IGUANA
empty in peach sun
above the beach
morning drinks at the guru beach club
for world travelers rich enough to afford luxury
our terrace awakes to mango pudding heat and hummus humidity soaking rich and poor in mexican majesty or yucatán misery
swimming with the lizards isn’t for everybody
survival depends on the lizard
TURTLES
you couldn’t see them at first but they were out there
bobbing helmeted heads
riding the tide
ancient surfers from faraway lands a thousand miles away
swimming toward edgy earth to accept Ixchel’s help
in choosing a mate
connecting in cosmic unity
giving birth to new life that awakened in sifting sand before crawling slowly with baby turtle steps back to the sea
SATORI
my first drink off the menu brought mescal and pepper salt
to cracked dry lips
a welcome drink at the guru beach club bar
ah, good, sings a brown-faced jack kerouac diety in a song sung by a black messenger bird
sand seeker suckers at the bar don’t hear jack’s melody
i whistle back
through pineapple passion and lime juice spit
wetting my whistle to share knowledge I know
but not too much
no guru should know too much
until the time comes to order another cocktail rimmed with
hot pepper salt and a double shot of
enlightenment that comes served in a big glass
Maya moon goddess Ixchel guards the entrance to Punta Sur.
Giver of life to humans and nature, she protects women above all, offering refuge on this island of women from pirates who plunder at their own risk.
Marauders die.
Ixchel lives.
Giving birth to purple rainbows, our mighty ancient diety gives us love when we most need her warm embrace.
Fierce when necessary, directing floods and storms, Ixchel punishes mad ravers who betray kindness.
A sea turtle sits atop her head. Other times a snake decorated with human bones wraps around her head and neck. Claws shape her feet. Holding a fertility fish, she brings nourishment and breath to the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula where we walk softly the sacred land of our earthly existence.
Surrounded by dancing palm trees, pristine white sandy beach and an aquamarine lagoon bordering the Caribbean Sea, I told the bartender where I was from.
“Scranton, Pennsylvania,” I said.
The deeply tanned young woman’s eyes immediately lit like burning turquoise gemstones glistening in the afternoon Mexican sun.
“No,” I said before she could respond. “Don’t tell me.”
“I love ‘The Office,’” she said, accommodating me in fluent English and digging into instant common ground we suddenly shared as strangers in Isla Mujeres, a tiny tropical island off the coast of the Yucatán Peninsula.
As far as she was concerned, idiot characters Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott from the American TV show are my lovable loser first cousins.
The next day, our guide for a tour in a golf cart — golf carts and scooters are ubiquitous on the island — picked us up at the Lotus Hotel with a smile offset by a brain loaded with local lore, history and deep cultural facts.
“Where are you from?” he wanted to know.
“Pennsylvania,” I said.
Blue eyes fired on all cylinders.
“Scranton?”
In a weird moment better suited for “The Twilight Zone,” another addictive American TV rerun, I knew I couldn’t escape the brand that shadowed my existence like a bad prison tattoo inked on my face.
“Somebody in the hotel told you,” I said.
The grin widened.
Nobody told him.
Sad to say, “The Office” now defines Scranton as the center of a nitwit universe populated by Dwight, Michael, Jim, Pam, Kevin and other imaginary friends who make the best of a dull and mundane life in my hardscrabble former coal town built by immigrants and their descendants who deserve better than a facetious comedy to label who and what we represent.
Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti actually endorses a plan to make the city more “walkable” that includes utilizing “The Office” as a theme. Jeff Speck, the urban design planner and a Boston-based business called Nelson\Nygaard pocketed $239,800 in Scranton’s American Rescue Plan Act funds for a “study” that suggests and encourages placing statues of show characters throughout the city, resulting in what Speck called “a downtown rebirth of a magnitude that cannot yet be imagined.”
Speck spoke with a straight face.
“I think maybe you’re a little proud and you don’t want this to be your world image. I’ve got news for you,” Speck told the public last year when he and Cognetti unveiled their bubbleheaded plan. “It is your world image. And people love it and they love you because of it. And I think it’s a mistake to not hitch your wagon to the star and do something about it.”
I’d prefer hitching the wagon to Speck’s dorky vision so Cognetti (if she ever regains her intellect) can drive him and his asinine advice back to where he came from. I seriously urge the mayor to rethink her misplaced exuberance for foolishness and refuse to pay the publicly-funded consulting bill. Instead, Cognetti should loudly berate the carpetbaggers’ incompetence for even suggesting we showcase our tough still-struggling town as an insulting sideshow attraction that turns hard-working ethnically and racially-mixed people into an international laughing stock.
Instead of Scranton shining on the world map because of our proud yet painful anthracite mining history, a past that still defines countless Scranton families including my own, a history of sacrifice, hard labor and achievement, Scranton looms synonymous with a harebrained television show.
Reviewers call the NBC mockumentary cringe-worthy and sarcastic – in too many ways the definition of Scranton community leaders who embrace contemporary cool rather than ancient coal in all its gory glory.
No one should fault our Mexican friends or anyone else for enjoying the show. The laugh’s on us. Ha ha. But stamping Scranton’s seal of approval with trademark tomfoolery and wallowing in its frivolity is like slinking into a VD clinic and asking for more disease instead of penicillin.
To make matters worse, rather than evolve with Mexico’s bold tradition of resistance and revolution, Maya brilliance and breath-taking natural environmental beauty, young Mexicans and who knows how many others globally embrace American pop culture at its worst with Scranton targeted as ground zero.
To our golf cart guide’s credit, his first stop included a three-paneled pastel color wall mural showing scenes from the Mexican Revolution that showcases women rebels, Zapata and Pancho Villa all cradling rifles above ferocious national emblems of the snake and eagle that mark Mexico as a powerful civilization.
I told our guide about the goofy Dwight Schrute wall mural near the National Bakery in Scranton. But I shamefully kept quiet about “The Office” cast mural that takes up another whole building wall in the heart of Scranton’s business district.
I had already related to the hotel bartender my personal experience with Rainn Wilson who plays Schrute in the show and how I once reached him on his cellphone when he blew off attending a local party with all the other stars of the “beloved” production. The bartender stood in awe as I described Wilson as whiny and incensed by my call, demanding and failing to find out where I got his private phone number and ordering me to never call him again.
I also told her about the recent foot race where 1,500 runners from across the country and the world flocked to Scranton to dress like their favorite “Office” character and run or walk down streets and past sites featured in the show that isn’t even filmed in wannabe hip Scranton but in too hip California.
“‘The Office’ used Scranton,” I said.
Only one other force of power and influence has used Scranton as much if not more. That singular dynamic phenomenon with hooks deep into Scranton’s roots is Joe Biden, a buffoonish caricature in aviator shades and an ice cream cone hat who even has a new city street and nearby expressway named after him.
Our golf cart guide wanted to know if American voters will choose Trump or Biden in the November presidential election. How did this bright young man who flew a Palestinian freedom flag from his golf cart perceive a doddering American president getting sucked deeper and deeper into the Israeli genocide in Gaza he supports, enables and helps with taxpayer-funded bombs?
Good question, señor.
I later pondered his inquiry as our United Airlines flight home detoured presumably because of bad weather in the southeastern part of the United States. Our pilot hugged the Gulf coast east of New Orleans, cruising over Biloxi, Mississippi, Mobile, Alabama, La Grange, Georgia and other onetime hotbeds of slavery, heading north through the Confederacy American rebels are convinced will rise again as a beacon of conservatism in the land of cotton.
How do narrow-minded antebellum-brained right-wingers perceive “The Office,” Scranton and “Scranton Joe” who makes more and more of his “hometown” Scranton birthplace each day as he crisscrosses America begging for re-election votes? Like Trump, endless Dixie rednecks still hate Blacks, Jews, women, immigrants, queers and blue-belly Northern elites like Biden. Do you think the average gumbo bar bouncer, shrimp fisherman or abused single mother serving beer in a hillbilly bar watches “The Office” reruns on days off and will vote for Biden?
Official Biden surrogates like Cognetti might unwittingly be doing Biden more harm than good as she cheers for “The Office” and Biden at the same time. The mayor better search deeper than the shallows of Biden loyalists’ minds for meaning as she sings along when Dwight Schrute and Michael Scott warble, “Ain’t no party like a Scranton party ’cause a Scranton party don’t stop.”
If voters turn on Biden, the party’s over.
On Thursday night, home in Scranton at last, I headed downtown for a tomato and basil pie. Standing outside Buona Pizza I watched a guy across the street take pictures of “The Office” mural. He snapped a shot, turned slowly in an aimless circle, snapped another and rotated in the other direction. Then he stood staring into space like he forgot where he was.
No, it wasn’t Joe Biden.
On second thought, maybe it was.
you have too much, señor
we do not have enough
we will share with you what we have
If you’re appalled by Columbia University students occupying an iconic New York City campus building made famous by ’60s anti-war student protest, patriotic thoughts of the Boston Tea Party must terrify you.
Columbia protestors broke a few windows in their continuing demonstrations against the Israeli/American genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Tea Party insurrectionists rallied revolutionaries across 13 colonies to stand against tyranny.
Proud student radicals at colleges and universities across America now confront a tyrannical police state and the American-made extermination of tens of thousands of civilian men, women and children.
Aging and gray at 73, yet as committed to the rising as ever, I stand with rebels past, present and future. Half a century ago as a young counterculture guerrilla in my nation’s capital, I, too, faced off against armed riot cops and the power of the Establishment.
Revolution is always worth the struggle.
In my flashback a personal political epiphany mingles with acrid pot smoke and poisonous tear gas burning my eyes. It’s November 14, 1969, a chilly Friday night in Washington, D.C., when normally refined DuPont Circle boils over with turmoil and violence.
I’m 18 years old.
The Vietnam draft is eating up male teenagers very much like me who die in thick, humid jungles in a corrupt and apocalyptic South Vietnam. Mostly white long-haired radicals smolder with tension amid rumors of troops heading our way. National Guard soldiers with loaded rifles patrol in troop convoys. We’re rocking with unrest.
To confront pungent CS chemicals in the air I do need a weatherman to tell which way the wind blows.
I had started classes at the Pennsylvania State University two months earlier, “on my own” for the first time in my life. Max and Gary, a couple of non-college buddies with whom I played varsity sports in high school, drove from one part of the rural Keystone State to another in State College for the weekend to hang out in my dorm room, smoke weed, drink sweet Bali Hai fruit wine and drop little purple pills of $3 organic mescaline.
Mike and Brian, two other freshmen from the fourth floor of Beaver Hall where my peers had elected me floor president (I got thrown out of the dorm early the next year after a drunken fist fight), crash the party waving a poster advertising a massive anti-Vietnam War demonstration a good four-hour drive away.
Like Grace Slick and Jefferson Airplane urge on their new album, “Got a revolution, got to revolution.”
When we pull into the nation’s capital packed into Max’s boxy Ford Falcon, the crowd surrounding us on all sides is so massive traffic freezes. A ragtag radical civilian army advances with purpose none of us knew existed as we pile out of the car and stare.
Raucous unfamiliar chants of “Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh, NLF is gonna win” erupt, pounding echoes in our brains. We’re too naive to understand the roar for the National Liberation Front as an endorsement of President Richard Nixon’s foe in America’s unjust war, the North Vietnamese army and the Viet Cong killer guerrillas. We heard little about that enemy back home when Rich and Bing and Danny and Larry returned to the world traumatized from the war or when little Mike Wright was the first boy on our block to come home in a box.
I refused to go to Mike Wright’s viewing at the tiny town firehouse, instead choosing to drink beer on another friend’s front porch on High Street in Duncannon, PA. A guy who passed the house said even laying in his coffin dead in his Army uniform, Mike’s smooth young face looked peaceful, like he was sleeping and not dead. The mourner said somebody told him the piece of shrapnel that pierced Mike’s heart was as thin as a sewing needle.
Red, yellow, black and green banners snap and wave in the cold wind. Giant papier-mâché heads bounce up and down, freaky carved political puppets alive and dangling from poles as budding tribes of untamed natives howl “YIPPIE” and race deeper into menacing carnival streets that grow insanely intense.
Jumping up and down in faded blue jeans, a white T-shirt and tan desert boots with no socks, Brian keeps a lit Marlboro dangling from his lips. Brian loves life, plays primitive blues piano, dances alone to Van Morrison and harmlessly flirts with any young woman who dares smile at him. Brian never saw anything like this scene.
None of us have.
Mike, Brian’s Bucks County roommate from Yardley, PA, pounds on the car roof screaming, “Holy shit, holy shit.” Chilly as it is, Mike’s dressed in the same uniform he wears to class in all weather – black loafers, no socks, blue jeans, white T-shirt and a thin brown suede jacket – that carries him through college to the day he graduates with two degrees. Transfixed, Mike rushes the crowd like a fullback spotting a hole. Mike’s a go-getter for better or for worse.
Knowing there’s no going back, I follow. Slung over my shoulder I carry a blue gym bag containing a pen and a spiral notebook as I dive deep into the first breaking news story I assign myself to cover as an aspiring journalist. A seething sea of protesters swallows Max’s Ford Falcon that disappears in the madness.
Brian vanishes.
Max and Gary fade away.
I’m wearing a thick orange turtleneck sweater I borrowed from Dean who lives in Beaver Hall. He and his roommate are the first Jews I ever met. Despite my rural white upbringing, I made friends with two Black guys from Philly, too. College expands our horizons. The threat of dying in an unjust war does too. My uniform for the uprising includes blue jeans, brown Dingo boots endorsed on TV by celebrity football star Joe Namath himself and a heavy blue Navy peacoat through which I can feel my beating heart.
Tear gas accumulates in clouds hanging above the trees, ripping into our eyes, tearing our vision and burning our nostrils, slapping us into an altered state of consciousness that’s far scarier than three-dollar mescaline. Desperate, moving hard and fast across DuPont Circle, Mike and I spot the red neon sign of a bar and push our way inside like scarred street commandos escaping enemy captors through the open doors of rebellion. We’re experts now, a new generation’s raw electric eyes to an insurrection in a city preparing for a mobilization of up to 750,000 people who oppose our government’s cruel war in Southeast Asia.
“What’s it like out there?” asks an excitable Establishment type.
Holding out the lapels of my thick coat, I say, “Take a whiff of this, man.”
Turning away from the stinging, clinging gas mist nobody will mistake for Jade East or Hai Karate cologne, he quickly backs off. Mike and I offer knowledge like Fidel and Che just back from the Sierra Maestras, regaling our privileged inquisitors with mind-blowing urban warfare observations that portray us as more important and seasoned than we are. We’re the center of attention and dig it, but soon tire of the scene. We need the harsh fix of broken glass in the gutter. Groovy gawkers want superficial news. We crave action.
“Thanks for the beer,” I say to a man with skin that matches the pearl onion in his martini who told us he was a reporter with the Associated Press as he seemed to call in his story from the black bar telephone.
“They don’t like us,” I tell Mike when we split, heading back the block to DuPont Circle.
“They’re afraid of us, too,” he says.
We laugh, a couple of tough, naive white, male teenagers with college deferments we didn’t even ask for, flush with Budweiser and the jangled nerve endings of our live wire night playing full blast in our heads like the run-through-the-jungle Credence song roaring from vibrating speakers on a psychedelic jukebox.
We quickly see the cop mob but don’t meet them head-on until they charge and are on top of us – dozens of D.C. riot cops in Samurai-like battle helmets rushing the two of us as soon as we get halfway across the park, brandishing dark clubs that shine like blue-black bruises beneath bright yellow street lights.
Agile and strong, Mike and I take off fast among a screaming horde that continues to chant, wave VC flags and scream anti-war slogans. Mike trips over a wire mesh trash can almost as soon as he turns and goes down hard, bellowing curses with cops swarming, dragging him to his feet and pulling him into the night. Crowd chants pound in my head as I sprint looking for a getaway and keep running, dropping my blue gym bag and scribbled notes until I’m almost out of the park – trapped in a city circle of concrete, dirt, grass and white toxic mist with frenzied cops in masks closing in fast, ready to crack open my skull because I chose an academic education over shooting my VC peers in a rice paddy or dying for my country in ‘Nam or coming home unhinged for the rest of my life – all in the dysfunctional spirit of America, land of the free and home of the knave.
A shiny black Buick sedan stops quickly along the curb, the left back door flies open, a woman screams, “Get in,” as I lunge headfirst into the back seat and pull the door closed. The driver slowly pulls away, calmly steering into the outer rim of traffic that continues to move forward despite the riot.
“We have a son your age,” the woman says before her stern, silent husband pulls to the curb at the next corner. I thank them for saving me, get out and head back to the bar where boozy bourgeoisie keepers of the kingdom locked the door and refuse to let me in even though they recognize me through the window. I’m fast learning the unwritten rules of the new American Revolution. Protesters survive at their own risk in this ruthless, predatory society where money, privilege and access mean everything.
Dazed and confused I ask tensed stragglers on the street where I can crash. They direct me to a row house on a nearby side street where I sleep on the floor in my clothes and don’t talk to anybody who’s stretched out near me. I’m stunned, a little freaked out and angry, but I keep the anarchy to myself. In the morning I still don’t talk to anybody. Turning up my coat collar I walk alone, following the crowd, moving deep into a maze of tall gray government buildings where thousands of insurrectionists and militants gather in a bright November sun.
Weathermen, the Mad Dogs and other small insurgent groups now lay siege to the main Justice Department building. Rocks and bottles smash through office windows. Tear gas again fills the air. Cops manhandle and arrest anybody they can grab, including mostly peaceful protestors. Uncertain soldiers grip rifles in fear. I keep my distance and remain nonviolent.
I’m a good kid, a good citizen and a good piece of cannon fodder to sacrifice in a brutal, shabby war. Other than experimenting with drugs, drinking and driving drunk, I usually obey the law.
Night falls.
The air turns cold as I make my way through huddled masses gathered around the Washington Monument. Blue white lights sparkle like my ice blue Aqua Velva aftershave lotion. My legs hurt. I feel abandoned in my own country. Over and over I yell, “Penn State, Penn State, anybody going to Penn State?” hoping to make a connection and get one long lucky ride back home.
Nobody responds.
I walk past the brightly-lit Lincoln Memorial and onto a wide street. I stick out my thumb. Why I think I can hitchhike 200 miles out of Washington on a winter night is a good question. After freezing for about a half hour, some redneck in a car throws a bottle at me. Glass smashes on the street. My thumbs are numb. Like countless draftees in far worse circumstances, I don’t want to fight but will if I have to.
Survival sometimes embodies rage.
A car filled with demonstrators stops. About an hour later I awake in a stifling hot backseat as they speed into the darkness and I realize I’m almost headed in the wrong direction on a black and barren interstate. They back up and let me out as I walk into the empty abyss.
Tired and needing sleep, I have no choice but to keep moving. Eighteen-wheelers roar by close enough to touch as I turn my back to protect myself against frigid wind and thrown gravel. My feet hurt. My face and ears hurt. I need shelter. A speck of light in the distance guides me over the guardrail, down a steep embankment and through a field. The spotlight gets brighter as the glow finally outlines a barn and a farmhouse. I find my way, step up onto the porch and knock on the door.
A man my father’s age answers. I apologize softly for bothering him so late at night. I tell him where I’ve been and ask if I can sleep in his barn. I look like everything farm-fed America is supposed to fear and hate. The man asks me inside. His wife wants to know if I’m hungry as she quickly prepares a hot homemade meal from their supper leftovers and gives me apple pie for dessert.
We don’t talk politics. I am what I am. They are who they are – God-fearing, law-abiding Americans helping a young wanderer in need and leaving an impression that lives with me forever. They make up a bed for me on the couch and I sleep soundly beneath a soft handmade quilt. In the morning the house seems deserted. I put on my boots quietly and go into the sun-filled kitchen looking for a pen to write a thank-you note. I lost my pens and notebook the night before when I dropped my gym bag in the unprovoked police attack. The farm couple’s son who looks to be my age appears out of nowhere and tells me his parents have gone to church. I thank him deeply, borrow a pen and paper, write a note to his mom and dad and head back to the highway in the golden light of a new day that puts me back at Penn State by dinner time.
Mike greets me like a returning war hero when I spot him in the back of the dining hall and we race to embrace. We tell our tales. The cops let him go when Mike lied and said he was a stringer for the Associated Press. God bless the First Amendment.
When I come home from school the following weekend, my father asks if I was the hitchhiker a friend of his saw walking the previous weekend by the river near the turnoff for our small town where the Appalachian Trail runs down the middle of the main street.
Yeah, I say.
“Why didn’t you stop and see your mother?” he asks.
“It’s a long story,” I say.
“Don’t ever do that again,” my dad says.
I promise I won’t.
The following spring, on May 4, 1970, on the campus of Kent State University, 28 Ohio National Guardsmen open fire on a group of student anti-war demonstrators, killing four and shooting nine others, one of whom a bullet permanently paralyzed. We don’t have to go to Vietnam for soldiers to kill us. Our own troops can easily shoot us on campus and slaughter us at home. We can die as volunteers of America.
My Pennsylvania State Police officer father eventually shows up on Penn State’s main campus in riot gear as part of a massive state police contingent assigned to secure the sprawling university grounds where students take over Old Main, the lofty administration building.
I’m getting radicalized all by myself.
Unlike before, I refuse to promise my dad not to do it again.
America today still needs all the nonviolent rebellion we can get. Violence might be inevitable. But peace is always the answer. For resistance and liberation to prevail and succeed we need to protest and question authority. We need to speak truth to power and hold powerbrokers accountable. We need to take it to the streets.
I long ago internalized those lessons of war and peace.
As always, time marches on.
Mike is living in Connecticut, enjoying the good life as a wealthy conservative businessman and grandfather who voted for Trump. His college roommate Brian died a few years ago, his sweet song disappearing into the heavens where his harmless innocence lives among the clouds.
For whatever the reason, Max didn’t talk to me at our 50th high school reunion in 2019. And after countless acid trips Gary became and remains an evangelist preacher who recently delivered the eulogy at a national cemetery for another high school friend, a Marine who survived Vietnam and led a local chapter of a notorious outlaw motorcycle club but succumbed to pancreatic cancer. Pastor Gary’s eyes met mine from a distance, but we didn’t seek out each other to talk.
After more than half a century of fighting the system, I’m still pushing political revolution as a good citizen and outlaw journalist who fights garbage corporate media as much as I fight the rest of elite mainstream politics.
Our rising’s mutinous message is as clear as the words a young woman recently shouted into the bullhorn outside the General Dynamics ammunition plant in my hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania – President Joe Biden’s birthplace.
“Biden, Biden, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide.”
America’s president should know better. If Democrats lose control of the country to Donald Trump or worse waiting in the wings, they’ll have nobody to blame but themselves.
From Scranton to Columbia to Gaza and beyond, our endurance empowers our mission.
We have the right to petition government for redress of grievances. We’re here to assemble and hold you accountable whether you like it or not. We don’t need permission to challenge your betrayal of humanity. We owe it to the whole world that is still watching.
So look what’s coming up the street.
“We are volunteers of America,” Jefferson Airplane’s national anthem defiantly declares.
“Got a revolution.
“Got to revolution.”
As parched Palestinian children drink poisoned gutter water, U.S. Sen. Bob Casey sips and savors a refreshing strawberry milkshake.
Dressed in a dull gray blazer, preppy slacks and a white open-necked shirt, Pennsylvania’s privileged candidate for re-election clutches his frozen treat like vintage TV show “Happy Days” character Richie Cunningham on a malt shop date.
The senator’s wife, Terese, snuggles under his left arm slung 50s sock hop style around his steady’s shoulders. In a childish celebratory gesture Pennsylvania’s lackluster senator raises his plastic lidded cup with a straw sticking from the top.
Yet, these are not the “Happy Days” of yore.
Terese is neither Laverne nor Shirley from another hit 70s comedy spawned from “Happy Days” and Casey is definitely not Fonzie, the super-cool, charismatic show character other guys want to be. No, Casey is Laverne and Shirley’s upstairs neighbors, goofy duo Lenny and Squiggy all rolled into one, squeaking their trademark “Helllloooo!” and bursting through democracy’s door like a mope.
If the man hometown Scranton Democrats affectionately call “Our Bobby” wasn’t so deadly, he’d be nostalgic sitcom material. Casey continues to oppose a permanent ceasefire in Gaza and stands firmly with the Israeli genocide he votes to continue, an intentional final solution and human extermination plan that has killed more than 40,000 men, women and children, more than 15,000 of whom are children. Millions of displaced Palestinians, shell-shocked and desperate to live, continue to seek shelter where the rubble meets the road.
Casey occasionally takes to the open road himself.
“Hey everybody, we’re on our road trip,” Casey says in a current online re-election campaign commercial. “I’m here with my wife Terese at the Soda Jerk which is, as you can see, a great diner here in Hummelstown.”
I can hear Lenny and Squiggy now.
“Hellllooo!”
“We had a great lunch,” Casey says in the campaign ad raising his cup so starving kids in Gaza can see how lucky he is. “I got a strawberry milkshake.”
Milquetoast Casey, 64, is as excited as you ever see him.
“Terese, you had?”
“I had a root beer float,” she says.
Okay, maybe Terese does have some Laverne and Shirley in her as the duo runs arm-in-arm down the street in the show opening chanting, “Shlemiel, Schlemazel. Hasenpfeffer Incorporated.”
“That’s pretty good,” Casey says of his date’s soda fountain selection.
“It’s good,” Terese says.
“It’s a fun trip and a great place,” Casey says. “We’re grateful for the service here and grateful to have this group. Good food.”
Without explaining what group he’s talking about (maybe some Israeli lobbying outfit or white phosphorous bomb manufacturing corporation), Casey again rubs in his good fortune and raises his cup in another toast.
Good times.
Good food.
Good God, has this man no heart, no compassion, no empathy for his mortal sins?
Giving Terese a self-serving squeeze while Gazan children eat leaves Israeli jets haven’t yet blown off the remaining trees or force down bread baked from animal feed, our shameless three-term senator grins a waxy grin that matches the cheap wax on his cup.
Pretty bad, Senator, not pretty good.
Does this Zionist tool have any idea how godawful his silly, oblivious behavior looks? Does his normally sanctimonious Catholic piety extend to countless murdered babies buried among the bomb craters? Does Casey forget the courageous sacrifice of countless college and university students who risk harm and arrest to stand on moral principle against the continuing Gazan slaughter in which Casey is complicit?
Talk about brain freeze. Twisting the narrative like a chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream cone, Casey blames guerrilla resistance army Hamas for everything bad in Gaza. No milk shakes for you!
Although Casey’s office has ignored my emailed questions or requests for information for a few years, I figured I’d again try to reason with him. After all, I do help pay his salary and he does represent me in the Senate where he advocates death and destruction in my name. So I sent a note to Natalie Adams, Casey’s press secretary, inviting Casey to sit down and talk.
“Since we’re Hill Section neighbors and live just a few blocks from each other he’s welcome to stop by the house for a beer,” I wrote in an email last Friday. “We can sit on the front porch and talk about the times and how they are “a-changing.”
“I met with the Senator years ago in his Scranton office and often interviewed him during the decade I hosted a talk show on WILK News Radio. We see each other regularly when my wife and I take our afternoon walks that pass his house.”
After a follow-up email, press secretary Adams failed to respond.
Of course, I realize Casey likely fears talking with me face-to-face over a cold bottle of Stegmaier or a lager Laverne and Shirley helped bottle at Shotz Brewery in Milwaukee. If my senator thinks so little of me as a neighbor, a constituent and veteran journalist, imagine what he thinks of you.
Deluded Bobby Casey might really believe he is the Fonze.
Despite the Gazan holocaust and America’s campuses seething with justifiable rage and dissent, Casey’s vision of an apple pie America force feeds voters make-believe happy days and imaginary milkshakes for everybody at Arnold’s drive-in. Meanwhile, the man protesters call “Butcher Bobby” fills his belly at the public trough and apparently sleeps well at night.
Fonzie would easily see through our phony tough guy senator. With his inimitable black leather grease and guts, the Fonze, America’s lovable bad boy biker would casually dismiss Casey with three oft-used “Happy Days” words:
“Sit on it.”
Waving both raised middle fingers above his head, the skinny young protestor widens his stance like a fearless bantamweight fighter. Wearing his pants so low on his bony hips you can see the NBA brand printed on his underwear waistband, he taunts about a dozen members of the Pennsylvania State Police (PSP) that stand shoulder-to-shoulder in the middle of Mulberry Street in downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania.
“Fuck you, cop,” the kid says, his puny voice emboldened with rage. “Fuck you, cop.”
A half block from where President Joe Biden just finished a re-election campaign rally and launched a fake homecoming tour in his birthplace, the kid joins about 50 peaceful protesters facing off against a line of all-white male staties standing tall in their trademark big-brimmed hats waiting for whatever might come their way. Two helmeted state troopers sit chewing gum on massive steeds that shit in the street, calm yet ready to gallop into any crowd if spurred on by their human masters.
“They’re abusing the horses,” the kid says, turning to me with a pitiful look. “They’re abusing the horses.”
No horse should have to face a screaming crowd in a crowded city block. But people are animals, too, and too many commando-minded cops have no problem abusing us.
“You like me, don’t you, cop,” says the protest’s sole antagonist, his wise-ass grin loaded with homophobic subtlety. “You’re looking at me. You must like me.”
A bruiser of a state police sergeant stands staring at his foe. The officer’s thick shoulders tense against a tight gray uniform shirt, his frame squared against the onslaught of insults. Built like a portable deer meat locker, the officer glares in tense silence. Hooking his thumbs into his gun belt he sets his jaw beneath the thin black chinstrap of his hat.
“Fuck you, cop,” says the firebrand with the marijuana leaf printed on the front of the black baseball cap he wears sideways on his head. “Fuck you, cop.”
The nametag pinned to the burly sergeant’s chest looks like it says “Block.” When I later inquire about the officer, a PSP public affairs spokesman in Harrisburg says nobody by that name works for PSP. Okay, maybe I read his name wrong. So let’s call him Sgt. Bad Day as in, “Are you having a bad day, officer?”
No matter which side of the Walther PDP duty handgun the Sarge woke up on, the cop has no good reason to cop an attitude with me. Dangling from my neck on a blue lanyard, my official plastic press pass says “BIDEN/HARRIS” and “PRESS & MEDIA.” Like it or not, and many political hacks at the Biden rally don’t like it one bit, the Secret Service, the White House and Biden’s re-election campaign cleared me with flying colors to cover the event.
As I move to snap another picture and take another video with my phone, Sgt. Bad Day shadows my steps. I pose no threat when I walk away from police and toward a Department of Public Works truck Scranton officials parked to close the street. Sgt. Bad Day orders me away from the garbage truck.
“I’m with the press,” I say.
“I know,” he says in a robotic artificial intelligence voice. “That’s not for the press.”
As I try to open up polite conversation he cuts me off. Bulky Sgt. Bad Day steps closer. Sensing he might grab me by the arm, I create distance by stepping out of reach. I know a threatening presence when I feel one. Escalating a non-existent conflict until he created one, Biden’s bouncer keeps walking me back in line by pushing his weight around.
I’ve been here before.
A Santa Maria cop in California assaulted me while I covered Michael Jackson’s 2004 not guilty plea for my local newspaper. When the late pervert pop legend’s fans swarmed his motorcade, I held up my official state photo ID even before I saw the uniformed city police officer coming at me. As he lunged and shoved me in the chest with both hands, I decreased the impact by stepping backwards. When he came at me again, not wanting to get arrested I jogged away from the scene. The former Santa Maria police chief later told me his officer claimed I moved toward him in a threatening manner.
Before I relocated back to Northeastern Pennsylvania almost two years later, the same police chief told me he knew I was telling the truth but decided to take no disciplinary action against the officer. Instead, the city’s top cop protected and served a bad cop.
Twenty years later, despite a continuing national epidemic of police brutality, I remain a model citizen and professional member of the press. Last week in my hometown during a presidential visit I again did my job the best I could.
Despite the young rabble-rouser’s rude, lewd gestures and fighting words, he, like me, stood in solidarity with our Constitutional right to assemble and redress grievances against our government. In case Sgt. Bad Day still misunderstands the lessons of our American Revolution, that freedom is called the First Amendment.
I have some experience in this arena. After cops arrested and charged me with a felony in 1991 for doing local journalism, I won a national journalism award for my service to a free press.
Except for Sgt. Bad Day who kept checking his watch, the state police officers who stood between the protestors and the president handled their duties professionally. I did what I was told and went were I was “allowed.” So did the peaceful protestors who trailed President Biden and his entourage through the city.
A PSP spokesman later said police made no arrests.
But I had not witnessed such an excessive mini-police state and show of armed force in a very long time. Overkill cop control is not democracy in our much touted land of the free. Armed government domination is the iron fist of an authoritarian regime.
My father, Shamus, served 34 years as a member of the Pennsylvania State Police, the oldest state police organization in the United States. He retired as a detective and one of the most highly decorated officers in the history of what he called “the job.”
Once when I was 17, I waited anxiously with my mother to hear if he got killed in the line of duty. Thankfully, the shot an escaped federal prisoner fired at his face missed when my ex-professional boxer father “slipped” the bullet when the gun came up inches from his head. Even after their shootout, my father treated his potential killer with respect, buying him a Coke and giving him cigarettes.
Over the years I sometimes thought about my dad’s attitude when, as a 4th degree black belt aikijujutsu instructor and Taihojutsu (Japanese police arrest techniques) black belt, I trained with and helped teach police and other law enforcement professionals techniques that might save face as well as lives. Under the watchful eye of my military veteran federal air marshal teacher, I stressed to all students, especially to police, that respect can sooth the savage beast. De-escalation means minimizing conflict, not acting bullheaded or wielding the power of the gun and badge with the zeal of a control freak.
I once told a training partner to smile as he employed a technique that can snap a wrist, break an elbow or dislocate a shoulder if exercised with recklessness or malice. Done properly with continuing practice the technique easily restrains an attacker. Most cops don’t train in restraint techniques. Most cops don’t practice restraint. Most cops who can’t control their emotions and try to rely on brute strength can’t even restrain themselves.
Police don’t have to cross over and join the protest line. But each time I observe sloppy, awkward and unprofessional police conduct I realize how much more we must demand from law enforcement so police will get smarter and more skilled. As pro-Palestinian protests against genocide increase nationwide, out-of-control cops run amok laying heavy hands on nonviolent anti-war college and university students, as well as journalists and others advocating human rights.
Violence begets violence.
Israel and its American government sugar daddies set the stage for their war with Hamas decades ago.
Whether you’re shooting a firearm or playing the piano, training is everything. Too many untrained cops can’t control themselves let alone play chopsticks on black and white keys.
Too many weak-minded cops also won’t like my advice.
Protecting and serving means shielding everybody — even a scrawny rebel yelling obscenities in your face. Free speech in America includes hate speech. Freedom is supposed to make system enforcers uncomfortable. Good cops understand integrity, fairness and dedication is required to keep the peace and uphold the law.
So from the bottom of my press pass, unlike my foul-mouthed inside agitator comrade, I offer this heartfelt message to Sgt. Bad Day who helped teach me how much more police officers like him need to learn about true public service:
“Thank you, cop,” I say. “Thank you, cop.”
No ticket for you!
Keep out!
No Scranton peasants allowed!
On President Joe Biden’s shamelessly ballyhooed homecoming trip Tuesday to Scranton, Pennsylvania, Biden banned the public from his rally in the heart of the city he lovingly calls his “hometown.”
While commoners pay more for milk and honey, Biden’s world is the land of silk and money
We the people need not apply.
Attendees who received an emailed invite to the event at the Scranton Cultural Center at the Masonic Hall groveled and preened like aging pheasants begging for attention at a royal petting zoo. None of the local lords and ladies seemed bothered when Biden pulled up the castle drawbridge, rejecting the unwashed masses Biden desperately needs to vote for him to win re-election in November.
Marie Antoinette, the last queen of France prior to the French Revolution who told the French riffraff to eat cake, would understand. So, too, could Biden decree, “Let them eat a Hank’s hoagie,” a starchy sandwich from Biden’s favorite Scranton shop smeared like extra mayo into his infantilized childhood memories.
White House bosses and state campaign officials credentialed me as a member of the local press, that increasingly nonaggressive First Amendment bastion upon which the populace depends for news and commentary. Scranton news media lost its adversarial bite a long time ago.
A toothless press is no press at all.
At almost 73, I might have been the oldest working journalist among a tightly-controlled sycophantic crowd that included a swarm of seemingly bored reporters representing global outlets who produced pablum reports. Still, these lackluster young clerks of fact and other dull news media types inspire me to keep the fire lit until the day I can no longer pay attention to details you won’t see anyone else report.
For example, who’s going to tell you Biden almost forgot Scranton Mayor Paige Gephardt Cognetti’s name? Within a minute or so of taking the stage, Biden’s memory went haywire, according to the official White House transcript of his speech.
“You know, thanks to the mayor, Paige C- — C- — excuse me, I’m going to — I was going to talk about the old mayor — Paige Cognetti, for that welcome. And she’s been incredible. She’s been with me all along the way,” Biden said.
Was Biden thinking of former Scranton Mayor Bill “C- — C- –” Courtright who’s into his fourth year of a seven-year federal prison sentence for conspiracy, bribery and extortion? Or was he thinking of Jimmy “C- — C- –” Connors, who does a far better job pushing his way onstage to sing “Johnny B. Goode” with whatever local band he can embarrass than he did making smart public policy as Scranton mayor.
Like convict Courtright, Connors wasn’t even in the audience. Later in the day Connors sat front row at another invitation-only private gathering at the Carpenters and Joiners Local Union 445 in South Scranton. Thank God he didn’t ask to sing.
But Jesus, Mary and Joseph, as the folky Scranton saying goes, how did Biden’s brain garble Cognetti for Courtright or Connors? Immersed in a wave of syrupy nostalgia, 81-year-old Biden goes through the motions like a melancholy octogenarian wallowing in the past while the present dissolves like a stale sugar cookie in hot milk before bedtime. Imagining the White House as a nursing home is unhealthy for America and other living things.
As I have for years, I did my best to get personal access to the president. All I asked was five minutes for a question or two. The campaign offered me Mayor Cognetti.
“Hi Stephen — unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be able to make an interview work today. Mayor Paige Cognetti will be on site at the event, and we can connect you with her,” wrote Biden Campaign Pennsylvania Press Secretary Allyson Bayless.
No thanks.
In response I asked Bayless why Biden has refused as president to grant an interview to any Scranton journalist and why the campaign excluded the public from the Scranton rally.
“Why did the campaign limit admission only to those with political connections?” I wrote.
Bayless ignored my questions.
What the Biden campaign brain trust should have organized as a welcoming return to his roots became a barbed no trespassing sign. Unless elite Democratic leaders and surrogates in Scranton and elsewhere across the country change their strategy, Biden’s fragile re-election bid will continue to teeter.
Even Mayor Cognetti willingly forsook people she was elected to represent, throwing them under the presidential limo for a chance to escort a doddering president going through his second childhood as he scrambled the real Scranton values he purports to uphold.
My grandfather emigrated here from Ireland, became an American citizen and dug anthracite coal underground as a miner for 45 years. My grandmother gave birth to 10 children in a little shingled house on Cedar Avenue. My father’s side of the family boasts four generations in this city, people who committed their lives to living and working here.
I moved in, not out. of Scranton when I had the chance. I’ve lived here for almost 20 years, twice as long as Biden. Unlike him, I’m not from here.
I am here.
Because Biden so seriously disrespected the Scranton public he barred from his speech, I suggest he stay the hell out of my city unless and until he upholds the cherished legacy of countless hardworking people who deserve better than the insult the president dropped on them when he came to town.
Scranton belongs to us, not him.