– the next pandemic, autocratic repression, even the collapse of civilization itself. But above all what I predict may cause them to flee down under is when the impacts of an aggrieved mother nature make it clear our species is going under. 

Climate change ultimately could be the great equalizer that even billionaires won’t escape from. I wish I were imagining this but nearly every week a significant weather event seems to be occurring around the world that is what we used to call a front page story when we still read printed newspapers. A quote in a recent Boston Globe article about increasingly unpredictable extreme weather summed it up for me–
“I don’t think we know what is normal anymore.”

I don’t know if I’ve been prescient or just pessimistic but I have been thinking for years that climate change will keep happening exponentially. It’s the x sign on your calculator and not the + one and more and more frequently we are being warned. 

“Only the acidity of the oceans, the health of the air and the ozone layer are within the boundaries considered safe, and both ocean and air pollution are heading in the wrong direction.”

I have a friend who for years denied climate change and would robustly refute any scientific evidence that showed it is occurring. He eventually changed his stance but with a new enthusiastic view that embraced what he sees as its benefits and not so much its problems.

“Look at the opportunities for Maine. Once there is a shipping lane across the Northwest Passage, we can have major ports again.”

I guess I’m just not a glass half filled kind of guy.

Up here in Camden, Maine yesterday we had weather that knocked out our power and knocked over trees all around us. Things could have been much worse! On a scale of 1 to 10 yesterday’s storm when measured against the recent disasters in Hawaii, Morocco and Libya was a zero! 

America will continue to have its share of increasingly abnormal weather events. A debate over whether or not climate change has anything to do with this one or that one is an unproductive distraction.

Will the multipolar world we are becoming save the polar bears? Will it do a better job of confronting the challenges and necessity of making our world safer for all forms of life? I won’t be around for the outcome and I won’t be hunkering down in New Zealand either.

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The Writers’ Strike might be ending soon but the future isn’t. At least I hope not yet.

So, I asked ChatGPT for a little help with a script…ChatGPT, write me a new ending for Casablanca.

INT. AIRPORT – NIGHT

The plane engine roars as Victor Laszlo (Paul Henreid), Ilsa Lund (Ingrid Bergman), and Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) stand on the rain-soaked tarmac. The tension is palpable, and Rick is struggling with his temper.

Rick: (intense)Ilsa, you’re a fool to leave Casablanca with Victor.

Ilsa looks at Rick, her eyes searching for understanding.

Ilsa: (defensive) Rick, I have to go with Victor. You know why.

Rick: (angry, but desperate) Ilsa, don’t you see? This is a mistake. You’ll regret it. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of your life.

Ilsa: (confused) What do you want me to do, Rick? I love you, but I can’t turn my back on what Victor is fighting for.

Rick takes a step closer to Ilsa, his voice softer but still filled with intensity.

Rick: (pleading) Ilsa, I’m asking you to stay with me. I’m asking you to think about what you’re giving up. You’ll be with Victor, but will you ever truly be happy?

Ilsa: (conflicted) Rick, please understand. I have to go.

Victor watches the exchange, his face a mix of disappointment and love for Ilsa.

Rick takes a deep breath, realizing that he can’t change her mind.

Rick: (resigned) Alright, Ilsa. You’ve made your choice. (sternly) You have to know that I won’t help you ever again and you’ll never see me again either. I won’t follow you and I won’t look back.”

Illsa: (nodding and then pursing her lips as she rolls her eyes) I understand. You’re not the man anymore that I knew in Paris.

Rick steps aside, allowing Ilsa to go up the plane’s boarding stairs without looking back. The plane’s engines roar to life once more, drowning out all other sounds as she enters the aircraft. (shaking his head) Rick watches the plane take off into the night sky.

As the plane disappears into the distance, Rick straightens his shoulders as he turns away to walk back to his cafe in Casablanca. He whistles “As Time Goes By”.

FADE OUT.

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