by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 26, 2022 | Featured, Politics, Travel
“It Can’t Happen Here” — Frank Zappa
Since recorded history, our world has continually been at war or engaging in domestic civil wars.
Why?
Perhaps it takes repeated wars to reeducate generation by generation those who cannot imagine the reality of war and civil war.
In school, I was taught history chronologically, war by war and how the victors carved new national boundaries and subjugated the vanquished only to have domestic revolutions subdivide countries.
After wars or revolutions end in battlefields and graveyards, but after that generation dies off, wars become books or movies or heroic stories.
It is all just “book learning.” It is easy to get good grades and learn nothing.
There are few generations that are blessed as we have been in avoiding wars or revolutions. The United States has been fortunate. Its last revolution was the Civil War which ended over 150 years ago, and our last foreign war, the Vietnam War, ended over 50 years ago.
I am part of a generation that has not experienced a civil war or a major foreign war for 50 years, however I have experienced both on foreign soil.
After my formal education was over, museums, libraries and good conversations became my continuing education; but international travel gave me the best insights into my own country, its prosperity and its people.
Over ten years ago, I spent an evening with friends in a beautiful plaza in Aleppo in Northern Syria. Talk about the government was discouraged by our guide. Less than a year later, Syria was at war with itself and that beautiful plaza and much of the city had been wiped off the face of the earth.
A little further south, the 2,000 year-old Roman ruins of Palmera, a once beautiful city built around a long dry oasis, would be badly damaged by this modern war.
When I visited Dubrovnik more recently, our guide pointed out the bullet holes that had chipped away that walled city, which had been part of the former nation state of Yugoslavia.
Last summer, during a trip to northern France and the battlefields of the First World War, our guide at the Battle of Belleau Wood pointed to a stand of trees and asked, “How could these trees have survived the battles here and the later deforestation that cleared these fields around it?” And then answered: “The fighting here was so severe that the trees cannot be cut down because the bullets still buried in these trees would break the blades of the saws.”
I have also visited cities and nation-states torn by war and revolution, for example, when I visited the occupied and divided Beirut, Lebanon.
I had been invited to an opulent lunch overlooking a beautiful beach and the city below.
In the cab home, the driver spoke some English. In stop-and-go traffic we were delayed at a roundabout. I found myself three feet from the barrel of a tank pointing directly at my face.
Hoping to encourage the driver to edge forward slightly, I started a conversation, asking about a billboard with a cornucopia of figures looking down on me. He told me that it memorialized the assassinated leaders of the country and city.
That evening, I had dinner with a family who had lived on the top floor of an apartment building in another section of the city, which had had its roof blown off during the intermittent shelling of the city the year before.
A teenage member of the family joked that his mother had, after the damage of the blast, asked if everyone in the family was all right and then went back to eating dinner.
When I asked how on earth they could be so matter of fact, he answered, “Dinner was ready and getting cold.” He then added that fighting had been going on and off in various parts of the city for years, and when it was near their school they got days off until the fighting moved elsewhere.
On my way to the airport as I headed back to the U.S. the next day, I had to show my passport to soldiers in the quadrant of the city that held the airport. I can’t remember if they were Shia or Suni.
So what does global history teach me about my country?
“It can’t happen here.”
Our country supports the freedom fighters of Ukraine as they fight and die to preserve their country from the bloody invasion by Putin — the autocrat so admired by our former president.
After the failed coup d’état lead by this former president (who then raised a quarter of a billion dollars selling the false claim of a stolen election), almost every member of his party voted against an investigation of that coup. Now, half our country still refuses to acknowledge the January 6th Committee’s findings, even though almost all the witnesses are Republicans appointed by Republicans.
The most important protector of a democracy is the informed voter. I wish many of my fellow Americans could be as fortunate as I have been, getting to travel internationally.
So many of my friends will tell me, “We have always gotten through it before. We’re Americans. It can’t happen here.”
“It can’t happen here.”
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 19, 2022 | Featured, Personal, Poetry
…Out of the rain of last week.
I’m back to work. Watch me pitch.
As a child growing up in New England I quickly adopted “Yankee entrepreneurship” and I completely embraced “self-reliance,” which required me to not work for others during summer vacation in case I felt an urgent need to go to the beach.
One summer back in the late 1960s, two high school friends and I started the “Right On House Painting Company.” This was a highly independent entrepreneurial effort.
Our advertising amounted to a forceful announcement of the company name followed by the lifting of our right fist to the sky and pledging solemnly: “Right On”!
We were, of course, saluting latex paint.
Because we were under-funded and had to keep the overhead low, we lived in an old barn off of Upper Lambert’s Cove Road, which we rented from a local commercial fisherman who had at least twenty cats and had been drunk all winter.
We struck a deal for $15 a week rent if we would help him remove the long johns he had been wearing all winter.
Despite the bargain rent, he got the better deal.
We cleaned out the barn and divided it into quadrants so each of us had a room and there was a room left for eating, drinking and entertaining.
It was our “green” corporate headquarters.
We had no running water but refused to live without elegance, so we built an outhouse in a birch grove with a white wicker chair with the bottom cut out of it. We were proud to be feeding the birch trees.
We were way ahead of our time.
We bathed nearby in Ice House Pond — pretty much always at night so we didn’t get our bathing suits wet.
To reduce automotive and travel expenses, we generally hitchhiked with a can of paint and a brush in one hand and our thumb extended from the other in order to get to work.
It was also an early form of targeted corporate advertising, since we ended up meeting everybody on Martha’s Vineyard over the summer.
Every ride was a job interview from the passenger’s seat, but it didn’t matter because we were on your way to work anyway.
Our corporate mission statement required that on sunny days we went to the beach. On rainy days, we played poker. On hazy days we painted houses.
We made good money.
When asked about our profit margins we would announce: “Enough is as good as a feast” and drop our eyes and lift our fist to the sky.
My entrepreneurial spirit has never died.
I have avoided being an employee over the last several decades by starting a law firm and retiring to become a poet and here I am selling my book… but man do I have a deal for you!
It’s all about how you look at things.
Don’t look at this book as poetry — everybody hates poetry and a book of sonnets is worse.
But! If you look at it like sort of a Bible written in rhyme and rhythm or maybe just “Easy Go’n Bob’s Book of Random Wisdom,” then why not?
Keep it where you can read just one sonnet at a time uninterrupted. Like the bathroom. Or a wicker chair with a hole in it. I’m not proud.
Consider the sonnet entitled “The Facts of Life,” obviously composed for future generations.
———
The Facts of Life
I swam, back then, with some father’s daughters,
Back stroking only slightly out of touch,
Out to the raft in the starry waters
And never thought of their fathers all that much.
My child, don’t judge me till you’re fifty-five
But there were midnight visits to “Ice House Pond,”
In my misspent youth, when I was still alive,
Where couples would strip, and swim and then bond.
And my child, this I know for sure is true:
At seventeen we all are born to be free
But ’cause I’m your father and I love you
Please consider this seasoned advice from me:
As you lust for life, avoid the crudity
But don’t miss occasional sponti-nudity.
———
Get it in softcover or on Kindle I don’t care. Get a copy and after you have read it, give it away. Spread the word. That is all I want.
It’s sometimes a little scary and sometimes a little sad and often about self-reliance, defiance, a second life, and “which way is the beach?”
Right On!
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 12, 2022 | Featured, Man Machine, Personal, Plays
This morning was hard. I woke up and it was raining. Over the last month, I have been coming to recognize a hard truth — which I finally realized this morning.
Over five years ago, I started this blog to force myself into a weekly discipline, to improve my writing skills and to explore how I could start a whole new career after retirement from a very happy first career as a lawyer.
My whole life I had quietly wanted to see if I could create a life as an artist.
After writing 10 plays for the wonderful little theaters in Baltimore, I decided to see if I could break into New York professional theater and I committed to writing and publishing poems.
I took classes at the New York Commercial Theater Institute and was fortunate to be accepted into the poetry program at Bread Loaf in Vermont.
All of a sudden, it was starting to happen, this improbable dream of mine.
My play “Onaje” was selected by FringeNYC in 2018 and, after great reviews, got picked up and nurtured by a NYC producer. After the rewrites and several table reads to make it a more fleshed out two-act play, “The Grace of God & The Man Machine” was ready.
But then COVID hit in March of 2020. The theaters shut down just as we were waiting to open off-Broadway.
Then in February of this year, we were ready again. We planned to open off-Broadway in November 2022 for a one-month run at Theatre Row on 42nd Street.
Also this year, I published “An Accidental Diary: A Sonnet a Week for a Year,” so we were on our way.
The dream was coming true!
But then, a month ago, COVID struck again and the producer went out of business after 15 years of producing successful shows. Even still, the producer offered the use of the performance space if I could find a new producer with such short notice.
This seems like an impossible task. I looked in the mirror this morning and I said it: “This lifetime dream may not happen.”
But then I realized, I’m not ready to give up just yet. Somewhere out there, there may be a partner, or a resource, or some other way to make this happen.
I turned away and looked for a diversion, for good news to chase away this awful gathering sadness.
Well, last week I learned that, along with my sonnet “Summer Thunderstorms” being chosen a runner-up for the Robert Frost Foundation poetry contest this year, “City Snow” had been included in the “Maryland Bards Poetry Review 2022” anthology. Both poems are from my book, “An Accidental Diary.”
I sat down by the window and opened my little book and reread “Summer Thunderstorm”:
Summer Thunderstorms
As with the generations long since dead
The fire and brimstone of the status quo
Wakes him up from the safety of his bed
And lightening frames him in the window
And photographs him in its afterglow.
Tonight he feels his present and its past
As the summer storm also comes and goes.
Conclusions are foolish in a world so vast.
For at the edges of his world and heart
Far past the farthest boundary of his grasp
Where ideas cause worlds to come apart
He lives in this place that will not last.
He loves his life more than he can explain
And leaves the window open to hear the rain.
I opened the windows to hear the rain.
After I looked out at the storm for a little while, I got a fresh cup of coffee and started writing this. I have stuff to do. It’s time to get back to work.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jul 5, 2022 | Featured, Personal
This is a 4th of July American love story straight from my heart. It doesn’t go where you might expect.
In 2014, I sold my controlling interest in the law firm I had created in 1990 and ran for state delegate because I was terrified by the emerging polarization of our country. I lost in a gerrymandered jurisdiction. I never had a chance.
As a child, I hitchhiked through 40 states and met strangers from endlessly different backgrounds and every walk of life.
Back then my rides often came from soldiers who had hitchhiked around the country themselves after the Second World War. They stopped their lives to offer me kindness with no thought of anything in return.
A ranking officer in a top-down convertible drove me into Paris Island, the US Marine training facility, because I could get a carton of Camel cigarettes for 15 cents a pack at the PX. The marching soldiers saluted the license plates as we entered and as he returned me to the road.
I came to understand the unspoken secrets of a country that preached justice and equality but had built its wealth with slave labor on stolen land.
Although we often agreed to disagree, my rides and I shared a national pride. This country had saved a dividing world from fascism and had recently passed legislation like the Civil Rights Act of ’64 in an attempt to correct our world at home.
As I traveled shotgun, I learned to listen. That was my job.
We talked and they would tell me about the joy and sadness and insecurity they could not tell their wives. I learned so much from them.
Every ride contained an unspoken understanding that we would never meet again.
The growing polarization that has been dividing us now for years has slowly broken my old hitchhiker’s heart.
This 4th of July, my children came home with their loved ones and their children. Last night, we decided to revisit an old movie which they loved to watch each year on the 4th: “The Sandlot.”
Because I’m deaf now, I sat in a chair up front facing the TV, my back to them, my face hidden from them as I looked up at the screen.
It is a baseball movie about kids growing up in the late ’50s or early ’60s. It is nothing but foolishness but it holds the beauty of a united America that believes in Babe Ruth, the innocence of juvenile behavior, and baseball as a national pastime and religion. James Earl Jones is the linchpin of redemption just because he is, not because it is politically correct.
Sitting with my children and their loved ones and their children behind me, I could cover up ever so gently my unexpected tears as they came.
by Robert Bowie, Jr. | Jun 28, 2022 | Featured, Politics
I am willing to admit I’m a moron but who the hell are these “originalists”?
Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett, Clarence Thomas, and Brett Kavanaugh have all identified themselves as “originalists,” but it now looks like Alito and Gorsuch do too.
So what do these originalists believe?
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, when asked that question at her confirmation hearings, said: “I understand it [the Constitution] to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”
Okay, Let’s look at some history.
Since the originalists say they must interpret the Constitution based on the time it was ratified rather than interpret the evolution of the historical wisdom it has grown to contain, there is some “originalist” history that they may have overlooked.
The “originalist” history, back when our Constitution was ratified in September of 1787, means: (1) women could not vote or own property, (2) Black people were slaves and didn’t qualify as “people” and (3) interracial marriage was a crime that would get you jail time.
An originalist interpretation of the Constitution, if applied to the present membership of the Supreme Court, would eliminate two-thirds of the “originalists,” as well as a majority of the entire Court.
So Amy Coney Barrett should not vote and should surrender all property she owns and drop out of the Court. And what should they do about Clarence Thomas, or his marriage?
But it gets even more absurd and worse for the fantasy logic of these originalists:
“A Law repugnant to the Constitution is void,” wrote Chief Justice Marshall, the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, on February 24, 1803 when, in Marbury v. Madison, he declared unconstitutional a law passed by Congress and signed by the President, based on the Supreme Court’s right of “Judicial Review.”
Nothing, absolutely nothing in the Constitution gave Chief Justice Marshall and the Supreme Court this specific power of judicial review. It is not in the Constitution anywhere.
Marshall, however, believed that the Supreme Court should have a role equal to those of the other two branches of government, so he interpreted the “intent” of the Constitution even though the words were not in the Constitution.
So how can the “originalists” have any basis to review anything?
I’ll tell ya.
As an Economist correspondent recently pointed out, “5 of the 6 conservative Supreme Court justices were appointed by a Republican Senate majority that won fewer votes than the Democrats” and “3 of the 6 were nominated by a President who also won a minority of the popular vote.”
So where are we now?
Are we a democracy? Are we a republic? Or is this when we lose all that? Have you been watching the January 6th hearings?
The billionaire President who appointed three of these originalists, managed us for four years with lies and Twitter and, after he was voted out, more lies in order to organize an attack on our government based on the Big Lie of a stolen election, and all these lies were affirmed by Fox (not at all) News, Ingram and Carlson.
Isn’t it time to start the long hard revolution to take our country back?
The midterm elections have to be that revolution.
If the Trump support, the originalists, and Fox News win the House and the Senate for Republicans in the midterms, those Republicans will continue their coup d’état and attempt to overthrow our democracy. They have made no secret of this.
America has evolved beyond the originalists. We freed ourselves from a king once before. We freed the slaves. We recognized women’s right to vote. As a democracy we have created a history of humanitarian change, and are capable of great creativity and the capacity to govern with a big heart when we are not divided.
Let’s get back to being the US Again.
