Bastille Day was not like the 4th of July

Posted on July 16, 2026 by oddmanout215

Swamp Rabbit raised a toast to his TV screen during a news feature about Bastille Day celebrations in France. “The Frenchies are really whooping it up,” he said. “This is their version of the Fourth of July.”

“Not exactly,” I said. “Bastille Day started a revolution that was a lot bloodier than ours.”

In fact, the American Revolution was a polite changing of the guard compared to the revolution in France that began on July14, 1789 and didn’t really end for a quarter-century. The American Revolution was about casting off British rule — British taxes, especially — but most Americans were otherwise content with the status quo. The French Revolution was about casting off everything – the monarchy, the landed gentry, the social order, the Catholic Church — and it led to factional warfare. Thousands of heads rolled, and the victims including many leaders of the uprising.

“I can’t picture that French dust-up being bloodier than ours,” Swamp Rabbit joked. “Unless they were in a food fight. They’re real serious about their cuisine.”

I scowled at him. “They were in a food fight. Their revolution was bloodier than ours because they were hungrier than us. The have-nots couldn’t get any bread, and the king and queen were too dumb or arrogant to do anything about it. Let them eat cake.”

It was more complicated than that, of course. The Americans rose up against what they thought of as a foreign government. There was an ocean between them and Britain. They just wanted the Brits to leave them alone. The French rose against their own government, which couldn’t afford to make reforms, partly because it had helped finance the American Revolution in order to undermine Britain.

The revolutionaries adopted the slogan “liberty, equality, fraternity” but didn’t live up to it for long. They made a commitment to the rights of man, just like the American revolutionaries, but they’ve suffered through some oppressive regimes since 1789. The current government is facing a major threat from neofascists and other extreme right-wingers. Last year, the International Federation for Human Rights warned that France is in danger of “dropping out of democracy.”

“They ain’t the only ones,” Swamp Rabbit said without going into the precarious state of democracy in America 250 years after Independence Day.

“It’s easy to start something,” he added. “But you never know where it’s gonna end, do you?”

Footnote: I miss Philadelphia’s annual Bastille Day celebration at Eastern State Penitentiary, which was discontinued years ago. It used to end with hundreds of “Krimpets” being thrown from the prison walls as a Marie Antoinette stand-in shouted “Let them eat Tastykakes.”

Another: Those of you who still read books might enjoy the passages about the French Revolution in Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence. The book weighs a ton, but the prose is breezy and elegant.

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Don’t like your history? Scrub, rinse, repeat.

Posted on July 11, 2026 by oddmanout215

At high noon I rushed over to Swamp Rabbit’s shack to read aloud from an essay in the NY Review of Books by the always insightful Fintan O’Toole:

National vanity is arguably dependent on the absence of national pride. To be proud of one’s country is… not to disguise its faults but to want to believe that the country is capable of rising above them. The keynote of national pride is “We’re better than this.” National vanity, on the contrary, is indeed a form of disguise. It uses the mask of greatness to cover up a society’s complex realities. The dark parts of its history and the persistent stains of injustice must be erased. The dignity of self-knowledge is sacrificed to the willed ignorance of inflated self-esteem. Self-belief is replaced by self-delusion.

“It’s too humid to think about that high-falutin’ stuff,” Swamp Rabbit said. “I ain’t even finished my first beer yet.”

But I was still fired up about the quiet purging of the historical record that started when the Trump administration declared war on national park exhibits that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

In Philadelphia, our hometown, the feds are fighting to permanently erase information about the nine enslaved people who were kept at the President’s House by George Washington. At the Second Bank of the United States, they’ve altered a panel that used to identify Thomas Jefferson as a slaveholder as well as a champion of freedom. At Independence Hall, a virtual tour no longer mentions that “accused fugitives from slavery” were once held there for court hearings.

And then there’s the ongoing campaign to discredit the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, which the Trump gang has accused of using “extreme political activism” “to divide, dispirit, and discourage our citizens.”

“I don’t get it,” Swamp Rabbit said. “If it weren’t for extreme political activity there wouldn’t have been no revolution.”

I told him that the MAGA goons who own the Republican Party are a sensitive bunch. They feel threatened when you expose the rot at the heart of their self-serving ideology, such as it is. They take it personally when you debunk the lies they embrace to justify suppression of ideas they’re too lazy to grapple with.

I said, “Beware of blowhards who, when confronted with evidence that their ideas are flawed, respond by calling you unpatriotic.”

“But they’re the peeps who run this country,” Swamp Rabbit replied. “They see the word ‘slavery’ and they push the delete button. They look in the mirror and see a perfect ’10.’ It don’t matter how ugly they are.”

I couldn’t argue with his summary of the MAGA mindset. He sounded like a swampy version of O’Toole.

All I could say is that visitors to the national historic park in Philly this summer — those who are paying attention — will hear a lot of talk about freedom but see few signs of what a struggle it is to protect democratic institutions, even in the country where the Bill of Rights was written. The purge will continue until something sparks a genuine backlash against MAGA, and that’s not happening yet.

Swamp Rabbit was feeling feisty because his parole officer, Victor Cortez, isn’t due to check up on him anytime soon. He tossed his empty beer can off his porch and fetched two full ones.

“You’d be better off going on a liquid diet,” he said. “It would help you roll with the punches.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I might end up like you — all punched out.”

Footnote: The Philadelphia Inquirer is doing a good job of calling attention to the damage being done by the sneaky federal whitewashers who lurk in the park.

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Oops, I got my mad kings mixed up

Posted on July 6, 2026 by oddmanout215

It was too hot to exercise, so I nodded out with NPR on the radio. When I woke, the network’s hosts and reporters were reading from a list of grievances:

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hither swarms of officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the consent of our legislatures.

Who was this “he”? Was NPR making a statement about Elon Musk and DOGE? Were they accusing ICE?

The staffers — Terry Gross, Nina Totenberg, et al. — read one or two sentences each: “He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to the civil power.” He has subjected us to “a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution.” He has quartered “large bodies of armed troops among us” and protected them “from punishment for any murders which they should commit on the inhabitants of these states.”

I wondered if they were referring to the innocent people killed last winter by federal agents in Minneapolis.

The NPR crew mentioned tyrants and “self-evident” truths. “Okay, now I get it,” I said. I ran next door to tell Swamp Rabbit that the clever NPR crew was quoting from the Declaration of Independence — using it to list reasons why “he,” Donald Trump, should be impeached again.

Swamp Rabbit’s radio was tuned to the same show. “You’re crazy,” he said. “They’re quoting what Thomas Jefferson wrote about King George. Ain’t nobody mentioned Donald Trump.”

“Maybe not, but they should,” I replied. “The one tyrant’s been dead a few hundred years. The other one’s still here. He thinks he owns the White House.”

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Quit whining, it’s only 102 degrees

Posted on July 3, 2026 by oddmanout215

The sleet sounded like beaded curtains brushed aside by a fleeing intruder. I lingered in bed, tensing up every time the ice pellets danced across my windows. My favorite blanket — the one with the embroidered dinosaur images — was beautiful but too thin. My teeth chattered…

I’m joking. It’s 102 degrees in Philadelphia today, and there’s no relief in sight. An extreme heat warning is in effect throughout the region. The “urban heat island effect” has kicked in and row homes all over town are hotter than brick ovens. SEPTA’s Regional Rail service is a mess because the heat has warped the tracks and made the wires sag. The Independence Day Parade is canceled, as was the Wawa Welcome America Salute to Service concert featuring Queen Latifah. Devastating news!

My layabout neighbor Swamp Rabbit frowned. “Why you gotta be sarcastic, Odd Man? The peeps were looking forward to seeing the queen.”

Inevitably, he reminded me that I mocked his desperation back in February when the city was stuck in single-digit temperatures and I couldn’t drive him to the liquor store because my car was encased in ice. I’d probably laugh now if he keeled over and died, he said.

“Quit whining,” I replied. “You’d be dead already if I wasn’t such a good neighbor.”

Last night the ancient air conditioner in his shotgun shack sputtered like a crashing plane and conked out. I let him sleep on my bedroom floor and gave him a bottle of French colonial water when he got up this morning.

“Ain’t you the generous one,” he said now. “I’m surprised you didn’t make me pay for it.”

“I put it on your tab.”

I think we’re both suffering from Angry Doomer Syndrome. It’s a state of mind that takes hold when you realize we’ve been taking one step forward, two steps back since the first Earth Day, in 1970. We’re still losing the battle against climate change triggered by our dependence on fossil fuels. The oil and gas barons are riding higher than ever, thanks to the crooks and bribetakers in government who are doing their best to stop the transition to renewable energy sources. You wouldn’t know it from the mainstream media, but many of us are angry and half-convinced we’re caught in a doom loop.

Swamp Rabbit balked. “I ain’t angry and I ain’t doomed. You’re just projectin’ your fear on all the peeps who ain’t doomers… But thanks for the water.”

“Just hope you don’t have to ask the government for water someday.” I said. “They’ll probably bring you gasoline.”

Footnote: From David Wallace-Wells in New York Times: “… One lesson of these pummeling, sequential extreme temperature events — one heat dome after another after another — is that we’re going to have to do an awful lot to make a future punctuated by so many more of them manageable.” 

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Green is the new orange

Posted on June 27, 2026 by oddmanout215

NYT columnist Maureen Dowd tweaked the title of an old monster movie for a recent headline: “The creature from the green lagoon.” Could there be a more apt way to describe the shiny beast who polluted the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial in advance of the nation’s 250th birthday?

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit sipped beer and shrugged. “It’s misleading. Trump ain’t black and he ain’t green. He’s orange.”

“Maybe it’s time for him to go green,” I said. “That orange goop he smears on his face is probably toxic.”

We debated the criminal-in-chief’s $14 million pool fiasco. Swamp Rabbit noted that Trump had wanted the pool water to have a blue sheen for the red, white and blue holiday. That’s why his no-bid contractor clowns painted the pool’s surfaces blue. But the water turned green as algae set in, and the paint peeled when they tried to kill the algae, and who knows what color the pool will be when July 4th rolls around.

“Dowd is right,” I said. “Green is Trump’s ‘essence.’ He’s like the algae — ‘slimy, stinky and unrelenting.'”

I mentioned the TV show “Orange Is the New Black,” about a woman who has to wear an orange jumpsuit after she gets sent to prison.

He looked confused. “What’s that got to do with anything?”

“In the fashion world, black is never out of style,” I said. “But every year a new color is ‘in’ and becomes as fashionable as black for a while. In Trump World, it’s orange that’s never out of style, but green is ‘in’ this year thanks to the pool. Green is the new orange, know what I’m saying? “

Swamp Rabbit raised his can of beer. “No, I don’t know what you’re saying, but here’s hoping I live to see Trump wearing an orange jumpsuit.”

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Soundtrack for the solstice

Posted on June 23, 2026 by oddmanout215

The sun was directly overhead on the longest day of the year. No shadows. I pushed a button on my phone. My neighbor Swamp Rabbit leaned back in his broken rocking chair, waiting to hear some songs that would blot out the present and help him relive happy summer memories.

“Swimsuit Issue” by Sonic Youth played and “Black Hole Sun” by Soundgarden.

“Turn that shit off.” he said, choking on his beer. “Sounds like the end of the world.”

“I’m just messing with you,” I said. “Those aren’t from my feel-good list.”

I made an adjustment and “Sunny Afternoon” played. It’s like lying on a beach chair in a cool breeze, watching the waves roll in. Swamp Rabbit drank up and smiled, but “Melt” by Barney Cortez and “Girl” by Beck seemed to unsettle him. He’s of a certain age, so it takes him a long time to warm up to songs he hasn’t heard a million times.

“Under the Boardwalk” reminded him of a cheap date in Wildwood, NJ. “Warmth of the Sun” brought tears to his eyes. Or maybe his allergies did that.

“This is great,” he said. “These songs are so good, they bring back memories of stuff that probably didn’t even happen.”

“Those are the best kind,” I replied.

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Court OKs sanitized slavery exhibit in Philly

Posted on June 22, 2026 by oddmanout215

Irony is a bitch. Last week, just in time for Juneteenth, an appeals court reversed a previous judge’s decision and ruled that Trump and his minions can replace the exhibit panels at the President’s House Site in Philadelphia. This means they are free to install their own panels, which de-emphasize and arguably whitewash the story of the nine people enslaved by George Washington at the site.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit heard the news and said, “What’s so ironic? What’s gonna be in the replacement exhibit?”

I told him the appeals court ruling is ironic because it undermines the meaning of the Juneteenth holiday by allowing the Trump gang to suggest it wasn’t all bad to be enslaved by Washington, who privately acknowledged that slavery was evil even as he used it to his advantage. The judges apparently were persuaded by the wording used by the National Park Service in composing the replacement panels:

Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.

“That’s kitsch, not history,” I said. “Whoever wrote it doesn’t know what autonomy means.”

“Those lucky slaves,” Swamp Rabbit said, acknowledging the irony. “Free tickets and a roof over their heads. They didn’t even have to pay rent.”

Only a few of the new panels mention the individual slaves. The revised version of the exhibit text reads more like a homogenized overview of slavery in general, meant for tourists – slavery was a terrible institution and here’s why, but the past is dead, somebody give me a cheeseburger.

Swamp Rabbit stroked his pathetic goatee and said, “The new panels don’t make no sense. I thought the exhibit was supposed to be about what it was like to be a slave in Washington’s house.”

I told him the new exhibit makes perverted sense if you realize it’s part of the Trump gang’s campaign to remove or alter all exhibits at national parks that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”

“This one just happens to be in our hometown,” I said.

And it helps to know that the Trump lapdog overseeing the campaign is Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, who has cut the National Park Service’s maintenance budget by 40 percent and moronically defended Trump’s national effort to eliminate wind power installations.

I couldn’t help thinking of Cynthia M. Rufe, the district judge who ordered the Park Service to put back the original panels when the Trump gang had them removed in February. She wrote, “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims — to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts… It does not.”

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Trump’s VP is making (up) history

Posted on June 17, 2026 by oddmanout215

Years before becoming Donald Trump’s vice president, JD Vance suggested that Trump might be “America’s Hitler.” That may have been his last truthful moment. Now he’s one of Dear Leader’s most prolific liars, and most of his lies tend to be whoppers. He outdid himself last week while arguing that his boss was negotiating an honorable end to his disastrous war with Iran:

If you go back to World War II, if you go back to World War I, if you go back to every major conflict in human history, they all end with some kind of negotiation.

My neighbor Swamp Rabbit was appalled. “This dude went to Yale but he’s an ignoramus. I guess he didn’t take no history courses.”

He was revisiting our recent “are they willfully ignorant or just stupid?” debate. I told him that Vance only pretends to be an ignoramus. He surely knows World II ended with the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan to allied forces. “He’s a big phony who enjoys lying,” I said.

My favorite Vance lie is from 2024, when he repeatedly told the media that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were stealing and eating pet owners’ dogs and cats. When he finally had to admit this was a lie, he said, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

That tells you all you need to know about the guy who’s next in line for the presidency.

Footnote: Still waiting for Victor Cortez, Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer, to render a verdict on whether it’s fair to refer to Vance as Trump’s Herman Goring.

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Matching Trump’s flunkies with Hitler’s

Posted on June 11, 2026 by oddmanout215

We were discussing yes-men last week when I raised a question: How do Donald Trump’s sycophants match up with Adolph Hitler’s? I mentioned Rudolph Hess, the longtime Hitler comrade who flew solo to Scotland with the idea of persuading the British to make a deal with Germany. Hess had fallen out of favor with his beloved Fuhrer and was desperate to please him. Who in Trump’s orbit would demonstrate such servility?

My hard-drinking neighbor Swamp Rabbit dissed me for equating Trump with Hitler. Then he said, “Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for attorney general. He went beyond flattering Trump and begged for the job. He said ‘I love you, sir‘ in front of the cameras.”

I grudgingly conceded that Blanche matched up pretty well with Hess — one point for Swamp Rabbit. When it was his turn, he challenged me to name the Trump propagandist who could be a stand-in for Hitler’s evil runt Joseph Goebbels.

“Stephen Miller,” I said. “I’m surprised he can say anything without making a Nazi salute.”

My turn again. I asked Swamp Rabbit which Trump weasel most closely resembles Heinrich Himmler, Hitler’s heartless Holocaust architect. He named Kristi Noem, the now-fired Homeland Security chief. Last summer, she primped in front of cages crammed with torture victims at a Salvadoran concentration camp. My pick was Marco Rubio, who has bragged about shutting down USAID, a move tantamount to condemning massive numbers of poor people to death by disease or starvation.

Swamp Rabbit balked. “Rubio is a sneaky little suck-up but he ain’t no Himmler. JD Vance should get that role.”

I told him Vance is better imagined as Trump’s Herman Goring. He competes with Rubio to be Trump’s most loyal stooge, just as Himmler and Goring jousted to be Hitler’s.

But Swamp Rabbit wouldn’t concede the point. “I’m tired of this game, Odd Man. Trump’s gang is evil, but they ain’t in the same league with Hitler’s mass-murderin’ goons. Vance is a practicing Catholic. Miller is a Jew.”

I demurred. “They’ve all stood by a convicted criminal who tried to overturn a presidential election and assembled a private army that persecutes nonwhites. They’re on board with his rejection of the Constitution, his support for Vladimir Putin, and his use of the White House as a cash withdrawal machine for himself and his crooked family. Where Trump leads, they follow without question. You really think they wouldn’t match the crimes of Hitler’s crew if given the opportunity?”

We decided to stop bickering and let a third party judge the match game. Swamp Rabbit’s parole officer Victor Cortez is due to drop by soon and he doesn’t like to be overruled.

Footnote: I wanted to match Robert F. Kennedy Jr. with Dr. Josef Mengela until I remembered Mengela wasn’t in Hitler’s Berlin mob. Oh well…

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Long dead, forever young (new Kerouac notes)

Posted on June 7, 2026 by oddmanout215

My first thought was oh no, not another article about Jack Kerouac. This one is in the New Yorker and is by Joyce Johnson, who has written well on many subjects, including Kerouac, her romantic partner in the late 1950s and her longtime friend. He’s been dead since 1969, and his life and work have been picked over by a million critics but…

I devoured the article anyway, looking for new minutiae about the On the Road author, a moody guy with working-class roots who was hyped as a rebel against mid-20th century conformity and used decades after his death as a sales tool for the Gap (“Kerouac wore khakis”) and other corporations. He alienated straight-arrow types and appealed to contrarians, foes of the status quo, artists and academics, avant-garde musicians, hardcore outliers, parttime bohemians —

“And aimless, no-account bums like you,” my rowdy neighbor Swamp Rabbit said.

I tried to explain my conflicted feelings. Kerouac, only 47 when he died, was a poetic visionary, a sentimental bloviator, a keen observer of social history in the making, a pathetic victim of America’s celebrity culture. I can’t think of another author I’ve read and changed my mind about so often over the years.

Swamp Rabbit snickered. “You ain’t changed your mind. You badmouth Kerouac for becoming a drunken slob, but you still think he’s cool.”

Swamp Rabbit, a slob himself, reminded me that I still own dog-eared copies of On the Road, Dharma Bums, Desolation Angels and a half-dozen other Kerouac novels, and works by or about William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and other writers often lumped together with Kerouac as exemplars of the Beat Generation, a term that describes young men who felt beat down and disillusioned by the pervasive materialism of post-World War II American culture.

Kerouac was the Beat who clicked with the public and became what the media now calls a countercultural icon. He was on “The Tonight Show” with Steve Allen and in glossy magazines, and his cross-country adventures with the legendary Neal Cassidy inspired “Route 66,” a TV series about two young guys on an endless road trip, looking for the American Dream or the meaning of life or something. Kerouac epitomized the spontaneity that often distinguished the Beats from more conventional writers. He didn’t rely on plots or outlines but rather on his lyrical, open-ended depictions of life as he lived it.

Swamp Rabbit was laughing again. “Your big words don’t fool me. You like them Beats because they were into sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll, like you.”

I told him it was sex, drugs and bebop jazz in their case. Kerouac, a Charlie Parker fan, called his writing style “spontaneous bop prosody.” He identified with outliers as diverse as Whitman and Dostoevsky and sought spiritual enlightenment through his reading and writing. He wasn’t a dilletante or a fake.

“Unlike some people I could name,” Swamp Rabbit said.

I gave him a dirty look. He asked if I’d learned anything from Johnson’s article.

“Only that the Beats should have treated women better, and that Kerouac’s best writing still reminds me of what it feels like to be young and free.”

“Free from what?” he said.

He’s my neighbor but I couldn’t resist: “From guys like you who are dead already but don’t know it.”

Footnote: Kerouac read his poetry on a bunch of audio recordings with Steve Allen on piano. Allen was the Steven Colbert of his era, except that he didn’t get thrown off TV for being a liberal.

Another: Kerouac came close to suing the producers of “Route 66” and the Chevrolet car company for stealing “the characters and theme” of On the Road.

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