Nazis for Trump
This prank posting involves an outdoor board only blocks from Trump Tower. Those damned ‘poster boys’ again.
Out Among Humans Notebook
Pat Shiplett Writes About People.
Tom and Frontier Justice
You be the judge about what the boys did when nobody was looking.
There were seven and a half guys in the group.
One of them had been diagnosed with a hole in his heart. He used it as an excuse never to climb the fence and retrieve the basketball. He counted as only half a guy.
They lived in a neighborhood that straddled several school districts. The boys were too far from their schools to hang out with classmates so they formed a group strictly out on convenience.
As a matter of survival, they worked tirelessly on the your-dick is-so-small style of humor they’d need in high school. They had heard that Cruncher and The Holocaust were coming their way and they were nervous.
It was in the spring when the thin, blond kid named Tom got strange. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, Tom couldn’t control his mouth.
He’d took to ridiculing one guy’s acne. He made slutty-divorced-mother-with-peroxide-hair jibes that drew blood. His cruelty could have been forgiven if he hadn’t developed a trait even worse.
Tom had become annoying.
He laughed too hard at his own jokes and he spit dumb-fuck insults out of the side of his mouth. You wouldn’t have liked it.
The guys gave Tom more than his share of second chances. None of them expected it and they hadn’t planned it, but one afternoon they took matters into their own hands.
They proceeded to indict Tom. They invoked a jury and held a trial. After finding him guilty they imposed the maximum sentence — they banished him from the face of the earth.
A movie about a lynching “The Oxbow Incident” often appeared on TV. Civics teachers across the country assigned it for discussion in class. The boys began to doubt whether their frontier justice had been just, if they should have entertained appeals.
A decade later one of the group ran into Tom at a singles’ bar — both were back in town for Thanksgiving. They shared several rounds of drinks without bringing up the past.
Tom had tried various lines of work in California and as much as he loved the ocean he was thinking about moving home to finish night school.
He was as thin and blond as always and, now in his twenties, he was as pleasant and sincere a man as you could ever hope to meet.
Trump and Police Conduct
When Donald Trump urged
police officers not to protect the people they take into custody, he was just joking.
At least that’s what his press secretary said.
He was just funnin’ when he suggested police officers shouldn’t help suspects after they cuff their hands behind their backs. If prisoners slice their heads open while being loaded into police vans, he chuckled, well they probably deserve it.
Police forces around the country weren’t laughing. They immediately condemned Trump’s remarks. (The Boy Scouts of America was forced to apologize for his comments just a week earlier.)
The president’s speech didn’t do our men and women in blue any favors. His words feed the mistrust that puts them and the public at greater risk. A law enforcement community that honors its oath to serve and protect is one or our nation’s greatest strengths.
If articles of impeachment are one day drawn up against Donald Trump, his use of police brutality as a punch line should be one of them.
Pranksters Update
— The ‘poster boys’ took a break from summer vacation to hijack billboards across the country. Read more…
The Peddler
The man hoped
his call would get lost within the bowels of the city’s communications hub. That would give him an excuse to put off the chore he dreaded.
But that kind of luck wasn’t to be.
Minutes before the Community Development Department officially opened for business, Chris pick up her phone and asked how she could help. “That’ll be simple enough.” she assured the caller.
There weren’t many requests like his so they’d have to do things the old-fashioned way — using pens, paper, staplers, etc. Chris wasn’t apologetic about that, she liked working with her hands.
She told her constituent he would need proof of identity. His passport would do and if he had a driver’s license he should bring that too. They made an appointment for that same day.
She took one look at the tee shirt the man would be selling and disappeared into her boss’s office. “We’ve decided to give you a special unauthorized discount.” she whispered in a conspiratorial tone.
She laminated the certificate he would wear around his neck and punched holes for a string. She slid her card across the desk and said if the police gave him any trouble they should call her.
“Congratulations, Peddler #7!“ The city wishes you every success!”
The word ‘peddler’ caught the man off guard, he didn’t like the sound of it. His mother hadn’t carried him seven months and eleven days so he could be a common ‘peddler,’ All he wanted was to unload a few tees.
The next morning he schlepped his wares to a neighborhood street fair where he found it intensely, acutely, profoundly painful to approach strangers. He experienced an immediate respect for the age-old profession that has helped shape civilization.
A city can issue a license and a badge, Peddler #7 will tell you, and it can give you access to its streets. But what it can’t provide is the grit, the heart and the cleverness it takes to survive out there.
NOTE: By regulation a peddler is not a street vendor. Vendors can set up a stand to display their goods but the peddler needs to keep moving.
Billboard, Born in Kenya
Kenya was the birthplace of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. It was at the center of Trump’s claims that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and was not legitimate in office.
As a candidate-to-be, he was looking for ways to exploit the rage and disbelief created by the election of an African-American president. He found an audience.
He took to Twitter 67 times and used hundreds of hours of free media exposure to flog his ‘Birther’ calumnies.
Taking a page from the KKK, he dragged a black man out of his home (in this case the White House) to humiliate him in front of the town folk. He mocked the human rights progress we’ve struggled to achieve.
Abraham Lincoln said the Civil War was God’s punishment for the wealth earned through slavery and that the blood shed by those in bondage would be repaid by those on the battlefield. “The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.” he added, quoting Psalm 19:9.
It’s possible our nation will be punished for allowing a race baiter into the Oval Office.
If Lincoln’s God is merciful He’ll decide that a Trump presidency is punishment enough — and that when he leaves office, our sentence will be commuted to time already served.
Poster in Madrid
“Love Whomever You Love.
Madrid Loves You.”
MADRID —You see this poster on almost every corner.
It’s surprising that a country that endured iron-fisted religious and political repression late into the Twentieth Century came to recognize same-sex marriage before we did.
After all, championing individual rights is one of America’s enduring points of pride.
New rights take time to root. Challenging the values of the past is met with passion and outrage, especially when it involves the loss of power over others.
The people who wrote our constitution knew that things would change in the future so they gave us the Ninth Amendment. It says we have rights they couldn’t begin to imagine and didn’t mention in that document.
The end of slavery, voting rights for non-whites and women, the right to remain silent and have a court-appointed lawyer all came about because the Founders left us a living, breathing constitution.
We can’t see into the future any more than those geniuses could.
There may be rights our children come to recognize that we haven’t — the right to medical care, for example, may be one of them. (Our Spanish friends agreed on that years ago.)
Teresa Hernández López
Baffled expressions are Teresa’s bread and butter MADRID — She’s part actress, part standup comic.
She’s a mime who uses her body to explain things that don’t translate. She’s an etiquette coach and a world-class diplomat.
Teresa Hernández López is a language professor who sensed early on that she would teach. As the second of five she helped attend to the education of her siblings.
She herself is a remarkable scholar — she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship by the US Department of State which she pursued in Scranton PA, where she later taught at the university level. “Have you seen ‘The Office?’“ she’ll ask.
Teresa’s not extroverted by nature, she uses the English word “shy” to describe herself but she becomes a different woman in front of students.
She conducts classes totally in Spanish, hiding her mastery of English even though it was her major — she graduated knowing more about our language than her own. She has since tackled her native Spanish with that same determined rigor. Portuguese is next.
Teresa teaches at a boutique language school built around a walk-in curriculum with no entry requirements. (It offers a convenient excuse to be in Madrid.)
Some students stay for weeks, others for months, many earn credits that transfer back home. A surprising number learn Spanish because of romantic interests. Teresa is fascinated by students from non-western cultures who have fundamentally different realities built into their languages.
She grew up in the traditionally Spanish way, her family living on the first floor and her ‘abuela’ on the fifth. She left her home town of Segovia to make her way in the Spanish capitol.
Entertainers and public speakers find nothing as terrifying as a room full of blank stares. But for Teresa, baffled expressions are bread and butter. Tortured pronunciations are music to her ears.
Billboard — Crime Scene
George Orwell is alive and well.During his campaign, Donald Trump accused Spanish-speaking immigrants of being more likely to commit rape and murder than other Americans — exactly the opposite is true.
When he lost the popular election, he accused millions of illegal aliens of voting unlawfully — that did not happen.
He was using fear and hatred to criminalize a entire group of people.
We’ve don’t usually hold politicians accountable for what they say in the heat of a campaign. But in an extraordinary move, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has taken the president’s remarks about religion at face value, citing them as proof that his travel ban is unconstitutional.
By a margin of 10 to 3, they found the president’s remarks too dangerous to be ignored.
Editor’s Update
— The ‘Poster Boys’ are up to their usual mischief, hacking and hijacking billboards. When you least expect it, there they are. Read more…
His Spanish Mistress
The old fool experienced exquisite pleasure along with the pain. It was simply too much for the old guy to resist.
He was weak and defenseless in its grasp. The Spanish language had become a dominatrix who imposed discipline and demanded submission.
She dominated him completely, forcing him to study hours a day.
She made him read in Spanish on the left page with English on the right. She forced him to crawl on all fours, going word-by-word, with a translation app wedged between his teeth. She corrected his conjugations and humiliated him in public.
But of course the man experienced exquisite pleasure along with the pain. He discovered that certain expressions have unexpected beauty and extraordinary powers in the language he was learning.
He devoured J. K. Rowling in Spanish and was amazed at how quickly her fair-haired British townsfolk became Hispanics. He laughed out loud when they cursed. This new language offered figures of speech he could steal and use in his own feeble attempts at writing. And who would know?
One year passed, then two, a third followed suit. When it was time to consent to yet another, he didn’t hesitate to say yes.
You may find it hard to believe but during those years of submission and domination, the old fool never thought to create a safe word. It never once occurred to him that this language thing was getting out of hand.
Serema and Soheil
The long forced march is behind them.
The couple seated at the table are about to harvest what they have sown. They’re giddy with achievement and release.
They’ve done it. They’ve nailed it. Totally aced it. They have tee-shirts as evidence of every function they’ve endured as students.
For one of them the immediate future involves tenure track at one of the Ivies; for the other an individually tailored portfolio of responsibilities within an international consulting firm —all of this due to years of work. And now even the gods of relocation have smiled on them — neither will need to sacrifice a career for the other.!
They’ll move to the East Coast within months. As they sit here today, they’re comparing the advantages of towns that triangulate their workplaces.
The young couple has been a part of our community for six years and has discovered that something as incidental as a coffee joint can shape the quality of life in a way few people would imagine.
There’s a reason their names and faces aren’t revealed in this post. Halfway around the world there are families and clans and religions that keep their distance from one another. A ethnic Kurd and an ethnic Armenian, a Muslim and a Christian, are not meant to be together.
Here at our coffee shop, at the most visible table in the center of the room, the man and the women don’t need to hide their troth.
They’ll tell you as a matter of fact that their decision of where to live next, together as a family, revolves at least in part around finding a coffee shop like this one.
