Volunteerism was down at our state fair this year. Two teachers hired last spring haven’t shown up at the Haines School. Word is our runners are quitting the cross-country team, one of the town’s most popular and successful sports programs in recent years. Folks are having a hard time committing. Is it any wonder? The fate of the nation hangs…
My anti-immigration friends are always telling me that the new immigrants aren’t like the “good old” immigrants who assimilated to life in the USA. So I’m thinking about my granddad, who we called Pop Pop, a tough little Polack who arrived at Ellis Island from a farm near Warsaw in 1905. He was 17 years old and he found his…
A political tide turned against liberalism in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan and the rise of the New Right. Funded by ultra-rich ideologues, the New Right made a sharp turn away from moderate conservatism – which for a decade or more had supported reasonable advances like abortion rights and environmental protection – and embraced issues it could use…
The kooks are now talking about civil war. Even the kooks at the coffee shop next to our city hall. War is coming in July, they say, because they read that on the Internet, the world’s largest bathroom stall, an endless wall of shadowy claims, allegations and innuendo to which the feeble-minded have no immunity. We had home-grown kooks stopping…
Before this year, I didn’t think much about drag shows. If I thought of them at all, I regarded them perhaps like jai alai: Fun and exotic for folks who are into that but nothing I couldn’t live without. Men dressing up as women for laughs or because they like silk undies. It’s a free country. Knock yourselves out. So…
“People under 30 don’t read printed material.” First and Pike News owner Lee Lauckhart, 2019 Alaska Airlines magazine is gone. The newsstand at Seattle’s Pike Place Market is gone. Newspapers are almost gone from Hudson News at the airport. See if you can find them. They’re tucked back in the corner, beneath pop fiction. Hudson News has officially dropped…
Perched on a hill in the rolling farmlands of eastern France stands a lone windmill, or “moulin” in French, a towering structure on those low fields, so stark and out of place that a passerby can’t help but stop in curiosity. The place is Valmy, in the Champagne region, an area that boasts the world’s most valuable grapes and some…
My favorite flavor of concerned citizen is the government worker, often a retired one, who stands up at a public meeting and says we have to get government off our backs. Astonishing how many of these guys forget to offer up their pensions as a place to start. A good number of these people – including retired policemen – were…
When I was a child, my father would sing to me to sleep with “The Big Rock Candy Mountain,” an ode to hobos and a life lived freely as a wandering bum. On the Big Rock Candy Mountain, lemonade bubbled up from springs, cigarettes grew on trees and they hung the jerk who invented work. It was an odd lullaby.…
I knew about four people in Alaska when I was invited to an “orphan’s Thanksgiving” in Anchorage in 1984. I had overstayed my plans to head south at summer’s end and was living in an apartment behind a strip mall on dreary East Tudor Road. November had been the coldest and darkest of my experiences with cold and dark. I…