07/07/2026
Leave a comment
Amy Krouse Rosenthal

945 Words: Funny Girl

This’ll be a one-day break from my ongoing series on the highs and lows of American history.

The memory of this person popped into my head overnight and I have to write about her today. A old friend. Amy Krouse Rosenthal. The writer, the children’s book author, the memoirist, the prankster, the wife and mother.

Amy Krouse Rosenthal. Image: Brooke Hummer Photography.

She may have been the most imaginative person I’ve ever met. At least she’s in the top three and, to tell the truth, I can’t think of who the other two might be. Maybe Tristra Newyear would be one of them.

You want a shining example of Amy’s imagination? Sure. Ten days before she died of ovarian cancer in March of 2017, she penned a lengthy article that ran in the New York Times titled, “You May Want to Marry My Husband.” In it, she listed, chapter and verse, the qualities of her husband, Jason Rosenthal. She knew she was on the way out and she wanted to do all she could to ensure he’d eventually get on with his life. “He is an easy man to fall in love with,” she wrote. “I did it in one day.”

Amy, seemingly every day, came up with a new idea for a project, an antic, a piece of performance art that never failed to elicit a titter or a guffaw. For instance, in the late 1990s signs reading, “Employees Must Hold Hands before Returning to Work” began to appear above sinks in all the hippest watering holes in Chicago, as well as two-thirds of all the dive bars therein. Sometimes, the signs’d be pasted over the obligatory “Employees Must Wash Hands….” placards. The signs were well-designed and professionally produced. They were Amy’s work. She went around affixing the signs to barroom bathroom walls over a period of many months.

That’s the kind of thing she did. Once, she staged an event on Chicago’s lakefront, in Millennium Park, calling it “17 Things I Made.” Among the things she’d made were several of her books, her kids, her wedding vow, a song, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Hundreds showed up to help her make an 18th thing.

I was sitting with her in Katerina’s coffeehouse on Irving Park Road one summer afternoon. I told her I’d just read that the noted existentialist philosopher, feminist, and author of The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir, had spent a lot of time in Chicago in the 1940s  and ’50s while she carried on a torrid affair will the author Nelson Algren. de Beauvoir, I told her, wrote that she’d had her first orgasm in Algren’s Wicker Park apartment. Well…, here, let me quote from a Chicago Reader story I wrote about Amy in December 2000:

“They should have a bronze sign there!” Rosenthal nearly hollered. “That would be awesome. That would be the most brilliant example of insight and creativity, and they could have one of those brown highway directional signs like they have for the Children’s Museum or Navy Pier.”

I wouldn’t have been a bit surprised if one day I’d see an historical marker, proclaiming the location of Simone de Beauvoir’s first sexual climax, posted outside Algren’s Evergreen Street home. Amy Krouse Rosenthal was perfectly capable of pulling that off.

She authored 30 children’s books, including the beloved, Duck! Rabbit! She wrote several memoirs, riffing on motherhood and family life, including, The Mother’s Guide to the Meaning of Life: What I’ve Learned on My Never-ending Quest to Become a Dalai Mama. She was a TED speaker and an NPR commentator. She contributed to Oprah Winfrey’s magazine and Amy Poehler’s Smart Girls. She frequently appeared in the New York Times — in fact, her first essay for that august rag, on “busy-ness,” ran side by side with a Salman Rushdie op/ed on the chances India and Pakistan might launch nuclear missiles at each other. Heady company, indeed.

That piece she wrote for the New York Times, her valedictory extolling the virtues of her husband? It drew better than 4.5 million online hits, so claimed the paper’s obit on her.

I met Amy when we both hung out and wrote at that storied center of the coffeehouse universe, Urbus Orbis, in the early 1990s. Invariably, she’d have kicked her shoes off and had tucked her legs under her as if she were in her own living room. She lived on her laptop as did I (and I still do to this day.) She laughed easily and often, her face crinkling as though she were on the verge of tears. Tears of glee.

She was a tiny thing, even though she acknowledged that as a little girl she was “chubby.” I have a photo of her in a box somewhere wearing my motorcycle helmet, taken in 1999 at her insistence. The helmet fit her the way the oversized carapace fit over Dave Thomas Dartn Vader takeoff character in Spaceballs.She grew up in the tony North shore suburb of Lake Forest, next door, in fact, to the renowned artists and writers residence Ragdale House, its alumni including Lynda Barry, Stanley Crouch, Alex Kotlowitz, Dennis Lehane, Rebecca Makkai, Sara Paretsky, Katha Pollitt, Alice Sebold, Ravi Shankar, and…, um, me. Amy cut her teeth as an advertising copywriter in Chicago and San Francisco, that is, until she realized that the ad world was way too cut-throat and pressure packed for her.

Amy turned to writing what she called “Brain Lint” gags and aphorisms and then expanded her range in every direction imaginable.

There’s no particular reason why I should be engaging in this eulogy other than Amy Krouse Rosenthal was one of the people I’ve known who shouldn’t be forgotten.

07/06/2026
Leave a comment
Declaration of Independence, US Constitution

804 Words: New & Improved

So desperate were the Colonies to break away from the English crown that the northern contingent pinched its collective nose and went to bed with the slave-holding Southern bunch. Each half figured the Revolution would be a bomb if the other wasn’t spooning with it at night.

How does that sound?

It’s the best possible spin I can think of to put on the contradiction that was the creation of the United States of America, a brand new nation in 1776 that bragged “All Men Are Created Equal” while initiating a mass assassination of Indigenous Peoples and counting Black slaves as less than human. And, you know, it wasn’t the last time this holy land embraced a savage, sadistic bedmate. Consider our World War II allies, the Soviets. Old Joe Stalin had just finished whacking some 7-10 million of his fellow countrymen in order to further his program of collectivization and remind the remainder of Russian et al citizenry that he could very well slit their throats too if they weren’t careful.

We’ll get to FDR’s decision to throw in our lot with the Soviets in 1942 later in this series on the highlights and lowlights of our nation’s history.

For now, let’s look at both the Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution.

To iterate what I wrote last week about our land’s two founding documents:

Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.

I’ll say it again — as an aspiration, the Declaration was beautiful. As a national charter, the Constitution was spectacularly good, except it carried within itself small (and large) print that said, “Yeah, but….”

Counting slaves as 3/5 human, considering women as 0/5 human, and viewing Natives as pests to be pushed westward or exterminated all were written, either explicitly or by legal wink into the Constitution. In that sense, we were no better than the Nazis, whom we justifiably continue to vilify to this day (well, most of us do; some Americans, apparently, are more “tolerant” of White male supremacy.

A Patriot Front Member.

America felt the Nazis were such an awful gang that we had to link arms with a putatively less awful nation in order to defeat them. Pragmatism, I guess. The same rationale, I suppose, that drove northern abolitionists to ally with southern slave-holders.

Anyway, the Constitution is filled with admirable Articles and clauses, The ability the change it, leading to the Bill of Rights that includes freedoms of speech and assembly, calls for redress and remedies for government wrongs, and later Amendments calling for due process and equal protection under the law and women’s suffrage show the 1787 document to be one of humanity’s greatest achievements.

“We the people” is the Constitution’s momentous opening line. It may be the most important thesis in all of human history. And, as Molly Ivins has pointed out, we’ve spent all the succeeding years of our history trying to include everybody in that club.

It’s the ifs, ands, and buts of the Constitution that rob the original draft of its sheen. I’ll put another spin on things — no document, philosophy, charter, hypothesis, or machine is ever fully realized (or perfect, in the word’s strict definition) right off the bat. Each must be kneaded, massaged, oiled, salted, tweaked, and/or pummeled into a better form. It would be of little solace to a Black woman living in South Carolina in 1830 to be told that the Constitution of 2026 would give her progeny a fair shake, but it’s true.

Lyndon Johnson Signs the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

The US Constitution, it’s 27 Amendments inclusive, is a vastly greater legal guarantee than James Madison et al‘s first stab at it. It’s a living thing. As such, it also can be maimed or even killed.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

07/05/2026
Leave a comment
Common Sense, Thomas Paine

696 Words: Common Sense & Our Cardinal Sins

Now here’s a highlight. A real one. A butt-kicking, nearly earth-shattering highlight in this, my cherry-picked listage (a word I just made up * ) of the highs and lows of American history.

( * Upon further snoopage 1, I find listage already has been coined. It’s French and it means precisely what I want it to mean and it’s occasionally allowed in English usage. By golly, I’m a polyglot!)
( 1 Dang. Snoopage exists as a word already, too, but it doesn’t mean what I want it to. So much for my coinage career. It actually connotes a sneaky, underhanded prying into someone’s personal affairs, papers, or other such stuff. Sounds like fun but it doesn’t work in this context.)

Anyway, today’s highlight is Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. Google it and you might find, as I did, plenty of people saying it remains the best-selling publication in the history of the United States. I don’t want to be cynical but, for pity’s sake, that doesn’t sound quite right. What about The Bible? What about Valley of the Dolls? What about any of the two dozen books Stephen King writes in a year?

For that matter, what about JK Rowling and that Harry Potter series of hers?

The Los Angeles Times, perhaps, sets things straight. “Common Sense,” according to an article written by AT Williams in the January 20, 2025 edition, “remains one of the best-selling works of all time relative to the U.S. population (2.5 million in 1776, not counting slaves and Native Americans).”

I buy that much more readily than I buy that Paine’s pamphlet remains the top-selling book/tract/thingy of all time in America.

The Original Common Sense Was 47 Pages, Stitched Together, No Cover.

William’s caveat, in fact, inadvertently brings up a lowlight that existed even as the Founders were printing the words “All men are created equal” on their parchment or Paul Revere iPads or whatever they were writing on.

A lowlight? Call it the lowlight. It is America’s mortal sin. Our own pair of proto-holocausts — our  genocide of the Indigenous Peoples who lived here and slavery.

“Not counting slaves and Native Americans,” indeed. Nothing defines us any better than that brobdingnagian contradiction. It proves my basic point: because we’re such a vast melange of humanity, the most diverse on the planet, we also represent the best and worst of human behavior.

We’ll look into our worst behaviors as this series goes on. Today, though, just to be celebratory, let’s stay positive and take a look at the most famous piece of writing by inventor, philosopher, statesman, British immigrant, hellraiser, American expat, deist, and drunkard, Thomas Paine.

Common Sense, a 47-page pamphlet, was America’s first bestseller. It was written in clear, concise language (shockingly, for its time) that laid out arguments for the establishment of a new nation, a principled, moral, progressive, egalitarian, almost utopian nation, one that hadn’t been seen in world in all of human history.

Paine lambasted monarchy and its hereditary lineage. Individual rulers, he wrote, led inevitably to corruption and tyranny. He argued that an independent United States would be the ideal for all the Earth’s peoples. He called for representative republican government. “The law,” he wrote, “is King.”

Government, Paine continued, was “a necessary evil” whose purpose was to curb the worst instincts in humans.

Grab your muskets, he advised, and let’s kick the hell out of the British. More than half a million copies of his pamphlet were printed and sold as the Colonies plunged headlong toward revolution.

In fact, the very notions Paine elucidated in Common Sense were revolutions in and of themselves. The pamphlet, you can say, kicked the common man — the common white man; remember the other kinds weren’t counted — into action. Common Sense, perhaps more than any other single thing, made the America Revolution go.

Here’s it is, in its entirety, online.

Thomas Paine’s Death Mask.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

 

07/04/2026
Leave a comment
Abolition

555 Words: Unlawfully Held

AMERICA 250

Let’s call this the first highlight in this, my mini, cherry-picked history of the United States as we celebrate America 250. Remember, I’m searching for both highlights and lowlights, inasmuch as I’m neither a fetishistic basher of this country, nor am I a starry-eyed cheerleader for it.

As I’ve written previously, since this place is the most diverse country in the world, a destination for millions of people wishing to settle down here, it fully represents both the best and worst of humanity. That’s the overall message I wish to convey.

I wouldn’t necessarily characterize the Revolution as a highlight, considering the fact that countless nations have arisen via that route since humans began to gather under flags. And, for the most part, revolutions replace old bastards with new ones. Nor do I consider either of the Declaration of Independence or the US Constitution highlights, simply because the lofty sentiments contained therein — liberty, equality, freedoms of speech and assembly, due process, etc. — were largely aspirational. But, okay, let’s give credit where it’s due: both documents made promises that few, if any, other national founders had ever made before.

Trying to compel the powers that run/own the United States of America to make good on the Founders’ promises has been an ordeal, a too often bloody one, throughout our history. But, okay, at least we have those promises. That’s more that 99.9 percent of the nations of the world have ever offered to their people.

Now then:

Highlight No. 1: The Society for the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage is founded on April 14, 1775, in Philadelphia. It’s the first anti-slavery organization in the Colonies. In 1784, it was renamed the Pennsylvania Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Free Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

Sheesh! That gang sure as hell had no idea how to cook up a short, punchy name, no? They could have called their new group the Anti-Slavery Society, only its acronym would have been ASS, so, uh-uh.

The Society was started by a Quaker named Anthony Benezet, who also had founded the first public school in the Colonies to admit girls (1755) and the first Negro School (1773). Benezet was born Antoine Bénézet in France in 1713. His family moved to the Pennsylvania Colony in 1731. Now styling his name to reflect his more Anglo digs, Anthony, 18 years old at the time, joined the Quaker abolitionist movement. Slavery, he held, was a direct violation of his faith.

As far as I can tell, few images of Benezet exist, so use your imagination. He was white, Gallic, and probably stunk like a goat considering the colonists lacked water heaters, shower wands, and Tom’s of Maine deodorants.

BTW, before the Bénézets left France, Antoine’s daddy-o  served as Voltaire‘s business manager. That Bénézet clan sure had some good, progressive chops, didn’t they?

Pennsylvania in 1780 began the gradual process of outlawing slavery within the state’s borders, largely thanks to the presence of the sizable Quaker abolitionist community there.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

07/03/2026
Leave a comment
Boston Tea Party, False Flag

541 Words: The First False Flag

America 250

From Merriam-Webster, online.

Today’s entry in my series on this country’s highlights and lowlights as we approach its 250th b-day, isn’t necessarily a contradiction, as have been my previous entries herein. It’s pretty straightforward but, just to keep things tidy, let’s label it as such.

Contradiction No. 6: The Boston Tea Party

Today’s CIA agents as well as spies and spooks from every undercover outfit around the world are heirs to the grandpappies of the craft, the Sons of Liberty. The loose, secretive Boston cabal had been active since Britain enacted the Stamp Act of 1765, imposing crushing taxes on the Colonies in the New World. Colonial printers could only use paper manufactured in Britain (and stamped to verify its origin) to produce legal documents, magazines, newspapers, and other printed material (like playing cards, believe it or not). It was far more expensive than paper the New World printers could obtain domestically. Britain used the paper’s tax revenue to pay for stationing its soldiers in the Colonies.

The imposition of the Stamp Act enraged residents of the 13 Colonies. They considered it an extreme form of taxation (higher prices, naturally, had been passed along to consumers) and argued that they shouldn’t be taxed because they had no representation in the British Parliament. Britain retorted by saying only landowners on the British Isles could serve in Parliament so the colonists were SOL. Out of this contretemps emerged the rallying cry, No Taxation Without Representation.

In 1773, Parliament passed the Tea Act, allowing the British East India Company to sell tea in the Colonies (tea being as indispensable to them as bottled water is to us) without being taxed. Well, the colonists huffed, that’s not fair! Why do they get off not paying taxes while we’re burdened by the Stamp Act?

The Sons of Liberty were driven to do something more than huff. In the middle of the night on December 16, 1773, a number of Sons dressed up as Native Americans, stole aboard the merchant ship Dartmouth docked in Boston Harbor, and procedure to toss overboard some 340 chests of East India Company tea.

Sons of Liberty in disguise.

Well, the British threw a fit. They imposed the Intolerable Acts in retribution, closing the Port of Boston and suspending the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter, eliminating any form of self-government there.

That was pretty much the last straw for the colonists. Within two-plus years the Declaration of Independence had been issued and the Revolutionary War was on.

As I’ve indicated before in these precincts, taxes were the drivers behind the American Revolution, not any high-minded ideals like liberty and other such stuff. Although, to be fair, the authors of both the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution were Enlightenment deists who plugged in all those noble notions like freedom and equality, values so slippery that we continue to try (and too often fail) to lock them down to this day.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

07/02/2026
Leave a comment
Boston Massacre, Paul Revere

595 Words: Monetizing the Revolution

America 250

My theme running through this series on the highlights and lowlights of American history as we approach this land’s 250th birthday has been contradictions. This country was, is, and always will be a stewpot of contradictions.

The box score thus far:

  • Contradiction No. 1 — Fleeing from, and then embracing, religious intolerance
  • Contradiction No. 2 — All Men Are Created Equal
  • Contradiction No. 3 — New World women
  • Contradiction No. 4 — “We the People” really means just a few of us

Now then,  let’s explore today’s contradiction.

Contradiction No. 5: The Boston Massacre, a memorabilia bonanza

On March 5, 1770, an incident occurred on a Boston street presaging an eerily similar event that took place about 120 years later in Chicago, the Haymarket Riot. The events were alike in many ways except for the spin put on each by elementary school history teachers and politicians running for office by wrapping themselves in the flag. (Or humping the flag as You-Know-Who has done.) The Boston Massacre comes down to us as a righteous demonstration by the plucky, spirited, determined revolutionaries who’d soon announce to the world that there was a new nation, eventually to be called the United States of America. The Haymarket Riot is positioned as an anarchistic, Marxist mob of alien terrorists whose bloodthirst resulted in the deaths of policemen.

In Heat.

For the three years since the Townsend Act had been enacted and its taxes imposed, lots of city folk in the American Colonies had been expressing themselves hotly in opposition. Their rage had spread, first, throughout the northern Colonies and then even down to Virginia. The British didn’t care for those rumblings. Britain sent over a contingent of soldiers to the Colonies to remind the hotheads who was boss. In Boston, the outnumbered British soldiers routinely were harassed and sometimes assaulted by civilians.

The soldiers (really, that era’s policemen) were getting itchy. And scared.

That late Monday afternoon in 1770, a crowd of 400-500 Bostonians surrounded a squad of nine British soldiers on the ironically named King Street. They shouted at and spit on the soldiers. Then some in the crowd started throwing snowballs. Next came stones and bricks. The soldiers panicked. One of them, perhaps accidentally, fired his musket. His cohorts reacted by shooting into the crowd.

When the smoke cleared, five civilians were dead.

The Boston Massacre became the ideal rallying point around which colonial revolutionary fervor would swirl for the next few years, until 1776 when the Declaration of Independence was issued.

Now, here’s the quintessentially American aspect of the aftermath. Paul Revere was a Boston artisan working in silver and copper. His silverware and engraved plates were hot commodities around the Massachusetts Bay Colony at the time. Immediately after the Boston Massacre, he began pumping out scads of commemorative items depicting the Massacre, listing the names of the victims, and so forth. Suddenly, has silver- and coppersmithing were in demand throughout the Colonies. He became an “industrialist.”

Revere even branched out into printing. His numbered print, “The Bloody Massacre perpetrated in King Street, Boston on March 5, 1770 by a party of the 29th Regiment,” sold all over the Colonies. In fact, an original copy of it to this day can fetch upward of $200,000 at auction.

Paul Revere print.

Revolutionary swag — now that‘s American.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

07/01/2026
Leave a comment
Haudenosaunee Confederacy, US Constitution

543 Words: All Men?

America 250

In 1776, the rebellious colonists issued their Declaration of Independence. It was an announcement to the world that a new country had formed, along the shores, mostly, of the Atlantic Ocean on the North America continent.

It begins with the words, “We the people….” No document had ever been created like if before in the history of humanity. A casual reading of the Declaration might indicate its authors were speaking for an entire nation of just plain folks — no royalty, no nobility, everybody.

The Constitution, written eleven years later, was, in part, based on a nearly five hundred year old alliance made by indigenous nations who lived west of the Appalachian Mountains and whose lands extended out to lakes Ontario and Erie, up into what is now Michigan, and as far west as the Mississippi River. It was called the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Those indigenous nations, who’d been beating the hell out of each other for centuries, decided to make peace and set up a loose alliance of semi-sovereign state-like plots of land, the bunch of which would consider themselves a single entity. The quasi-states would trade with each other and protect each other when the need arose. They called their founding pact The Great Law of Peace.

Representatives of the Iroquois, Assiniboine, Crow, Pawnee, and Dakota peoples (artist’s conception).

The founding five nations, with a sixth eventually joining, became matrilineal societies, with birthrights, inheritances, and living arrangements based on mothers’ bloodlines. That’s definitely not what either Britain or the newborn independent colonies had in mind, but much of the rest of the Iroquois Confederacy’s governance principles inspired the authors of the Constitution.

Contradiction No. 4: All Men Are Created Equal. They weren’t of course, according to the new country’s charter. Women and Blacks and people who didn’t own land were intentionally excluded from the “We” mentioned in the Declaration of Independence when the Founders got around to writing the Constitution eleven years later.

But, as contract law and commons sense tell us, if you say you’re going to do something, you are legally bound to do it. Even though the authors of the Constitution stood on their heads to exclude certain groups from its guarantees of rights, that single, simple pledge, All Men Are Created Equal, was a holy grail (lower case) that would spur all the Abolitionists, the civil rights workers, the Suffragettes, and every other gang working to achieve equality and guaranteed rights. It helps explain, for instance, why Black US Army soldiers could fight with such valor and determination in World War II, even though the country they were fighting for segregated them, imposed Jim Crow laws on them, and did all it could to convince them they were not as good, not as worthy, as White people.

All Men Are Created Equal was a promise. A lot of blood has been shed by people trying to get America to keep that promise.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins

06/30/2026
Leave a comment
America 250, Coverture, Taxation

657 Words: “Their” Women

AMERICA 250

As I indicated yesterday, I’ll be mulling, penning, screeding, praising, and brick-batting this altogether weird-assed nation as we approach its b-day No. 250. Yep, this nation, where the vast majority of us were born into it, quite randomly, through no choice of our own. Yet, the majority of that majority thinks people who actually want to live here, who make the choice to get here, who pick up and move across thousands of miles and rivers and oceans are somehow are less worthy of being here than those of us who, through the roll of the dice, were born here. Weird, huh?

We are a nation of contradictions.

Keep in mind I’m not going to uniformly slam the United States of America, nor will I cheerlead for it. We’ve done great things. And we’ve done fucked up things. I’m interested only in our highlights and lowlights, of which there’ve been scads of each.

Yesterday I started this series with Contradiction No. 1 and Contradiction No. 2. It’ll be the theme of this thing.

Around about the 1760 and ’70s, sentiment was fast building among the mainly British arrivals on the east coast for independence from the English crown. Britain had recently established the Declaratory Act, saying, essentially, that the King (or Queen) of England reigned supreme over the 13 Colonies. Britain then followed up with the Townsend Acts, a series of punitive taxes, apparently designed to remind the colonists who was boss. The colonists started to scream to high heaven over these taxes which, really, were the spark that led to independence. Yeah, sure, there were plenty of things to admire about the nascent revolutionaries, and I won’t ignore those things, but, push comes to shove, we eventually split away from England over taxes.

That’s a sentiment that remains with us to this very day. For more than two and a half centuries, “Taxation is theft” has been the shriek of free market fetishists, self-made man fabulists, capitalism genuflectors, Ayn Rand objectivists, and a healthy portion of MAGA cultists.

Anyway, today’s Lowlight is yet another example of our nation’s contradictory nature. Just as the emerging rebels were hollering about the Declaratory and Townsend acts, saying, in essence, screw you England, we don’t need ya, the colonies gleefully adopted one of Britain’s most regressive, antediluvian laws.

Contradiction No. 3: The colonies adopt Britain’s “Coverture” laws. Under British common law, married women…, well, didn’t really exist. English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish wives, at the time and for many years before that, could not own land or property, could not keep their own wages, could not draft wills, could not enter into contracts, and actually could not have any other identity than that of their husbands’. They were, in essence, the legal equivalent of a man’s acreage, his plow, his goat, his musket, or his hat. “Coverture,” writes historian Catherine Allgor, “held that no female person had a legal identity. At birth, a female baby was covered by her father’s identity, and then, when she married, by her husband’s.”

Those damned Englishmen, the colonists figured, might have been tyrannical tax imposers, but they weren’t all bad, were they? They sure as hell knew how to keep their womenfolk in line.

The whole notion of coverture started unravelling in the mid-19th century, although quite a few states in this country still did not allow individual women to own homes or get credit cards well into the 1960s and even the ’70s.

Both Great Britain and the United States eventually came around to granting females the right to vote, women’s suffrage becoming the law in the former beginning in 1918 and the latter in 1920.

●

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. — Theodore Parker.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. — Frederick Douglass.

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America. — Molly Ivins.

06/29/2026
Leave a comment
250 Years of America

693 Words: Birthday USA

America 250

In this bizarrely polarized nation, most of us either think of its history as the greatest feel-good story ever told or the direst nightmare ever experienced.

Of course, it’s neither. Or, more accurately, it’s both.

My friend George Bull, as voracious a reader as I know, pointed out to me a neat little piece that ran in The Observer this weekend, a reflection on the USA’s 250 years, penned by a passel of noted scribes. They are:

That’s quite an all-star cast, including a bunch of Pulitzer Prize winners, a screenwriter, an Ivy League professor, both a National Book Award winner and a nominee, a New York Times Notable Book honoree, and a satirist. Their essays do well to prove a point that I’ve long held — that the United States of America, being the most diverse nation on the planet and, throughout its 250 years, a destination for immigrants from every corner of the world, represents both the best and worst, the full range of thought, feeling and behavior, that humanity has to offer.

Our current president and his MAGA worshippers would love for us to see this place as a holy land, bestowed upon us special people by our gracious god (well, they’d capitalize the word, but I never do), and a beacon on a hill that too many of the Earth’s bad guys would like nothing more than to be destroyed from without and within.

The purists who form the religious wing of the “woke” crowd view the US as a cesspool of greed, violence, slavery, rape, hatred, toxic masculinity, cutthroat competition, and crushing conformity.

Again, like any stew, this nation is a mix of all those ingredients. And, again and again throughout our history, we’ve swung back and forth between one extreme and the other.

BTW: My reference to woke’s “religious wing” means just this: my sisteren and brethren of the Left, the progressives, the liberals, or whatever you wish to call us, too often slip all too easily into a priestly orthodoxy. At worst, they excommunicate erstwhile allies who split hairs in a taboo manner and wind up always and forever paring down our numbers. All those strategically unified Right Wing, free market, authoritarian, Christian nationalist Republicans, maintaining their maximum numerical advantage, of late have been able to wrest control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court, most statehouses, and too many other levers of power hereabouts.

They know how to keep the tent big; we don’t.

Purity’s nice when it comes to drinking water, It sucks in a democratic-republic political system.

Anyway, I figured why don’t I have a go at this exercise? Why don’t I cherry pick the highs and lows of this country’s story? So I’ll start, appropriately, at the beginning.

Of course, both historic landmarks I begin with represent contradictions. I mean, what are we if not a nation of contradictions?

Contradiction No. 1: The White proto-Americans who came to this “New World” from the British Isles between, oh, 1600 and the mid 18th century, came here primarily, to escape religious intolerance in their homeland. Upon arrival here, they promptly imposed their own religious intolerance.

Contradiction No. 2: Those White, erstwhile Brits decided to form their own country, issuing a Declaration of Independence, and then writing themselves a Constitution. They preached, “All men are created equal.” Beautiful words. Gorgeous words. No society had ever before advanced the notion that people could govern themselves, without relying on a god-given noble class, without submitting to a powerful priesthood, without acknowledging that one group of people were superior to another. Except, women weren’t included under the rubric “people.” Nor were non-landowners. Black’s were fractions of people, 3/5 to be precise. It took fully 188 years before the United States got around to ensuring that every human being, no matter their sex, gender, skin color, wealth or lack thereof, was equal under the law. And to this day, forces within this nation continue to chafe against those guarantees.

Good and bad. There’s more, Oh, there’s more. I’ll get to more over the next few days as we approach the Fourth of July.

06/24/2026
1 Comment
History, Rick Perlstein

612 Words: The Five Most Important Days

Historian Rick Perlstein says he’s been assigned by one publication or another to come up with the five most important days in the world over the last 175 years. Why 175? Search me.

Out of curiosity, I typed the following into Google:

What were the five most important days of the last 175 years?

Here’s what Google’s AI came back with:

  1. April 25, 1953, The discovery of DNA’s structure
  2. November 9, 1989: The fall of the Berlin Wall.
  3. September 2, 1945: The formal end of World War II.
  4. July 20, 1969: The Apollo 11 moon landing.
  5. August 15, 1947: The partition and independence of India.

That’s it. Nothing beyond 81 years ago. Nothing that happened between 1851 and 1945, AI contends, is as important as five things that happened since. Who knows? Maybe AI is right. Although I might suggest Lincoln’s wholly un-American Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, might give at least one of those five a run for its money.

By the way, I call Lincoln’s EP “un-American” because it was just that. It was the first time in our weird nation-state’s history that the chief executive ever prioritized human beings over property rights. And, for the life of me, I can’t think of a single other time a president — or Congress, for that matter — has done it again. If you don’t see how very, very un-American Lincoln’s act was (and is), then you don’t understand this place at all and/or have bought in to your seventh grade social studies teacher’s happy horseshit.

What about, as well, July 16, 1945: The Trinity test? I’m guessing proving humanity’s capability to invent, produce, and detonate a weapon that, in sufficient numbers, could potentially wipe out all of us might be a tad important.

How about the unspecified date in October, 1879 when Thomas Edison demonstrated the first practical incandescent lightbulb. Time magazine around the tunr of this century ran a series on the greatest inventions of the preceding millennium and concluded with the claim that the lightbulb was Number 1.

Then again, I’ve got a book somewhere in my library that claims the nail might be the most important, transformative invention in human history. Once our species started nailing, screwing, and bolting things together we Homo sapiens began separating ourselves from the rest of the food chain. I don’t know if I buy it but it’s an argument.

Philo Farnsworth ought to put in a claim — September 7, 1927: The first television signal transmission. Farnsworth, of course, is the poor schlub who invented the one thing that has come to dominate our every waking moment — and even our non-waking moments if we forget to turn the TV off before we fall asleep. The corporate monster, the RCA Corporation, got all tumescent when it heard about Farnsworth’s TV system and tried to buy his patent for it. He refused and the company responded by…, well, crushing him. The poor sap.

My personal favorite is the day in 1933 when Frances Perkins told the soon-to-be inaugurated Franklin D. Roosevelt she would reject his request that she become Labor Secretary unless he pledged to enact what would become the New Deal. We’re talking about a bold, straightforward woman leveraging the President of the United States into providing electricity for rural Americans, putting the Great Depression unemployed back to work, repairing the nation’s crumbling infrastructure, protecting people’s bank accounts, investing in the arts, initiating Social Security, and so, so much more.

Too, there was October 1, 1949, the day Mao Zedong stood in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square and declared the creation of the People’s Republic of China. The country’s then population of more than a half billion might consider that front-page news.

Anyway, Perlstein’s assignment sounds like fun. I look forward to finding out his five most important days in the last 175 years.

 

← Older posts