10/20/2026
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Billy Bullion, How Hard Could It Be?

762 Words: Life and Death

Wow. It’s been almost two months since I’ve expelled hot air in this space.

I’d been busy researching and writing a big piece for Bloom magazine on homeless people in Bloomington. As well, I had two or three other smaller piece deadlines I had to meet. Plus I got sick as a dog for about three weeks. Trust me when I say this: you may have heard about colitis but you have no idea what it’s all about until you get it. Sans details, suffice it to say colitis is torture.

Anyway, it’s over and done with. I hit my deadlines. I’m neither in jail nor the morgue so, overall, life is fairly decent these days.

This past weekend I made a batch of scones (I’m becoming a scone king) and a huge pot of chili. I have a secret for making a thick, rich chili — I add a can or two of refried beans to the pot. That way I don’t have to add extra tomato paste — this time I used The Loved One’s garden tomatoes — and so the end product isn’t overly acidic. TLO and I will be eating chili every dinner for the rest of the week. And, no, neither of us will get tired of it.

This week, also, I got back to my book, How Hard Could It Be?; The Stories of WFHB, Bloomington Community Radio. I’ve made corrections to the reader’s copy I published in August, reformatted the page layout, rejiggered many of the photos, and I’m about to publish a second reader’s copy. Fingers crossed, there won’t be too many more mistakes and errata to correct so, if the book publishing gods are looking kindly upon me, this thing’ll be out and available to the public by Christmas time.

A caveat: writing a book and construction work are awfully similar in that projected deadlines, anticipated finish dates,  are about as hard and fast as promises written on the wind. So, let me just say the book’ll be out when it’s out.

A very wonderful guy whom I knew for a spell back in the late 1990s has died after a long battle with colo-rectal cancer and all the metastases that generally ensue. My sister Fran died back in 2008 from the same endless series of treatments, recurrences, and spreads. Watching both these souls go through their years-long ordeals has led me to conclude that should I ever be diagnosed with colon cancer, or any of the bowel malignancies, I’ll forgo all the radiation and chemotherapy rigmarole and just let the damned thing kill me as quickly as it will. I mean, long-time Pencillistas know I’ve already been through cancer treatments, so I have zero desire to go through it all again.

The fellow who died this past month was named Billy Bullion. He was one of the smartest, quickest, funniest guys I’d ever met. He worked with my old pal, Sidney Feldman. Their Conspirators theater gang is a cutting edge off-Loop stage troupe that reflected Billy’s whimsical, rebellious, in-your-face stage stylings. I recall sitting one night with Billy and Sid at the Twin Anchors rib joint in Lincoln Park, laughing all night long about things like the Super Chief in the 1960s cartoon, The Funny Company. The Super Chief — they couldn’t do him these days, for obvious reasons — was an Indian who spoke only in a loud train air horn voice. Every few minutes, Billy’d respond to a query like the Super Chief, making us flop around in gales of laughter.

Bullion (L) & Feldman (Image: Nathaniel Fishburn/Chicago Reader)

Billy was a graduate of Evanton Township High School, a veritable assemply line factory for actors, playwrights, filmmakers, and other creatives. For pity’s sake, ETHS alumni include:

  • Joan Cusack (Saturday Night Live, numerous movies, Emmy-winning TV actor)
  • John Cusack (High Fidelity, Say Anything, Sixteen Candles, Stand By Me, The Grifters, Bullets Over Broadway)
  • Jeremy Piven (Entourage, Ellen, The Larry Sanders Show)
  • Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill:Vol. 2, The Hateful Eight, The Natural)
  • Claudia Jennings (“the Queen of the B Movies”)
  • Karen Finley (performance artist)
  • Samantha Irby (comedian, essayist, TV writer)
  • Lynn Moody (Roots, Knots Landing)
  • Steve Pink (director, screenwriter)

The school also has produced notables like George Ball, LBJ’s ambassador to the United Nations; Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveller’s Wife; Alexander Frey, symphony orchestra conductor; and more.

Billy Bullion held his own against all of them, talent-wise.

An example of Billy’s wit: his Chicago Tribune obit says he was preceded in death by Captain Steve Rogers. The Captain was his beloved Boston Terrier. Here they are:

08/28/2026
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March on Washington

741 Words: The Very Same Steps

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

I was 61 years old when I first visited Washington, DC. I’d been dying to go for years — hell, decades even, ever since I watched for the first time the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.

A flying saucer lands in the nation ‘s capital and the visitor from another planet who emerges from it — his name was Klaatu — warns us that our at-the-time primitive delving into nuclear power to make bombs was a threat to neighboring planets. “I am leaving soon and you will  forgive me if I speak bluntly,” Klaatu says in his valedictory as he and his robot Gort prepare to depart the Earth. He goes on to say humanity’s fiddling with nuclear weapons not only threatens our own survival but that of neighboring planets. Klaatu and Gort are sort of cosmic policemen who roam about warning benighted civilizations such as ours to knock off all this war business and start acting…, well, civilized. “It is no concern of ours how you run your own planet, but if you threaten to extend your violence, this Earth of yours will be reduced to a burned out cinder.”

Klaatu

Earlier in the movie, Klaatu, in disguise, accompanies a ten-year-old kid to the Lincoln Memorial where he reads the Gettysburg Address etched in the pedestal of the Lincoln statue within. “Those are great words,” he says. “He must have been a great man.”

I promised myself I’d go to that very spot one day. I wanted to see the great words of a great man with my own eyes. Later, after learning about the March on Washington, I was doubly moved to visit the Lincoln Memorial. For dozens of reasons, I never got to Washington until my seventh decade and — just my luck — the first year of the first Trump term.

The Loved One and I stopped in for my coffee fix one morning at a McDonald’s that was a stone’s throw from the White House and — wouldn’t you know it — right above the trash bin was a framed portrait of the sitting president. I don’t know if that particular McDonald’s displays a portrait of whomever is president in that spot, or if the manager was making a witty statement re: Li’l Duce. I like to think it was the latter.

Anyway, TLO and I rented bikes to get around the Mall and the Smithsonian and all the other highlights of the capital. The first place we went (after my McDonald’s coffee) was the Lincoln Memorial. I wanted to stand precisely where Klaatu stood in the movie and on the very same steps where Martin Luther King stood when he proclaimed, “I have a dream.” I did both things. Highlight of my life.

Today is the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington. People again are gathering on the spot where a quarter of a million stood on that late summer day in 1963. I don’t know how many people will show up today. The speakers are scheduled to be Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, Bernie Sanders, and a slew of other progressive notables. The ’63 March took place when there was still a smidgen of optimism in this country, before JFK was gunned down and Vietnam tore us apart and Watts and Newark and Detroit burned and Nixon’s Watergate served as the final nail in whatever faith or loyalty or hope the public had in this thing called America.

A Quarter of a Million

Since then, we’d become so disenchanted that we elected — twice! — a snake-oil selling, prevaricating, insulting, incurious, unread, power-mad TV reality show star as president simply because he thumbed his nose at all the previous hypocritical sons of bitches who’d preceded him in the Oval Office.

Martin Luther King had a dream in 1963. This year, we have a nightmare.

●

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.

 

08/07/2026
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Blue jeans, Coca-Cola

757 Words: Inventive America

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

In the latter years of the 19th century, a huge number of machines, devices, tools, implements, and other objects that made human life a tad easier, incrementally, were invented. Americans either by birth or immigration like Tesla, Edison, Bell, Deere, and Westinghouse are recognizable to this day. And then there were anonymous innovators like Wisconsin farmer Peter Houston who invented the roll-film camera and housewife  Josephine Cochrane, an imaginative and brilliant tinkerer who invented the first automatic dishwasher.

Josephine Cochrane

Cochrane was married to a fellow who made bushels of money as a dry goods merchant. They lived in a big Chicago mansion. One day, she threw a dinner party and, after it was over, her kitchen staff washed the dishes. In the process, they chipped a bunch of her heirloom china pieces. She thought there had to be a better way so she sat down with pen and paper and got to drawing machines that would use boiling water to clean dinnerware.

Her eventual automatic dishwasher became so successful that she formed a corporation to produce it and other gadgets she came up with. Her company eventually became known as KitchenAid.

A later Cochrane dishwasher design

Such was life in post-Civil War America. Entrepreneurs, scientists, and just plain folks — brilliant all — could invent things that would change the world…, or at least some small part of it.

Perhaps the two longest-lasting identifiable American brand names were made possible by inventions in 1873 and 1886. The first was a minuscule hunk of copper. The second, a patent medicine and alcohol alternative sold in a Georgia drugstore.

Levi Strauss was a San Francisco dry goods merchant specializing in work clothes for miners and factory workers. He wanted to design pants that would be both comfortable and durable, previously incompatible clothing characteristics. Strauss and his denim fabric vendor in 1872 realized simple stitching would not hold good work trousers together well so he invented “An Improvement in Fastening Pocket-Openings,” copper rivets, that would make his soon-to-be named Levi Strauss blue jeans arguably the second most important and successful attire innovation in human history. Only the loom, I’d argue, made articles of clothing more accessible, affordable, and universal. Strauss gained US Patent No. 139,121 on May 20, 1873 for his rivet.

Blue jeans are worn in every continent and in every country. They are as American as Coca-Cola.

A Georgia pharmacist named John Pemberton, who became a Confederate lieutenant colonel during the Civil War, suffered a saber wound in his chest during a battle in Georgia. He became addicted to morphine to cope with the pain. Having studied medicial chemistry in the 1840s, Pemberton experimented with different concoctions, hoping to wean himself off dope. He wasn’t the only southerner suffering in the post-bellum years. Drug addiction, alcoholism, and pathological depression were rampant among the defeated population. Pemberton tried substances like the poisonous buttonwood plant, hoping to extract a painkiller and overall sedative that would help him and others.

Pemberton distilled a compound made of coca leaves and kola nuts that was actually a type of wine at first. Then, with the temperance movement beginning to rage across the nation, he had to find a way to make his concoction alcohol-free. He and another pharamcist friend experimented with different recipes for his coca and kola mixture. One day, Pemberton accidentally spilled carbonated water into his latest mix. Voila.

Coca-Cola bottles through the years

I can’t provide any more detailed information on how Pemberton and his friend came up with Coca-Cola as it is, literally, a more closely-guarded secret than the instructions for making a primitive atom bomb. We do know, though, that Pemberton chose to market his compound under its now-ubiquitous brand name for no better reason than it sounded just right. It was alliterative and punchy and memorable.

Coca-Cola is drunk on every continent and in every country. It is as American as blue jeans.

●

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.

08/05/2026
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Ötzi, Science Cafe

1040 Words: Science Guy

Ötzi could have been the star of the show Tuesday night at science cafe. But he wasn’t.

The night belonged to Alex Straiker, the research scientist who noses into the micro-realm of the brain at Indiana University. Specifically, Straiker investigates cannabinoids and neurons and how the former affects the latter. You want to know why your mouth turns so dry after you smoke a bowl? Straiker knows.

He’s been running Bloomington’s science cafe for the last few years. It was started in these parts by his friend and IU colleague Erika Biga Lee, who copied the idea from a similar regular event she’d caught years ago in Denver. These days, there are scads of science cafes around the world, the idea being experts in nerd and geek fields give informal talks to the public in bars and…, well, cafes. Bloomington’s incarnation has been one of the top draws of this locale for me since I arrived in 2009. It’s essentially a casual college intro class to any subject ranging from nanotechnology to the science of sweetness to placebos and much more. It has bounced from place to place over the years, primarily at Finch’s on Kirkwood but more recently it’s found a home at Friendly Beasts, a cidery on 2nd Street.

Friendly beasts is a tight fit for anything more than a couple of dozen sippers but last night, Straiker’s talk on Ötzi, the poor fellow who died 5300 years ago and whose preserved corpse was found in the ice in a mountain pass on the border between Italy and Austria in 1991, packed the house more than usual. It was his valedictory; he’s shoving off for a research position at the University of Galway within the next couple of weeks.

Straiker (L) & Ötzi

Great for him; too bad for us. Alex was one of the first people I became friendly with when The Loved One and I hit town 17 years ago. He was an habitué of Soma coffeehouse on Grant Street, the first third place I haunted here. (A side note: now that my WFHB history book, How Hard Could It Be, is largely finished, I’ll be moving into more fiction writing. I’ve got an idea to write a novel set in rival coffeehouses, with all the drama, creativity, and humor that can be found among a couple of motley collections of painters, poets, slackers, singer/songwriters, actors, scam artists, junkie-wannabes — oh, you know, the normal cast of characters in any good urban coffeehouse.)

Anyway, I met Alex and his then-wife, the painter, language maven, and children’s book author Anna Witte, at Soma. Knowing the two of them opened up a huge door for me in this town. They started me off on my now-decade and a half-plus journey to find community in Bloomington. Anna left these parts years ago for the Pacific Northwest. Now Alex is giving us the breeze for Ireland.

His talk on Ötzi was fun and informative and what more could you ask for from a free college-level lecture in a place where you can also get boozed up? Generally, science cafe speakers are experts in their particular fields but last night, for Alex’s final presentation, he decided to take the stage and I must say, his may have been the best science cafe I’ve been to yet.

Because he had to immerse himself in a cram course on the corpse, he dug up and presented info any lay person might find compelling, more so than that an Ötzi specialist might think relevant. You may recall Ötzi — a couple of hikers on an Alps mountain gap stumbled upon his remains, partially embedded in the ice and spectacularly preserved as no such similar body that has ever been found before.

Researchers dug the old bird up and found a treasure trove of clues about his life, from what appeared to be medicinal seeds and herbs he carried in a pouch, to the grains of pollen found in his belly, to the kind of shoes he wore. (Apparently, he cobbled his own shoes — they had bearskin soles, deerskin uppers, and a mixture of grass and tree bark inside for insulation, perfect for protecting his dogs from the Tyrolean high-altitude ice.

Replicas of Ötzi’s shoes

An arrow head was found in Ötzi’s shoulder, leading researchers to conclude he’d been shot from behind and bled to death. Ötzi also had an apparently recent hand injury consistent, police forensics experts said, with fending off a knife attack. It appeared that Ötzi’s valuables — his straw cape, his bearskin cap, the bow he’d been carving, the copper axe he carried, and other gear — hadn’t been swiped. Who killed Ötzi and why? No one knows. One of the sections of Alex’s talk was “Murder or Justice?” Could Ötzi have been, in Alex’s words, “a jerk?” Was he some kind of marauding loner who terrorized nearby communities? Or was he the unlucky victim of random violence?

I like to think Ötzie was a sheep rustler. The gap where he was found was a well-traveled path for sheepherders to move their ovine gangs from one valley pasture to another.

Ötzi can be seen, through thick Plexiglas, in a cooler at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology in Bolzano, Italy.

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More fascinating factoids: at first reconstructors and imagineers made a model of what Ötzi might have looked at when he was alive. Advances in DNA knowledge since then have shown that the early image was too white. The people who lived around the area 5300 years ago, DNA studies have shown, were much more dark-skinned so he would have been, too. Ötzi suffered from male-pattern baldness; he suffered from an early form of Lyme disease; and he had dozens of tattoos all over his body.

I know all that, and more, now, thanks to Alex Straiker and science cafe. Erika Biga Lee will carry on as the producer of the local science cafe series. In fact the next session will be some time in September.

Last night’s session was bittersweet. I’m happy for Alex; he seems excited about the new challenge in his life. I’m sad, too, that he’s leaving. He’s already pledged to start up a science cafe in Galway. I told him I wasn’t sure if I could make it to all its sessions.

08/04/2026
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Anthony Comstock, Birth Control, Censorship

977 Words: Comstock

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

By this time in my little subjective history of the United States, a laundry list of the nations’s highs and lows, the things we should be proud of and the thing we should atone for, America is about a hundred years old. It’s not yet a world power. The big guns on Earth at the time were almost exclusively European. England and France ruled the lands and seas as far as their armies and navies could reach. Germany and Italy had very recently unified, becoming sovereign countries for the first time. Russia was a sleeping giant. China wanted to be left alone. Japan was so standoff-ish that it’d occasionally bombard a foreign ship that had wandered into its territorial waters.

The US was still about a half century away from becoming the geopolitical behemoth it remains to this day. Perceptive observers, though, might have sensed that this burgeoning industrial giant that was drawing in immigrants from every corner of the planet would be the next big thing.

Even though the first woman, Victoria Woodhull, had run for president in 1872, women for the most part were legally prevented from voting in this country. Susan B. Anthony, for one, tried to vote — illegally — in New York in the ’72 presidential election. She was arrested and charged. The judge, realizing she would go to the Supreme Court if he fined her, decided not to do so. Who knew what any activist Justices might have ruled. They might have okayed women’s suffrage, for chrissakes!

Susan B. Anthony

The world was changing.

And those in charge wanted to put the brakes on some of the change.  For instance, women were fast coming to the realization that they could be something more than baby incubators. Loads of men were aghast that so many women were availing themselves of the contraceptives of the day. Other women even had abortions. By golly, it all had to be stopped. On March 3, 1873, Congress passed the Act of Suppression of Trade in, and Circulation of, Obscene Literature and Articles of Immoral Use, popularly known as the Comstock Law. The main thrust of the law was to prevent information about birth control to be sen via the US Mail.

Anthony Comstock was the secretary for the New York Society for ther Suppression of Vice. And there was no greater vice than that of a woman engaging in sex for any reason other than procreation. Pleasure? Enjoyment? Fulfillment? Simply other words for sin.

Comstock despised “libertines,” and dedicated his own life to making theirs hell. In fact, he often bragged about how many people he’d driven to suicide by hectoring, harassing, and otherwise terrorizing them for their pleasure-seeking ways.

Born in rural New Canaan, Connecticut in 1844, Comstock was raised by a strict, pious mother who fed him a steady diet of Bible stories. He grew up thinking he was destined to become a modern day David, fighting against the Goliath of sin and lewdness. He fought in the Civil War where his fellow Union soldiers mocked him for his over-the-top religious zeal.

Comstock

He moved to New York City where he worked as a salesman. Comstock was disgusted by the open suggestiveness of the day, the way women dressed and the smut in books and pictures. Hell, people in New York could buy postcards featuring women in languid pases, revealing their ankles and/or shoulders. And prostitutes! Good god in heaven, they seemed to be on every street corner. It was all too much for him. Comstock took it upon himself to feed the police information about bordellos, hooker strolls, gambling joints, and other deadfalls so they could make splashy busts. He’d often purchase what he considered obscene materials and then return to the shop with the police so they could arrest the seller. In other words, he was the city’s self-appointed hall monitor.

Vintage Pornography

In 1872, Comstock wrote a bill banning contraceptives and making the buying and selling as well as the exchange of information about them through the mail or across state lines illegal. His bill also targeted any and all forms of obscenity in books and poeridicals. Obscenity, in the bill, was not defined. But Comstock knew, in his heart, what it was — just about everything that smacked of enjoyment and gratification, and anything else he deemed to be alien. He moved to Washington, DC and began lobbying Congress to enact his law. He didn’t have to twist too many arms because the House and the Senate quickly passed his draft law, pretty much verbatim. At the same time, Congress appointed Comstock an at-large postal inspector. He became, for all intents and purposes, the nation‘s hall monitor.

Contraception and, of course, abortion, for the next fifty years and more were virtually outlawed in most states. It wasn’t until Margaret Sanger founded Planned Parenthood in 1916 and traveled the country as an evangelist for birth control that things started, slowly, to change. It took another 56 years for the US Supreme Court to rule women had a right to abortion and then a further fifty years before the Court reversed itself and allowed the states to outlaw abortion again.

Sanger

The spirit of Anthony Comstock remains strong 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.

 

08/03/2026
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Feminism, NRA, Victoria Woodhull

900 Words: Pioneer

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

A woman ran for president in 1872. On May 10th of that year, Victoria Woodhull became the first female to attempt to become the Chief Executive. She was nominated by the Equal Rights Party. Her vice-presidential running mate was Frederick Douglass.. The ER Party hoped to unite the causes of women’s suffrage and civil rights for Black people.

Victoria Woodhull

It all sounds so good at this remove but, sadly, the Woodhull/Douglass ticket didn’t earn a single Electoral College vote. The incumbent president, Republican Ulysses S. Grant ran against the Liberal Republican Democrat Horace Greeley. Funny isn’t it, that a major political party in the United States could proudly call itself liberal. That, of course, was a hundred and fifty years ago, before Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and social media turned the word into an condemnation.

Four other candidates received Electoral votes. Remember, no matter what kind of a job Grant had done in his first term, nearly half the country despised him thanks to his role as the victorious general in the Civil War. Still, he whomped the other five wannabes; 55.6 percent of voters chose Grant; 43.8 went for Greeley. The other four fellows split the remaining six-tenths of one percent. I couldn’t find any figures for the Woodhull/Douglass ticket. Not that it would have mattered — Victoria Woodhull would have been six months shy of her 35th birthday by the time the March 4, 1973 inauguration date arrived, making her too young to be president. The Equal Rights Party ticket gained no Electoral votes and no source that I’ve found is able to say how many actual votes she and Douglass got. A common descriptor of her total vote count is “negligible.”

1872 was a fitting year for the nation’s first woman presidential candidate. That same year, Congress enacted a law calling for equal pay for male and female federal employees. Now that surprised me, inasmuch as equal pay sounds so 1970s or even later. Nevertheless, the US government a century and a half ago, in many ways, set a progressive — dare I say liberal — tone for the country and for the world. This even as it still was engaged in a sweeping campaign of ethnic cleansing and genocide west of the Mississippi River. Once again illustrating the too-often baffling contradictions inherent in our country’s DNA.

For example, here’s another counterpoint to the Equal Pay act: the year prior, an organization was founded, one that would, over the decades, assume gargantuan power within the halls of Congress, the Supreme Court, and American life in general. A couple of old soldiers named William Conant Church and George Wood Wingate started the National Rifle Association of America in New York state. Their idea being soldiers needed to learn how to shoot better. US Army studies showed that, during the Civil War, Union soldiers fired about a thousand shots for every recorded Confederate hit. Church and Wood’s new group proposed to offer English-made rifles as prizes for the top marksmen in competitions.

The NRA eventually would morph into a gun safety organizations until the 1960s when it shifted gears to become — get this! — a gun control group. Yep. The Black Panthers of Oakland had begun toting long guns onto the steps of the statehouse in Sacramento (California was an open-carry state at the time). The virtually-all-White NRA was aghast and began proposing gun control legislation — and succeeding in its offorts. Then, of course, it became an advocate for everybody to carry everything up to and including, it seems, thermonuclear weapons.

The Black Panthers demonstrate in Sacramento

Anyway, Victoria Woodhull. She was among the more radical women of the day, an advocate of free love, a serious women’s liberation movement. Others who called for free love, a rejection of traditional marriage that relegated women to chattel status, included Mary Wollstonecraft and her husband, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Emma Goldman.

Woodhull, who was called “the high priestess of free love” wrote: “Yes, I am a Free Lover. I have an inalienable, constitutional and natural right to love whom I may, to love as long or as short a period as I can; to change that love every day if I please, and with that right neither you nor any law you can frame have any right to interfere.” All of which sounds pretty normal in this day and age but 150 years ago was seen as something akin to calling for the worship of Satan.

By the way, Woodhull also was a pioneer in a couple of other arenas — she and her sister, Tennessee Claflin, were among the very first women to found and publish a newspaper in the United States and Victoria alone was the first woman to found and operate a brokerage house on Wall Street.

●

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.

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07/31/2026
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Oil

820 Words: The Ultimate Lowlight?

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

So, the United States, at the cost of more than 620,000 lives and the destruction of several southern cities, has established itself as a non-slave nation. Your elementary school history books will tell you the North won the Civil War. I’m not so sure.

The only leader executed for his role in the Civil War was President Abraham Lincoln. And for the next hundred years, the South legislated against and terrorized Black people, largely keeping the mass of them in perpetual poverty and political impotence. Southern segregationists would wield outsized power in the US Senate and House even if no southerner was elected president until Jimmy Carter in 1976. The likes of Dick Russell of Georgia, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, and James O. Eastland of Mississippi, by their antediluvian, regressive, racist votes and pronouncements, wouild have made Reinhard Heydrich grin. George Wallace would become one of the most successful third party candidates for president in American history. He crowed while Alabama’s governor, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” and rode that sentiment into 10 million votes, or 13.5 percent of the total in 1968.

To this day, people in both the South and the North wave Confederate flags.

The 75 million or so people who voted for Donald J. Trump for president three times expressed contempt, either intentionally or not, for every step forward in race relations in the United States since 1865.

Barack Obama, whose father was Black, served two terms as President of the United States but his presence in the White House ignited the basest, most hate-filled reaction imaginable over the next ten years and into the foreseeable future.

Barack Obama

Yes, the surrender of the Confederate States of America signaled the end of slavery in the United States, but that’s all. Black people have been relegated to a secondary status in this country ever since, just as millions of pariahs would have been had Nazi Germany had its way. Perhaps the best thing I can say about race relations in the US since the Civil War is the authorities never really engaged in a systematic, institutionalized genocide of Black people, although tons of individuals did their damnedest to bring that about.

The last significant Confederate force to capitulate signed its cease-fire on June 23, 1865, more than two months after Robert E. Lee’s surrender. The commander of that last southern army was Gen. Stand Watie of the First Indian Brigade of the Trans-Mississippi. He was a native Cherokee who, understandably, held no affection for the United States government even though by the end of the war most Cherokees had aligned with the North.

Stand Watie

Where, then, did the United States head once the minimum good, the end of slavery, had been accomplished? Believe it ir not. America almost immediately plunged into an era that threatened not just a race of people, but the entirety of humanity.

On October 26, 1865, just six months after the Civil War had effectively come to an end, a fellow named John D. Rockefeller began formalizing a business partnership that would eventually become Standard Oil of Ohio. That company and its progeny would steer the nascent petroleum and subsequent automobile, airplane, and god-knows-whatever-other internal combustion engine industries over the next 160-plus years. Rockefeller would become, some argue, the richest man in the world. The oil industry would become the single most important driver of global economics and geo-political relations by the middle of the 20th century.

The burning of oil to power engines, warm and light our homes, run our power grid, and otherwise make modern life possible, would profoundly affect the composition of the atmosphere of the entire planet, not to mention spark countless wars over territory, control, and transportation of petroleum-based stuff.

Millions of people have died in clashes to challenge or prop up the global oil industry. As dramatic as that number sounds, it pales in comparison to the number of potential deaths as global warming and climate change foul our air, raise our sea levels, create extreme weather, force environmental migration, and more over the next few decades.

John D. Rockefeller

For the last century and a half, Rockefeller largely has been portrayed as a great American hero. Whoever among us remains in the next century and a half surely will view him as perhaps humanity’s greatest supervillain.

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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.

07/29/2026
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How Hard Could It Be?, WFHB

It Takes a Community

Publication date for my book, How Hard Could It Be? The Stories of WFHB, is coming tantalizingly near. Just a few short weeks ago, I got an advance copy of it and, as luck would have it, ran into WFHB board president Emily Jackson in the parking lot of the Monroe County Public Library that day. Naturally, I pulled the copy out of my bag and showed it off to her. She clicked a pic of it and me and posted the shot on social media.

Jeanette Smedberg caught the post and immediately asked EJ the DJ to connect us. Next thing anybody knew, Jeannette was volunteering to preview the manuscript.

EJ the DJ snapped me in the Monroe County Public Library parking lot.

Retired now, Jeannette ran BCS Advertising here in Bloomington for years. She has extensive experience in proofreading, typesetting, and other chores related to the precise placement and appearance of words and images in various media. Jeannette was able to offer learned, considered suggestions and has been trained to catch the most minute typo, misuse, or grammar sin. I jumped at her offer.

Jeannette took the task seriously. Her eye is sharp. Wielding her blue pencil with a deft, sensitive hand, she’s caught hundreds of chinks in my prose. She even challenged me on an aspect of style, which made me think deeply about my approach and forced me to justify certain things I had done.

She fell out of the sky and the book is going to be all the better for it.

07/28/2026
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America 250

1074 Words: Gun-Barrel Politics

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

Here’s a lowlight. An all-too American lowlight.

On the evening of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln was shot by Confederate loyalist John Wilkes Booth as the president sat in a box at Ford’s Theater in Washington DC. Lincoln and his wife Mary were attending a performance of the play, Our American Cousin, written by Englishman Tom Taylor.

Only a few short weeks before, the president had been inaugurated to his second term. The Civil War had, for all intents and purposes, come to an end just five days prior to the shooting.

Technically, the war ended a year and half later, on August 20, 1866, when President Andrew Johnson issued a proclamation saying, “[[the] insurrection is at an end and… peace, order, tranquillity, and civil authority now exist in and throughout the whole of the United States of America.”

The seceding states, eleven of them, formed the Confederate States of America, a would-be nation that never attained recognition from the United States (naturally) nor any other country in the world. Think of how odd it is that a rebellious territory in any country should declare independence and not, then, be supported by anybody else on earth. Of course, when your wannabe nation is based primarily on the idea of slavery, and you proudly say so, people (and countries) are going to tend to shy away from you.

The eleven, after hostilities ended, were put on probation before they could be fully readmitted to the Union. A majority of each seceding state’s population had to swear out loyalty oaths before their state governments could be reorganized. All their leaders had to swear allegiance to the United States. Each state had to rewrite its constitution, largely to repudiate antebellum thinking and specifically to outlaw slavery. Confederate military leaders were barred from holding public office. The Confederate states, too, had to cancel all their war debts, meaning anybody who financed the southern cause was out of luck. The whole process lasted until 1870 when the last of the seceding states’ representatives were readmitted to the US Congress.

Although, as Heather Cox Richardson and others argue, many in the southern states continue to fight for the ideas of the Confederacy to this day.

A scene from the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Lincoln, born in Kentucky, raised in Indiana, and, as an adult, a lawyer and politican in Illinois, couldn’t even enjoy a full week of peace in the nation he led. He was rendered unconscious by Booth’s bullet that struck him behind the left ear. He was carried to a home across the street from Ford’s and laid diagonally (he was exceptionally tall) on a bed there. No one who examined Lincoln thought he could survive. He didn’t. He died the next morning at 7:20.

Lincoln was the first United States President to be assassinated. He wouldn’t be the last. In fact, within the next 35 years, two more presidents, James A. Garfield and William McKinley, would be killed by assassins’ bullets. The man who replaced McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, himself was shot when he tried to run again for president in 1912. JohnF. Kennedy was gunned down in 1963, making it four presidents killed in office.

As mentioned here previously, a gunman attempted to shoot at Andrew Jackson but his pistols misfired. A man holding a pistol and waiting for the official procession to pass him during President William Howard Taft’s summit meeting with Mexican Presdient Porfiro Diaz at El Paso, Texas in 1909 was disarmed. Anarchists plotted to kill President Herbert Hoover during his visit to Arentina in 1928. In 1933, a man shot at newly-inaugurated President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Miami. He missed but struck and killed Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak, who died of his wound. Zionist militia men in 1947 mailed letter bombs to the White House in hopes one of them might kill Truman. Three years later, Puerto Rican independence activists stormed Harry Truman’s residence (the White house being renovated at the time) in an attempt to kill the president.

JFK, for that matter, survived a couple of assassination plots before Lee Harvey Oswald succeeded in killing him. A rabid anti-Catholic man planned to ram Kennedy’s limousine with his dynamite-laden car a few week’s before the inauguration but he changed his mind when he saw Kennedy’s wife and daughter kiss him goodbye the morning of December 11, 1960. As if that isn’t bad enough, just a few days before Kennedy was killed, another man, a right wing extremist and John Birch Society member, planned to kill Kennedy during a presidential visit to Chicago but his landlady caught wind of his plans and notified the Secret Service.

In 1972 and ’74, two men tried to kill President Richard Nixon. The first hoped to shoot him during a motorcade in Canada but Nixon’s car drove by too fast for him to take good aim. The second planned to hijack a commercial airliner and crash it into the White House but he was shot and killed at the airport outside Baltimore. By the way, that first man was named Arthur Bremer and he’d go on to shoot and paralyze presidential candidate George C. Wallace in Laurel, Maryland in 1972.

Two women, one of them a Manson Family member, attempted to fire guns at President Gerald R. Ford within two and a half weeks of each other in September 1975. A gang of 14 Kuwaiti and Iraqi men plotted to kill President George H.W. Bush’s by car bomb while he was in Kuwait City in 1993. They were thwarted.

Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme in Custody.

And then…, oh for Chrissakes! I haven’t got the room or the desire to list all the assassination attempts and plots against Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump, and Joe Biden. A quick count shows at least 41 such shots (literally and figuratively) against those five presidents alone.

All this is to say it’s become more likely that an American president will be shot at, bombed, rammed, or otherwise assaulted than not these days. This country’s history is rife with attempts to off the Chief Executive but now it’s become almost epidemic.

We’re a violent bunch.

07/24/2026
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Civil War, Reconciliation, Slavery

532 Words: Too Civil

AMERICA 250

My series on the highlights and lowlights of American history, marking this nation’s 250th birthday. The whole idea being we, as a nation, have done great things and we’ve done rotten things. And sometimes the things we’ve done have been both great and rotten. We are, to be sure, all too human.

So now we come to the ultimate highlight/lowlight in American history.

The Civil War.

Or, as the Bad Guys referred to it, the War of Northern Aggression.

By the way, those Bad Guys never got a proper comeuppance, other than getting their asses whupped in the war itself. The leaders of the so-called Confederate States of America, as well as that “nation’s” generals, its financiers, philosophers, influencers, clerics, and traders in human lives, never were brought to justice, never punished, never compelled to atone for their myriad sins.

As a rule, I tend to be sympathetic to any group of people who wish to rebel or secede but not so in this case. Sadly, it remains necessary to this day, more than a hundred and sixty years later, here in the United States of America, to say what should be universally accepted — that Jefferson Davis,  Alexander Stephens, Judah Benjamin, Robert Toombs, John C. Breckenridge, and their evil collaborators  were wrong, morally, existentially wrong, and deserving of the hangman’s noose.

The historian Heather Cox Richardson lays out the particulars of modern America’s inexcusable winking at the secession and subsequent war in her book, How the South Won the Civil War. It’s as if Germans still celebrated Kristallnacht or the Japanese continued to revere the legacy of Hideki Tojo. Even the Soviets tried to wash their hands of the malignant fallout from the Joseph Stalin era in the years immediately after his death. (On the other hand, just as many Americans embrace the antebellum South,  romanticize its rebellion, and — honestly — long for a return to a time when dark-skinned people knew their place, a good many Russians today wish their country still had a tyrannical leader like the man whose forced famines, brutal gulags, and thought-crime executions resulted in the deaths of at least 10 million people. In other words, we Americans aren’t the only saps on earth.)

Therein lies the essence of the contradictory highlight/lowlight of the Civil War. Lincoln may have been magnanimous and forgiving in his “with malice toward none” stance. He may have been manifesting the most admirable characteristics of his Christian faith. But he allowed evil to survive by not choking it off, its ideas as well as its purveyors, swiftly and decisively. The way to do that would have been to hang Davis et al from the highest trees and outlawing the Confederate flag.

Unhappily, that banner continues to be waved, on front yard flagpoles, on pickup trucks, on tattoos, on blogs and in podcasts, and anywhere else where people can legally display their stupidity. Again, places like Germany flat-out ban the waving of the Nazi flag. They, at least, understand the normalization of it, just as we normalized the “stars and bars,” is a tacit endorsement of everything it stands for.

That normalized Confederate flag stands for the kidnapping, the buying and selling, the terrorizing, the dehumanization, the whipping, the chaining — all the atrocities inherent in the practice of slavery. The United States of America fought a bloody war to stop that practice. Then it said to its former practitioners, All is forgiven, fellas. You’re okay by us.

They weren’t okay.

How Kidnapped Africans Were Transported to America.

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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.

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