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The Acid Queen

[Please note: The word “Featured” on the left side above was NOT inserted by this blogger, but apparently was inserted by WordPress, and it cannot be removed. NO post in this blog is sponsored.]

The Book of the Week is “The Acid Queen, The Psychedelic Life And Counterculture Rebellion of Rosemary Woodruff Leary” by Susannah Cahalan, published in 2025.

Rosemary was born in April 1935 in Saint Louis. Her family changed residences frequently through her childhood. At the dawn of her thirties, she made a friend and lover in a high place, in the form of Timothy Leary. Born in 1920, he was famous by then for his advocacy of LSD. He was still married, but separated from his second wife.

In the second half of the 1960’s, wealthy heiress Peggy Hitchcock owned the humungous estate up in Millbrook, New York State, on which Leary led a socialist cult. His purported goal was to educate his disciples in improving their lives by using controlled substances. Those drop-outs from society consisted of tens of upper-middle-class whites who were rebelling against their bourgeois lifestyles.

Leary’s lawyer helped him and Rosemary weasel out of legal trouble with drug possession and tax evasion, in arguing that the drugs were a tool of their religion. In September 1966, they legitimized their religion as a church by completing the legal paperwork, naming it League for Spiritual Discovery. It was monotheistic, urging its parishioners to alter their consciousness with LSD on a weekly basis, and smoke marijuana on a daily basis.

That same month, Leary and Rosemary raised funds by putting on a psychedelic and spiritually uplifting show that involved performance art, special-effects and preaching (of a hybrid Christianity and Buddhism), at a theater in Manhattan for a sold-out audience of more than twenty-eight hundred. Although he was already way older than thirty, Leary appealed to disaffected, countercultural American youths, doing the talk-show circuit on the idiot box, and doing the lecture circuit on college campuses.

In January 1970, the Nixon administration passed an anti-drug law to harshly punish all the kinds of people (those protesting the Vietnam War; employees of communications outlets who were propagandizing about drugs– raising awareness of them, and their uses; and those who believed in a libertarian lifestyle) on the president’s enemies list.

Read the book to learn much more about Rosemary’s life, times and social circle.

Speaking of a president with an enemies list who is harshly punishing all kinds of people: The current one is doing so, but he himself has yet to be punished in a way that fits his decades’ worth of numerous crimes! Here’s a little song that depicts the tip of the iceberg.

THE CRIME GAME

sung to the tune of “The Name Game” with apologies to the Estate of Shirley Ellis and to whomever else the rights may concern.

The crime game.

Tax-cheating! Tax-cheating. Tax-cheating. System-beating. Funny-money. Secret meetings. Oh my. Fines-defeating. Tax-cheating.

Treason! Treason. Treason. Base appeasin’. Spying, lying. All season. Oh my. Justice-teasin’. Treason.

Come on everybody. This is the time. I bet you we can make a list, of a fraction of Trump’s crimes. Committing of the crimes, he vehemently denies. But courts and courts, and courts contain his lies. And then we say the crime, then repeat, then we say a rhyme, then a phrase, rhyme, and oh my. Then we say a rhyme again, and the crime a third time. Then the verse is done. We could do this all day and for all time. And there’s hardly a crime that we can’t rhyme.

Failed coup! Failed coup. Failed coup. Chaos grew. Uncivil drivel. Trump’s nasty crew. Oh my. Hatred ensued. Failed coup.

But all of Trump’s crimes helped him amass power. So he got rich and he makes people cower. Like. No prez. Before. He controls the vast network Fox. Like, everyone should be wary, wary. Together, they’re scary, scary. To truth and justice, he is contrary. Okay?

Now say libel. [libel] Now libel repeated. Now say a rhyme, [rhyme] and a phrase. Now say a rhyme another time, then oh my, and the rhyme another time. Then the crime. And there’s hardly a crime that we can’t rhyme.

Everybody do fraud!

Fraud. Fraud. Court see-sawed. Appeals-deals. Rulings flawed. Oh my. Trump’s base is awed. Fraud. Pretty good.

Let’s do conspiring!

Conspiring. Conspiring. Illegal-firing. Steam-rolling, controlling. RICO hiring. Oh my. Gets tiring. Conspiring. Very good.

Let’s do racketeering!

Racketeering. Racketeering. Lots of smearing. Plugs for thugs. Lots of hearings. Oh my. Trump’s base is cheering. Racketeering.

Saming with defaming.

Defaming. Defaming. Situation gaming. Jeering and sneering. Cruel nicknaming. Oh my. False blaming. Defaming.

The crime game.

The Forgotten Founding Father

The Book of the Week is “The Forgotten Founding Father, Noah Webster’s Obsession and the Creation of an American Culture” by Joshua Kendall, published in 2010.

Webster was born in October 1758 in western Hartford, CT. His 1778 Yale class consisted of forty graduates. In the 1780’s, he created a spelling and grammar primer for early childhood education that improved upon the then-standard text. It used phonics to teach pronunciation. He believed that Americans– who had recently declared their independence from Britain– should develop their own style of English, to differentiate themselves.

In 1782, beginning with Maine and Vermont, northeastern colonies passed laws on the copyrighting of original literary works. Even though the U.S. Constitution was ratified in June 1788, federal law superseded state law only after Congress passed a law granting a fourteen-year copyright term in 1790.

Throughout his life, Webster propagandized via publishing inflammatory, libelous, anonymous writings in the major newspapers in the states in which he lived– Connecticut, Massachusetts and New York.

Webster also was one of the first people to collect data on Americans. In 1785 and 1786, he traveled around the thirteen colonies and counted the number of homes (from a few hundred to a few thousand) in major cities. To financially support himself, he went on the lecture circuit. He was a capitalist at heart.

“Webster thus was counting on the Philological Society to help him cash in on the passage of the Constitution which suddenly improved the commercial prospects for his books.” He could sell his federally copyrighted book more efficiently with less competition, by arguing that standardized school curricula in all the states, would help unify the country.

However, around 1812, when Webster was elected as Representative in the Massachusetts statehouse, he reversed himself on Federalism, and instead advocated states’ rights. He jumped on the bandwagon in attempting to oust president James Madison. His political views were liable to change with his strategic interests– as do those of any opportunistic, power and money-hungry alpha male.

In late 1828, Webster’s American Dictionary, containing about seventy thousand words, was introduced to America. At the dawn of the 1830’s, “Having personally lobbied the executive and legislative branches of government, Webster did not neglect the judiciary. He was hoping to get the Supreme Court to unite behind a certificate in support of his dictionary.”

Read the book to learn about Webster’s other lifetime achievements, and his times.

As can be seen, there’s nothing new under the sun since Noah Webster’s generation. Here’s a song about that.

POLITICAL HEROES

sung to the tune of “Celluloid Heroes” (the long version) with apologies to The Kinks, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

Every candidate’s a schemer, and every candidate is bought, and every candidate hires bullies. Most lie without a second thought. There are fixers at every level, from the White House to the streets. And you can read about their districts and political-wards. Their myths are written with every tweet.

Don’t be unfair to The Donald, as you review his sordid past. He was persistently hostile and agile. He amassed enough power to last. He attempted a coup with his cronies, and sat himself on a throne, but he ended up golfing and babbling, because his dictatorship got old.

You can see armored cars as you drive around their districts and political-wards, bigwigs who have LEGacies. Most you’ve never even heard of. They have their entourages and consultants and volunteers in their campaigns. The ones who succeed have the best public-relations brains.

President Donald Trump looks very vacant indeed. AI software does his public-addresses. HE can no longer lead.

Avoid disparaging Donald Trump or you’re in for a legal fight, and worship Donald Trump because his was such a glorious life.

If you said “Voting for him, you’re garbage,” Donald Trump would smear you good, and when you voted against Donald Trump, he cried “fraud!” and sent in his hoods.

Please don’t TREAD now on dearest Donald, ’cause he’s actually TACO, not tough. He should have begun younger in campaigning. Too bad he’s only made OF flesh and blood.

Every candidate’s a schemer, and every candidate is bought, and every candidate’s in show biz. Most lie without a second thought. And those who are successful are always on their guard. They’ve got lawyers, judges and thugs, in their districts and political-wards.

Political life is a nonstop soap-opera media show. An angry, nasty world of real-life villains and heroes.

Political heroes always personally gain. And political heroes seize-the-day in their TIME.

Political life is a nonstop soap-opera media show. An angry, nasty world of real-life villains and heroes.

Political heroes always personally gain. And political heroes seize-the-day in their TIME.

Major Noah

The Book of the Week is “Major Noah, American-Jewish Pioneer” by Isaac Goldberg, published in 1938.

Born in July 1785 in Philadelphia, Mordecai Manuel Noah was raised mostly by his grandfather. In the 1810’s, Noah, George Washington, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, the governor of Pennsylvania and other “Yankees” (people living in the then-northeastern United States) were expansionists– proposed that the U.S. annex Canada and Florida.

Noah engaged in various profit-seeking pursuits in his lifetime: playwriting, literary criticism, speech-making, newspaper publishing, and international diplomacy. In 1813, he was named Consul on the Barbary coast. His territory included Algeria, Tunisia– where lived about sixty thousand Jews, and Spain. He hopped a ship to get to the Mediterranean. His goal was to stop the activities of pirates in that region, and to negotiate the release of twelve Americans who were then-prisoners of the Algerians.

As is well known, early-nineteenth-century Britain had the world’s best navy; she trained boys seven to twelve years old, in seafaring. In July 1813, a British navy boat captured Noah’s, as the War of 1812 was still raging. There ensued a long, complicated,(and weird!) series of events.

Fast-forward to April 1815. American president James Monroe sent a letter to Noah informing him that he should never have been hired as Consul because he was Jewish; his religion was unfavorable with regard to foreign-service negotiations in northern Africa, so Monroe was firing him as Consul. That letter didn’t get to Noah until July 1815, at which time, Noah was “headed to a dungeon in Tunis.”

Fortunately, the deliverer of the letter, an American commodore, hadn’t read it because it was addressed to only Noah, personally. Bristling and posturing, Noah lied to the commodore in such a way that led him to demand that the British pay his personal debts. After that, Noah “got the hell out of Dodge.” He had actually gone rogue– sort of a cross between Oliver North and Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. Upon returning to the United States, he printed his own propaganda to paper over his indiscretions, and used his friends in Congress to exonerate himself.

Noah then went into the newspaper publishing business. In the 1810’s, “American journalism was not yet out of its black period– an orgy of assault, battery, libel, recrimination, accusation, bribery, scurrility, chicanery, such as makes the succeeding development of yellow journalism appear by comparison, a Sunday picnic. Such was indeed, the tradition of journalism in our adolescent United States.”

In 1820, Noah, (actually seeking to profit in real estate), put forth a big idea of purchasing Grand Island, in the city of Buffalo, New York State, to provide a colony for the “wandering Jews” of the world.

Five years later, Noah had sufficient financial backing consisting of other people’s money to start his venture, which he called “Ararat.” He gave himself the titles Governor and Judge of Israel, making announcements in newspapers worldwide. Poland’s government wouldn’t allow Noah’s public notice to be published, as his campaign was perceived as a plot to overthrow the Hapsburg monarchy.

British rabbis to whom Noah gave fancy titles and invited to his new Israel, politely declined his offers of employment, saying they were happy where they were, and that he was undeservedly acting like the Messiah; only God would know the location of apocalyptic Israel. The French and Austrian rabbis weren’t fooled either, and actually called Noah a charlatan.

In the 1830’s, when pressured to explain himself as to why he switched political parties from Democratic to Whig (conservative), he gave the best excuse ever: The party, not he, had changed! His former party had become unprincipled. So in the interest of good conscience, he switched.

Read the book to learn much more about Noah’s philosophy, writings, and machinations.

No Way But to Fight

The Book of the Week is “No Way But to Fight, George Foreman and the Business of Boxing” by Andrew R.M. Smith, published in 2020.

Born in 1949 in the Houston, Texas area, Foreman grew up in poverty in a large family. His future looked dim, as his schooling had been scant and his leisure activity had consisted of mugging people on the streets in the middle of the night.

Beginning in the mid-1960’s, president LBJ’s federal job-training program, called the Job Corps, arguably saved Foreman’s life. Various mentors who had acquired diverse life experiences- military veterans, counselors, coaches and teachers– supervised about two thousand troubled teens. Foreman learned about boxing, and won the first tournament he fought, in January 1967.

Foreman’s coach got him excused from the military draft for an undisclosed reason. As is well known, rival boxer Muhammad Ali became religious and resisted the draft. Through the decades, compulsory military service hindered plenty of careers of professional athletes, but they (Ty Cobb, Joe DiMaggio, Joe Louis and Roger Staubach, to name four) didn’t make a public issue of it. The government wanted to punish Ali on behalf of those athletes– regardless of his ethnicity– because it was unfair to them, that Ali could continue to develop his career while their lives were disrupted or put at risk.

Ali obviously turned this into a civil rights issue, but other people considered him to be “cheating” as he was getting an unfair advantage over his competition. It is interesting to see how, through the decades, the conversation has shifted on how some Americans define “cheating” in professional sports.

Performance-enhancing drugs (regulated in international competitions but not terribly strictly in American professional sports) have quietly disappeared from the discussion in the United States, as a million conspirators have pushed gender-issues to the forefront– as the next form of cheating. That just shows how easily human beings can be brainwashed by propaganda!

Anyway, yet another turning point in Foreman’s career, occurred at the dawn of the 1970’s, when he met Dick Sadler. The boxing promoter was a rare bird– did business on a handshake and wasn’t as greedy as his competition.

Boxing through the 1970’s was a complicated business, considering all the stakeholders involved: the fighters themselves, their entourages, event-venues, event-broadcasting outlets, the various professional groups that organized the matches, and the political entities that regulated and taxed the aforementioned.

In the early years of his career as an amateur, Foreman was criticized for choosing to fight easy opponents. In March 1974, he was also labeled unpatriotic for scheduling a match outside the United States (in Venezuela), even after his tax-avoidance and financial-related divorce troubles had ended. The international media stories arising from that fight, smacked of the poor diplomatic relationship between America and Venezuela (for oil-related reasons).

Read the book to learn much more about the boxers of Foreman’s generation who began their careers in the 1960’s, the history of the industry through the 1990’s, and Foreman’s careers.

No Better Time

The Book of the Week is “No Better Time– The Brief, Remarkable Life of Danny Lewin, the Genius Who Transformed the Internet” by Molly Knight Raskin, published in 2013. This short, slightly sloppily edited volume whose title exaggerates, described the brief life of a dot-com startup genius.

Danny Lewin was born in May 1970 in a suburb of Denver, Colorado. His family moved to Israel when he was fourteen. He enlisted in the Israel Defense Forces, and then he moved back to the United States to attend school at MIT.

While in school, with a friend, Lewin helped develop a technological innovation within the big-picture innovation of the whole Internet. Initially, his dot-com business, named Akamai Technologies, provided the service of preventing of the crashing of the browser when: a video went viral or a website got overwhelmed with traffic, or a denial-of-service attack was launched against a website. Through algorithms, obviously, eventually, computer scientists discovered the required optimal number of servers communicating among themselves to maximize computing power to minimize latency and downtime.

In the second half of the 1990’s, worldwide usage of the Internet, a decentralized network of potentially infinite networks, was in its infancy. This meant, for ordinary users, downloading of data was extremely slow. Impatience was growing in leaps and bounds as time-saving devices (like office software) were, too; resulting in “irrational exuberance” over securities sold to the public that funded dot-com startups. The likely reason Akamai still exists today while so many other tech startups failed, is that there was an actual, valuable service behind it!

By spring 2000, after receiving ginormous funding from its IPO, Akamai’s customers’ servers collectively numbered more than 2,750 in more than one hundred fifty networks in forty-five nations. At the book’s writing, Akamai controlled between fifteen and thirty percent of the world’s Internet traffic.

Read the book to learn much more about Lewin, the people who helped him, and his startup.

The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon

The Book of the Week is “The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon, The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady” by Heath Hardage Lee, published in 2024.

The future first lady Pat Nixon was born in March 1912 in Nevada. She was orphaned as a teenager. She faced numerous other hardships, so she was forced to play well with others; making her a skilled diplomat. In the second half of 1959, when her husband Richard (“Dick”) was running for president, she got her own campaign in order to attract female voters. There were buttons, banners, songs, and speaking engagements at social events such as teas and gatherings at women’s clubs.

Pat usually refrained from publicly expressing her opinions on her husband’s political activities, but she felt most strongly about gender equality. When he was finally elected president in 1968, she campaigned for the Equal Rights Amendment, and urged Dick to nominate female U.S. Supreme Court justices when two vacancies arose.

However, he hid behind the sexist American Bar Association’s assessment that the whole list of female nominees was unqualified for one reason or another, when he had to finalize his choices.

During Dick’s time as president, both individually and with Dick, Pat traveled extensively internationally to maintain friendly relationships with America’s then-allies. She still kept her personal life as private as possible, but complained she felt underappreciated in her diplomatic role.

People offered to help her write a book about her world-peace making. Yet, in her mind, publicizing her political activities was akin to her usage as a prop to promote her husband. But– isn’t that what politics is– managing the image of the big boss?

Beginning in the summer of 1973, the media covered nothing but the Watergate investigation. The special counsel who prosecuted the bad actors in the Nixon administration judged that the president “had entered a criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice.” This, pursuant to the “smoking gun” consisting of a conversation between Dick and his aide Bob Haldeman, recorded on tape in June 1972.

John Dean, the president’s former attorney, participated in the cover-up by urging the labeling of the break-in as a matter of “national security.” Therefore, the FBI and CIA shouldn’t interview two key witnesses in the case. When Dean was charged with crimes, he provided damning testimony saying that Nixon was aware of all the wrongdoing all along.

In May 1976, Woodward and Bernstein, the two investigative journalists who broke the Watergate stories, revealed the whole incident-crowded affair in a book. According to Heath Hardage Lee, some of its contents were tabloidy. The book made the claim that Pat became a drunk loner in the last several months of her husband’s presidency. The TV comedy-sketch show Saturday Night Live (“SNL”) portrayed her thusly, too. But Lee pointed out that Pat’s image had been conflated with that of Betty Ford.

Another reason why Pat was smeared in this way, might be that it was actually the president who had become the drunk loner when his crimes were coming to light. This assertion has been recounted in various primary sources that described the president’s behavior in the presence of Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman.

It is likely that the SNL writers were reluctant to mock the former president, as they might still have been subject to lawsuits and political retaliation. Anyway, read the book to learn much more about the public life Pat chose to have, and her struggles in trying to stay private.

ENDNOTE: Speaking of privacy, lawsuits and political retaliation– along with the issues of free speech, exploitation and the public’s right to know about how much of what their government is doing– modern communications technologies have muddied the waters. Even so, Donald Trump’s extreme litigiousness is his legacy.

Trump can dish it but he can’t take it. That’s why he’s suing everyone all the time. It’s a way to trot out the “victim card” to elicit sympathy from his base, and harass anyone who displeases him. Here’s what he’s singing now.

I WANT TO FORCE YOUR HAND

sung to the tune of “I Want to Hold Your Hand” with apologies to members of the Beatles, their estates, and whomever else the rights may concern.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want your criticism ba-anned.
For your excuses, I won’t stand.

You must, cave in to me.
I’m a defamed man.
Oh jeez, you’ve pained me.
I’m in conTROL of this land.
You’re thwarting my best-laid plans.
You’re hurting THE Trump brand.

And when I crush you, I’m still not, satisfied.
It’s such a feeling that your abuse, I can’t abide.
You hurt my pride.
You all lied.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want your criticism ba-anned.
For your excuses, I won’t stand.

And when I crush you, I’m still not, satisfied.
It’s such a feeling that your abuse, I can’t abide.
You hurt my pride.
You all lied.

I SUE, to tell you something: You’re under my command.
When I, sue-over everything, I want to force your hand.
I want to force your hand.
I want to force your hand.

I want to force your hand.

John Lewis

The Book of the Week is “John Lewis, In Search of the Beloved Community” by Raymond Arsenault, published in 2024. Lewis was America’s Nelson Mandela.

Born in 1940 in Alabama, Lewis became an extremely influential civil-rights activist and politician beginning in the 1960’s. He was fortunate to have teachers at his high school who inspired him to earn a higher-education degree in liberal arts. Ironically, the colleges which historically catered to blacks, had curricula that taught trades related to agriculture and construction, that kept blacks economically disadvantaged.

By the late 1950’s, Lewis had already met Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family. When Lewis applied to the all-white Troy University in Alabama, King warned him that he and his family could: receive death threats, get doxed (the pre-internet version), and even be physically harmed.

Starting in the 1950’s, major federal laws had been passed in order to eliminate the separate designations of eateries, restrooms, schools and other public areas for whites and blacks, in the Southern States. Historically, through such segregation, the blacks had been provided with inferior facilities and services in connection therewith. White inciters of hatred continued to obstruct the integration process.

Lewis became a leader or member of civil-rights protest groups such as the Freedom Riders, CORE (Congress of Racial Equality), and SNCC (Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee). The groups adopted Gandhi’s nonviolent, “turn-the-other-cheek” philosophy. Lewis helped plan, organize and execute protests, marches and other events. He also participated in them. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a leader in the SCLC (Southern Christian Leadership Conference). King could be arrogant, and invoked God in excusing himself from protests he chose not to participate in.

In spring 1961, collaborating with CORE, the Freedom Riders planned to take interstate rides in Southern States on Trailways and Greyhound buses, and eat and use the restrooms at the bus stations along the way. Approximately half of the Riders were white, but the blacks (and the whites) still became victims of violence when they sat in the front of the buses or entered the (illegally) still-segregated facilities in the bus stations.

In one particularly ugly incident, the KKK had been tipped off as to where and when just over a dozen Riders on a bus going from Birmingham to Montgomery, Alabama, would get off at a rest stop just beyond the city limits. Haters (men, women and children(!)) were waiting for the passengers. The Riders were physically beaten to a pulp with common household items such as baseball bats, chains, tire irons, hoes, rakes– and the bus was firebombed. Law enforcement deliberately took its time in acting to stop the violence. It was the Riders who were arrested. During the first half of 1961, more than 300 of 436 Freedom Riders who took sixty protest-bus-rides ended up in a prison in Mississippi.

The elephant-in-the-room question is, with all of the scholarly readings Lewis and other civil rights leaders had done in preparing for protests and marches, why did they (and media workers, too) not protect themselves against the worst-case-scenario?

In other words– wear full riot gear just like law enforcement officers did in later incidents when those officers were bashing heads and beating limbs with billy clubs? The Riders and other protesters also should have known and used ways to minimize the physical harm done by tear gas, water hoses and attack-dogs. Why did they not protect themselves? That would have been defensive (still nonviolent), not offensive.

The Riders’ goal was, through civil, peaceful disobedience, to overcrowd the jails. That would generate more good publicity than harming other people or destroying property, as did splinter groups that later branched off from the original aforementioned civil-rights organizations. The Riders endured disgusting jail conditions. Yet they opted to stay in jail even when they could have been released on bail.

In the early 1960’s, government leaders at all levels– with their reputations and thus reelections on the line– were initially at wits’ end about all the bad publicity they were getting for treating the protesters so badly. But eventually, they came up with some dirty tricks to influence public opinion and cause the groups to devolve into dissension.

Read the book to learn much, much more about Lewis and his times.

On a related note, it’s deja vu all over again (in terms of othering, civil rights and all that). “You-know-who” has become the poster boy for continuing to make incivility socially-acceptable in American society. His political opponents are the perfect target for his smears and hating on immigrants.

Yet, according to the History Channel, Trump is the descendant of immigrants– his grandparents, who came from Germany and Scotland. The German ones lied, saying they came from Sweden. “Trump maintained the ruse at the request of his own realtor father, Fred Trump, who had obfuscated his German ancestry to avoid upsetting Jewish friends and clients.” Heritage-whitewashing was not uncommon; the Schicklgrubers did it, too, the opposite way.

Anyway, if the truth makes you angry, you’re living a lie. Here’s a little ditty Trump has been singing of late. Of course, ladies and gentleman, the views of this man are not necessary….

SUPERIOR PEOPLE
sung to the tune of “Everyday People” with profuse apologies to Sly and the Family Stone, Mijac Music, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and to whomever else the rights may concern.

I’m always right.
I’m never wrong.
My own beliefs are in my song.

I’m a birther, a big star, all-American and then,
you know I’ll make us great again.

I-I-I am superior people, yeah, yeah.

THERE are lots of FOReigners who SHOULDn’t
get a green card.
We’re MAKing them the fat ones
while DE-priving our excellent ones.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

(you’re caca) We CAN’T live together.

My family’s better. Yours might be too,
if your genes are GREAT in my view.

If you-elect me, you know,
I’ll breed the best.
You know, you can put me to-the-test.

I-I-I am superior people, yeah, yeah.

I’LL make a border that KEEPS out these CRIMinals.
YOU’LL be a rich one.
WE’LL keep out the POOR ones.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

(you’re caca) We CAN’T live together.

I’LL look at the yellow one but think-TWICE about the BLACK one,
and possibly the RED one,
but the BEST one will likely be the WHITE one.

We’re way too nice. I’ll transform ICE.
I-could GO on and GO on.
De-PORT you and you and you.

I-I-I am superior people.

Cobb

The Book of the Week is “Cobb, The Life and Times of the Meanest Man Who Ever Played Baseball, A Biography” by Al Stump, published in 1994. Born in December 1886, Cobb grew up in Royston, Georgia.

In 1904, with big-league dreams, Cobb began “paying his dues” in semi-professional baseball. It was employment-at-will. The team paid his travel expenses to away-games at stadiums around southern states via horse-and-buggy in all sorts of weather. The food consisted of bean soup, hog jowls and grits.

Throughout his baseball career, Cobb behaved badly in various ways to get attention and his name known and remembered. He took full advantage of every opportunity to make his own stats look good, although he himself was a social outcast on his own team. He was a man of supernatural ability in both hitting and fielding, and he groomed his legend to the maximum.

Early on, Cobb got himself thrown out of the game for shoving, and spitting on the umpire. He began many a bench-clearing brawl. He repeatedly, anonymously wrote letters of shameless self-promotion to then-famous sports writer Grantland Rice at the Atlanta Journal to get his name in the paper, because his team was too low-level to be covered by the media.

Cobb pioneered various kinds of slides while base-stealing, in ways that would intentionally plant his sharpened metal cleats into basemen’s legs, to injure them, and make them drop the ball. No rule against that dirty trick was imposed during his career. He acted the drama queen– moving the second-base bag closer to third base by kicking it a few inches in mock frustration. Cobb would loudly comment on the game in order to psychologically rattle opposing players.

Americans were shocked when they learned a couple of years after the scheme was executed, that some Chicago White Sox players sought to financially benefit from deliberately losing the 1919 World Series because organized crime figures organized gambling on the games.

In 1921, Cobb simultaneously played for and managed the major league Detroit Tigers. He was a hypocrite, banning his team (except himself) from playing golf, and during spring-training, ordering practice on Sundays. He himself didn’t show up for the latter, as he was visiting the minor league teams he co-owned in Rhode Island and Georgia.

“One corrupt game in every 300? Club owners blanched at that news. They had covered up the rewards systems, allowing it to pervade a game believed by millions of Americans to be on the square. Now, the outcome was shameful disclosure.”

Just as dishonesty waxes and wanes over decades in various areas of American life, it’s time to clean it up again in politics. BUT– only after one big burst of phony outrage spikes media ratings in the next few months, as American society values overpaid noisemakers (talking heads) on the idiot box and sports figures, more than: passionate teachers, sincere public servants, whistleblowers, and muckrakers pushing for social justice.

It is no accident that it’s more expensive than ever to be an idiot these days. Prior to cable TV (beginning in the 1950’s), the price of a TV set included the vast wasteland of entertainment and ads via pure broadcasting. For most Americans, watching TV now entails the purchase of an overpriced monitor and on top of that, payment of a monthly installment forever (!) to receive that vast wasteland (which still includes ads!), for more choices. That installment helps pay the obscene salaries of the said overpaid noisemakers and sports figures. The idiot box and radio pay people to talk. And certain politicians pay people not to talk.

Anyway, read the book to learn much more about Cobb’s family life and career– the man, the myth, the legend.

Rockne of Notre Dame

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The Book of the Week is “Rockne of Notre Dame, The Making of a Football Legend” by Ray Robinson, published in 1999.

Knute Rockne was born in March 1888 in western Norway. Two friends convinced him to become a student at Notre Dame (located in South Bend, Indiana), which had open enrollment for anyone who could pay the tuition. In the 1910’s, Rockne was able to get paid for playing and coaching American football simultaneously. The financial rules of football played at schools and football played as a form of work, were still evolving.

Rockne took full advantage: he knew all the public-relations tricks for building a reputation and maximizing his earnings. He sometimes played under a fake name, or sent a substitute to play under his real name. He got away with that because few people knew what he looked like.

In the nineteen-teens, Rockne became an assistant coach and trainer for the Notre Dame football team. He was promoted to head coach in 1918 when the previous one retired. One team member was a colorful character named George Gipp (as in “Win one for the Gipper”). His life outside football consisted of drinking, gambling and cutting classes.

Rockne condoned Gipp’s behavior because he helped the team achieve a winning record with his extraordinary talent. However, by March 1920, when Gipp’s sins became excessive and he was a bad influence– hurting the reputation of the school– Notre Dame’s administration basically told him “Fat, drunk and stupid is no way to go through life, son” (like in the movie, Animal House) and expelled him.

In a not-uncommon situation, by late April 1920, local businessmen pressured Notre Dame’s president into reinstating Gipp, because they wanted to see a winning football team, and they were major investors in the school’s then- and future facilities.

Rockne always had a profit-making pot of irons in the fire, that included betting on the games of his own team. Gambling was rampant among numerous stakeholders of the American sports scene at the time. By the early 1920’s, Rockne could even control his own press, becoming a weekly columnist (sometimes published by ghostwriters) in syndicated newspapers. No one seemed to care that conflicts abounded among Rockne’s other (concurrent!) positions– Notre Dame’s athletic director, football recruiter, track-team coach, etc.

The Notre Dame football team’s profitability rose when the team was finally invited to play in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena on New Year’s Day 1925. The school (pursuant to Rockne’s negotiations) collected a portion of the gate receipts (of paying fans at the stadium). The game was broadcast on the radio.

The Notre Dame team played against Army every year. The football community had yet to feel the effects of the Great Depression in their big game of November 1929 at the then-Yankee Stadium. “A special train brought in Notre Dame’s eighty-piece marching band, and hundreds of South Benders came along with them.”

Through the decades, Rockne’s influence spread far and wide, as he served as a father-figure to dozens of his players. He recommended them for coaching positions after they graduated.

Read the book to learn much more about how Rockne became a legend in Notre Dame football.

Jonas Salk

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The Book of the Week is “Jonas Salk, A Life” by Charlotte DeCroes Jacbos, published in 2015.

Born in October 1914 in East Harlem, Salk grew up in the New York City area. In 1942, he got a fellowship to study polio at the University of Michigan, that served as a draft deferment. The spread of influenza and pneumonia had caused ruined lives and a massive number of deaths in previous years, so health officials wanted to stem a similar kind of devastation in connection with polio. Unlike measles or mumps, the flu was found to have variants. Polio was also found to have variants, so making a vaccine for it was a complicated affair. Even so, in the 1940’s, medical researchers were permitted to experiment on human subjects in, say, mental institutions and prisons.

In 1945, Salk signed a contract with the drug company Parke, Davis that allowed him to collect royalties for the flu vaccine. In October 1947, he got to manage his own laboratory at the University of Pittsburgh. His goal to was to create a polio vaccine in order to eradicate the fear of illness and deaths that was then plaguing ordinary Americans.

Salk was one of the first scientists to describe the-then idea of herd effect: during an epidemic, when a population became effectively vaccinated, there were fewer people to whom to spread the virus– the rest of the population, or herd. Therefore, disease-spread was greatly reduced. In the absence of an effective vaccine, disease spread like wildfire.

At his new employer, Salk chafed under a bean-counter and inferior resources. But he sold his soul and became a workaholic bureaucrat. He got the dean’s permission to renovate the place, in exchange for teaching classes and delivering lectures in serving the Pittsburgh community.

Salk tested whether mineral oil was a good adjuvant in a flu vaccine. This was a non-toxic substance added to the syringe to stimulate the production of antibodies at the vaccination site on the arm. An effective adjuvant would allow the patient to better fight the flu and a variety of other germs. Besides, it would dilute the vaccine, cutting costs.

By 1948, Salk had developed a reputation for explaining his work to laypeople at press conferences, so he was able to get funding to study how many types of polio virus there were. His belief was that inactivated (dead), rather than live virus cells in the vaccine-syringe could still be effective. Other alpha-male scientists disagreed with him. Live virus was riskier, because there was a small chance that even a healthy patient could contract or spread the disease.

By 1953, Salk’s research on monkeys and children showed that his vaccine was effective. However, “The press continued to incite the public; exaggerated and inaccurate reports created unreasonable expectations.” The public began clamoring for the vaccine. The clashing egos of polio research-scientists resulted in power struggles over how to conduct vaccination field trials.

The mid-1950’s saw a successful nationwide study on Salk’s polio vaccine that made him a celebrity. His wife and three sons lost their privacy. The press slapped Salk’s name on the vaccine, even though a rival scientist named Sabin aggressively pushed the live-virus vaccine that became the standard one used for decades across the United States from the 1960’s onward.

Read the book to learn everything you ever wanted to know about the history of polio vaccines (including the 1955 vaccine-making drug-lab mishap that resulted in illness, deaths and lots of scapegoats)– how hard it was to make them safe and effective and convince the public of same (hint: The chief reason it was so hard was that it costs money and scientists can’t do research without money, and humans are corrupted by money; also, scientists tend to have big egos and want to win a Nobel Prize).