TO SIGN OR NOT TO SIGN

A US Census lady knocked on my door over the weekend and asked very few questions compared to what were asked during the 2010 or 2000 census. After recording names, sexes, and birthdates of people who lived at my address on April 1st, she came to the inevitable race question which went something like: did I consider myself Hispanic? I told her I’m human; so is my wife, and that’s all she needed to know. With that she said she was all done and got up to leave.

Surprised, I asked her what the federal government would do with data about race if I had identified myself as belonging to one of its categories. She said would have had more questions if I had identified as “white.” She would have asked about ethnicities like Irish or Italian, but since I declined to racially categorize myself or my wife, she stopped. There were no questions about religion, occupation, or citizenship status — the kind of data useful to historians studying trends. Perhaps she knew I was a retired teacher, but wasn’t aware that I still work. We live in the same town and I know her and her family.

Government at all levels is obsessed with discriminating between people based on skin color or ethnicity, and has been for as long as I can remember. Decades ago I stopped cooperating. When encountering ubiquitous race questions on official forms, my habit is to draw in a box, label it “human” and put a check it. While distributing state testing forms in my public school classroom, I suggested to students that they could do the same. Many did.

Obsession with race is getting worse. At the University of Southern Maine in Portland — a state institution — president Glenn Cummings recently asked all students and faculty to sign a “Black Lives Matter Statement and Antiracism Pledge.” He intends to publish a list of everyone who signs it, and that, by process of elimination, would also become a list of those who did not sign it. Would they then be subject to sanctions or harassment?

What about students and faculty who, while recognizing historical oppression of blacks in America, disagree with BLM’s anti-capitalism or its inherent Marxism? How about those who object to a pledge by BLM’s Greater New York president Hawk Newsome that: “If this country doesn't give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it”? Or how about those who disagree with Chicago BLM organizer Ariel Atkins who said BLM rioters looting stores were justified because: “That is reparations. Anything they wanted to take, they can take it because these businesses have insurance.”

The University of Southern Maine pledge states that:

We stand in solidarity with those who are working for justice and change. And we invite you to join us in pledging to be a practicing antiracist at the University of Southern Maine and in all aspects of your life. We believe, as Ibram Kendi writes, that "the only way to undo racism is to constantly identify it and describe it — and then dismantle it.”

Never having heard of Ibram Kendi, I did searches on him. His latest book is: How To Be An Antiracist. About it, Christopher Caldwell contends in National Review:

Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

This is dangerous rhetoric. It assumes that “systemic racism” is a real thing — that if you’re white, you were born with “white privilege,” as well as inherent racism against so-called “people of color.” If you don’t sign pledges like the one USM President Glenn Cummings urges you to sign, if you don’t kneel during the national anthem, if you don’t constantly proclaim that you’re not racist, you might as well proclaim that you are. The USM “community” will no doubt see you as such.

USM is a state institution. It’s supported by our tax dollars and it shouldn’t be pressuring its students or faculty to support political positions, much less radical-left ideologies like those espoused by Black Lives Matter. Along with almost all levels of government, USM is obsessed by race. We would all do better to insist there is only one race — the human race — and no subsidiaries exist.

PORTLAND CITY HALL HOMELESS ENCAMPMENT

“I have nine children with nine different women,” said Richard Cox, 56, who also said he is a former Army Ranger and has been homeless for a year. He, along with Aaron Porter, 24, were assigned to me as trained press liaisons for the homeless encampment at Portland City Hall on Congress Street. Aaron told me he has been homeless for eight years but both men preferred to call themselves “unhoused.”

Press liasons Richard Cox and Aaron Porter

They were attached to me last Friday after I took some pictures near the medical tent and asked questions of the volunteers there. One got on a walkie-talkie and pretty soon Richard and Aaron showed up. We went around the corner on a side street so my digital audio device didn’t pick up traffic noise or screaming obscenities from “residents” like the two women near us were delivering with incredibly-loud voices. 

Gray stains on pavement are dried urine

The “unhoused” encampment has grown on the steps of Portland City Hall and on the sidewalks in front of and beside the impressive stone edifice for almost two weeks. It would be more accurate to describe the building as a formerly-impressive edifice as it’s now covered with stains of dried urine, tents, trash,  sleeping bags, canopies, and people sleeping or walking around. How much more the encampment grows may be determined by a Portland City Council meeting scheduled for Monday, August 3rd.

Aaron and Richard told me no one is working in the building since Covid and are instead working from home. However, the Portland Press Herald reported that City Hall closed for business the previous Monday because staff felt unsafe. Walking around the encampment, I was reminded of what's happening at the other Portland on the west coast and in Seattle where leftists took over whole city blocks.

A large, prominent, professionally-printed sign on the sidewalk declared: “Our Demands,” which included: “DEFUND THE POLICE” and “EXTEND EVICTION FREEZE.” Another sign said: “HOMELESS LIVES MATTER.” That called to mind the Black Lives Matters protests there few weeks ago accompanied by violence and looting. Protesters included organizers like African refugees Hamdia Ahmed and Abdul Ali. Later, someone named Abdikareem Hasan was arrested for firing several shots into the nearby Portland Police Station parking garage.

Abdikareem Hassan

Leaving Richard and Aaron and walking carefully up the steps of City Hall, I squeezed between tents and sleeping bags, some with crashed-out people in them. There was dried urine all the way to the top and I couldn’t avoid stepping in it. I pitied people in tents on the lower steps and on the sidewalk as the urine would, of course, flow down to them, especially when it rained. I was glad not to see, or step in, any excrement, however.

Urine stains on City Hall steps

In one kiosk, I saw a list of people to whom donated tents, sleeping bags, soap, XL women’s diapers, kids’ clothes, and many other donated items had been given. There were written directions conspicuously posted explaining when to administer Narcan for those who overdose. 

“Housed” people were arriving regularly to drop off items that were requested on still another list. Everything visible, except for the people, was donated from the outside. This was clearly kept going by others who wanted political visibility.

Press liaisons Richard and Aaron wore walkie-talkies on their belts and were periodically called to quell disturbances. A Paddy Wagon with blue lights flashing on the next block took people to the police station or to the Cumberland County Jail where I had been volunteering for four years until the pandemic closed it to employees and inmates only.

Preble Street Resource Center

Also closed down by government overreaction to the virus was the nearby Preble Street Resource Center. It had provided all the services to the homeless now being delivered at the City Hall encampment and more. That seems a foolish decision considering that those camping at City Hall and in Deering Oaks Park aren’t socially distancing and few wear masks. There were also toilets at Preble Street. Paradoxically, it seems the “unhoused” at the encampment don’t have to live in donated tents because city officials have said homeless shelters at Oxford Street and at the Portland Expo are operating at only half capacity.

Portland Police Chief Frank Clark reported that shots were fired at the encampment on Saturday. The whole thing seems a political stunt to this writer and US News said it's organized by something called the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition,” I did several searches for it and only came up with a Facebook page. Links from there led me to national, leftist sites with LGBT, socialist, and communist links. The Portland Press Herald, however, has not dug into the “Maine People’s Housing Coalition” or its affiliates.

Is Portland, Maine being plagued by the same leftist forces now ruining the other Portland on the west coast? It would seem so.

Recognizing Talent And Lack Of It

Lots of talent goes unrecognized. After Tom Brady played what was probably his last game as a Patriot last Saturday, most believe he is (was?) the best quarterback ever, but few saw that talent early in his college career. Coach Belichick saw it though, and it has paid off handsomely for football fans all over New England. It’s been quite a run for Patriots, but it couldn’t last forever.

Maine's Dave Mallett

Often I’ve observed musicians playing locally who are very talented, but had to continue struggling with small gigs here and there while working other jobs to support themselves. I’d see others on television with great notoriety but lacking the talent locals demonstrated. How did they gain widespread fame when the locals were unknown beyond a fifty-mile radius? Marketing? I suppose it’s all good so long as the performers and those listening are enjoying themselves. 

Museum of Fine Art Boston

There are those to whom talent is ascribed but who seem totally lacking in it. Wandering through art museums, for example, one must question the judgement of curators who display absurd objects purported to be “art.” As a boy, my mother would take my siblings and me into Boston to the Forsyth Dental Clinic where fillings and braces were free. Some days I’d have hours to kill and I’d spend it at the Museum of Fine Arts just across the Fens. Most of what I saw was amazing work but in other stuff I could discern no artistic merit. At only eight or ten years old, I knew it was junk.

Alleged Art at MFA Boston

It’s been a half century, but I see about the same proportion of art and junk hanging at the Portland Museum of Art today. A fine museum, it has collections by truly great artists including Winslow Homer, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Claude Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and many others. And then there’s alleged art by others whose names I cannot recall because I am profoundly unimpressed when viewing their stuff. I felt they were trying to con me. As a kid I trusted my instincts — never thinking, as some others did, that there must be something there I just wasn’t bright enough to see.

Are art “experts” only pretending when they claim to see talent others cannot? Are they like the adults who pretended to see beautiful clothes on the emperor? In that iconic children’s story, the tailor who created the emperor’s “clothes” knew he was a con artist, but the emperor and his subjects on the street who watched him process in the nude didn’t trust their instincts. When they pretended to see beauty, it was out of fear of being seen as stupid because they couldn’t see what they believed everyone else could.

And then there are poets. No doubt there are many talented ones out there, but I’m not sure they comprise a majority. All through elementary school, high school, and college I was encouraged to “appreciate” many different poets. Some I actually did appreciate, but not many. As an undergraduate I had a leftist professor of English who declared Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” the best poem of the age. Drifting leftward myself in those days, I tried hard to see the genius he insisted was there, but never could.

My parents sent me to a Catholic prep school in Lowell, Massachusetts when Lowell native and writer Jack Kerouac was at the height of his fame. Several times I tried to read his books, but just couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. I quit reading after about forty pages into three or four of them. Seeing a drunken Kerouac in 1968 on William F. Buckley’s PBS program “Firing Line,” didn’t impress me either. That Allen Ginsberg and he were close friends only made it worse.

Ginsberg and Kerouac

Very recently, however, I got another insight into Kerouac from an unlikely source. On the 50th anniversary of his death, The American Spectator did a tribute to him. A quote: “On the Road was really an autobiographical expression of Kerouac’s longing and searching for something — that something was God. Historian Douglas Brinkley, the editor of Kerouac’s diary, reported that nearly every page carried a prayer, an appeal to Christ for mercy, or a sketched crucifix. ‘Kerouac was trying to make everything holy,’ said Brinkley.

In its obituary, the New York Times quoted Kerouac from one of his last interviews in which he declared: “I’m not a Beatnik, I’m a Catholic.” Uncomfortable with his literary fame and its cooption by sixties leftists, his drinking got worse. It killed him in 1969 at 47. Lately I’m seeing Kerouac as a conflicted soul who, if he had been able to reconcile his tortured life with his understanding of God and achieve sobriety, might have displayed a more authentic genius than the world had hitherto witnessed.

Happy Indigenous People's Day!

Santa Maria in Portland Harbor

What struck me most about the Santa Maria was how tiny she is. A replica sailed into Portland Harbor last month and I paid ten dollars to go aboard and look around. More astonishing still was remembering that the Nina and the Pinta — the two caravels sailing with the Santa Maria — were even smaller. There’s only one enclosed space on the biggest ship, and that was where the captain slept. Its fifty-two crew members slept on the open deck of the 117-foot ship, only going below with the cargo when the weather was bad.

Good Columbus

Americans my age were taught to revere Columbus for his intrepid maritime leadership sailing across uncharted waters, holding a mutinous crew together, and discovering what we call America. Now school children are taught that Columbus was a money-grubbing, European, white guy who slaughtered and enslaved innocent Native Americans who only wanted to help him and his men. When Democrats took over Maine government in 2018, they abolished Columbus Day and ordered Maine citizens to celebrate “Indigenous Citizens Day” instead.

Bad Columbus

Not only that, schoolchildren are now taught that Columbus was too dumb to know he had bumped into two previously unknown continents and thought he was in the Indies. So, he called the people he found “Indians,” and they continued to be called that for the next five centuries until progressives insisted they be called Native Americans. Whenever I meet someone who is a real American Indian and looks nothing like Senator Elizabeth Warren, I ask whether he or she wishes to be called Indian or Native American. So far, all have said, “Indian.” Next time I’ll also ask: “How about calling you ’Indigenous Person’?” but I think I know what the answer will be.

In light of all this, I wonder if I should be wishing people “Happy Indigenous People Day” over the weekend in Maine, and “Happy Columbus Day” in New Hampshire since I’m so often driving back and forth across the state line. Will automobile dealerships in Maine be putting on special Indigenous People’s Day Sales? Is it now illegal to sponsor a “Special Columbus Day Sale” over here on Maine’s side of the border?

Since no drawings or plans of the original Santa Maria exist, we cannot know how closely the ship I explored compared to it. All I can say is that it represents the closest guess of what it probably looked like based on other ships in use at the time. I have to wonder if the Spanish crew members knew about what happened in Maine when Democrats returned to power. Would they have sailed right on by Portland if they knew?

Portland Progressives demonstrate

I didn’t see any left-wing demonstrators down there on Commercial Street while I was touring the ship and it doesn’t take much to get them cranked up enough to staple signs to sticks and march down the street chanting. I expected the arrival of Columbus’s ship would have been enough to turn them out. Doing research for this article, I learned that a replica of Nina sank last April in Corpus Christi Texas, but the articles I read said nothing about foul play and the ship was eventually re-floated.

The City of Portland had earlier (2017) abolished Columbus Day before the whole state did it in 2019 but I don’t recall seeing any Indigenous People celebrating the new holiday and I’m often there during the second Monday of October. Come to think of it, I never saw any Spanish Americans or Italian Americans (Columbus was Italian) celebrating when it was called Columbus Day either. I do see people celebrating other holidays like the 4th of July, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, but those last two are threatened by progressives as well. The Pilgrims, after all, were also white Europeans. Progressive groups are now claiming that Thanksgiving is “celebrating ongoing genocide.”

And of course, Christmas has been under siege by the left for decades now. Public schools no longer mention the word, calling it “Winter Holiday” instead. People paying homage to political correctness are hesitant to say, “Merry Christmas” outside their own household, wish people “Happy Holidays.” It all makes me wonder: what’s next? Labor Day? The diminishing number of unionized workers still marks the occasion but most of our populace gives it a big ho-hum.

Memorial Day is celebrated and we’ve all known soldiers who have died in recent wars. That holiday should be safe, and Veteran’s Day too. Martin Luther King Day? It’s still relatively new so I guess it’ll be okay for a while. I have come to believe most Americans care much more about getting a paid holiday off from work than whatever it is that day is supposed to commemorate.

It’ll be up to the Spanish now to decide whether they’ll pay future voyages of the Santa Maria to Portland, Maine.

I'm Harassed And Assaulted Wearing A MAGA Hat

Young man who knocked the hat off my head

It’s dangerous to wear a MAGA hat in liberal cities like Portland, Maine. Remember when the left appealed for tolerance of their views on social and political issues? Well, many have become most intolerant of conservatives — sometimes violently, as I personally learned at Portland’s “First Friday Art Walk” last week.

Jahagir Turan beaten in Manhattan last week

A quick online search reveals several instances here, here, here, and here over the past two years in which people were physically assaulted for wearing MAGA hats — including a Manhattan man who had his face smashed in last week, but the incident was ignored by mainstream media. With all this in mind, I put on a MAGA hat and walked down Portland's Congress Street during that city's monthly event.

Artists selling their wares filled the sidewalk from the Museum of Art to Monument Square. My wife agreed to come if she could walk twenty feet behind and pretend not to know me. Along the way, I saw several stylized paintings of breasts and “Buteruses,” short for “Beautiful Uteruses.” Another woman sold T-Shirts proclaiming “F**K ICE” and “F**K THE POLICE.” I asked questions of several artists who were happy to discuss their work. Some, however, looked at my hat and answered through gritted teeth.

At the Art Walk in Portland

Two men walking by and nodded approvingly. Other people elbowed each other and pointed at me. A small group in Monument Square held up a large piece of canvas with the words: “Say No To Racism!” I walked around them as they stared at my hat. It was much the same on the return trip until a young black man snarled, “Why you wearing that hat? You shouldn’t be wearing that!” But he kept walking in the opposite direction so I proceeded on.

On Congress Street last Friday

There were more dirty looks from artists and passers-by until I got back to the intersection with High Street. In front of the Museum is an open triangle on which several artists had set up. A young man there said he admired my courage and took my picture. Then dozens of people applauded as a group of 20-30 demonstrators marched by with signs proclaiming “MAINE JEWS SAY CLOSE THE CAMPS — NEVER AGAIN IS NOW” and “ABOLISH ICE!” and “STOP FAMILY SEPARATION!” I went to the curb and took pictures.

On Congress Street last Friday

Back at the triangle, I saw the young black man had returned. In a more civil tone, he asked why I was wearing the hat. I said I liked Trump’s policies on immigration, his judicial nominations, his handling of the Middle East, the economy — until someone shouted: “What’s your job?” I said I was a retired teacher. “What did you teach?” I told them US History. “So you know about US History?” said the young black man. Yes, I said. “Trump hates people like me!” he responded, getting hostile again. “You shouldn’t be wearing that!”

Looking at my hat

Seven or eight others behind him, all white, joined him saying loudly, “Trump is racist!” I asked them what evidence they had. A young woman said Trump called white supremacists in Charlottesville “fine people.” I said Charlottesville began as a demonstration against removing statues honoring soldiers who fought for the South, but the angry group wouldn’t let me finish. Several shouted at once: “He’s racist! He raped women!”

What the left sees when looking at a MAGA hat

As they loudly berated Trump and me, I asked if I could photograph them. “No!” they said, except for the young black man. He extended his arm with his middle finger out and said, “Go ahead.” I snapped the picture, then noticed our audience had expanded. The black man got more hostile and said, “You can’t wear that hat! This is my city! I told him I watch the news, form my own opinions, and I have a right to express them just as others do — and this isn’t your city. He clenched his fists and pretended to rush me. Another man appeared at my side and told the young man to “cool it.” Still another said, “You’re saying that because he’s black! Why don’t you tell me to cool it? Because I’m white?”

At that point, the young black man knocked the MAGA hat off my head and ran off down Free Street. I put it back on and turned around to face the crowd again. Some apologized for what he had done. Others got more civil at first but soon resumed shouting at me. I offered counterpoints whenever I could though I doubted I would change any of their minds. But others were watching and listening so I calmly stood my ground.

My wife, however, looked very worried and asked me to leave but I wanted to continue. I parried verbally with the hostiles a little longer until she pulled my hand and whispered in my ear: “Those children are getting scared.” Behind her were three kindergarten-aged kids sitting on the curbstone who looked at me wide-eyed and upset. That bothered me more than my opponents did. A man, their father maybe, watched over them.

Once more my wife pleaded with me to leave, so I did, promising myself I’d return next month — wearing my MAGA hat again, of course.