To Grandfather's House and the Return of the Annual Murfin Winter Holidays Music Fest

                             Over the River and Through the Woods  by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

 Note--The launch of this year's Murfin Winter Holidays Music festival was delayed by the illnesses of the proprietor and a lengthy new transcription.

Those all-Christmas music radio stations are already churning out the short rotations of holiday hits.  TV specials from high brow to hip are on almost every night.  There are plenty of ways for you to get your jolly jones for Yuletide tunes satisfied.  But if you are in the mood for a quiet moment each day with a steaming mug of coffee, cocoa, mulled something, or a taste of more adult, the annual Murfin's Winter Holidays Music Festival is for you!

This is how it works:  Every year beginning on the day after Thanksgiving--Black Friday--if you must--until the Feast of the Epiphany/Day of the Three Kings--on January 6, I will post a seasonal song.  And not only sacred and secular Christmas favorites, but also songs celebrating the many winter festivals observed this time of year--Hanukkah, St. Nicholas Day, Santa Lucia, Winter solstice, Boxing Day, and the New Year.  I try to mix the familiar with what might not be so well known including songs from different cultures and new music.  

Of course there will be plenty of time and space for the old chestnuts.  Regular followers know that I am especially fond of the secular songs of the Golden Age of American Christmas Music which stretched roughly from the early 1930's to the late 1970's.

I am also eager to get suggestions and requests.  You can instant message me on Facebook, e-mail pmurfin@sbcglobal.net, or make a comment on a blog entry.

We will kick things off with a traditional Thanksgiving song while the leftovers are still in the Fridge.

Here in Northern Illinois it was a typical gray November Day with temps hovering around freezing and only rare drifting snow flakes,  We never have the king of deep snow cover that would have allowed a sleigh ride to Grandfather's House for Thanksgiving.  But things were different during the Little Ice Age that gripped North America during and after the American Revolution.

That's why the poem Lydia Maria Child published in 1844 and titled A Boy's Thanksgiving Day and later set to music often ends up being sung as a Christmas song.

Child was recalling her own childhood when snow indeed laid deep and thick on the hills and ice froze streams in New England by mid-November.

The Little Ice Age is estimated to have lasted from about 1350 to 1850 and to have been particularly harsh in Europe and North America.  It began after the extended Mid Warm Period which began about 950 and peaked around 1100.  During that time Mediterranean agricultural practices extended deep in Europe.  The Little Ice Age plunge destroyed much of that agricultural base causing widespread famine and suffering.

There were variations of temperatures including short spurts of mild warming.  But especially severe winters clustered abound 1300, 1650,1750, and the last around 1850.  Some experts extend the period almost to the 20th Century to include the epic blizzards of 1886-'87.

The Little Ice Age was truly devastation.  Greenland was completely depopulated of its Norse settlers and Iceland lost half of its population.  Famines in Scandinavia claimed at least 10% of the population, much higher in remote northern farming villages.  Unreliable growing seasons and weakened populations made them much more susceptible in the periodic plagues that swept Europe.  In densely populated cities like London the death tolls were staggering.

During the Little Ice Age rivers, canals, and even sea ice froze for months at a time.  Ice skating became both reliable transportation and a popular diversion in Holland.

Winter sea ice extended  for miles around Ireland and closed major ports.  Great Rivers like the Thames in London, the Rhone and the Rhine froze solid.  A Swedish army was able to march across the seat to attack Copenhagen.  In the Low Countries rivers, canals, ponds and marshes froze solid every Winter encouraging a culture that encouraged ice skating.  Dutch and Flemish depicted it all in their many winter scenes and landscapes--a type of painting virtually unknown during warmer periods.

In North America crop failures encouraged competing and often warring tribes to create political alliances to fairly share hunting grounds which became much more important as crops failed and fisheries froze over.  Thus, the Iroquois Confederacy was born  as well as smaller alliances of tribes scatter along the Eastern Seaboard from Chesapeake Bay north to modern Nova Scotia.

When the folks we call Pilgrims landed on the rocky shores of New England they were seeking not just relief from religious persecution, but a warmer and more hospitable climate than their refuge in frigid Holland.  They were aiming for balmy Virginia but fate and bad weather deposited them  the equally grim north.  They and their soon to arrive Puritan neighbors suffered in the early years and their colonies only began to prosper  in a brief warming period.

 

Deep snow often blanked New England.

The American Revolution was fought in one of the worst cold spells and the weather often played a central role in in the fighting.  If there had not been plenty of snow on the ground and frozen rivers, for instance, Henry Knox could not have hauled all of the heavy artillery from the fort at West Point  to George Washington's troops besieging Boston without oxen dragging the cannons overland on sledges.  Washington and the Continental Army famously endured the heavy snow and bitter cold of Valley Forge.  The same weather kept thee British cooped up in New York and other port cities and not wrecking havoc in the countryside.

By the time of the Revolution New Englanders had established a late autumn Thanksgiving tradition as an alternative holiday to Christmas which was once banned as Papist on onde hand, an orgy of pagan revelry on the other.  The celebration had absolutely nothing to do with a dinner party shared between the Pilgrims and the local natives.  That gathering was long forgotten. It originated in local proclamations of fasting and prayer in thanks for delivery from the native nations after King Philip's War and for local bountiful harvests.  Fasting eventually gave way feasting as a natural part of a harvest festival.

Dates for the observances varied depending on local proclamations but were in late November on some day other than the Sabbath or a Wednesday when mid-week prayer meetings were held.

The celebrations came only after all of the crops were in.  After snow fall came the long hunt for deer, turkey, and other game. Atlantic storms made cod fishing too dangerous.  Larders were filled and the men, at least, were idle.  Women, of course, were expected to prepare and cook the feast.  Younger children with no hope of inheriting the farm typically moved away to find land of their own.  It became customary for them to return to the old homestead for the feast.  And in an era when roads were bad and often impassable, the frozen ground, snow, and rivers made travel easier even over long distances.

So, many a family bundled up, climbed aboard, and headed for the Old Folks' home whether it was just down the road or days away.

                                    Child on the porch of her Wayland home in the post-Civil War era.

These were the happy days Child was recalling.  But she was also 14 years old in the famous Year Without Sunshine.  The 1815 eruption of Mt. Tambora in the Dutch East Indies and other volcanic activity spewed enough ash high into the atmosphere to block  the Sun from the Northern Hemisphere for most of the year.  Famine lurked that year but could not completely discouraged the traditional trek home for Thanksgiving.

Unless you are on the southern and eastern shores of the Great Lakes this year there will be scant chance of a sleigh ride for Grandma's pumpkin pie.

The cover of one of many editions of Child's most famous poem.  Although she might have preferred to be remembered for her abolition and women's rights advocacy or her passionate devotion to children's literature, I don't think she would be entirely disappointed.
 

Hear are the original words to Child's poem:  

A Boy's Thanksgiving Day

Over the river, and through the wood,

         to Grandfathers house we go: 

        The horse know the way to carry the sleigh

        Through white and drifting snow. 

 

Over the river, and through the Wood, 

          To Grandfather's house away!

          We could not stop for doll or top,

          For 'tis Thanksgiving Day. 

          Over the river, and through the wood--

          Oh, how the wind does blow!

          It stings the oews and bites the nose

          As over the ground we go.

          Over the river, and through the woods--

          And Straight through the barnyard gate,

          We seem to go extremely slow,

          It is so hard to wait!

          Over the river, and through the wood--

          When Grandmother sees us come,

          She will say, "O dear, the children are here,

          Bring a pie for everyone."

          Over the river, and through the wood--

          Now Grandmother's cap I spy!

          Hurrah for the fun!  Is the pudding done"?

          Hurrah for the pumpkin pie!

          --Lydia Maria Child

 

Technical Glitch, Your Blog Service May be Effected

 Here at Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout we are experiencing technical difficulties that make posting new blog entries extremely difficult.  For nearly a week your techno idiot proprietor has been struggling with the inability to use and cut/copy/paste functions.  My mouse is not working so I can only use my keyboard and and touch screen.  This means that posts must be typed in and formatted directly in the Blogger editor and not just pasted in from an original Word document.  For long posts that is very time consuming especially if I have to also type the whole document in Word to save for my archives and possible future use.

Your service will not be interrupted if you access our daily post by links from my Facebook timeline or from any of the Facebook groups where I frequently share content.  Going into Thanksgiving and the launch of the Annual Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival I will post blog entries from earlier entries.  

Hopefully the issue here will be soon resolved to make new original posts and up-dates and edits much easier.  Thanks for your patience.

Remembering the Real Alice With Arlo Guthrie's Classic

 

 

Note--The Annual Murfin Winter Holidays Music Festival on this blog would usually kick off with this hippie/Thanksgiving talking blues.  But Alice Broch, the inspiration for Arlo Guthrie's classic Alices's Restaurant died last Thursday at the age of 85 in Provincetown, Massachusetts.  A life long rebel and nurturing mentor, her warm presence was at the heart of Arlo's comic ramble.  So we remember her.

 

The Thanksgiving Song of Baby Boomers was Alice's Restaurant, which WFMT  in Chicago obligingly plays each Turkey Day.  Plenty of ageing hippies cue up their venerable vinyl, dig out a CD or even pop in ancient cassette tape into a surviving player.  Some them will even know how to find it apps and mysterious platforms.

Arlo Guthrie, the son of legendary Woodie Guthrie and modern dance teacher Marjorie Mazia, was only 18 years old at Thanksgiving in 1965.  He was trying to stake out his own identity independent of the long shadow of Woody, who was already hospitalized in the last stages of Huntington's Chorea.  He was away at college in far away Montana while acolytes, notably Rambin' Jack Eliot and Bob Dylan sat by his Dad's bedside and appropriated his musical mantle.  Arlo was bored and restless at school.  He was playing and singing around campus and local coffee houses but had no reputation of his own when he decided to hitch hike back East for a possible last visit to his father and to settle into communal living in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

 

The Hippie Thanksgiving feast at the old church in Stockbridge as seen in Arthur Penn's 1969 film Alice's Restaurant.
 

He attended a joyous holiday feast in the old church building where he and many others were crashing, Alice Brock, the former librarian of a boarding school in town that Arlo had attended, and the proprietor of a new counter cultural restaurant, supplied most of the food.

After dinner Arlo and a pal, loaded what described as "half a ton of garbage" into a ramshackle truck  to take it to the town dump which they found closed for the holiday weekend.  Not knowing what to do, the pair simply dumped their load in a ravine just off the road, not uncommon then in much of America found a letter addressed to Arlo in the mess, he arrested jim, took him to jail and charged him with illegal dumping.  He was convicted by a Justice of the Peace, fined, and ordered to clean up the mess.

 

All of which Arlo did  with more or less good humor, amused that he was now a convicted criminal for what he called littering.  By the end of the decade many hippies, swept up in the emerging ecological movement, including Arlo himself, recognized that the offense was far more serious  than it seemed at the time  But that was all in the future.

Arlo in line for his induction physical.

 

Having dropped out of college and losing his student draft deferment, Arlo was called up for induction into the Army while the Vietnam War  was raging and being drafted  had serious, even fatal consequences.  Arlo showed up for his induction physical with no real plan for what to do and a cheeky, irreverent attitude.  The scrawny kid who had a good chance of inheriting his father's fatal genetic condition somehow passed.  Then his record turned up and he was rejected as unfit for military service as a result of a criminal record consisting solely of one conviction.

 

All of which Arlo described in detail in a rambling 18 minute story song, Alice's Restaurant Massacree which he began to perform at his small gigs around the Northeast.  Boston WBAI Public Radio host Bob Fass got a hold of a tape of the song from a liver performance and played it repeatedly on his overnight broadcasts.  It became an instant word-of-mouth countercultural phenomenon and led to Arlo being signed to a major record label--Warner Bros, which released the song as the entire A side of Arlo's debut album Alice's Restaurant in 1967.  It became an instant classic.  Two years latter in 1969 director Arthur Penn adapted the song into a movie with Arlo playing himself.

 

Arlo quickly became a major star on the folk/pop festival and concert circuits.  He performed Alices's Restaurant  at almost every performance until the end of the Vietnam War made it less relevant.  He also realized, "I would never sing the song to a virgin audience again"  He stopped performing it by the mid-'70s and resisted all pleas or demands that he do it. 

 

Arlo shortly before his retirement.
 

Eventually, he decided that he would include it on the the 10th anniversary of the song. Then he revived it for the 30th,40th, and 50th anniversary tours.  His last public performance was at his annual Thanksgiving concert in 2019.  After the Coronavirus pandemic cancelled his planed 2020 farewell tour and a series of stroke impeded his ability to walk  and play guitar up to his own standards, he announced he would no longer book  any new shows.

Meanwhile, there is an active campaign to have Arlo named to the Kennedy Center Honors.  A lot of us geezers think it is well desrved.

Greenback Party Flourished and Faded But Their Platform Finally Triumphed

 

The Greenback Party logo was rather charming.

On November 24, 1874 a new political party was born at at a convention held in Indianapolis,  Indiana.  They called themselves the Independent Party. In some states they would first appear on the Ballot as the National Party.  But within months the new party was widely known as the Greenbacks while they grew at an astonishing rate challenging the entrenched Republican and Democratic Parties.

The party was formed out of frustration with both major parties as the powerful Eastern banking interests demanded that the Federal government stop issuing paper money and return to the issuance  of currency to themselves.  Federal paper money, popularly called greenbacks, had first been issued under Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase to help finance the Civil War.  Inflation had been the inevitable result.

The banks and conservative hard money politicians in both major parties wanted not only to stop the government printing presses, they wanted to require that bills be redeemed in specie--gold.  that would create instant deflation.  But farmers and others who took out loans in inflated dollars would be required to repay the full face value plus interest in much more expensive new currency gold.  This alone would wipe out many farmers and small businesses.  It was also a blow to Western mining interests by demonetizing silver coinage.  Silver coins would continue to circulate but notes--printed currency--would have to be paid in gold.

 The banks got their way with the passage of the Coinage Act of 1873.  Facing ruin, borrowers and their soft money supporters in both parties organized to challenge the banking oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

Within months the new party was established  and running candidates under various names in most states.  Although its greatest strength was in the Midwest and West, it also found support among small farmers in the South and Northeast.  In fact, with Democrats and Republicans fracturing mainly along the lines of the Civil War, it looked for a time like the Greenbacks were the only truly national party.

The Species Payment Restoration Act of 1878 completed what the Coinage Act had begun.  It  limited remaining outstanding greenbacks in circulation to $300 million and the Secretary of the Treasury was directed to "redeem in coin" legal tender notes by January 1, 1879.

                                        A poster for 1876 presidential candidate Peter Cooper of New York.

In 1876 the new party nominated the distinguished but eccentric 85 year old Peter Cooper for President.  Cooper was an industrialist who had built the first practical locomotive in the U.S.  He was also a philanthropist who founded Cooper's Union, a college open to students of all economic classes, and religious, racial, or ethnic backgrounds.  For decades he had been  a leading voice in liberal New York politics.  The party knew it had no chance of winning the Presidency, but the prestige of Cooper led to success in getting on the Ballot in most states and helped elect local office holders.

The Greenbacks crested in the off-presidential year 1878 when he elected 13 members of Congress.  Thomas Ewing, Jr. of Ohio, a pre-war Kansas Free Soil leader and a post-war soft money Democrat, was the leading spokesman for the party in Congress and the most widely known and influential public figure.

In 1880 the party broadened it base and attracted new support from industrial workers  in the Northeast, especially the politically savvy Irish, by adopting a staunchly pro labor platform which advocated a progressive income tax and the eight hour day.  It also made a bid for the support of middle class reformers, previously primarily Republican, by endorsing women's suffrage.  The rise of the Grange Movement mirrored Greenback popularity with its original Farmer base.
 

                 James B, Weaver of Iowa was the Greenback standard bearer in 1880.

The Iowa's James B. Weaver.  He received 305,997 popular votes, 3,3% of the total.  It was the high water mark for the Greenbacks in presidential election.

Despite the continuing popularity of their core demand--the return to a system of government issued currency detached from gold--in some areas the party began a decline.  The middle class reformers never did abandon the Republicans in any significant degree.  Southern Democrats gained as Reconstruction ended and their seized state governments from Black Republicans and fusion or pro-Union Whites leading to the Jim Crow Era.

The press of both Republicans and Democrats fiercely attacked the Greenbacks as a collection of dangerous and nutty extremists.

Meanwhile, the Knight of Labor largely collapsed following the Great Railroad Strike of 1877 and the rising craft union movement was both conservative and actually hostile to mass industrial workers greatly weakening their political power and influence.  The Irish returned to being Democratic loyalists in most big cities.

Back in Indianapolis the 1884 party convention nominated Benjamin F. Butler for President.  Butler also received the nomination of the even smaller Anti-Monopoly Party.  As sitting Governor of Massachusetts, Butler was a polarizing figure in American politics.  A pre-war Democrat, Buttleer was a political general famous for his occupation command of New Orleans and his order to treat "disrespectful" ladies as "women of the streets plying their trade."  He later commanded the Department of Virginia where he refused to return run away slaves that reached his lines to their masters declaring the refugees were "contraband of war."  He was also widely suspected of corruption.  Elected to Congress after the War he became a leading Radical Republican and one of the managers of President Andrew Johnson's unsuccessful impeachment prosecution in the Senate.

 

The nomination of Benjamin Butler former Union General and sitting  Governor of Massachusetts--and reputedly the ugliest man in American politics--killed the remaining support of the Greenbacks in the South.

Butler's presence on the ticket, despite a Mississippi running mate, virtually killed  the Greenbacks in the South.  As head of the ticket he won only 177.090 popular votes, just 1.7% of the total.  The party was also reduced to just two seats in Congress, one of them taken by former presidential candidate Weaver.

By 1888 local party apparatus around the country collapsed.  Only eight delegates showed up for a nominating convention.   The gave up and went home.  The party was essentially dead--but not their ideas.

In the 1890;s a new Populist Part took up most of the core platform.  The Populist's first presidential candidate in 1892 was the last Greenback in Congress--Weaver again.  In 1896 fiery Nebraska orator William Jennings Bryan got the nomination of both the populists and Democrats, campaigning on the old Greenback demand of the free coinage of silver and an end to the de facto gold stnadard

The Maiden Flight of the China Clipper Was Romance of the Air

 

Note--Technical problems here at Heretic, Rebel, a Thing to Flout world headquarters delayed this post and may continue to disrupt service until your scribe and editor and get some damn thing fixed.

She was without a doubt the most famous--and romantic--single commercial aircraft ever to take wing, an icon of a shrinking world, and an honest-to-God movie star in her own right.  It all began on November 22, 1935 when the Pan-Am World Airlines China Clipper lifted out of the water of Alemeda, California with a cargo of air-mail bound for Manila in the Philippines.

Heavily laden with cargo and fuel the mighty four-engine Martin M-130 struggled to gain altitude.  A scheduled loop around San Francisco for the befit of the press and newsreel cameras had ti e scrubbed and pilot Edwin Musick realized he could to get over the San Francisco-Oakland Bridge then still under construction so he dramatically flew under the span.  It was a risky start bt the plane was on her way.

It was epic, arduous, and took seven days with lay-overs for fuel and to rest the crew at Honolulu, Midway Island, and Guam.  Setting down in Manila Bay her cargo of 110,000 pieces of mail was cause for national celebration.  The Clipper was soon in regular scheduled service and carrying passengers.

Pan-Am President Juan Trippe following flight progress on maps and a globe.

 The flight was a long time coming.  It was the vision Pan-Am founder and President Juan Trippe, a swashbuckling Wall Street investor turned aviation entrepreneur.  After earlier forays into the infant industry, Tripp founded the Aviation Corporation of America which opened Latin American air mail service with a flight from Key West to Havana in 1917 with Musick at the controls.  He saw the future of international commercial aviation was in flying boats and put Pan-Am's resources into helping develop and put them into operation.  With planes like the Sikorsky S-42 which made Trans-Atlantic service feasible.  With well-established routes to South America, Africa, and Europe Pan-Am was the unofficial U.S, flag carrier.  Trippe turned his gaze East.

But Asia was far Away and regular service would require new, larger, and more powerful aircraft.  Trippe commissioned a new plane from the Glen L. Martin Company of Baltimore, Maryland.  The builder designated the new planes as the M-30 Martin Ocean Transports--all-metal flying boats with streamlined aerodynamics and four Pratt & Whitney radial engines.  The planes could accommodate 36 day or 18 overnight sleeper passengers and carry a flight crew of 7 plus cabin attendants for passenger service.  Three of them were built for Pan-Am.

The China Clipper was the first one built and was test flown on December 30, 1934.  It was delivered to the airline fleet on October 9, 1935.  Her sister ships were the Philippine Clipper and the Hawaii Clipper.

Meanwhile Tripe sent Musick, now Pan-Am's senior captain on two flights in a Sikorsky @-42 to scout routes to the Philippines and from Manila to China.  Musick was then one of the most famous aviators in the world holding more the 10 world records for long-distance and flying boats.  He was also by far the most experienced pilot in world having racked up nearly two million trans-oceanic air miles.

Captain Edwin Musick was the most experienced global pilot and had personally scouted and laid out the routes of the China Clipper.

With the route laid out, Musick was the easy choice for senior captain on the inaugural flight.  The rest of the crew were also respected veterans and included First Officer R.O.D Sullivan and navigator Fred Noonan, later famed for doing the same duty on Amelia Earhart's doomed round the world flight.

Weekly passenger flights across the Pacific began in October 1936 with the Hawaii Clipper.  Connecting service from Manila to Hong Kong began in 1937 using S-42 with the Clipper class Martins taking over that leg a year later.  All three Martins flew these routes but in the public's eye they were all China Clippers.

 

A lobby card for Warner Bros. 1936 China Clipper starring Pat O'Brien, Hmphry Bogart, Henry B. Walthall, Ross Alexander, and, of course, the China Clipper herself.

Public fascination with the Clipper was so high that Warner Bros/First National Pictures rushed into production a film aptly named China Clipper staring Pat O'Brien as a thinly disguised Trippe who was single-minded and ruthless in his aim to establish trans-Pacific service no matter the cost.  The turgid melodrama was noted as an early non-gangster role for Humphey Bogart as a safety conscious pilot at odds with his boss but saved the day by flying the plane safely through a storm and into a mail contract.  The movie used newsreel and stock footage of the real Clipper including a clip of Edwin Musick flying under the bridge.

The China Clipper was featured in other films including the 1937 comedy Fly-Away Baby and the 1939 adventure Secret Service of the Air and was referenced in others.  Much later Alec Baldwin portrayed Trippe in the bio-flick of his rival Howard Hughes in The Aviator.  She also figured in radio serial and popular pulp fiction.

The China Clipper and her sister aircraft and two crew of that inaugural flight all met disastrous ends, a reminder of how dangerous long distance air travel still was in even the most advanced planes.

On January 28, 1938 Musick and his crew of six died in the crash of the S-42 Samoan Clipper near Pago Pago, American Samoa, on a cargo and survey flight to Auckland, New Zealand.  A few month later in July the Hawaii Clipper disappeared between Guam and Manila with the loss of nine crew and six passengers and Amelia Erhart's twin engine plane vanished somewhere over the Pacific with navigator Fred Noonan on board.

The Philippine Clipper survived a Japanese air raid on Wake Island, an event depicted in the 1942 moral boosting film Wake Island.  Pressed into war-time service with the Navy along with the China Clipper, she was lost in January 1943 between Ukiah and Boonville, California on a flight from Honolulu killing Pacific submarine force commander Admiral Robert H. English and 18 others.

 That left the original China Clipper as the sole survivor of the fleet.  Released from Navy service she was assigned to the inaugural flight of Pan-Am service between Miami and Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo via Rio de Janero.  The plan was attempting to touch down at Port of Spain, Trinidad with an inexperienced pilot at the controls under the supervision of a veteran captain.  After aborting one approach the pilot misjudged his altitude and came in nose down hundreds of yard short of his designated landing zone.  The plane's hull smashed on impact, took water, and quickly sank.  All 28 on board were killed.

I'm surprised the History Channel has not had a breathless Curse of the China Clipper feature, or maybe it has.  But no mystery curse or cover-up conspiracy is needed--aviation was still that dangerous over vast distances and violent storms.

Trippe would go on to lead Pan-Am for decades introducing more innovations like  the Boing 747, the workhorse of international aviation.  He died in 1981 at the age of 81.  Mercifully, he did not live to see the ignominious failure of what had been the world's premier airline a decade later.

 

Grim but Fading Redletter Aniversary Rolls Around Again

 

New Yorkers hastily gobbled up extra edition newspapers.

Note--The Event that was the pivotal shock to the Old Man's shrinking cohort.

November 22.  For members of at least a couple of generations  I don't have to say or write anything else.  You know.  The date and the event are etched in your memory.  If you were sentient in 1963 the moment you heard the news is so solidly implanted in your memory that you can recall every detail--the cast of the light, the muffled sobs and wails, even the smell of the autumn day 61 years ago.

November 22, 1963 was, of course, the day President John D. Kennedy was shot while passing the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas, Texas in an open car with his young wife, resplendent in pink, sitting beside him.

 Moments before shots were fired a smiling J.F.K. and his glamorous wife Jacqueline rode in the open car behind Texas Governor John Connolly and his wife. 

I am not going to relate all the details.  You know them.  Nor am I going to sort out the 1,354 or various conspiracy theories which have been put forward.  Most of them are ridiculous.  A few are compelling.  The official Warren Commission Report was as full of holes as Swiss cheese. and the Congressional investigations since then have at best given us a glimpse "through a glass darkly."  The absolute truth, if there is any such a thing, will probably elude us.

In one of the most memorable moments in television history CBS anchor Walter Cronkite removed his glasses as he delivered the somber news the President had died.  Many who rushed home from school or work saw it live.

It is enough to know that a young President, in whom so many of us had cast great hope, was killed by some vague unknowable Them who wanted him dead.  That hope, merited or not, by the flawed individual was crushed. 

It is the stuff of Legend.  Two hundred years from now operas, epic poems. or whatever form heroic art takes shape then, will  imbue the event in magic and dignity.

Yet right now, this is still particularly our day.  It owns us inescapably.

Many rushed to buy the special hard bound Kennedy memorial Life Magazine edition that included photos of the funeral and kept it for decades.

But for my own grown children it is only a historical event.  Their stomachs do not flip with the remembrance.  They acknowledge it without understanding it the way we acknowledged  December 7, 1941--the single stark moment in our parents' lives.  For them September 11, 2001 the pivot of history.

Much attention was paid to the President's grave at Arlington National Cemetery with it Eternal Flame.  Extreme weather conditions and government shut downs have extinguished the flame briefly.  The bodies of the President's two infant children--Patrick and Arabella, were re-interred on the site at the request of his widow.  Later his brothers Robert and Edward as well a Jacqueline herself were added to the plot.

 And as for my grand childeren...well it just another day in the walk-up to Thanksgiving and the Christmas season.  They hardly know who John Kennedy was.  The never heard of Lee Harvey Oswald.  If reminded, they may grunt a foggy awareness.  But it is no more real to them than the Peloponnesian Wars.

 

In Crisis Bards Step Up--Poets in Resistance Again at Tree of Life

 

In more than 55 years of justice activism I have endured dozens of political losses and a handful of satisfying wins.  My motto, oft repeated, has been "suffer, grieve, suck it up, look to the long arc of justice, go back to work, and battle again."  But the morning after the election I was stunned and shattered as never before.  I could hardly comprehend the catastrophe that befell us.

I couldn't find that resilience that morning.  Not only did all hope feel lost, but my perhaps naive faith in the essential decency of the American people was crushed.  Those that I love and care for seemed to be in immediate danger, but I was too paralyzed to respond.

But by Wednesday morning I slapped myself silly and told myself to snap out of it and get back to work.  But how can a semi-decrepit old relic really help out?  My marching days are behind me and, as I pointed out in one poem would be useless except a part of the barricade.  Then it hit me I'm going to bring back Poets in Resistance!

 

The Old Man reading at the original Poets in Resistance program at Tree of Life UU Congregation in 2017.

 

Previously I organized and hosted Poets Against the War at the old Congregational Unitarian Church in Woodstock during the run-up to the war in Iraq in 2003 and the original Poets in March 2016 as Donald Trump was rolling-out his disastrous and threatening first term agenda.  It was one of the most successful public programs hosted at Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry drawing a packed house.  Poets in Resistance II was scheduled  for March 17, 2020--the day the whole country went into lock down because of the Coronavirus pandemic.

 

I was inspired by a quote from novelist Toni Morison:

This is precisely the time wen artists go to work.  There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear.  We speak, we write, we do language.  That is how civilizations heal.  I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.  Like failure, chaos contains information that can lead to knowledge--even wisdom.  Like Art.

And I wrote in the call for poets for the original Poets in Resistance:

This was as good a time as any to revive the tradition of poets as prophets of their people, defenders of the oppressed, champions of justice, and fearless voiced ready to speak truth to power.  Such poets and such poetry might just be the voice the now needs to be heard, might be relevant enough to be dangerous.  And dangerous is what he have to be.  Worth a try, anyway.

Some folks might say that a program like this is mere preaching to the choir.  It is far more than that.  It rallies us and brings us together in mutual aid and solidarity.  It builds associations and assures threatened communities that they are not alone, and that they have sanctuary and support of Tree of Life.  And in the Red corner of a Blue State it pits our oppressors that we will not surrender to tyranny.  That's important work.

Poets in Resistance Again will be held just days before the inauguration on Saturday, January 11 from  7-10 pm at the Tree of Life Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 5603 Bull Valley Road in McHenry.  A call for poets will go out soon along with more details.  Spread the word.  

Contact Patrick Murfin at pmurfin@sbcglobal.net or call 815 814-5645 for more information.

Holding Transgender Day of Remembrance as a Light for the Ostracized and Despised

 

Note--For a year when fear stalks the transgender, gender non-conforming people as well as their families and circles of loved ones as never before, it is important to take and give solace today.  This post is updated from previous versions.

Maybe because their names and faces get lost in the grim glut of crime reporting. Maybe because no one knew their story—or their secret.  Maybe it’s because the Guardians at the gate want to protect our tender sensibilities.  Maybe it’s because outside of “those people” no one cares.  Or maybe it’s because some see a kind of rough justice acted out on the streets and prefer to let it go on as they used to whistle-by-the-graveyard the dark at lynchings that kept Black folk in their place.

Globally according to the FBI's Uniform Crime Report for 2024:

Attacks based on Gender Identity Up 16% from Prior Year, Those Based on Sexual Orientation Up23%...More than 1 in 5 hate crimes are motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias....that there were 2,402 recorded incidents relating to an alleged victim’s sexual orientation in 2023, up from 1,947 the year before, and 547 relating to an alleged victim’s gender identity, compared with 469 the year before. The gender identity category included 401 instances that were specifically anti-transgender and 146 that targeted someone who was gender nonconforming....For the second year in a row, more than 1 in 5 of any type of hate crime is now motivated by anti-LGBTQ+ bias.

 

The actual numbers are likely higher.  There is no uniform reporting of crimes against trans and gender-diverse people ranging from those who have completed surgical reassignment, those who identify with a gender other than the one assigned at birth, those who embrace gender ambiguity, cross dressers, and drag performers who may be perceived as trans regardless of their orientation.  Many police reports identify victims only by their genitals and, especially in urban, crime plagued areas, most murders not involving children, multiple victims, white, or prominent victims are poorly covered by the press.

Levels of violence have risen in the United States but there is anecdotal evidence that the general rise of intolerance and hate crimes fostered by Donald Trump, his Republican Party, and semi-hysterical right wing Evangelicals has disproportionately affected those who are identified as Transgender, especially Blacks, Latinos, and other minorities due to the double-whammy of the rise of White Nationalism.

Haters respond to none-to-subtle cues from Republican state legislators and right wing media.  The last Trump Administration tried to define transgender identity “out of existence” and erase civil rights protections for LGBTQ+ people.

More state laws now narrowly defining gender as a biological, immutable condition determined by genitalia at birth and more are coming  in the effort to roll back recognition and protections of transgender people under Federal civil rights law. 

 

Street demonstrations demanding safety and justice respond to the right-wing backlash against Trans rights and escalating violence.

The Trumpist Justice Department rescinded Obama era protections for Transgender individuals in prison despite irrefutable evidence that placing prisoners in general populations based solely on birth genitalia is an open invitation to assault, rape, and even murder—precisely the outcome former Attorney General Jeff Sessions had in mind.

Meanwhile those red state legislatures worked over-time on their own attacks including ludicrous Bathroom Bills, removing protections of trans students in schools, and blocking or stripping out existing inclusion in hate crime laws.

Black Trans women are over-represented by percentage of the population among American crime victims.  Often tenuous and sometimes strained relations between activists in the Trans, Black, Gay, and feminist communities have sometimes stood in the way of common action and protest.

The International Transgender Day of Remembrance had its origin with the murder of Rita Hester, transgender African-American woman murdered in Allston, Massachusetts on November 28, 1998.

Like so many memorial days do, an outpouring of community grief and anger led to a candlelight vigil held the following Friday, December 4 with 250 people in attendance.

 

That vigil inspired the Remembering Our Dead web project and the International Transgender Day of Remembrance.  Gwendolyn Ann Smith, a transgender graphic designer, columnist, and activist helped organize the first public vigil in honor of all victims the next year in San Francisco in November of 1999.

Since then, the observation has spread across the world. 

The Unitarian Universalist Association, Tree of Life UU Congregation in McHenry, and Prairie Circle UU in Grayslake vigorously support Transgender rights.  Many congregations will participate in vigils, marches, and demonstrations today and/or have special worship services.

Many local, national, and international organizations now participate in and promote the Day of Remembrance.  I am proud to say that the Unitarian Universalist Association and the Side of Love Campaign have played a leading role.  Many UUA congregations dedicate some part of their services this time of the year to the memorial.