Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow

There is always something new to be found in America's past that also brings greater clarity to our present, and to the future we choose to make as a nation.

— Eric Rhoads

I volunteer time and money to support a local "friends" group devoted to Cooch's Bridge Historic Site.

It's a labor of love.

A lifelong history buff, as a kid I never "got" why everyone wasn't equally enthralled by the past.

But I couldn't explain to anyone why—other than its romantic aspects—I found history so enchanting.

I had no explanation.

So I was delighted to discover in college that the 19th-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel had formed a theory of history that, for cogency, has never been topped.

Hegel thought that history is like nature: it evolves. 

Just as nature evolves toward more complex and harmonious systems, he argued, so does history. But where nature represents the material, history represents the spiritual.

History is the evolution of spirit (Geist).

Of course, that's a big leap from the record of events you'd find in a history textbook, or even the record found at an archeological dig. 

But Hegel distinguished three ways of understanding the past:

• Original history, which comprises eyewitness accounts of the past and historians' interpretation of those accounts. Hegel called this the "portrait of time."
  
  
• Reflective history, which comprises grand narratives of the past. Hegel distinguished four kinds of reflective history: universal, pragmatic, critical, and specialized. Universal history examines whole nations and peoples. Pragmatic history examines the past through the lens of an ideology, such as Christianity. Critical history examines the past with the aim of providing an alternative explanation of it (The 1619 Project is a contemporary example). Specialized history examines singular topics, such as furniture, art, munitions, or mass migrations.
  
  
• Philosophical history, which comprises the history of ideas. Here, events embody thought and are spiritual epiphanies. In other words, Hegel insisted, history is Geist manifesting itself. History is not a matter of dates and places, but of ceaselessly unfolding "logic."
  

Philosophical history reveals to us that history—despite the recurrences of greed, cruelty and sadism—is incremental progress. Looking back as philosophers, we see that the bad is always overcome by the good; that reason always prevails; and that freedom, the "soul truth of Geist," ultimately triumphs.

History, Hegel said, is Geist "in the process of working out the knowledge of that which it is potentially."

And that which Geist is potentially is personal freedom.

Above: Cooch's Bridge. Photo by Ann Ramsey.

Little Soul

Little souls who thirst for fight,

these men were born to drill and die.

— Stephen Crane

Like 190 thousand other Irishmen, Mike Folliard, my cousin six times removed, fled County Roscommon in the 1850s to escape starvation.

He wound up living on a farm outside leafy Franklin, New Jersey.

Mike was 18 in late July 1861, when Congress authorized formation of an army of 500 thousand volunteers—a call to arms that was immediately met by men like Mike, who enlisted for the thrill of marching into battle and the steady paycheck promised (Mike mailed all his army pay to Ireland, as boat fare for a widowed sister).

On August 27, Mike was mustered into the 1st New Jersey Cavalry (the "Jersey Cavaliers") at Trenton. At some point the next month, while stationed in Washington, DC, he visited a photography studio—likely that of Matthew Brady—to have his portrait taken in his handsome, new uniform.

That was the last time he'd do anything so civilized. 

Just a few weeks later, he found himself in Virginia, riding scout to defend the capital from Confederate takeover.

Cavalry was used throughout the Civil War as an infantry commanders' "eyes and ears," so Mike's regiment was nearly always exposed to enemy fire.

Mike's regiment fought in major battles at Cross Keys, Cedar Mountain, Brandy Station, Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, Brandy Station, Gettysburg and Bristoe Station.

During the latter engagement, in October 1863, Mike was captured by surprise outside a village known as Buckland. The cavalry officer who allowed Mike's regiment to be entrapped, as it had been, was none other than General George Armstrong Custer.

Mike was summarily transported to Andersonville Prison in Georgia, where he lived among 45,000 other Federal POWs inside a stockade surrounding 16 acres of land (the size of three city blocks).

As it was to many other prisoners, Andersonville was unkind to Mike.

He died of scurvy on July 25, 1864, six months after his capture.

A thousand other POWs at Andersonville died, as Mike did, of a disease brought on by starvation.

He was only 21.

Above: Little Soul by Robert Francis James.  Oil on canvas. 11 x 14 inches. From an 1861 photograph of Corporal Mike Folliard, who is buried in grave Number 3938 at Andersonville National Cemetery.

Illth

Americans—Republican voters, especially—romanticize the rich. 

They're held up as titans, when in fact they're just lucky.

The Victorian critic John Ruskin felt that Englishmen of his day were equally guilty of romanticizing the rich—and were wrong to do so.

Rich people hoard, Ruskin argued, taking their wealth out of circulation.

But wealth is only useful in circulation.

"If a thing is to be useful," Ruskin said, "it must be not only of an availing nature, but in availing hands. 

"Usefulness is value in the hands of the valiant."

Ruskin, leaning on his Classics education, defined the "valiant" as the "valuable;" as those who "avail towards life." 

In a word, workers.

Ruskin thought the rich were worse than just idle: the rich are like "dams in a river" and "pools of dead water which, so long as the stream flows, are useless, or serve only to drown people."

Ruskin wondered why English didn't have a word for the harm caused by wealth. 

He suggested illth. 

Illth, Ruskin said, is the "devastation caused by delay." 

By hoarding their wealth, the rich postpone its use until after their deaths. 

In this sense, Ruskin believed, the rich act as "impediments" to the flow of wealth.

From their great country houses, nothing ever "trickles down."

Ruskin published these thoughts in 1860, 12 years after Karl Marx published The Communist Manifesto. 

But whereas Marx's essay, published by a small society of fellow travelers, was largely ignored, Ruskin's, published in a popular magazine, created a firestorm.

The English critics despised it.

Ruskin's essay was declared "one of the most melancholy spectacles we have ever witnessed."

"Absolute nonsense," "utter imbecility," and "intolerable twaddle," the critics wrote.

One critic called the author himself "repulsive," adding that Ruskin was the "perfect paragon of blubbering; his whines and snivels are contemptible."

But was he contemptible in condemning the rich for fostering illth?

I don't think so. 

Illth, you could say, is the underbelly of wealth.

Wealth is a 13th-century word meaning "prosperity." It derived from another Old English word, weal, meaning "health."

Ill, also a 13th-century word, came centuries later to mean "unhealthy;" but its original 13th-century meaning was "wicked." 

Illth, therefore, means "wickedness." 

Ruskin's point was clear: when you look at their underbellies, the rich are wicked.

They block our way to prosperity; they don't create it.

Will Republicans ever get it?

HAT TIP: Thanks to copywriter Nancy Friedman for introducing me to illth.

Stupid Lasts Forever

Youth ages, immaturity is outgrown, ignorance can be educated, and drunkenness sobered, but stupid lasts forever.

— Aristophanes

A Tennessee Republican this week held up Hitler as the paradigm of self-improvement.

State Senator Frank Niceley defended a bill to ban the homeless from public parks by invoking Hitler's time as a tramp in Vienna:

"I wanna give you a little history lesson on homelessness," Niceley told his colleagues. 

"In 1910, Hitler decided to live on the streets for a while. 

"So for two years, Hitler lived on the streets and practiced his oratory and his body language and how to connect with the masses. And then went on to lead a life that got him in the history books. 

"So, a lot of these people, it’s not a dead end. They can come out of these homeless camps and have a productive life, or in Hitler’s case, a very unproductive life. I support this bill."

If Niceley wanted to live up to his name, he'd also sponsor a bill to provide Tennessee's homeless with free toothbrush mustaches.

The Forgotten Lem Boulware

Ronald Reagan's insane policies helped create today’s Gilded Age.

— Ben Gran

They are ideologues. I hate ideologues. 

— Philip Roth

Historians credit Ronald Reagan's antediluvian notions of "big government" to the influence of the right-wing ideologue Barry Goldwater.

They've forgotten the more important influencer: Lem Boulware.

Boulware was GE's head public relations man in the 1950s. 

While on the job, Boulware gained a national reputation for extolling laissez-faire, bashing Washington bureaucrats, and bullying labor leaders.

Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of raw capitalism, Boulware insisted.

Nothing.

Boulware's libertarian influence on American businessmen was so pervasive that it endures today, when a nonnegotiable stance—such as the price of a new car—is called an instance of Boulwarism.

The paranoid Boulware believed that American workers, abetted by New-Deal era intellectuals in Washington, posed a mortal threat to the business-owning class—and made no secret of it. He rang the reactionary's alarm bell at each and every opportunity, using GE employees like Ronald Reagan as his shill.

Reagan had befriended Boulware while the Hollywood actor served as the weekly host of "General Electric Theater," one of the nation's top TV shows for over a decade.

As they toured the country hosting press junkets, Boulware took it upon himself to "tutor" the dimwitted actor (Christopher Hitchens once called Reagan "as dumb as a stump" and his deputy chief of staff Michael Deaver told me that he "babysat" the puerile president).

Like a sponge, Reagan absorbed Boulware's Hobbesian views.

America, Boulware preached, was the land of opportunity, private ownership, free markets, and low taxes. 

Anyone who wished to call himself an American accepted those qualities—plus the fact that prosperity trickled down from the "beneficent" 1%. 

Resistance meant you were a goddamn Communist.

Boulware's Gilded Age views were known in Chamber of Commerce circles as the "philosophy of private enterprise."

The gullible Reagan, while traveling with the wily PR man, would listen to his teachings and swallow them whole.

The actor wasn't the only one of GE's 190,000 employees to imbibe Boulware's Kool-Aid during the '50s. 

Tens of thousands did.

The PR man made sure of that by circulating right-wing books among management and publishing four in-house magazines that explained the philosophy of private enterprise; arranging continual in-house workshops on the topic; and deputizing supervisors throughout the company to act as his mouthpiece.

To prepare GE's supervisors to carry his message, Boulware also circulated reprints of articles by the arch conservative William F. Buckley.

Boulware viewed his task as one of re-educating the serfs.

The simpleminded star of Bedtime for Bonzo was merely one of them.

The Gnadenhütten Massacre

The news of the atrocities in Ukraine are heartbreaking.

Russians are barbarous, we say.

It can't happen here, we say.

Wrong.

In March 1782, a year before the end of the American Revolution, a band of Pennsylvanians murdered 96 Lenape Indians by smashing their skulls with mallets as they knelt and prayed to Jesus.

In what became known as the "Gnadenhütten Massacre," the Pennsylvanians then piled the bodies of the men, women and children inside a Moravian mission and burned it to the ground.

The murderers claimed they wanted revenge for Lenape raids on their homes.

But the Lenapes they bludgeoned were innocent.

Like Quakers, Moravians were pacifists; so were their Indian converts.

Ironically, the Moravians and the Lenape converts had been helping the Patriots all through the war, working as guides and spies—acts that often got them arrested and tried by the British.

The incident spurred reprisals.

The Lenapes resurrected their practice of ritualized torture—discontinued during the French and Indian War 20 years earlier—and targeted the men who had participated in the atrocities.

As the philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, "To the war of every man against every man, this is also consequent; that nothing can be unjust. The notions of right and wrong, justice and injustice, have no place there."

Strongmen

A friend who posts reactionary memes every day on Facebook admitted to me he not only gets his jollies provoking "your kind," but secretly wishes Trump were president.

You probably know a lot of people like him.

I wish they'd all read Strongmen, historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat's 2020 account of modern authoritarianism, now out in paperback.

It's the scariest read you'll find outside a Stephen King novel.

Ben-Ghiat finds every modern strongman—including Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Amin, Pinochet, Erdogan, Duterte, Bolsonaro, Berlusconi, Gaddafi, Hussein, Orban, Putin, Modi and Trump—cut from precisely the same vile cloth.

Strongmen are all emotionally stunted weirdos who seize the levers of power because dominion over others fills an inner need to prove they're not emotionally stunted weirdos.

They're masters in the dual arts of disguise and deceit.   

"They don the cloak of national victimhood, reliving the humiliations of their people by foreign powers as they proclaim themselves their nation's savior," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

"Picking up on powerful resentments, hopes, and fears," she continues, "strongmen present themselves as the vehicle for obtaining what is most wanted, whether it is territory, safety from racial others, securing male authority, or payback for exploitation by internal or external enemies."

Strongmen rely on distortions, myths, lies, and propaganda to build a faithful audience, banking on followers' willingness to abandon the real world in favor of the fantasy world the strongmen create.

Eventually—as in the case of my misguided friend—there's no talking to a strongman's followers.

"They believe in him because they believe in him," Ben-Ghiat writes. 

Their unshakable faith in the strongman leads them to insist you—by believing in a world where people strive to live in peace, right systemic wrongs, and work for prosperity and progress—are "drinking the Kool-Aid."

But strongmen really don't give two shits about their followers and, in fact, are openly contemptuous of them. 

All they really care about is robbing the treasury, punishing critics, controlling women and women's bodies, and pursuing vainglorious goals.

Soon—to every other citizen's detriment—chaos, bankruptcy, and warfare ensue, as strongmen lose what little is left of their ability to distinguish the difference between personal lusts and their nation's needs.

Their sick, self-aggrandizing projects invariably lead to their comeuppance and to a national apocalypse, as our parents witnessed in World War II and we're witnessing in Ukraine now.

"Authoritarian history is full of projects and causes championed by the ruler out of hubris and megalomania and implemented to disastrous effect," Ben-Ghiat writes.

Why don't Trump's followers see that?

POSTSCRIPT: Should you find the inclusion of Trump in the company of strongmen like Mussolini and Hitler far fetched, bare in mind that Trump's press secretary has acknowledged he openly admired other dictators' ruthlessness.

"I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him," Stephanie Grisham told The Hill. "He loved the people who could kill anyone."

Historian Ben-Ghiat says the "strongman's golden rule is: do whatever is necessary to stay in power."

We see Trump apply that rule every day.

Ukraine

When the rich wage war, it's the poor who die.

— Jean-Paul Sartre

Putin is the richest man in the world.

His cronies are among the richest.

Why they are compelled to crush Ukraine culminates from their unfathomable wealth.

It also culminates from their remoteness from 99.99% of humanity.  

"Love of money is blind," says artist Erik Pevernagie. 

"Greed and money make people forfeit the quiddity of life, banish them from what is essential and alienate them from themselves. They lose their identity and become drifting exiles."

Above: A tank rolls through Kherson, Ukraine. Photographer unknown.

UPDATE: Early this morning, Ukraine announced its forces have launched a counter-offensive outside Kyiv, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Handle Me with Care

Been beat up and battered 'round,
Been sent up and been shot down.

— George Harrison

Dependency on a retirement nest egg has turned me into an obsessive market watcher.

That's not a healthy habit. 

Unchecked, it induces stock market stress.

So my usual jitteriness wasn't helped a bit yesterday morning when economist Peter Berezin announced that, with Putin on the rampage, the odds of a "civilization-ending nuclear war" in the coming year have risen to 10 percent.

But not to worry, folks, Berezin said.

"Despite the rising risk of Armageddon, investors should stay bullish on stocks,” he told The  New York Times.

The Times found the economist's prediction of increased earnings somewhat baffling.

"What I wasn’t trying to say," Berezin replied, "was that stocks were going to go up if there is a nuclear war. Obviously, they will go down. 

"The point is that everything else will go down, too."

Somehow, I'm discomfited by Berezin's analysis.

Maybe it's my memories of all those duck-and-cover drills we practiced in grade school; those uncles with mildewed bomb shelters; or Walter Cronkite's live coverage of the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I don't know.

But the fact that the prices of all investment vehicles will fall when the world turns into a radioactive ash heap doesn't much ease this market watcher's jitters.

I was tempted to place a sell-everything order with my guy after reading Berezin's analysis, but I resisted the urge.

Instead, I ordered a box of Potassium Iodide on line and spent the rest of the morning painting a picture (my encore career).

The problem with a pronouncement like Berezin's isn't that it's wrong.

The problem is that, when it comes to Boomers, it's tone deaf.

Mr. Berezin—a Gen Xer—clearly doesn't grasp the fact that, as Cold War survivors, we Boomers have to be handled with the utmost care.

Sure, we thought annihilation went out with giant shoulder pads.

But a lot of us have PTSD. 

Post Thermonuclear Shivers Disorder.

We're easily triggered.

Easily.

So, please, handle us with care.

Commander in Thief

The party of crooks and thieves is putting forward its chief crook and thief for the presidency. We must vote against him.

— Alexei Navalny

When thievery is baked into a nation, as it is in Russia, we call it a kleptocracy. 

Kleptocracy, meaning "rule by a class of thieves," is a 19th-century word derived from the Greek words kleptes, meaning "thief," and kratia, meaning "rule."

Corruption in itself is bad enough; but far worse is the predatory and psychotic nature of kleptocrats.

Kleptocrats rule by bullying and by silencing their critics.

And when their rule is threatened, kleptocrats go on a murderous rampage.

That explains Putin's invasion of Ukraine.

Pro-reform Ukraine threatens his thief's rule over Russia.

It also explains Trump's attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Joe Biden's win threatened Trumps' unhampered venality.

It will take decades for future historians and forensic accountants to quantify Trump's take during his four years in the White House, but it was well over $2 billion.

Of course, compared to Putin, Trump's a piker. 

Putin has taken 100 times that amount.

It's hard to put yourself in the shoes of a self-dealing psychotic willing to murder to protect his kleptocracy; harder still to hear your fellow citizens say they'll vote to return a self-dealing psychotic to the White House.

My one hope lies in the high likelihood that the newly formed Task Force KleptoCapture will reveal that Trump has been laundering Russian kleptocrats' money—a federal crime—for decades, and that our Commander in Thief will at last be brought to justice.

Stay tuned.

We live in wondrous times.

Peaches and Cream

Americans hate history. What we love is nostalgia.

— Regi Gibson

Teachers, librarians, and museum curators are at sixes and sevens over how to sweeten America's story.

That's because peaches and cream trump truths in this country.

Truths just get you in trouble.

American exceptionalism, the saccharine tale of the "city on a hill," is our preferred confection. 

We serve it 24/7 at every table in town.

Right now, the GOP—the party of Putin—would make it America's official dessert.

So much for apple pie.

And the GOP would deputize its members, Stasi-like, to help the state round up dissident chefs.

I don't care for a kitchen run like that.

And will do everything in my powers to thwart the GOP.

How about you?

Are you on the side of truths?

Report No. 32-04 VD

Ukraine's tragedy may be America's blessing.

The sudden spotlight on Putin may open the eyes of Trump fans to his treachery.

They might come to realize what the rest of the world knows: Trump is Putin's bitch, which doesn't quite recommend 45 for reelection.

Excerpt from Report No. 32-04 VD

With luck, that spotlight will land soon on a Kremlin document leaked last July, Report No. 32-04 VD.

While America's mainstream media slumbered all that month, reporting only on the Tokyo Olympics, Europe's media headlined the document's leak.

Report No. 32-04 VD, dated January 14, 2016, is a Kremlin brief that was discussed by Putin in a meeting of Russia's national security council a week later.

At the end of the meeting, Putin directed three spy agencies to begin "all out" disinformation campaigns to help then-candidate Trump win in 2016. 

The spy agencies were to "alter the consciousness of the masses, especially in certain groups."

Putin believed a Trump White House would disrupt and weaken America, his longtime nemesis.

"A Trump victory will definitely lead to the destabilization of the US socio-political system and will see discontent erupt," the report says.

The document also assesses the mind of then-candidate Trump.

"Trump is an impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual suffering from an inferiority complex.”

Report No. 32-04 VD confirms the Kremlin had blackmail materials from "previous unofficial visits by Trump to the territory of the Russian Federation." 

No doubt, those include the infamous "golden showers" video.

Should Trump resist the Kremlin's intervention in the presidential election, Putin would remind the candidate he could ruin him.

So as you witness Ukraine's tragedy unfold, remember what mom used to say.

"Behind every cloud there's a silver lining."

Or at least a golden shower.

Quousque Tandem?

For how much longer, Catiline, will you abuse our patience?

— Cicero

Fox News cut off Trump last night when he attributed Putin's invasion of Ukraine to the "big steal."

"Putin was going to be satisfied with a peace, and now he sees the weakness and the incompetence and the stupidity of this administration, and as an American, I'm angry about it, and I'm saddened by it, and it all happened because of a rigged election."

Interviewer Laura Ingraham cut off Trump at this point and jumped to another story. She returned to Trump minutes later, only to get into an argument with him.

We can only hope media companies—even propagandist ones like Fox News—have lost patience with Trump's bullshit.

It would not be the first time a popular figure was silenced by broadcasters.

In November 1938, radio stations nationwide banned Father Charles Coughlin, a Nazi-sympathizing Catholic priest with 30 million avid American listeners, after he denied during his weekly broadcast that Kristallnacht had hurt Germany's Jews. (He claimed it only targeted Communists.)

The stations insisted the airwaves could not tolerate Coughlin's intolerance—an abuse of the freedom of speech. Without a platform, the Nazi-loving Coughlin soon vanished from the public forum.

In November 63 BC, Rome's consul Cicero convened the senate in order to lay before it a plot to overthrow the Roman Republic.

The plot's leader, the corrupt Senator Catiline, sat in the gallery as Cicero delivered his First Speech against Catilina, one of history's greatest political orations. It opens:

Quo usque tandem abutere, Catilina, patientia nostra? Quam diu etiam furor iste tuus nos eludet? Quem ad finem sese effrenata iactabit audacia? 

For how much longer, Catiline, will you abuse our patience? How much longer will your madness make playthings of us? When will your unbridled effrontery stop swaggering?

Quo usque tandem abutere, Trump, patientia nostra?

Dutch and the Donald

Nothing personal, just business.

— Dutch Schultz

A judge last week ruled that Donald Trump must testify in New York Attorney General Letitia James’ investigation of his company.

With the decision, Trump can no longer avoid justice. 

"He's running out of the tricks that he used in the past," one journalist noted.

Not quite.

He can take a page from fellow New Yorker Dutch Schultz. 

He can kill Letitia James.

In 1935, the Jewish mobster Schultz found himself the target of New York City’s special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who'd pledged with his appointment to rid the city of racketeers.

Dewey was a crusader, with eyes set on higher office (he would run for US president three times between 1940 and 1948). He pursued Schultz with vigor, indicting him for tax evasion. As Dewey wrote in his 1974 memoir, Twenty Against the Underworld, "I regarded it as a matter of primary importance to get Dutch Schultz."

Schultz's reaction was true to form. 

"Dewey's gotta go," he told associates and put out a contract on the prosecutor's life worth $25,000 (over $500,000 in today's money).

When Schultz advised the New York syndicate of the contract, the other family bosses balked, insisting that to rub out Dewey would only bring more government prosecution. They refused to authorize Schultz's hit.

"I’m gonna hit him myself," Schultz told the syndicate.

But the hit never happened. 

Instead, the syndicate rubbed out Schultz, whom they considered a loose cannon.

But, flashing forward, Trump doesn't have a syndicate to answer to. He can rub out Letitia James with impunity.

Stay tuned.

Fade up music.

Prediction

With all eyes on Putin, watch for this story to develop in the coming weeks: all along Mr. Obvious was a paid shill of the Russian autocrat.

Follow the money.

Moderates Rise Up

Everything in moderation, including moderation.

― Oscar Wilde

San Francisco voters this week put the kibosh on "Squad politics," according to Axios, when they tossed three lefties off the city's seven-member school board.

It seems the jettisoned board members went too far when they placed priority on renaming 44 public schools in honor of BIPOC over reopening the city's shuttered schools.

That in a nutshell is the problem with immoderate Dems.

Like their right-wing opponents, they never address problems; they only manipulate symbols. 

Moderates, on the other hand, roll up their sleeves and get shit done. (For a vivid history lesson in this, listen to the LBJ Tapes. They're remarkable.)

Moderates also know that America looks like more like Maybury than Roxbury. 

What happens in San Francisco doesn't stay in San Francisco, alas, and as a result left-wingers on the national stage are freaking out.

Their loud-mouthed obsessions with punishing police, tearing down statues, and renaming buildings now threaten their re-elections—and the majority enjoyed by Democrats.

"It's a huge problem," one political strategist told Axios.

Squad politics are left of most voters', who want fixes not to systemic injustices, but to galloping inflation, violent crime, illegal guns, crumbling bridges, diseases like Covid-19, and a rigged tax system.

"The hard-left politics of the so-called 'Squad' are backfiring big-time," Axios says. The Squad has turned the Democrats' brand toxic in the hinterlands.

No surprise, Squad members and their Congressional aides are refusing to comment on the voter uprising this week. No doubt they're working in closed session on a new name for San Francisco.

How about Graybury?

NOTE: Learn more about the voter uprising this week in San Francisco.

Toiletgate

Our Commode in Chief may no longer be on the seat of power, but he occupies the headlines daily.

Axios reported this week that Donald Trump routinely flushed White House documents down the toilet, in violation of the Presidential Records Act, which requires their preservation.

Aides regularly found the papers clogging his personal toilet.

Trump, of course, pronounced the story "fake."

But I think the story holds water. Far too many White House aides saw this Super Bowl to doubt it.

If Trump were half as smart as Richard Nixon was, he'd have called the White House Plumbers to fix things.

The Washington Post called called Trump’s action a "wrenching testimony to his penchant for wanton destruction.”

I agree wholeheartedly with The Post, as I agree with Harvard historian Heather Cox Richardson's assessment of Trumps' document dump.

"The idea that he was flushing so many documents that he periodically clogged the toilet seems a commentary on his regard for the American people."

Trump promised a "Great America;" but he dealt us a royal flush.

Now can we please flush Donald down history's drain?

Heroes

A Hero of Liberty is a person who either promoted freedom, faith, or family values.

— Heroes of Liberty website

A new publisher of kids' books hopes to combat wokeism in grade schools with a series of books that glorify so-called "Heroes of Liberty," including John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Fox News has called the series, written for second grade readers, "phenomenal," failing to recognize that it's above the reading-skills of 99% of Fox News' viewers.

As right-wing Supermoms move to ban classics like Maus, Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451 from curriculums and school libraries nationwide, the Delaware-based publisher has released its first title in the series, John Wayne: Manhood and Honor.

House editor Bethany Mandel, formerly a staff writer at the Heritage Foundation, thinks John Wayne: Manhood and Honor can rescue kids from the wrongs of feminism.

She told Axios the book "counters the narrative that 'masculinity is toxic.'

"Boys are conditioned to behave like women," Mande said. "We wanted to give boy readers a glimpse of a positive male role model who doesn't apologize for being manly and masculine."

While she wants the "Heroes of Liberty" series placed in school libraries, Mandel also wants "inappropriate" books removed.

You can guess what those books might be.

For my part, the only heroes I want to celebrate are the sandwiches that go by that name.

I want to see them removed from federal watchlists and made a standard menu item in every school cafeteria. And I want to see September 14 made a national holiday.

Which is why I recommend Delawarean Vince Watchorn's A Meal in One: Wilmington and the Submarine Sandwich.

A Meal in One tells the story of how the foot-long gut-bomb first came about—and why. It's an enthralling book about poor immigrant laborers and the small-time entrepreneurs who kept them fed.

You want to talk about "family values?"

There are more family values packed between two halves of an Italian roll than than in all the bombast ever spewed by Wayne, Reagan, Thatcher, or Barrett.

None other than President Biden wrote, in the foreword to A Meal in One, "I frequently stop in one of Delaware’s established sub shops to pick up lunch, dinner or a late-night snack without thinking twice about the role the sub played in putting Delaware on the culinary map.

"I must give credit to the Italian-Americans who settled in Delaware’s Little Italy and developed and popularized the culinary creation Wilmingtonians simply and affectionately call the 'sub.'

"I give further credit to Vince Watchorn for publicizing this relatively little-known fact about our proud city to everyone who loves good food."

John Wayne may know a thing or two about manliness, but I prefer my heroes to come with capicola, sweet peppers, and an extra dab of mayo.