Legend

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.

— H. L. Mencken

This much can be proven: the soft drink known as Dr. Pepper was first sold in 1885 by a Waco, Texas, pharmacist named Wade Morrison.

A patent from that year documents as much.

As to the drink's specious name—well, like much of history, you must take most of the story on faith.

The legend holds that Morrison named the soft drink after a former employer, Dr. Charles Pepper, of Rural Retreat, Virginia.

Pepper had been a surgeon in the Confederate army before retiring to open a pharmacy in Rural Retreat, from which he dispensed a sweet and spicy elixir not dissimilar to Morrison's later concoction.

The legend suggests further that Morrison was Dr. Pepper's assistant and was in love with the doctor-turned-pharmacist's daughter.

Told he wasn't suited to marry the boss's daughter, Morrison swiped one of the doctor's formulas and fled to Texas.

But whether Morrison ever worked for Pepper is questionable.

Although US Census records show Morrison indeed lived in the vicinity of Rural Retreat and worked as a pharmacy clerk, he may never have even known the doctor, much less worked for him. 

But Morrison, aiming to turn his soft drink into a powerhouse throughout the South, was happy to market it under Pepper's name and title.

By doing so, he reasoned, he could conjure both the notion of "healing" and warm memories of the Lost Cause—a winning combination in the soul-sick South.

Morrison's branding strategy worked.

By the turn of the 20th century, his company, Artesian Manufacturing & Bottling, had sold hundreds of thousands of bottles of Dr. Pepper in Texas and Virginia.

Soon the company would become the Number 2 seller of soft drinks in America, outsold only by Coke, and Morrison would crown Dr. Pepper the "King of Beverages."

Even today, ignoring "woke mobs," the company stands by the legend that Wade Morrison named Dr. Pepper after the Confederate surgeon.

POSTSCRIPT: To learn more about Dr. Pepper's brand history, go here.

Above: Dr. Pepper by Annie Morgan Preece. Oil on canvas. 6 x 6 inches.

Dock Boggs

In the bright sunny south in peace and content,
The days of my boyhood, I scarcely have spent, 

From the deep flowing springs to the broad flowing stream, 

Ever dear to my memory and sweet is my dream.

— Dock Boggs

I first learned of Dock Boggs from Greil Marcus' Invisible Republic, the rock critic's look into the "old, weird America."

New York Magazine called Marcus' landscape the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, and anonymous poets of all stripes."

Boggs was one of the latter—a morose, hard drinking Appalachian poet who sang like his blacksmith daddy and picked a blues-style banjo in the fashion of the Black banjoists he heard in the railroad camps surrounding his home.

Boggs was born in 1898 in Southeastern Virginia and, as a young man, made a living working in the coal mines and peddling moonshine.

For three years in the late 1920s, he tried desperately to earn a living as a professional musician, entertaining at parties in the mining camps and recording 12 songs (eight for Brunswick Records in New York and four for Lonesome Ace Records in Chicago). 

But he quit music in 1929 when the stock market collapsed the parties and recording deals came to a sudden halt.

Boggs stayed out of the music business for over 30 years, until he was rediscovered in the early 1960s by the leaders of the folk revival.

In 1963, one of them coaxed the 65-year old Boggs out of Norton to play at large festivals. 

Boggs also recorded an album that year for Folkways Records in New York, and became a strong influence on Bob Dylan, David Crosby, and even the 15-year old Bruce Springsteen.

Say what you will of it, Boggs' music is raw. 

"I put so much of myself into some pieces that I very nearly broke down," he once told folklorist Charles Wolfe. 

Greil Marcus claimed in Invisible Republic that Boggs sounds when he sings "as if his bones were coming through his skin."

"If God ever requires that rocks cry out," singer-songwriter Lesley Miller wrote, "they may sound as old and earthy as Dock Boggs. 

"His banjo rings like the end of time, and his voice cries out from the deeply submerged recesses of the American heart and mind."

Boggs' old-time music is the polar opposite of today's Country, where the emotions and rural references are formulaic and trite and about as "country" as the corn pone at Popeye's. 

Boggs' characters, in contrast, are real: they're dirt farmers, hillbillies, convicts, wastrels, and murderers, all deeply afflicted by the fates they must suffer. 

Not one drives a Ram, supports our troops, or wears tight blue jeans. 

And they usually wind up vanquished, humiliated, or dead, not home on the couch with the hot wife and the football game.

"Dock deserves fame for his efforts to live true to what he believed God expected of him," English professor Barry O'Connell wrote.

"Never a conventional life, his was also shaped by extraordinary gifts. Among them was an almost instinctive capacity to see and hear the events of his world newly.

"Through his music, he transmuted the everyday into something more beautiful and startling and acute than we are usually able to feel."

Above: Dock Boggs by R. Crumb.

Postscript: Listen to this lovely instrumental by Nora Brown. It's Dock Boggs' "Coke Oven March." 

Trump's Defense

They who rule unjustly and incompetently have been raised up by God to punish the wickedness of the people.

— John Calvin

As the inculpatory evidence mounts every day, it's reasonable to ask what defense Trump's lawyers will use in the upcoming trial, The People v. Donald J. Trump.

I'm not a lawyer, but it seems clear to me that his best defense is the one known as vis major (a tort law defense, not a criminal law defense; but what the hell).

God did it.

Arguing vis major, Trump can escape all liability for the damages to democracy that occurred on his watch, simply by blaming God.

He can put forward in his defense the writings of John Calvin, who argued in Institutes of the Christian Religion that God, not voters, appoints our leaders—both the good and the wicked ones.

Good leaders reflect God's grace; wicked leaders, His wrath; but "all equally have been endowed with that holy majesty with which He has invested lawful power."

Trump may have been a wicked leader, but God was responsible; so Trump should not be punished for his treasonous deeds.

Instead, he should be revered.

"In a very wicked man, utterly unworthy of all honor," Calvin writes, "provided he has the public power in his hands, that noble and divine power resides which the Lord has by His word given to the ministers of his justice and judgment.

"Accordingly, he should be held in the same reverence and esteem by his subjects, in so far as public obedience is concerned, in which they would hold the best of leaders if he were given to them."

Stay tuned.

A hard rain's a-gonna fall.

Above: The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin (1852). Oil on canvas. 54 x 84 inches.

Earwash

Now wash out your ears with this.

— Paul Harvey

Were its apostles—Hannity, Levin, Ingraham, et al.—not so flagrantly gangsterish, conservatism might have more adherents.

As things are, "conservative" is an aspersion and only 36% of Americans own up to the label, according to Gallup.

That percentage that hasn't changed in three decades.

To increase conservatism's base would take a thorough cleansing of the outhouse that is "conservative talk radio" today.

And it would take the reincarnation of Paul Harvey.

A staple of ABC News Radio, Harvey was carried on 1,200 stations throughout the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, reaching nearly 15% of the US adult population.

Famed for his tagline, "Now you know the rest of the story," Harvey had a quirky, affected delivery, a kind of velvety staccato that he stole from "old-time" announcers and which he made his own by introducing frequent—and senseless—pauses.

Cherry-picking the day's news and adding backstories, Harvey used his daily broadcasts as a platform for an obvious, but unstated, Midwestern conservatism.

Through his copy, he loved to picture instances of self-reliance, honesty, modesty, and diligence. 

He loved Horatio Alger stories and the gospel of hard work. 

He loved tales of sacrifice and heroism in war.

And he loved to berate big government for any effort to bring about economic justice.

"I was never one who sought to make the small man tall by cutting off the legs of a giant," he said of the Great Society. "I wanted to drag no man down to my size, but only to preserve a way of life which might make it possible for me, one day, to elevate myself until I at least partly matched his size."

Harvey's partisanship, veiled by his Puritan-cum-Pollyanna attitude, set him apart as a broadcaster.

So did his commercialism.

Like today's podcasters, Harvey would commingle sponsors' messages with his copy, so that editorial and advertising content flowed seamlessly from his lips.

The practice—we now call it "native advertising"—earned him the label "the finest huckster ever to roam the airwaves."

"I am fiercely loyal to those willing to put their money where my mouth is," Harvey once said.

A testament to his gentle conservatism, Harvey received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush in 2005.

It's the highest honor a civilian can receive.

"Americans like the sound of his voice," Bush said at the ceremony.

"Over the decades we have come to recognize in that voice some of the finest qualities of our country: patriotism, good humor, kindness, and common sense."

You sure won't find anything remotely like those qualities on conservative talk radio today, where venom and lies are the stock in trade.

Now you know the rest of the story.

Spam!

My father had a visceral aversion to hot dogs, stemming from his military service during World War II.

Stationed on an Air Force base in southern England, he claimed that all his daily meals for a nine-month spell had consisted solely of canned Vienna Sausage, because the mess could obtain no other food. 

After that, he couldn't even look at a spiced ham product without growing nauseous.

I don't recall ever seeing him eat a hot dog; not at a picnic, not at the drive-in, not even at the ball park.

Our family, as a result, also never ate Spam. 

You might say, as youngsters, we were Spam-deprived. 

(Oddly, we did often eat Taylor's Ham, a New Jersey-made "pork roll" hardly different from Spam except that, to comply with residents' taste, you would fry it to the consistency of saddle leather.)

Spam, not to be confused with electronic junk mail, has a sovereign past among canned lunchmeats.

Invented in 1937, the pork mash was Minnesota meatpacker Jay Hormel's way of monetizing the least desirable part of the pig, its shoulders.

Cooked and canned in a vacuum so it wouldn't "sweat" while unrefrigerated, the emulsified "miracle meat" got the name Spam at a company New Year's Eve party, when the guests were asked to name Hormel's latest product.

One guest blurted “Spam” and it stuck.

Three years later, 70% of Americans were eating the stuff.

Housewives bought 40 million cans of Spam in 1940, eager to see if Hormel's ad campaign was true: "Slice it, dice it, fry it, bake it. Cold or hot, Spam hits the spot."

But Spam really took off in 1942, when the Pentagon started to buy it—along with every other canned lunchmeat—by the boatload, to feed GIs in Europe and the Pacific.

Over 100 million pounds of Spam were shipped abroad.

The GIs, of course, despised it, saying "it's the real reason war is hell."

But locals felt differently. 

In England and the Asian Pacific, civilians—the majority at the point of starvation—scarfed Spam up, instantly making it a menu staple morning, noon and night.

They called Spam a "godsend." 

Their avidity meant that Spam would find its way onto main courses, served with everything from eggs to fish, toast to rice, cheese to vegies.

And it still is today.

Worldwide, Hormel has sold over eight billion cans of Spam since 1937.

Our Florida Fascist

The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.

— Henry Wallace

Make no mistake, Ron DeSantis is a fascist of the first order.

Scapegoating is his go-to strategy, as it was Hitler's.

Consider DeSantis' latest fundraising appeal, brought to my attention by a praiseworthy article in the neo-Nazi, pro-Trump magazine The American Mind.

In it, DeSantis asks donors to recognize their common enemy.

"Our country is currently facing a great threat," he begins. "A new enemy has emerged from the shadows that seeks to destroy and intimidate their way to a transformed state that you and I would hardly recognize."

And who is the common enemy donors should fear?

"The radical vigilante woke mob," he says; a hard-charging horde of hysterics comprising teachers, writers, athletes, philanthropists, scientists, CEOs, and liberal politicians. 

This is the mob, DeSantis says, that burned our cities in 2020, crucified Karl Rittenhouse, and stigmatized anti-maskers; this is the mob now persecuting the January 6 insurgents.

The radical vigilante woke mob will not only "tear down monuments and buildings, but tear down the American spirit," DeSantis writes. "They go after the family unit, parental rights, traditional moral values, the church, and fact-based education."

DeSantis is fairly blunt in identifying precisely who populates this steamrolling juggernaut: Jews, Queers, Blacks, and Commies.

"Over the past few years, we’ve watched horrified as this group has attempted to brainwash our children into thinking we live in an evil, racist, irredeemable country," he says. 

"We listened to them deny science and data to exert political theater, all the while trampling over personal liberties enshrined in the Constitution. 

"We saw them take to the streets for an entire summer like outlaws, burning, looting, and destroying everything in sight."

But, never fear, the radical vigilante woke mob has met its match: Ron DeSantis.

"I am choosing to counter this enemy with faith, with reason, and with freedom," DeSantis declares. "As Governor of the Free State of Florida, I have chosen to lead with a vision that builds America up, rather than tears it down."

If this drivel sounds all-too familiar, it's due to its resemblance to Hitler's rantings.

Hitler targeted only Jews and Commies, because Germany in the 1930s had few open Queers, and even fewer Blacks; and called the common enemy the "Jewish influence," instead of the "radical vigilante woke mob."

But the differences end there. Hitler's message uncannily mirrors DeSantis': we must annihilate our internal foes, or we'll all become Bolshies; and I'm the man to do it.

"In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it," Hitler said in 1939. "During the time of my struggle for power, the Jews received my prophecies with laughter when I said I would one day take over the state and settle the Jewish problem. Their laughter was uproarious—but I think for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face. 

"Today I will once more be a prophet: if the international Jewish financiers should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth—and thus the victory of Jewry—but the annihilation of all Jews in Europe! 

"The nations are no longer willing to die on the battlefield so that this unstable international race may profit from a war or satisfy its Old Testament vengeance.

"The Jewish watchword 'Workers of the world unite' will be conquered by a higher realization, namely 'Workers of all classes and nations recognize your common enemy!'"

Now hold on, wait a minute!

Does a passing similarity between DeSantis' and Hitler's rhetoric actually make them kin? Or, as they say in Hollywood, is the resemblance strictly coincidental?

In other words, am I fretting over a libtard's bugaboo?

A more companionable commentator, columnist David Brooks, would say that I'm not, despite his conservative leanings.

He sees DeSantis and his craven followers as the vanguard of "the terrifying future of the American right," which he describes as "the fusing of the culture war and the class war into one epic Marxist Götterdämmerung."

DeSantis, Brooks argues, will use the power of the state—since teachers, preachers, journalists and marketers won't do it—to ram right-wing beliefs down everyone's throat.

Hitler called that conformity the "national community."

DeSantis calls it "We The People."

With no room for dissent, or for bodily or intellectual autonomy, there's not much difference.

I am the American Voter

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the 

collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

― H.L. Mencken

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America.

But that's as far as I go.

All that "one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all" stuff that follows is socialism.

Jesus would never approve that shit.

Besides, socialism is the reason gas is so pricey.

I spent $110 yesterday to fill the Ford F. 

F is right!

It's all the Dems fault—them and the Blacks and all the other freeloading coloreds.

Oh, and the child molesters. Can't forget them.

Go back to where you came from, I say (but not aloud). Don't let the door hit you on the way out.

Why can't we all just get along?

I'll tell you why.

Too many people want their own bathroom.

What's wrong with men's room and women's room?

And women—don't get me started on women.

I'll never forgive Jane Fonda.

Never ever ever.

I am the American voter.

Cartoon: Dave Whamond

What the Frock?

I have little respect for Southern Baptist pastors.

Tarot card readers have better credentials.

But when they preach the kind of abject hate Pastor Dillon Awes preached last Sunday, my disrespect turns into contempt.

Marking the start of Pride Month, Awes told his flock that every single gay "should be lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head."

Hitler-like, he called the mass executions "the solution for the homosexual in 2022."

Realizing his solution might sound a tad harsh, Awes deferred to Scripture.

"That’s what God teaches," he said. "That’s what the Bible says. You don’t like it? You don’t like God’s Word."

I never realized the Ancient Israelites had guns, or shot sinners in the back of the head. 

You learn something every day.

Awe's boss, Pastor Jonathan Shelley, backed his underling's bloodthirsty solution, insisting, "This is not murder but capital punishment."

In case you're wondering, Pastor Awes' Stedfast Baptist Church occupies a strip mall in Watauga, Texas, a suburb of Forth Worth. 

The pastor, of course, doth protest too much.

His obsession is no doubt an instance of reaction formation. 

We'll soon hear, in the manner of so many clergymen, that Awes has been arrested on charges of pedophilia, a crime that, in Texas, earns you a 99-year sentence. 

Fine with me.

As Hunter S. Thompson said, "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, 'Hell yes, I'm from Texas,' deserves whatever happens to him."

Pastor Jonathan Shelley further justified Ames' venomous sermon by claiming all gays molest children.

"It is our duty," he said, "to warn families of a real threat that exists in our society."

Therein lies my concern. 

Were these two morons not influential, they'd be irrelevant—nothing more than two out-of-touch Texas snake charmers.

But they are influential.  

My fear is that scapegoating gays for all of society's problems will become a core GOP tenet; and Pastor Ames' "solution," a GOP policy.

Berserk

So now we know: when faced with the certainty of surrendering the White House, Trump went berserk.

His diehard followers—alas, there are still millions—will no doubt romanticize his pigheadedness.

When you don't know any better, it's easy to romanticize someone who goes berserk.

Berserk is awesome. 

Berserk in invulnerable. 

Berserk is heroic. 

Berserk, a 19th-century word, comes from berserker, an Old Norse word meaning a "warrior clothed in bearskin." Sir Walter Scott introduced berserker into English in his 1822 novel The Pirate.

Norsemen considered berserkers to be fearsome warriors of superhuman strength; warriors who, protected from harm by the universe, would go into a frenzy during battle, smiting the enemy with unquenchable savagery.

Modern pharmacologists believe berserkers' mysterious might was drug-induced.

Their ferocity came, scientists say, from ingesting henbane, a common weed with narcotic properties that was used throughout the Ancient World to kill pain and cure insomnia.

While ingesting a small dose of henbane anaesthetizes you, ingesting a large dose induces rage, combativeness, and feelings of invincibility. 

It also prompts you to tear off all your clothes and bite people—friend and foe alike.

While most of Trump's followers are anti-maskers, I think even they'd agree that, should he continue to appear at rallies, Trump ought to be required to wear a mask.

The mask I have in mind was the one used in Silence of the Lambs to restrain Hannibal Lecter.

It's simply a matter of pubic safety.

Above: The Standard Bearer by Hubert Lanzinger. Oil on wood.

It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Or Was.

I dug Mad Magazine. My brain is wired to mock.

— Lalo Alcaraz

Sometimes Congressional investigations prompt criminal charges; sometimes, new laws; and sometimes, public outcries for justice and reform.

But a 1954 Congressional investigation prompted a new magazine.

Mad was the result of a bipartisan investigation of the comic book industry by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency.

Comic books—filled in the day with murder, mayhem and sex—were on the hot seat because experts had claimed that they corrupted young readers.

And Congress agreed: its investigation of the industry reached the conclusion that comic book publishers were de facto smut merchants who needed to be censored.

A "comics code" was written and a watchdog group set up.

One publisher, however, was of no mind to comply.

Entertaining Comics skirted Congress' directive by upping the trim size of its comic book Mad to that of a magazine and renaming the product Mad Magazine.

Magazines had no code or watchdog.

Free from censorship, Mad in its heyday entertained well over a million Baby Boomers a month, providing a steady stream of puerile parodies, cornball sendups, and idiotic satire.

Most of all, Mad represented relief from the stifling conformism and earnestness of the 1950s and '60s.

"Mad's consciousness of itself as trash, as enemy of parents and teachers, even as money-making enterprise, thrilled kids," The New York Times said on the occasion of magazine's 25th anniversary. 

"It was magical, objective proof to kids that they weren't alone, that there were people who knew that there was something wrong, phony and funny about a world of bomb shelters, brinkmanship and toothpaste smiles."

My favorite feature in every Mad was the TV show parody. I still remember some of the nutty titles the magazine gave to these spoofs:

• Walt Dizzy Presents
• The Rifle, Man!
• The Phewgitive
• Voyage to See What's on the Bottom
• 12 O'Crocked High
• Mission: Ridiculous
• The Flying Nut
• Kojerk
• Makeus Sickby
• The Straights of San Francisco
• Kung Fool
• The Dopes of Haphazzard

When they worked—which was often—Mad's spoofs excelled in their ability to transport you to a cartoon world where vile windbags and moronic stumblebums reigned—a grotesque and absurd world not unlike your parents' and teachers'. The characters were all gangly, their noses bulbous, their limbs marionettish, their clothes ill-fitting. When they spoke, they spoke in elaborate paragraphs that were studded with bombast and Yiddish slang which, unless you lived in a Jewish household, you only encountered in the pages of Mad.

Mad lasted on newsstands 67 years—much longer than anyone would have predicted. But, with the appearance of rivals Zap Comics and National Lampoon, Mad's best days were over by the 1970s.

According to The New Yorker, Mad "subverted the comic form into a mainstream ideological weapon aimed at icons of the left and the right—attacking both McCarthyism and the Beat Generation, Nixon and Kennedy, Hollywood and Madison Avenue."

I can’t remember the day when I fell in love with Mad. It was too long ago. But it was an inextricable rite of passage for every kid in the '50s and '60s at least to sample the zany sarcasm Mad dished out every month and to spend a few moments in a world where both the emperors and adults had no clothes.

Poetic Facts

Myths which are believed in tend to become true.

— George Orwell

Conservatives love their myths.

They don't want to hear that Betsy Ross didn't design the American flag—no more than they want to hear that Blacks didn't arrive in America as "immigrants" or that Ronald Reagan didn't have an ounce of intelligence.

They'd much rather cherish myths.

Liberals aren't much different, when it comes to it.

They don't want to hear that early feminists didn't burn their bras or that Martin Luther King was less than a saint.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it," Joseph Goebbels famously said.

The same holds for myths or, more accurately, "poetic facts."

The Betsy Ross Flag is one such poetic fact.

Betsy indeed worked as a seamstress in Philadelphia and was acquainted with George Washington, due to his occasional attendance of her church.

But that's as far as things went. 

That Betsy made our first flag was a yarn spun by her grandson, who in an 1870 speech claimed she'd been hired by Washington to design a flag for his army.

Harper's Weekly, an immensely popular magazine, picked up the speech and spread the tale nationwide.

Talk about "false flags."

The story was nothing but star-spangled bullshit.

"Every historian who’s looked into it has found no credible evidence that Betsy Ross made the first American flag," historian Marc Leepson told National Geographic last year.

The "Betsy Ross Flag" is a myth made of whole cloth.

And it's become lodged in the fabric of history—much like the "voluntary" nature of slavery and the "genius" of Ronald Reagan.

An analogous tall tale concerns how the Betsy Ross Flag was unveiled.

Flags in general weren't flown by infantry during the Revolutionary War; they were flown only by ships and forts.

But that fact didn't deter patriotic Delawareans from insisting the Betsy Ross Flag was unfurled for the first time at Cooch's Bridge, site of the only Revolutionary War battle in the state.

Cooch's Bridge—fought September 3, 1777—was a British victory, so perhaps the fiction felt consoling.

Howard Pyle's The Nation Makers

The hard facts were: the Continental Congress indeed resolved—on June 14, 1777—that the nation would adopt a flag comprising stars and stripes; and it made that resolution public three months later—on the very day of the Battle of Cooch's Bridge.

And so it seems the first announcement of the flag became the first appearance of the flag.

The fiction took root in Delawareans' imaginations not in 1777, but in 1940, when it was included in The Battle of Cooch’s Bridge, whose author claimed that "circumstantial evidence" proved the story to be true.

And the circumstantial evidence? 

A "history painting" by Delaware artist Howard Pyle that appeared on the cover of Collier's Magazine in June 1906.

Pretty flimsy evidence—especially when you consider the painting depicted another battle altogether.

Historian Wade Catts told National Geographic the Betsy Ross Flag wasn't carried into the Battle of Cooch's Bridge for practical reasons.

"The American formation fought as an ad hoc light infantry corps," Catts said. "The whole purpose of the infantry was stealth and secrecy, so it is highly unlikely they would have carried a flag into battle."

But how much more comforting is it to cherish the poetic fact that the embattled Americans carried the Betsy Ross Flag into the Battle of Cooch's Bridge?

And how unromantic to say that it never happened.

As the late historian Ed Bearss was fond of saying, "It never happened—but it should have."

Mother of Muses

Sing of the heroes who stood alone,

whose names are engraved on tablets of stone.

— Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan's "Mother of Muses," critics agree, is among the singer-songwriter's finest pieces. 

Released in 2020—seven decades after his arrival in New York as a fresh-faced folkie from Minnesota—the song represents a collage of archaic people and events that Dylan counts as sources of inspiration.

Sing of Sherman, Montgomery and Scott,
Sing of Zhukov and Patton and the battles they fought,
Who cleared the path for Presley to sing, 

Who carved out the path for Martin Luther King,
Who did what they did and then went on their way,
Man, I could tell their stories all day.

Romping the "old, weird America," Dylan is like a vacuum cleaner whose bag never gets emptied.

He compiles, more than composes; derives, more than devises—pastiching from the sourcebook we call American History and hoping listeners never forget that "we stand on the shoulders of giants."

"All ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources," Mark Twain said. "There is not a rag of originality about them."

That's certainly true of Dylan's murky lyrics. As a songwriter, he's is like a dealer at an antiques mall or a docent at a roadside attraction, ready to regale you with lore about obscure objects and eccentric people.

Listening to his words is like taking vacation with Sarah Vowell.

"When Bob Dylan performs, he channels a whole universe of time-weathered emotions, ideas, and legacies," says Giovanni Russonello, music critic for The New York Times. 

His rootedness makes him an "ambassador for the country's past and its indelible ideals."

In his memoir, Chronicles, Dylan describes songwriting as inheritance, a process of "converting something that exists into something that didn't."

"Mother of Muses" acknowledges just a few of the dusty items in the cabinet.

There are thousands more in Dylan's catalog.

NOTE: Bob Dylan turned 81 May 24.

Lumber Jack

I don't know of any great man who ever had a great son.

— Anthony Mann

Architect Frank Lloyd Wright had a son named Jack who was tormented all his life by his father's fame.

He hoped some of it would rub off on him, but things just never quite worked out.

At the age of 18, shiftless and unhappy, Jack Wright quit his freshman year at the University of Wisconsin—his father's alma mater—and headed to the West Coast, where he scraped along on menial jobs until deciding to try his hand at architecture. 

Jack smooth-talked his way into a job as a draftsman at a Los Angeles construction company, but quickly grew restless with his junior-man's position. When he announced his intention to move abroad to study architecture, Jack's father offered him a job as office manager at his now-bustling Chicago studio, in lieu of help with tuition.

Jack would last at the studio of Frank Lloyd Wright only four years: his father fired him after a heated argument over salary.

Suddenly jobless, Jack Wright tried something altogether new: designing toys for Chicago retailer Marshall Field. 

Swiping his father's earthquake-proof design for Tokyo's Imperial Hotel, Jack designed a set of notched wooden logs that kids could play with (his US patent application described the miniature logs' purpose as "Toy Cabin Construction"). 

He packaged the logs in a garish green and red cardboard box that featured a log cabin and a portrait of Illinois' favorite son, Abe Lincoln. 

The packaging promised "Interesting playthings typifying the spirit of America."

Jack Wright's "Lincoln Logs" caught on like wildfire. Parents and kids—swept up in a post-World War I patriotism craze—couldn't get enough of them. 

Although they never made him rich and famous—Jack would return to architecture after selling his patent for the toy to Playskool for $800—Lincoln Logs became 20th-century American kids' go-to building blocks, peaking in sales at 100 million sets. 

In 1999, along with the Hula Hoop, View-Master and the Radio Flyer Wagon, they were inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame, 27 years after Jack Wright's death.

Fake News' Forerunner

When you strike at the morale of a people,
you strike at the deciding factor.

— William "Wild Bill" Donovan

You may recall that, in March, a web video circulated in which Volodymyr Zelenskyy asked fellow Ukrainians to surrender.

Forensics experts within hours identified it as a "deepfake," and the major platform providers deleted the video—but not until this Russian-made propaganda piece had reached millions.

When we think of fake news, we tend to think of Russia, Q-Anon, and—first and foremost—Fox News.

But the US government perfected the art of fake news—at the time called "black propaganda"—80 years ago.

In March 1943, against FDR's wishes, Colonel "Wild Bill" Donovan formed the Morale Operations Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

Forerunner of the CIA, the OSS had been Wild Bill's brainchild. 

He modeled it after Britain's MI-6 to function as an immense spy ring comprising 13,000 soldiers and civilians, including celebrities like John Ford, Sterling Hayden, Stephen Vincent Benet, Archibald MacLeish, Robert E. Sherwood, Paul Mellon, Carl Jung and Julia Child (over a third of the spies were women).

But the Moral Operations Branch was something else. 

It was specialized.

A distant admirer of Joseph Goebbels, Wild Bill fashioned Morale Operations to be the US government's propaganda arm. 

Its mission: to sow doubt and distrust within the armies and civilian populations of the Axis nations.

You win a war, "by mystifying and misleading the enemy," Wild Bill said.  

"When you strike at the morale of a people, you strike at the deciding factor."

To this end, Morale Operations manufactured and delivered tens of thousands of pieces of fake news during World War II:

• It airdropped into Germany fake newspapers that claimed anti-Hitler resistance was on the rise.
  
  
• It airdropped flyers that showed the US produced a new warplane every five minutes—far more than Germany.
  
  
• It printed facsimiles of an official Nazi flyer after D-Day, changing the text to instruct German soldiers to shoot their own officers, should they order a retreat. The Germans unwittingly circulated the fake flyers among their troops.
  
  
• It mailed fake letters to the families of German soldiers that claimed their deceased sons were victims of mercy killings by Nazi doctors.
  
  
• It produced a fake weekly economics newsletter that suggested German businesses would prosper if the Nazi Party were removed from power.
  
  
• It instigated rumors designed to incite rebellion in Nazi-occupied territories. The rumors described successful revolts and assassinations that had never happened.
  
  
• It broadcast music programs on a fake radio station, embedding news reports of German defeats every hour on the hour. After Operation Valkyrie, the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler, newscasters announced the names of hundreds of "suspects," hoping Germans would conclude that the plot was widespread than it actually was. The Gestapo executed 2,500 of the "suspects."

Even though FDR deplored such tactics, "Wild Bill" outlined them in the Morale Operations Field Manual, a 60-page handbook he published in January 1943.

The top secret manual stated that field personnel engaged in Moral Operations must be reliable Americans with "demonstrated proficiency in administrative affairs and the theory and practice of influencing human beings."

In their jobs, all field personnel would "within the enemy's country, incite and spread dissension, confusion, and disorder; promote subversive activities; and depress the morale of his people."