Even if Orwell never goes out of fashion in New Trumpia. Cover photo credit: Rainbow PUSH Coalition; video clip here.
First, the here and now.
CHICAGO (AP) — The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, a protege of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and two-time presidential candidate who led the Civil Rights Movement for decades after the revered leader’s assassination, died Tuesday. He was 84.
Others who are better versed in recent American history can be relied upon to opine, and that’s fine by me. Rather, I have a story of my own. It began in 1984 (that year, again) and was revived in 2016, when the following was published at NA Confidential.
In both instance, I received a letter…
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Who doesn’t love genuine, tactile, anonymous fan mail with a real postage stamp? You get so little of it in this electronic age of ill behavior on social media.
I’d previously scheduled a two martini Saturday evening, and subsequently enjoyed an entertaining Facebook discussion of my fresh new mash note, one culminating in my being first trolled and then blocked, to the vast amusement of us all.
That’s modernism for yoy, but I’d already become nostalgic for ancient times, so very long ago that New Albany had a newspaper covering New Albany (whoa). Nostalgia is a feeling best indulged in moderation, unlike the martinis fueling it, but I’ll risk the digression.
Chronologically advanced readers will recall that my persistent “bullying” began during the decade of the 1980s, when I was known to submit frequent “letters to the editor” to the New Albany Tribune. One of these days, I’ll dip into the bulging banker’s box downstairs and unearth fragments of the archive, but for now, just one example should suffice to make the point.
In late ’83 or early ’84, after writing a letter to the ‘Bune in opposition to one or another of Ronald Reagan’s reactionary conservative excesses, I received a small, tidy envelope in the mail. There was no return address of any sort, only a New Albany postmark. In those days, you wouldn’t think to shake a suspicious envelopes for white powder or similar residue.
I shrugged and opened the envelope, finding crude, palsied, seemingly superannuated handwriting on a small rectangle of spiral notebook paper. The message was brief and to the point.
Jesse the Revolutionary
Or Killer Kennedy
Who is your choice?
The note wasn’t signed, and so it was that a...Read more
