Definition and Diversity

“Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and the test of our civilization.”

- Mahatma Gandhi

A new Democratic think tank has emerged to challenge the party’s current thinking and policy ideas. The aim of the Searchlight Institute is to: “Disrupt rigidity. Think Big. Spark a Realignment.” So far, so good. Sign me up.

In an interview with Reid Epstein of The New York Times, Adam Jentleson, the group’s founder, singled out two issues the Democrats need to dial back in order to broaden their appeal: climate change and L.G.B.T.Q rights. That’s when the Searchlight Institute and I parted company.

For these are not fringe issues that have been hijacked by narrow constituencies at the expense of the broader party. On the contrary, the future of the planet and the right of each person to define themselves – both as to who they are and who they aspire to be – are foundation stones of any political movement I care to join.

The current Republican party has both caricatured and demonized these issues and presented them as evidence that the Democratic Party has been taken over by woke radicals who are out of touch with ordinary Americans. That message has been gaining traction, not only among Republicans, but also among Democrats.

It’s time for Democrats to stop accepting definitions imposed on them by their opponents and then scrambling to change their policies to accommodate the criticism. If this keeps going, the Trump administration will be soon redefining the entire country right before our eyes. Or have I missed something?

Think about climate change. The issue is too big to tackle, our politicians say. It’s global and other countries aren’t doing their share. It’s also bad for business, and Trump says it’s a hoax. And while we dither, the earth gets hotter, the oceans higher, and the storms more devastating. Some hoax.

On the other hand, we are told that the issue of L.B.G.T.Q rights is too small. Such a fuss over so few people. But this issue goes to the core of democracy, which must constantly navigate between individual rights and community values. My ability to define myself is the essence of individualism, and my neighbors’ willingness to accept me as I am is the lifeblood of community. Together, in tension, individualism and community constitute the two pillars of democracy.

Instead of reducing things to their smallest component – how many trans athletes are there in Maine high-school athletic programs, for example? (four) – we need to see them as part of something bigger. Every human rights movement – from civil rights to workers’ rights to women’s rights to gay rights – began as an assertion of identity. You will no longer define us; we will define ourselves. Over the last century Americans have broadened that sense of identity to include more and more people. Until now.

We need to think bigger, not by pandering to interest groups but by understanding the big issues that bind us together. Instead of caving in to those who would reduce climate change and L.B.G.T.Q rights to fringe issues, we need to create a vision that embraces both our unique individuality and our interconnectedness with all life. The key to this is diversity, a word that is being swiftly banished from both our politics and our language. But diversity is the link between environmental preservation and social justice, and it is fundamental to each. As the guiding principle of nature, it is our only defense against climate disaster. It is also the only way to resolve the tension between individualism and community, for it recognizes the importance of each of us in the mosaic of all of us. For in the end, how we treat the earth is nothing more than a measure of how we treat each other. 

I Dissent

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

Let me see if I‘ve got this straight.

If you live in Los Angeles, and you speak with a foreign accent or have brown skin or talk to your friends in Spanish or have a landscaping job, you can be picked up by ICE. That’s what the Supreme Court ruled Monday in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. It was, predictably, a 6-3 decision, and since it was unsigned, it’s a little hard to know exactly what the majority was thinking. The three justices in the minority, however, left no doubt about their thoughts. “We should not have to live in a country where the government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish and appears to work a low-wage job,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”

Los Angeles is a Spanish name; it translates in English to the city of Angels. In fact, the six largest cities in California all have Spanish names: San Diego (Saint James), San Jose (Saint Joseph), San Francisco (Saint Francis), Fresno (ash tree), and Sacramento (sacrament). California is the most populous state in the nation, and its name is believed to derive from Calafia, the mythic queen in a 16th-century Spanish novel.

The Hispanic community has existed in California since 1683 and has long been the state’s largest ethnic group. In Los Angeles Latinos make up almost half the city’s population and are by far its largest group. This should not be surprising because California was part of Mexico until President James K. Polk invaded Mexico in 1846. Two years later he acquired California, as well as New Mexico, Colorado, Arizona, and Nevada – all Spanish names that will undoubtedly soon be changed. Gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in the Sierra Nevada foothills just as the war was ending, and the ensuing gold rush brought 300,000 prospectors from all over the world in search of hitting it big.

I recount this brief history, which will probably soon be stricken from the Smithsonian and future history books – but can still be found on Wikipedia – to illustrate the absurdity of declaring 47% of the population of Los Angeles (probably more if you count the well-tanned residents of Beverly Hills) fair game for federal arrest on their looks alone. Although racial profiling would seem to be barred by the Fourth Amendment, and is specifically prohibited by California law, the Supreme Court appears to have upended all that in in Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo. Perhaps immigrant profiling is different from racial profiling.

While five justices were silent about their reasoning, Justice Kavanaugh offered a concurring opinion. (Concurring with what? you may ask, since there was no other opinion. I have no idea.) “To stop an individual for brief questioning about immigration status,” he wrote, “the Government must have reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the United States” – and while “apparent ethnicity alone” is not enough, it can be a “relevant factor.” He then cited as other corroborating factors the ones Justice Sotomayor listed in her dissent. As for his emphasis on “brief” stops, videos of encounters with ICE officers provide a chilling illustration of what that can mean. One commentator suggested that the reason no other justices signed on to Kavanaugh’s opinion was because they were too embarrassed to set their names to it.

Is this what has become of Dr. King’s dream?

I can think of many reasons to disagree with Charlie Kirk. I can think of no reason to kill him. This is a personal tragedy for his family and friends. It is also a tragedy for democracy.

Hubris, Control, and the Death of Beauty

"I am glad I will not be young in a future without wilderness."

- Aldo Leopold

Maybe you seek beauty in nature. If so, you’d better hurry because the United States government has a very different idea about the “value” of nature, one that has nothing to do with beauty and everything to do with control. The current administration has little interest in protecting our few remaining wild places, nor in helping us learn how to live more harmoniously with the natural world. It has but a single goal: to control nature. Only then can we quantify what it can yield, monetize it, and pillage it for profit. Forget about all the values that nature already freely provides, from climate mitigation to ecosystem services to, well, beauty.

"We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us,” Aldo Leopold wrote. “When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” – and thereby save both it and us.

America’s long tradition of protecting wild and beautiful places was codified in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson signed The Wilderness Act, which had taken eight years to get to his desk. Howard Zahniser, its foremost advocate, wrote perhaps the most succinct and poetic definition of the law’s intent: "A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain."

These days man is more like an unwelcome guest who grabs all the food and won’t leave. The Trump administration’s environmental and wilderness plans are the opposite of the spirit of the: to underfund national parks, build roads in roadless areas, clear cut old growth forests, and, of course, “drill, baby, drill” – in short, to make short-term and shortsighted economic gain the only value of the natural world.

“To those devoid of imagination,” Leopold wrote many years ago, “a blank space on a map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

Or maybe you seek beauty in museums and auditoriums, where the works of painters, sculptors, composers, and others have been distilled over time. Here, too, the role of our government is no longer to support the arts; it is to control them: to dictate what gets shown in museums, heard in auditoriums, and taught in classrooms; to ban pictures it doesn’t like and censor speech and thought it disagrees with. Here is a painting, “inspired by Rubens and Valazquez,” that Trump’s administration said proved the Smithsonian Institution is “OUT OF CONTROL.” They don’t like the subject matter.

Rigoberto A. Gonzalez, Refugees Crossing the Border Wall Into South Texas (2020)

Control is precisely the word for Trump’s agenda. Control nature. Control the arts. Control education. Control information. Control the Fed. Too often we focus so intently on the economic aspects of Trump’s policies that we overlook the cultural and spiritual wasteland they foreshadow. When the Nazis gained power in 1933, Joseph Goebbels immediately took over the news media, the arts, and information, and he turned them into propaganda to control the people. He could not see beauty; he could only see power. That is what’s at stake here.

Today, in America, the idea of beauty as a value in its own right – whether in nature or in art – has vanished from the public conversation. It is being removed from museums and bulldozed from the landscape. It is surely not a coincidence that ugliness and meanness of spirit now flourish in its place. For beauty is not ephemeral to our lives, nor to our communities; it is essential to the nourishment of our souls.

One Man’s Dream is Another Man’s Nightmare

“I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

- Martin Luther King, Jr., August 28, 1963.

August 28th, 2025. Today is the 62nd anniversary of the March on Washington. Of all the events I have missed in my life, this is the one that saddens me most. Instead, I had spent that summer with two high-school friends laying pipeline across the Jicarilla Apache Nation Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. It was a summer job before our freshman year in college, and we couldn’t wait for it to be over.

Meanwhile, 250,000 people of all colors and walks of life, from across the country, arriving by car, bus, and on foot from across the country, gathered at the Lincoln Memorial to protest for (for, not against) freedom and jobs. The last speaker of the day was a 34-year-old Baptist minister named Martin Luther King, Jr., who gave the most important speech of his life, which has forever after been known, simply, as “I Have a Dream.” (You can watch it here.)

Warren K. Leffler

Although I did not know it at the time, I had not completely missed that speech, for on a freezing weekend in February, Dr. King had come to a small boys boarding school in central Massachusetts and, in the course of that visit, had spoken to the school’s students, faculty, and neighbors, giving what turned out to be an early and still-unpolished draft of what he would later say in August. Those words changed me in ways I’m still discovering.

While King’s speech was the centerpiece of the March on Washington, there were thousands of others who made the day happen. Most importantly, perhaps, and least remembered, is a man named Bayard Rustin, one of the great organizers of his time.

Bayard Rustin was a living definition of diversity. Black, gay, a pacifist, a Quaker, and one courageous human being. He was absolutely committed to non-violence and had persuaded King to do away with armed guards, despite the constant threats on his life. Rustin was not visible at the march because Sen. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina outed his homosexuality on the Senate floor, but he handled all security matters.

“Bayard was absolutely adamant that this was going to be a peaceful day,” recalled Joyce Ladner years later, “and all the press, before we planned the march, was virtually hysterical, you know, that they’d have to call in the National Guard, that if all these black folks came to Washington, there would be riots. And Bayard was determined that not only would the march be peaceful, but that it would go beyond that, that it would police itself, and that it would be absolutely non-violent” (State of Re:Union (Dec. 3, 2010) called “Bayard Rustin – Who is this Man?”, recently discovered by my daughter Gayley).

For weeks, Rustin trained groups of Washington police, black and white, in non-violent crowd control, and the result was a remarkably peaceful and joyful day.

Rowland Scherman

The march led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1963 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, now under assault from courts, executive orders, and cynical gerrymandering efforts. It also brought out the ugliness of the racism it opposed when, fewer than three weeks later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, killing Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11).

Today, August 28, 2025. Can you imagine Donald Trump looking down from his helicopter on 250,000 protesters, most of them poor and working class, black and white together, marching resolutely to the Lincoln Memorial, where a gay Black pacifist is handling security? King’s dream is Trump’s nightmare.

Where does an event like this – peaceful, joyful, diverse, unified, determined – fit into Trump’s rewriting of America’s past? His history is not big enough to hold it. But America’s is.

That day 62 years ago does not yet reflect who we are as Americans. But it shows who we can be. It is beyond time to reclaim that dream and to make it a reality.

This country was founded on disobedience. For what is our Declaration of Independence but a declaration of disobedience? Resist.

Casual Cruelty and the American Dream

 "It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

- Macbeth, briefly King of Scotland 

As the manacles of the police state lock ever more tightly into place –

  • Active-duty military members patrolling our city streets

  • The dehumanization of immigrants

  • The criminalization of political opponents

  • The rewriting of history, both old and recent

  • The replacement of the arts with propaganda

  • The attacks on an independent press and academic freedom

  • The politicization of our armed forces

  • The defunding of public agencies and the extortion of private entities

  • The elevation of “toughness” as the most ennobling of virtues

  • The erosion of guardrails between public service and private enrichment

  • The building of concentration camps

  • The forced exportation of undesirables

  • The expulsion of the homeless

  • The attacks on voters and voting processes

  • Masked and armed agents making unannounced arrests

  • The suffocation of dissent

  • The replacement of competence with zealotry

  • The international realignment from democracies to dictatorships

  • Demonizing the most vulnerable among us

  • The disappearance of due process

  • The cult of violence

  • Extreme gerrymandering at the command of the White House

  • The emphasis on division at the expense of unity

  • The breakdown of civic decency

  • The replacement of science by ideology

  • The priority of order over law

  • The perversion of language

  • The ascendance of fear over hope

  • The aggrandizement of power

  • The cult of personality

  • The denial of reality and the triumph of the big lie

  • Casual cruelty

– it is time to stop looking away in the hope that four years will quickly pass and our own lives will be untouched.

This list, however incomplete you may find it, does not represent the principles with which you and I grew up. Has America lived up to those principles? No, we have not. But neither has America abandoned them. And we must not do so now.

I have written about some of these issues in earlier postings on this blog, I believe it’s worth going more deeply into what we are in danger of losing – and what we may already have lost. To that end I am planning to offer a discussion class this fall called “The Soul of America” – if America or any other country can be said to have a soul, particularly one that might be worth reclaiming. The course will be in much the same format as “Huck and James,” which I offered in the spring: 4 or 5 zoom sessions of 45 minutes, built around some short, seminal documents from American history, with plenty of opportunities for give and take and for thinking out loud together. We will focus on documents proclaiming what we aspire to be and on the reality of who we have been and are now. And we will see if we can come to some agreement about the soul of America, whether it is something worth saving or reclaiming, and how we can go about doing so.

If you are interested or want to learn more, please let me know at jamesgblaine2@gmail.com.

* A note from a reader in response to my August 5th post, Sleight of Hand:

“I am surprised you did not touch upon the character aspects of cheating at golf. The reason cheating cannot be tolerated is because it is too easy. Absent the “moral prohibition“ there would essentially be no game at all. Cheating at golf . . . is a serious character flaw. Ask a Trump voter if he would like to have the president in his [golf] club and watch the laughter begin. Nobody would.”

Sleight of Hand

“There’s very few people that can beat me in golf,” Donald Trump

Please watch this short video.

First look for any objects on the green grass to the left and front of the man in the cart. There appear to be none. Then watch the two men wearing red vests walk in front of the cart. They are called caddies. Concentrate, not on the first man, but on the second, the man on the right. Pay particular attention to his right hand. Suddenly a small white object appears on the grass. It seems too small for a polo ball, too big for a moth ball, and too round for a marshmallow. Could it be a golf ball? Why, I believe it is. But where did it come from? Now the man in the white hat spies the round white object, gets out of his cart, and prepares to hit the ball.

That man is Donald Trump, the president of the United States. He is, by most accounts, a good golfer. He says his handicap is 2.8. which is very good. By contrast, I am not a good golfer and my handicap is 20.6. By that measure, the president is over seven times better than I am. In fairness, though, he plays a lot more than I do. How much of Trump’s handicap is due to such sleights of hand as shown in the video is hard to say, but in 2019, an accomplished and very funny journalist named Rick Reilly wrote a book on the president’s golf. It's called Commander in Cheat. In it he wrote of the caddies at Winged Foot Golf Club in Mamaroneck, NY, who have watched Trump kick his ball on the fairway so often that they nicknamed him “Pele.” The book is a good read, and very funny, although from the vantage point of 2025, the anecdotes seem less amusing.

For in the end, a golf score is only a number, and numbers seem to mean less and less these days. When the Department of Labor issued a jobs report last week that showed a weakening economy, the president called the numbers “rigged” and fired the director of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Upset with the environmental regulations that are currently keeping seven billion metric tons of auto emissions out of the atmosphere, Trump rescinded the endangerment finding, which has guided scientific analysis for the last 16 years. When he didn’t like the final numbers in the 2016 election, a mob of his supporters attacked the Capitol in an effort to overthrow the government. And on and on.

Donald Trump is not the best golfer ever to lead a country. That honor goes to Kim Jong Il, the former supreme leader of North Korea. In 1994 he played the first round of his life at the grand opening of the Pyongyang Golf Complex, which has the country’s only 18-hole course. Kim, who was then in his early 50s and stood 5’3”, shot a remarkable 38 under par. At 7,700 yards, the Pyongyang course is longer than the Masters in Augusta, Georgia, and Kim had 11 holes-in-one. “Kim had the best approach to conquering the sport of golf,” reported ESPN. “Have your national propaganda department lie for you.”

It isn’t clear whether Kim Jong Il ever played a second round of golf. But his record has never been equaled. He died in 2011, five years before Donald Trump became president. They never had a chance to play against each other. It would have been a heck of a match to watch.

Here We Are

“There is no daylight.”

“There is no daylight between the House Republicans, the House and the president on maximum transparency,” Mike Johnson, Speaker of the House of Representatives. July 21

Truer or scarier words have rarely been spoken.

For “daylight” is precisely what the framers sought to build into the Constitution in the first place.

Here is what James Madison wrote in Federalist #47: “The accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Madison’s thinking on this derived from Montesquieu, who wrote in The Spirit of Law: “There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates.”

While the separation of powers is itself fundamental to democracy and to human liberty, it is not sufficient. It must be accompanied by a system of checks and balances in which each branch can check the overreach of the other two.

“A Legislative, an Executive and a judicial Power, comprehend the whole of what is meant and understood by Government,” wrote John Adams. “It is by balancing each of these Powers against the other two, that the Effort in human Nature toward Tyranny can alone be checked and restrained and any degree of Freedom preserved in the Constitution.”

The language, punctuation, and capitalization of these quotes may seem old-fashioned, but the message could not be clearer. A constitution in which the three branches operate separately but have certain abilities to check the aggrandizement of the others is the bedrock of democracy and of the liberty that comes from self-government.

This is no longer happening in the United States.

Speaker Johnson went on to say, in his very next sentence, that the president “has asked the attorney general to request the grand jury files of the court; all of that is in process.” This is the same attorney general, Pam Bondi whom, The Wall Street Journal reported, had told Trump in May that his name was in the Epstein files. The White House called the report “another fake news story” – and tried to change the subject by accusing Barack Obama of treason. The speaker then refused to hold a vote on the release of the files and sent the house into summer recess to prevent the matter from being brought to the floor. All that remains is for the supreme court to weigh in with yet another 6-3 decision boosting the power of the president. Then there will be no daylight indeed.

And for what? To cover up, once again, the personal peccadilloes of the president of the United States and to make the three branches of government protect him at all costs.

That the future of the republic should rely on such a sordid foundation as the assignations of Jeffrey Epstein and the questions surrounding his suicide in prison (while he was supposedly on suicide watch) is the latest example of how low we have sunk in just six months. Starvation stalks Gaza. Climate change has brought unprecedented heat levels from Houston to Chicago. Almost 12 million Americans are at risk of losing health care coverage, and U.S. Marines have been sent into the streets of our own cities.

That the Congress of the United States spends its time protecting the predations of powerful men at the expense of the lives of the young women who were their victims, not to mention the country they are supposedly governing, defies belief

Yet, to borrow from the last line of the Dorothy Parker story: “Yes, here we are,” she said. “Aren’t we?

State of Alarm

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

With 1.4 million people, Maine ranks 42nd of the 50 states. It is the least densely populated state east of the Mississippi River and the most rural state in the country. Its lighthouse in West Quoddy Head – despite its name* – is the easternmost point in the United States. It is closer to both Africa and Europe than any other place in America.

Politically, Maine has a fascinating history. It joined the Union in 1820 as part of the Missouri Compromise. For 23 of the next the 29 election cycles, the governor, who is elected in September, came from the same party as the president, elected two months later. Hence the maxim: “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” That ended in 1936, when Maine and Vermont were the only states to support Republican Alf Landon in Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide, which prompted FDR’s campaign manager to quip, “As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."

Currently, of Maine’s two senators, one, Susan Collins, is a Republican with a reputation as a moderate. And while she supports her party the vast majority of the time, she votes against Trump more than any other Republican. The other senator, Angus King, is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. A moderate on most matters, he has worked painstakingly to bring members of the two parties together. Because he believes that a major source of dysfunction in Washington is that Democrats and Republicans no longer know each other, he regularly invites members of both parties to share pizza at his apartment.

While Maine’s two House members are Democrats, they have little else in common. Chellie Pingree, who represents the city of Portland and the surrounding area, has a consistently progressive voting record. Jared Golden, who represents the other four-fifths of the state, is probably the most conservative Democrat in the House. Only two Democrats are more likely to vote with Trump than Golden. (The most likely – I kid you not – is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.)

Golden treads a delicate line. Although only 42 years old, he is serving his fourth term representing a district that has three times voted heavily for Trump. The former marine is an old-fashioned “labor and lunch pail” Democrat who carries a gun. He was one of five House Democrats to vote against the assault weapons ban in 2022.# After the mass shootings in Lewiston in October 2023 left 18 people dead and 13 wounded, Golden reversed himself, saying, “To the people of Lewiston, my constituents throughout the 2nd District, to the families who lost loved ones, and to those who have been harmed, I ask for forgiveness and support as I seek to put an end to these terrible shootings.” Those words very nearly cost him re-election.

Governor Janet Mills, a Democrat, is liberal on many issues, notably woman’s rights, less so on the environment and guns. Earlier this year, following a viral exchange over transgender athletes, she incurred the wrath of Donald Trump. He has since withheld millions of dollars in federal funds already approved for Maine’s schools, colleges, and health systems.

So there it is. Five very different officeholders in a small, rural state, with one thing in common: they all oppose the legislation Trump signed into law on July 4th. “The President may call it the ‘Big Beautiful Bill,’” wrote Gov. Mills, “but there’s nothing beautiful about it.”

“I've been in this business of public policy now for 20 years, eight years as governor, 12 years in the United States Senate,” said King. “I have never seen a bill that is this irresponsible, regressive, and downright cruel.” After JD Vance had cast the tiebreaking vote, King could be heard excoriating his Republican colleagues, something the collegial senator has never been known to do.

In 2018, I asked King about the consequences of Trump’s presidency. He told me that things were bad, but he did not believe the republic was in danger. He has clearly changed his mind. On April 29th, he told the Senate: “This President is engaged in the most direct assault on the Constitution in our history, and we in this body, at least thus far, are inert – and therefore complicit.”

This bill should make clear to everyone the danger this administration poses to the future of the nation. They are no longer making any attempt to hide it. Even the name, “Big Beautiful Bill,” is intentionally in your face. That Maine’s five leaders, from across a broad political spectrum, all opposed the bill is a sign of hope. That they fell short of stopping it should be a siren call for us all.

It’s time for Maine to once again become a bellwether, not just for Vermont, but for America. It’s time to revive the maxim, “As Maine goes, so goes the nation.” Above all, it’s time to take seriously the alarm sounded by these five disparate political leaders.

* East Quoddy is across the bay in Nova Scotia.

# Reflecting Maine’s electorate, Collins, King, and Mills are also generally pro-gun.

The “I” Word

“I may do it. I may not do it. Nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

Donald Trump, when asked about bombing Iran, June 18, 2025.

While Bobby Kennedy’s people at Health and Human Services were making a series of confusing and contradictory decisions about vaccine research, I got Covid. I didn’t take it personally; I’m sure the timing was coincidental. Covid ain’t what it used to be, but it’s not much fun. Apart from an endless cough, my main symptoms were fatigue and depression, both of which are still hanging around long after the virus itself has gone.

Depressed is not what I want to feel in these times as I watch Donald Trump dismantling the institutions of this country, not one by one, but all at once. As someone who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, I have not always been sympathetic to the role institutions play in the life and health of the nation. Not all institutions are good, and none is perfect. Slavery, for example, was America’s “peculiar institution,” one that threatened both the existence and the soul of the nation. And I spent three years in the army at a time when National Guard troops fired into student protesters at Kent State, killing four and wounding nine.

But institutions, I have learned, are the glue that holds the country together. The most basic are the three branches of government as set forth in the Constitution, three separate branches that are meant to check each other even as they work together as single whole. This secular trinity is a difficult concept to wrap your brain around, and yet, except for the Civil War, it has held us together through some very tough times.

Our constitutional form of government grew out of the Enlightenment, which had taken firm hold in Europe and America by the mid-18th century. The Enlightenment elevated reason over passion, which is the other great foundation stone of our republic. From those two pillars – the separation of powers and the primacy of reason – grew a state marked by representative government and based on the rule of law, in which both individual rights and religious liberty were protected.

These ideas stood in contrast to the absolute monarchies and religious intolerance that had previously dominated much of the world; and from them have flowed the institutions on which this country has relied for the last two-and-a-half centuries – including a free press, academic freedom, an independent judiciary, and a non-politicized military. Their purpose has been to serve as a check on demagoguery and to protect the rights of those in the minority and others who are out of favor.

The alternative, as our founding fathers warned, is a kind of mob rule in which tyrants recast the institutions that brought them to power into instruments of their own will. They seek to replace “we” with “I”.  See, for example, January 6, 2021.

That is what is dismaying about this weekend’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities. I have no more idea than anyone else what the ultimate outcome will be; and it is fine to say, as some have, that this is Donald Trump’s war. But it isn’t. It’s being waged in the name of our country, which is why the Constitution unequivocally gives to Congress the power to declare war.

“L’etat c’est moi” (“I am the state”), Louis XIV, king of France, is alleged to have said in the 17th century. One hundred years later, the Constitution of the United States began with the words, “We the People.”

That epic change is simple to describe: There is no I in We the People.

Note: I plan to be on a reduced schedule this summer, as our house will be filled with the laughter and tears of children. They are the reason I still write these posts.

Happiness

“Whoever is happy will make others happy.”

- Anne Frank

The 2025 World Happiness Report is out, in case you missed it – which wouldn’t be surprising, given all the unhappiness, anger, and meanness filling the headlines and social media posts – and nowhere more so than in our own country, where the current spirit of vindictiveness would seem so petty if the stakes weren’t so high. The very idea of happiness seems a luxury reserved for the comfortable, even a frivolity in a society where success is measured in terms of power and wealth, and the corresponding ability to humiliate those beneath you. The way to happiness is to get rich and amass power. And pay no attention to the warnings – from the ancient Greeks to Shakespeare to David Brooks – that such hubris leads to calamity.

In this year’s rankings, Finland once again finished first, with Denmark, Iceland, and Sweden close behind, and Norway, the remaining Scandinavian country, in 7th place. While Europe is overrepresented in the top 20, with 14 countries, Costa Rica (6), Israel (8) and Mexico (10) all cracked the top ten.

By contrast, the United States dropped again to #24, continuing its steady slide that began in 2016. It is the country’s lowest ranking ever. The report cited declining social trust and growing inequality as the key contributors.

At the bottom of the list is Afghanistan. Beset by violence, poverty, and the subjugation of half its population (women), that nation is not only last of the 147 reporting countries (a few were deemed too dangerous to canvas) but is on a steep downward spiral with faint hope of recovery.

This year’s report focused on the impact on human happiness of “caring and sharing.” It turns out that most of us are more pessimistic about the kindness and generosity of others than is the case. That is, we expect people to be meaner and more selfish than they actually are. But it turns out that trust in others is a better indicator of our own happiness than either our income or our employment.

This has far-reaching implications, not only for our personal lives, but for the nation, and even the world. “The happiest countries are also among the most generous,” the report notes. “A positive correlation exists between international aid and happiness, suggesting that countries spreading happiness beyond their borders are not only happier but also more benevolent.” Foreign aid, it turns out, does as much for the giver as the recipient. These subjective experiences, in turn, shape a society’s values and voting behavior more than ideological or political beliefs.

All of which suggests, at least to me, that we are moving catastrophically in the wrong direction. Admittedly, it didn’t take a report from Oxford University’s Wellbeing Research Centre to make me realize that, but it did remind me that virtues like kindness, generosity, and happiness are more than minor considerations on the political stage. They are the glue that holds a society together, and in this country “the decline in happiness and social trust explains a large share in the rise of political polarization.”

One reason for this, I think, is that happiness, unlike power and domination, is not a zero-sum game. You cannot increase your happiness by taking away the happiness of someone else. In fact, you can only increase your happiness by contributing to the well-being of others. That is why communal happiness is essential to democracies and why autocrats hate it.

Start small: Greet your neighbor with a morning smile. Say “hi” to the stranger on the sidewalk. Volunteer for something. Join a local board or committee. When you go out, carry a few bucks of “give-away” money in your pocket. Laugh from deep in your belly. Let’s start a movement. Pass it on.

The simple methodology of the report: “Our global happiness ranking is based on a single question from the Gallup World Poll, derived from the Cantril Self-Anchoring Striving Scale (Cantril Ladder):

“Please imagine a ladder with steps numbered from 0 at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder represents the worst possible life for you. On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time.”

A Case for Teaching the Liberal Arts

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

- George Santayana

“I think it’s a great gesture from Qatar. Appreciate it very much. I would never be one to turn down that kind of an offer. I mean, I could be a stupid person and say, 'No, we don't want a free, very expensive airplane.' But it was . . .  I thought it was a great gesture." President Donald J. Trump.

Sharon Hahn Darlin

“Trojans, don't trust this horse.
Whatever it is, I'm afraid of Greeks even those bearing gifts."

Laocoon in Virgil’s Aeneid

Ten Reasons Canada Should Never Become the 51st State

“Never say never.” - Donald Trump

I recently received the following letter from my imaginary Canadian friend.

Cher Ami,

After watching this week’s meeting at the White House between our prime minister and your president, during which they discussed Mr. Trump’s desire to annex Canada, I am sending you a list of ten reasons why Canada should never (“jamais!”) become America’s 51st state. The public meeting was cordial, even jocular, but afterwards, in private, Primary Minister Mark Carney asked President Trump to stop referring to Canada as the 51st U.S. state.

  1. NFS. Most obviously, because the Canadian people don’t want to. As Mr. Carney told Mr. Trump, in the kind of transactional real estate terms he understands, Canada is not for sale. “Having met with the owners of Canada over the course of the campaign,” the newly elected Carney said, “it’s not for sale. Won’t be for sale, ever.”

  2. The Senate Problem. With 40 million people, Canada is slightly more populous than California (39 million). That means we would have more Congresspeople than any of your current 50 states. That’s a lot of power. But we would only have two senators, which is not nearly enough to represent an area the size of your country. Two senators is a non-starter.

  3. Dirty Oil. The oil sands in Alberta are the third-largest proven oil reserve in the world. It is also the world’s dirtiest oil. Fortunately, we export 97 percent of that oil to the United States, which seems to have an infinite appetite for it. We like this arrangement; we don’t want the oil back.

  4. Clean Water. On the other hand, we have the best water. Canada has been called “the Saudi Arabia of fresh water,” although much of it is not currently available for human consumption. That’s fine with us. We have watched you pollute and strangle your rivers and other sources of fresh water, and we don’t want you getting your hands on ours.

  5. Language. We are officially a bilingual nation, and your president has just designated English the official language of the United States. We have enough problems in Quebec; we do not need you taking down our French traffic signs. And by the way, it’s pronounced kay-BEC not KWEE-beck.

  6. Tariffs and Trade Wars. We will have to negotiate around your new tariff obsession because we seem to have no choice, but we have zero interest in getting sucked into your dumb trade wars.

  7. Refugees. From the American Revolution to the Underground Railroad to Vietnam war resistors, Canada has always been a place of refuge for American dissenters. Again today, we see your people turn longing gazes to the north. In March, philosophy professor Jason Stanley became the third tenured faculty member to leave Yale for the University of Toronto, saying, I want “to raise my kids in a country that is not tilting towards a fascist dictatorship.” We are proud of our legacy as a safe haven.

  8. Greenland. It’s just a short hop across Baffin Bay from northern Canada to Greenland, a great staging area for U.S. troops. We don’t think that’s a very good idea. As they used to say in England during World War II, the only problem with the Yanks is that they are “overpaid, oversexed, and over here.” We don’t want them up here.

  9. Monarchy. We already have a septuagenarian king, one who lives 3,000 miles away, speaks in complete sentences, does not constantly need to hog the stage, and cares deeply about the environment and climate change. Why would we trade him for Trump?

  10. Friendship. Why do you Americans think you have to own everything? Can’t we just be neighbors?

You say, “Never say never.” We say, “Jamais veut dire jamais” (“Never means never.”)

Cordialement,
Ton ami

Huck and James

Due to cancellations, we have a couple of openings for course:  A discussion of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and James by Percival Everett.

The first class is May 5th at 6 p.m. Please let me know if you are interested: jamesgblaine2@gmail.com

The course will explore the two novels in four sessions.
Dates: May 5, 12, 19, 26 @ 6 p.m.
Each session will meet once a week on Zoom and last 45 minutes.
Class size: minimum of 8, maximum of 12.
Format: discussion group.
Cost: $75
Readings: the two books
Prerequisites: none

Class 1: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
What did you think of the book? What did you like/not like about it? The novel was published in 1885 about events taking place 20 years earlier. How does it stand up 140 years later? Think yourself back in time and compare what your reactions would have been then and now. Why do you think this has been the most banned book in America from its publication to the present?

Class 2: James
What did you think of the book? What did you like/not like about it? What’s the significance of the title? In what ways does Everett’s story follow and/or diverge from Twain’s story? In what ways did this book really stretch your mind?

Class 3: Jim and James, Huck and Tom
What role does each of these characters play in the books? Are James and Jim the same person? What unites them? What differentiates them? How does Jim’s role evolve? Is Huck the same person in both books? How does his role evolve from Twain’s book to Everett’s

Class 4: From the Mississippi to America
How do these two novels, taken together, affect your thinking about America, past and present?

Payment: You can pay by: sending a check to me (James G. Blaine, PO Box, 1027, Northeast Harbor, ME 04662) or Venmo or Zelle. I can also include a Stripe option if that works better for you.

Sea Dance

“Wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds.”

- Francis of Assisi

On Easter morning the wind blew out of the northwest across a clear blue sky, making the sunlight dance on the waves of the choppy sea like tiny sparkles of light, always moving yet somehow unchanging, especially out toward the horizon, which, as the prayer tells us, is “nothing save the limit of our sight.” I sat by the shore, transfixed by this joyful dance, at once buffeted by the gusts of wind and warmed by the sun. On this morning, whatever your faith, comes the promise of spring and the hope for rebirth.

Two days later we celebrate the 55th Earth Day. Inspired by the leadership of Sen. Gaylor Nelson of Wisconsin and launched on April 22, 1970, the event began as a protest against environmental destruction and the pollution of the earth, its air and its water. Public concern about these issues had been growing through the 1960s, starting with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, and reaching a kind of crescendo in the summer of 1969 when an oil slick caught fire on Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River. This had happened dozens of times before and until then had been considered little more than the cost of industrial progress. But this time was different, and the burning river became a visceral image of environmental destruction and an apt symbol for the first Earth Day.

Coming in the wake of the huge movements to end racism and the Vietnam war that had characterized the 1960s, Earth Day began as a day of protest. It was about stopping things – the poisoning of our land and air, the pollution of our waters, the destruction of wetlands, the threats to endangered species, overpopulation. It was built consciously on the earlier movements, and it quickly became an effective political platform. A year later, it inspired Walt Kelly’s most famous cartoon.

To me, though, Earth Day is a time for celebration as much as protest, for joy as much as anger. Yes, we need to be angry as we watch the full-scale assault – not only on 55 years of environmental protections – but on the environment itself. But let this day, at least, be one of wonder more than rage. We have inherited something beautiful, and despite our best efforts, it will be beautiful long after we are gone. The earth does not need us; in fact, it may well be better off without us. But we need the earth. Its beauty cannot be monetized; its true value has nothing to do with what we can extract from it.

Ridding ourselves of anger does not mean giving up on action. There is a line, not necessarily  straight, but certainly clear, that runs from Francis of Assisi to Henry Thoreau to Mahatma Gandhi to Martin Luther King, Jr. It ties people together instead of driving them apart. It sees humans as part of the natural world, not its overlords. It has long fascinated me that the most important outside supporter of Earth Day was not Friends of the Earth but the United Autoworkers. “Without the UAW,” said Denis Hayes, the event’s national coordinator, “the first Earth Day would have likely flopped.” The auto companies’ management, on the other hand, was already working hard to kill the Clean Air Act.

There is far too much anger in the world and not nearly enough beauty. Our anger should not define our Earth Day protests. Care deeply. Act positively. Speak calmly. For remember, when Saint Francis preached to the birds, not one of them flew away.

Standing Up

My home state and my alma mater are much in the news these days. I am proud of them both.

Last Friday, Maine said no. In the face of increasingly bellicose demands by the Trump administration, the state will not ban transgender girls from high school sports. In the eight weeks since Governor Janet Mills and President Donald Trump had words on the subject at a White House event, the Department of Education has moved to end all federal funding to K-12 schools and referred the case to the Department of Justice; the Department of Agriculture has paused funding and is reviewing all research and education programs going back to the Biden administration; and the Department of Health and Human Services has referred its case to the Department of Justice. Yesterday, the Justice Department filed suit against Maine. That’s a lot of firepower. The state has 45,000 student athletes, of which two identify as transgender. There are twice as many cabinet-level departments coming after them.

Mills’ decision was not an easy one. Federal funding underwrites 10% of Maine’s education budget. In the minds of many Mainers, the state is sacrificing millions of dollars for an unpopular policy that benefits an infinitesimal number of people. With the economy reeling from tariff whiplash, the withholding of these funds will bring a lot of pain.

But let’s not fool ourselves. This isn’t about high school athletics. It’s about singling out a vulnerable group and marginalizing its members in the pursuit of power. We have seen it again and again in the last few months. And it will not end here.

That’s what Harvard discovered on Monday. In response to its initial appeasement efforts, the government sent a five-page letter demanding that Harvard essentially cede control over major components of the university and its programs. Then, and only then, would the government consider restoring some of the $9 billion in federal grants it has withheld. If you think Harvard can be arrogant, you should read this letter. Although money is a huge driver for Harvard, the university finally and firmly said no. The Trump administration immediately froze $2 billion in funding, and President Trump personally threatened Harvard’s tax status. This is the road to totalitarianism

So, what are some takeaways from all this?

  • Are Maine and Harvard the beginning of a trend among states and universities to refuse to capitulate to big government demands? Or will they be outliers of a movement that fizzles?

  • More hopefully, this unseemly process has forced both Maine and Harvard to come to terms with the difficult relationship between principles and money. Money matters, and a lot of it is at stake here. But as we are already seeing with other universities, corporations, and law firms, it’s a Faustian bargain to sell your soul.

  • Whose money is it anyway? The Department of Education’s? The president’s? Or the people’s?

  • Yes, there’s waste in government, as we are witnessing right now; but the funds distributed to such entities as Maine and Harvard are not gifts bestowed by some capricious potentate. They are investments in our country and its future.

  • In a democracy, it is not the prerogative of the executive branch to overrule existing state laws or to dictate what its citizens can read or think.

  • To all my friends who rail against the excesses of big government, what we are watching now, in real time, is the most massive executive overreach since we declared independence from George III in 1776.

  • It’s easy to stand up for things that are popular. It’s essential to stand up for those that are not.

The New Epithet

“’When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in a rather scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’”

- Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

If students at the United states Naval Academy wish to read Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, he or she (but not they) will need to sneak it onto campus in a plain brown bag. For Angelou’s autobiography was one of 381 books ordered removed from the Nimitz Library last week by Pete Hegseth, the Secretary of Defense. The collective sin of these books is that they promote discuss the satanic trinity of diversity, equity and inclusion, more familiarly known as DEI.

You can almost taste the disdain with which members of the Trump administration spit out these letters, as if they can’t get rid of them fast enough lest they contaminate their morals. And then they leave them hanging in the air, like a virus spreading infection. DEI. The quintessence of woke.

As I write this, those three letters are spreading fear and misery through many of America’s most powerful and once-respected institutions. Because of them, the government is clawing back hundreds of millions of dollars from some of the nation’s most storied universities. Columbia stands to lose $400 million, Brown $510 million, Harvard $9 billion. Public libraries are being targeted and books removed. And on Thursday, the federal Department of Education gave every K-12 school district in the country 10 days to certify the elimination of all DEI practices – even as the department is under orders to dismantle itself because this administration believes that public education should be a matter for the states.

Let’s think about all this for a minute. With all the problems facing the world, the entire government now seems focused on three words:

  1. Diversity. “The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social ad ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc.” Diversity is also the foundation of the natural world, of which, we seem so often to forget, we are a part. Without it, we would be dead. Diversity’s nearest synonym is variety, “the spice of life.” Its opposite, in my opinion, is monotony. “Diversity is the one true thing we all have in common,” said Winston Churchill. “Celebrate it every day.”

  2. Equity. The quality of being fair and impartial. “Justice according to natural law or right,” says Merriam-Webster; “freedom from bias or favoritism.” A second meaning is the shareholders’ interest in a company, that is to say, the value of your stocks. Last week, while the feds were obsessively tracking down three words, that value fell through the basement.

  3. Inclusion. The act of including someone or something, of becoming part of a larger group. The opposite of inclusion is exclusion – being shut out or rejected, being shunned and alone. The great symbol of exclusion is a wall.

These three words are so insidious that the federal government now deploys vast computer systems to ferret them out of every cranny of American life – a modern-day Anthony Comstock, the self-styled “weeder in God’s garden,” dedicated to suppressing obscenity wherever it lurks. This is the bureaucratic state run amok; we are now living in Humpty Dumpty’s world. But these people have it backwards. Far from destroying America, these three words are the guides to what we, as a nation, should aspire to be: Diverse. Equitable. Inclusive.

You don’t have to be fluent in Latin to know that the original meaning of DEI is “of god.”

Thuggery

Of course we couldn’t all come here on the Mayflower. . . .But I got here as soon as I could.” - Anton Cermak

On July 25, 1967, U.S. Army tanks rumbled down the burned-out streets of Detroit, Michigan. The tanks were part of a deployment of 4,700 battle-tested federal troops that President Lyndon Johnson had ordered into the city. It was the third day of the largest urban rebellion in the country’s history and had come less than two weeks after a similar uprising in Newark, New Jersey. Altogether, during that “long hot summer of 1967”, more than 150 riots erupted in largely Black neighborhoods in cities across America.

At the time I had just finished college and was awaiting my own orders into the army. What were then called race riots had a long history in this country, but this was different. I had never before seen tanks and heavily armed soldiers in American cities, firing on American citizens and being fired on in return. I was stunned.

Through the years, when I have taught American history courses, I have often shown videos from those riots. I have asked the students to think about what the videos can tell us about our country’s past and present. Such discussions of America’s history of racial strife may no longer be allowed under executive order number I-don’t-even-know-anymore, issued on March 27th and titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Last week a short video shocked me as much as those newsreels from 58 years ago. It showed the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. She was walking alone on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts, talking on her cellphone to her mother in Turkey, when an officer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement approached her and blocked her way. You can hear Rumeysa let out a small scream of fear – and you can hear a bystander ask, “Are you kidnapping her?” – as five other ICE officers appear from several directions and surround her. Masked and without visible identification, they take her phone and toss her backpack on the street, then handcuff her and hustle her into to a waiting car. Before the day was over, she would be in a detention facility in southern Louisiana, without access to her family or an attorney.

She has, as yet, been charged with no crime, and her only offense appears to be an op-ed she co-authored in The Tufts Daily newspaper. The article, which was published a year ago, urged Tufts President Sunil Kumar to adopt resolutions passed by the student senate to acknowledge Palestinian genocide in Gaza and divest from companies with ties to Israel. It is an opinion piece, and the four authors voice their strong opinions, nothing more. They call on the university to act, no one else. They do not mention Hamas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has provided innuendo, but no proof, of her connection to campus unrest beyond the op-ed. Her friends are baffled by the allegations, saying they bear no resemblance to the person they know.

The urban riots of 1967 brought tanks into our nation’s cities and raised questions about the possibility of a police state. Yet, less than six months later, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Johnson, issued a thorough and sobering report. “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal. . . . What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” According to last week’s executive order, such words are now considered subversive.

I don’t know what you would call a country in which masked government agents arrest a young woman, without warning and without charges, and confine her, without due process, to a detention center 1,600 miles away. Nor what you would call a government that whitewashes our nation’s history of racial struggle. I once called it a police state.

The Power to Name

“L’etat, c’est moi.” Louis XIV

The power to name is an awful power.

Early in the Book of Genesis, even before he has created Eve, God gives Adam the power of naming “every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens.” It is an enormous power, one that elevates man above all the other animals and charges him to subdue the earth and all the creatures on it. God gave that power only to Adam, and it not something to be taken lightly. It is in many ways the equivalent of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind (and we know what happened to him).

Somehow, Donald Trump has arrogated that power to himself. We saw it on his first day in office, when he signed executive order 14172, which renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. With his signature he changed almost 400 years of map making. Despite its policy against “giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming,” Google immediately caved in, and the deal was done.

Later that day, Trump signed executive order 14168, with the impressively Orwellian name of “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It asserted that there are only two sexes – a man and a woman – and they are fixed at birth. To define human beings seems an extraordinary assertion of presidential authority, and one I was unable to find in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Not only does it give enormous power to the federal government, it also denies people their fundamental right to define themselves. It’s a power God didn’t even give to Adam, and it paved the way for executive order 14201 (“Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”).

There are many more such instances:

  • Although almost a quarter of Columbia’s students are Jewish, President Trump defined the university as antisemitic and is threatening to withhold $400 million in federal funds.

  • Having for years classified immigrants from Latin America as thugs and criminals, he recently deported three planeloads of Venezuelans without a fig leaf of due process.

  • Accusing South Africa of “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” against whites, he offered Afrikaners expedited refugee status in the U.S.

  • By upending reality and declaring (1) Ukraine the aggressor in its war and (2) President Zelensky a dictator, Trump can now make his own peace with Putin.

And woe to anyone who questions such unprecedented power. The Associated Press’ continued use of the term, Gulf of Mexico, got it banned from covering presidential events. Columbia capitulated and ceded to the Trump administration unprecedented control over university policies. I wrote recently of the torrent of retaliation Gov. Mills brought down on Maine by following current state law rather than submitting to an ex cathedra proclamation from the Oval Office. The president, however, is demanding not just Maine’s compliance, but “a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled.”

And there you have it. Many of these issues are neither simple nor clear cut. The ruling against transgender athletes, for example, is Trump’s most popular policy.  In a democracy, however, we have traditionally debated contentious matters in public forums, from the town meeting to the halls of Congress. But the power to name – to define – bypasses that process and gives extraordinary authority to the namer. President Trump did not ask Governor Mills for her explanation; he demanded her submission. In doing so, he equated the institutional power of the office with the personal power of the man. This is not a good idea. It is also not a good omen.

A Mighty Woman with a Torch

“. . . and her name Mother of Exiles.” Emma Lazarus

Monday was St. Patrick’s Day, named for the patron saint of Ireland and celebrated around the world, especially in cities with large populations of Irish descent.

In the spring that I turned five I was diagnosed with rheumatic fever, which required me to stay in bed from April to October. I had to be carried to the bathroom, and when we visited my grandmother near Cape Cod, I was carted to the beach in a red wagon. When at last the doctor told me I could get out of bed, I excitedly stood up, only to collapse immediately to the floor. I would need to learn to walk again.

My own patron saint through all of this was a young woman named Catherine Maguire, who had recently emigrated from County Longford in the Irish midlands. She was high-spirited, with a ready twinkle and a reddish birthmark over part of her face. She cared for me, played with me, disciplined me, and carried me everywhere for those six months. Later, when I had recovered, she would take my sister and me into New York City for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Her Aunt Nell had a small railroad flat on Second Avenue, where the elevated trains rattled outside her parlor window, and Robbin and I slept on the couch.

The parade itself was a grand affair, overflowing Fifth Avenue with Hibernian societies and marching bands and politicians from Tammany Hall to Albany, all of them wearing green. It seemed that every New York cop was Irish and Catherine knew them all, so we always had a front row perch.

Even then, in the early 1950s, the Catholic Irish were not fully accepted by the New York establishment. Their ancestors had been coming for well over a century; and after the Great Hunger struck in the mid-1840s, the Irish diaspora exploded. More than two million refugees came to America between 1845 and 1870, swelling the populations of eastern cities, crowding into squalid slums, working 80-hour weeks for a pittance.

"Predictably,” wrote Gregory Couch in The Bonanza King, “the influx provoked a backlash among native-born Americans. Anti-Catholic Yankees regarded the newest wave of desti­tute, starving refugees as 'Saint Patrick's vermin.'"

Gradually, through the rise of their political leaders and the Catholic Church, the newcomers got jobs throughout the city, particularly in the police, fire, and public works departments. By the late 19th century, another great wave of immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, had taken over the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; the assimilation of the Irish into the American mainstream was under way.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine their struggles, and yet America remained always a beacon for them. “When the boat sailed into harbor,” Catherine’s younger brother, Hugh, told me years later, “the man next to me said, ‘that’s New York.’

“‘Go on with you now,’ I said. ‘In New York the streets are paved with gold.’”

“When Hugh comes home to visit,” his brother John told me years later in Ireland, “all he can talk about is how much better everything is in America.” By then Hugh had worked his way up managing an A&P in the Bronx and survived a bullet in his stomach while thwarting an attempted robbery.

The Irish were the first large wave of immigrants to come to this country. They came, as did those who followed, because they had few prospects at home. Most didn’t speak English and few could read or write. Labeled gangsters and drunkards, aliens and revolutionaries, their vulnerability and desperation made them ripe for exploitation. Many didn’t survive, but over time those who did worked their way into the fabric of American life. Americans take pride in having given them opportunity, and for many we certainly did. In return they built our country.

When Catherine sailed home to Ireland in 1953, I vowed to find her one day. Twenty years later I walked up the lane in Moyne Cross, County Longford, to the tiny farm on which she and her husband, Pee, were raising their nine children. But that’s a story for another post.