Across AMERICA, July 4, 2026

A DECLARATION

By the PEOPLE of the

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

In GENERAL OUTRAGE

WHEN in the Course of human Events, it becomes necessary for a free people to denounce the political bands which have connected them with a leader and his government that have egregiously abused their powers to the point of endangering democracy and overturning the sacred values upon which the nation was founded, to restore the laws, separation of powers, limited government, and fundamental rights of the people to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God and of their Nation’s Constitution entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of humankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to such an extraordinary action.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all humans are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among People, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, That whenever any Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to reject the rogue, corrupt, and faithless leader, and to do so employing such principles and organizing their powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that humankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by removing the gross offenders to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such a Misleader, and to provide new Guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of the American people; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to demand the removal of the Despot. The history of the present President of the United States is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these United States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world:

• He has engaged openly and brazenly in Corruption on a scale unimaginable in the previous history of our nation, taking in billions of dollars for himself and his family.

• He has ignored the people’s representatives in Congress and invaded the rights of the people.

• He has induced a mob to invade the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the American Constitutional Republic and keep himself in power after he lost an election by seven million votes. The mob sought to hang his own vice president and attack members of Congress. The thugs assaulted police officers, defecated on the floors of the Capitol and smeared excrement on the walls. He let a horrified nation see it all on television and then told them they didn’t see what they saw and that the insurrectionists were patriotic picnickers. Then he claimed that the thugs were heroes. Then, after many of them had been tried by juries of their peers, found guilty of heinous crimes and sentenced to prison terms, he pardoned and released them all as soon as he got back into power.

• He has sought to set up, wholly without legal authority, a slush fund from taxpayers’ money, to pay anyone he falsely claims was wronged by the previous administration, notably the above-mentioned insurrectionists.

• He has pursued policies — including foolish tariffs, a war of whim, unjust taxation and removal of needed regulations — that have caused the cost of living of Americans to rise dramatically and made ordinary life for millions of Americans unaffordable.

• He has mocked the suffering of the people of our nation, saying that affordability is a “fake word” and “a con job,” “I love the inflation,” and that the unaffordability of housing is a “big yawn” for him.

• He has sided with dictatorial regimes and turned against our traditional democratic allies.

• He has undermined the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the most successful defensive alliance in history, thereby aiding the authoritarian war criminal Vladimir Putin and severely weakening the defense of our nation and of democracies in general.

• He has jettisoned the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that the Obama Administration and other world powers had worked out with Iran in 2015 to remove most of that nation’s enriched uranium, strictly limit its nuclear program to non-military uses, and have ongoing strict international inspection to ensure that Iran was doing what it agreed to. He did this for no reason other than his personal animus towards Mr. Obama.

• He has launched, without consultation with Congress or allies — apart from Benjamin Netanyahu — a war of choice on Iran for the purpose of restoring what he had thrown away in the JCPOA, ignoring intelligence that indicated both that Iran would respond by closing off the Strait of Hormuz and that the Iranians were nowhere near having a nuclear weapon.

• When his war on Iran did lead to the closing of the Strait of Hormuz and a worldwide economic crisis, he has declared that he was about to commit — in our name, the name of the United States of America — one of the greatest atrocities in the history of the world. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” he posted of what he would do to Iran.

• Then, seeing how disastrous his war was, he began negotiations — from a much weaker position then the United States had when he had suddenly attacked during promising negotiations — in which the objectives were to get a deal that would be less effective than the JCPOA he had thrown away and would have as its main goal the opening of the Strait of Hormuz, which had always been open before he launched the war.

• He has said, “sounds good to me!” about being with the largest mass murderers in history, Mao, Hitler, and Stalin.

• He has appointed many plainly unqualified people to head critically important government departments, choosing them based on their unquestioning loyalty to him, rather than to the American people and the Constitution.

• He has dismantled USAID and the extraordinary humanitarian work it did, causing vast numbers of avoidable deaths, weakening our capacity to prevent the spread of disease, and greatly damaging the view of America around the world.

• He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by turning the Department of Justice into his personal law firm instead of the head of our system of fair enforcement of the laws. He has had the Justice Department bring charges against people based on nothing other than that he doesn’t like them. He even had a huge banner with his face on it hung on the front of the Justice Department.

• He has sent across the nation swarms of heavily armed, masked and unidentified, poorly trained, inexperienced, and undisciplined U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents and ordered them to round up, not as he said in his campaign, “the worst of the worst” criminals who are in our country illegally, but anyone who looked like they might be in the United States illegally, resulting in the seizing of people on the basis of their complexion or accent. In many cases US citizens, and in most cases hardworking, law-abiding people who have long been in the country, serving their communities and doing necessary jobs have been imprisoned. The ICE agents have sometimes used brutality — cruelty seemed to be encouraged — and in several cases killed American citizens.

• He has protected the perpetrators of these crimes from trial and punishment for their attacks.

• He has ordered the construction of massive “detention centers” — private prisons that will profit from having large numbers of people incarcerated.

• He has drastically cut taxes on billionaires and corporations, exacerbating the greatest concentration of wealth at the very top in our history.

• He has caused the federal debt to soar more rapidly than ever before except in major wars.

• He has, without congressional authorization, imposed high tariffs on imports, varying them based on which countries and leaders he likes at a given moment. He insists that tariffs are paid by the foreign producers, which is nonsense. Tariff wars lead to economic crises and increase costs for our people.

• He has undermined freedom of speech and the press.

• He has threatened to invade countries — allies at that — and seize territory.

• He has tried in numerous ways to prevent free and fair elections. He continues to lie ceaselessly that the 2020 Election was stolen from him and seeks to prevent millions of people from voting.

• He has appointed as the Director of National Intelligence a man with absolutely no experience in intelligence, but with complete loyalty to the president, for the purpose of interfering in elections to favor him and his party. This endangers both national security and democracy.

• He has demolished the East Wing of the White House without the approval of anyone because he wants to have a ballroom built. He said the cost would be entirely covered by private donors (who would be seeking favorable treatment from the president). Then he asked for a $1 billion appropriation of public funds to pay for it.

• He has sought to construct monuments to himself across our nation’s capital. In violation of both law and long tradition intended to avoid the appearance of monarchy, he is having his image placed on coins. He has renamed government-related buildings for himself.

• He has sued the government, which he heads, for $10 billion because someone leaked one of his annual tax returns years ago. He was suing himself for $10 billion that the taxpayers would have to pay. He has said he would be happy to release his tax returns but could not because he claimed he was under IRS audit. Now he has had his Justice Department issue an order that his taxes, as well as those of his family and his businesses, are never to be examined or back taxes and penalties paid. Ever.

• He has, after running on the pledge to have all files relating to his former close friend and convicted mass pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, obstructed the release of those files, had large redactions made in the ones that have been released, and arranged for Epstein’s convicted co-abuser to be transferred to a country club prison and is considering pardoning her.

• He has had the knowledgeable people — the experts — in many government agencies fired and either not replaced or replaced by people whose only qualification is that they praise him.

• He has slashed funding for medical and scientific research, undermining the longstanding position of the United States as the world leader in these areas.

• He has put a man who opposes vaccines and has many anti-science views in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services.

• He has put a television news personality with no qualifications for the job and who pushes white “Christian” nationalism in charge of our nation’s military.

• He has made another television personality with no qualifications head of the FBI.

• Both of those unqualified leaders have forced many experienced and highly competent people out of their positions, weakening our national defense and law enforcement.

• He has stopped projects for renewable energy, some of them nearly completed, and is promoting renewed use of fossil fuels, thus accelerating global climate change.

• He has sought to have the history of our nation rewritten to support his own current beliefs, always a mark of dictators.

• He has called, while slashing spending on programs that help people, for a half-trillion dollar increase in military spending when the US military budget already exceeds the spending of the next nine largest spending nations combined. And that spending is mostly for ultra-expensive equipment that is increasingly obsolete and can be defended against by inexpensive drones.

• He has lied with impunity about almost everything, employed the tactic of accusing his opponents of doing what he is doing himself, making up false stories and presenting them as truth, and otherwise.

• He has debased public decency, respect for others, and the sense of community, and promoted hatred and division to a truly extraordinary degree. He mocks disabled people and veterans, uses repulsive language against women and people not classified as “white” — and anyone else who crosses him, and poses as what he thinks is a “real man” by promoting cruelty and not caring about others.

• He has endeavored to bring about a Great Leap Backward for our country and people — back to when it was a White Man’s Nation in which White Men Rule, reestablishing the hierarchical worldview that prevailed before it was challenged by the Enlightenment and American Revolution. Under that outlook, categories of human beings are classified as inherently unequal, with some — viz., men, those with northern European ancestry, rich people, owners of large businesses, those of a favored religion, heterosexuals — dominate and subjugate others — viz., women, those whose skin is not considered “white,” people who are not rich, workers, those of all other religions or none, LGBTQ people.

• His rule has been totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

• In every stage of these Oppressions, We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A President, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our “Republican” brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their president and his party in the national legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over the American people. We have reminded them of the circumstances of the founding of our nation upon the revolutionary concept that all people are equal in their humanity and should have the right to govern themselves. We have appealed to their sense of justice and magnanimity, and we have pleaded with them to disavow these usurpations. They, too, have been deaf to the voice of justice and of our common history. There have of late been some signs on the part of some in that party beginning to dare to oppose the intolerable. We welcome into the ranks of true American patriots all those who now perceive the enormous threat and are willing to join in a broad coalition of all Americans who want to Make America America Again.

We, therefore, the People of the United States of America, across this great land — from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Lubec, Maine, from Point Barrow, Alaska, to Key West, Florida — in General Outrage do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these United States, solemnly publish and declare, That these United States are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent of the Trump Regime; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to his corrupt rule and must instead promise our Allegiance to the ideals of 1776, to the Constitution of the United States, and to the Rule of Law equally applied to all.

We pledge to do everything within our power — a power that is great indeed when so many millions of us come together for the purpose of saving our country and its ideals — nonviolently to bring this attempt to impose tyranny upon us to an end.

We pledge to organize in our communities, to protest in the streets, to register as many people as possible to vote, to recruit or ourselves become poll watchers, to vote regardless of any impediments the regime may put in our way, to stare down and walk past any forces, uniformed or irregular, that may be at polling places to intimidate us, to join any needed efforts after the election to turn back attempts to reverse the expressed will of the people, to pressure a new Congress with majorities that support democracy and the aspirations of 1776, to work quickly to remove the Tyrant from office and to begin to prepare a Constitutional Amendment that will allow for situations in which a president and those beholden to him or her in Congress who brazenly go against the Constitution, the laws, and the interests of the people to be removed from power and a new election held without the nation being left helpless and powerless for four years.

And for the support of this Declaration, we mutually pledge to each other and to all Americans our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Democrats need to make a net gain of four seats this fall to gain control of the United States Senate. Where might they come from? North Carolina? Sure. Ohio? Likely. Maine? Yes. Alaska? Good chance. Iowa? In play. Texas? With James Talarico against one of the most corrupt politicians in America, Yep. Florida? Outside chance. A few observers are even beginning to suggest — ironically because of the Supreme Court’s destruction of the Voting Rights Act outraging and motivating black voters — that there is some possibility that Lindsey Graham could lose in South Carolina.

But Mississippi? Are you out of your mind? Well, I may be. Maybe Andy Borowitz is, too. On Sunday, he wrote a fascinating analysis of the vulnerability of incumbent Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith. After quoting his essay in full, I’ll add some comments of my own.

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Today we’ll look at a US Senate contest that’s been very much under the radar, because it’s in a state long considered solidly Republican: Mississippi.

The last Democratic senator in The Magnolia State was John C. Stennis, first elected during the Truman administration. Could Democrats end that lengthy dry spell this November?

It would be a huge upset, but they have a secret weapon: the Republican incumbent, epic assclown Cindy Hyde-Smith. Because when Cindy opens her mouth, anything can happen.

In 2018, Mississippi’s Republican governor, Phil Bryant, tapped Hyde-Smith, the state’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Commerce, to replace Senator Thad Cochran, who had resigned for health reasons. Seven months later, she faced former US Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy in a special election to serve the remainder of Cochran’s term. And that’s when Cindy, the Mouth of Mississippi, started making headlines around the world—for all the wrong reasons.

Hyde-Smith became the author of her own catastrophe at a campaign event in Tupelo three weeks before the election. After a rancher named Colin Hutchinson praised her to the crowd, she cheerfully reciprocated, “If he invited me to a public hanging, I’d be on the front row.”

People ignored her eccentric choice of preposition—generally, one sits in the front row, not on it—and focused on how deeply offensive her zest for public hanging was, given Mississippi’s notorious history of lynching. According to the NAACP, of the 4,743 lynchings that occurred in the US between 1882 and 1968, 581 happened in Mississippi, more than any other state. Seventy-two percent of those lynched were African American—as was Hyde-Smith’s Democratic opponent, Espy, who called her comment “reprehensible.”

The backlash was swift and brutal, as corporate donors fled Hyde-Smith’s campaign. Walmart tweeted from its official account, “Sen. Hyde-Smith’s recent comments clearly do not reflect the values of our company and associates. As a result, we are withdrawing our support and requesting a refund of all campaign donations.”

Coming to Cindy’s financial rescue was a white knight—emphasis decidedly on white. A businessman named Peter Sieve with a history of Nazi-adjacent utterances gave her campaign the maximum individual contribution, $2700. Hyde-Smith grappled with the thorny moral issues raised by such a donation by quietly cashing his check.

But Cindy’s piehole was just getting started. Speaking in Starkville, the home of Mississippi State University, she floated this modest proposal: “[T]here’s a lot of liberal folks in those other schools who that maybe we don’t want to vote. Maybe we want to make it just a little more difficult. So, I think that’s a great idea.” If voters were going to be disenfranchised, Cindy seemed to be suggesting, she wanted to be on the front row.

After declaring her enthusiasm for public hangings and voter suppression, what abhorrent box did Hyde-Smith have left to check? If you guessed “posing for a photo wearing a Confederate hat,” you’ve been paying attention.

A week before the election, Politico unearthed a (now-deleted) Facebook entry from 2014 in which Cindy posted just such a pic as she gushed about her visit to the home of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America. “I enjoyed my tour of Beauvoir,” she wrote. “The Jefferson Davis Home and Presidential Library located in Biloxi. This is a must see. Currently on display are artifacts connected to the daily life of the Confederate Soldier including weapons. Mississippi history at its best!”

If anyone wondered where Hyde-Smith got the brilliant idea of dressing up as a Rebel soldier, that mystery was solved a few days later. The Jackson Free Press revealed that she had attended the Lawrence County Academy, a “segregation school” established in 1970 to enable white parents to avoid sending their children to an integrated one. A member of the cheerleading squad, Cindy is shown third from right in the yearbook photo below, posing with the school mascot in Confederate army attire.

As surreal as this photo is, it’s far from the most bizarre content to appear in a Lawrence County Academy yearbook: that would be the description of Hyde-Smith as the “wittiest” member of her class. (I had to read it several times to be sure it didn’t say “whitest.”)

On Election Day, Cindy’s enthusiasm for Confederate headgear repelled enough voters to turn what should have been a Republican romp into a nail-biter. Cindy saw off the challenge from Espy, but just barely.

Since then, Hyde-Smith has had years as an incumbent to endear herself to Mississippi voters. That’s gone about as well as Jefferson Davis’s presidency.

In the Senate, Cindy has been a reliable firehose of inanities, perhaps most memorably in 2024, when she blocked a bill offering federal IVF protections by claiming that it could lead to the creation of “chimeras.” In case you’re a little rusty on Greek mythology, the creature Hyde-Smith sought to ban boasts a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail. Lest you accuse her of bias against all mythological creatures, Cindy expressed no explicit opposition to gorgons, griffins, and centaurs.

Given Hyde-Smith’s howler-laden track record, it’s not surprising that a new poll by Impact Research indicates that 55% of Mississippi voters have an unfavorable view of her and 53% would rather vote for someone else. And those numbers could get even uglier, thanks to two issues that might prove to be her kryptonite: inflation and Iran.

Hyde-Smith has been a full-throated supporter of Donald Trump’s disastrous Middle East misadventure, which, at 60 percent disapproval, is his second-most despised demolition project after the White House ballroom. Voting against a resolution that would have limited Trump’s use of military force against Tehran, she declared, “President Trump is taking decisive steps to eliminate the Islamic Republic of Iran’s decades-long campaign of deadly attacks against Americans and our national interests.”

Unfortunately for Hyde-Smith, those decisive steps have helped jack up food prices, a subject she’s addressed with a nonchalance so jaw-dropping, it rivals her Senate colleague Joni Ernst’s legendary take about Medicaid cuts: “Well, we all are going to die.” Asked in a local TV interview about rising beef prices, Cindy offered this helpful tip: “You know, you have so many proteins to choose from.”

I’m struggling to picture hordes of Mississippians at July 4 barbecues flinging tofu and tempeh on the grill. But instead of shopping for an alternative protein, Magnolia State voters might be considering an alternative senator. This year, Democrats have nominated a formidable opponent, Scott Colom, who—in a particularly delicious plot twist—owes his candidacy to none other than Cindy Hyde-Smith.

In 2023, Colom, a district attorney from Northeast Mississippi, was Joe Biden’s pick to be U.S. District Court Judge for the state’s Northern District. Cindy blocked his nomination, citing his support for trans rights and his backing by the Great Liberal Satan, George Soros. (While announcing her opposition to Colom, who is African American, Hyde-Smith was careful not to wear a Confederate hat.) Three years later, Colom is highly motivated to send her packing. According to the poll by Impact Research, he trails Hyde-Smith by only 3 points. And when voters are informed about the candidates’ positions, he actually pulls 3 points ahead.

Though conventional wisdom still favors Hyde-Smith, Democrats have started taking Colom’s chances seriously: earlier this month, a super PAC called American Bridge 21st Century poured $2 million into his campaign. Could Colom pull off a shocker? The recent string of Democratic upsets in ruby-red locales suggests that Cindy shouldn’t count her chickens—or any other proteins. The election is still more than four months away, more than enough time for the Mouth of Mississippi to alienate voters. And if, on election night, Cindy Hyde-Smith winds up conceding defeat, I’ll be on the front row.

So, is there a realistic chance that Scott Colom could be a United States senator representing Mississippi come January?

[Full Disclosure: Scott is a former student of mine at Millsaps College. He is a great person and I fully support his candidacy.]

I am well known to be a congenital optimist, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. That said, yes, I believe the race at this point is a tossup and Scott has a real chance to win. Here are a reasons:

• Cindy Hyde-Smith is very much a lightweight. She is among the “Republicans” in Congress who are hand puppets on one of Donald Trump’s small hands, with Trump as the ventriloquist. She has done almost nothing for the people of Mississippi.

• The nationwide trend against Trump is very strong. That will result in some Mississippi voters defecting to vote against his stooge. More important, it is likely to lead to many people who voted for him not to vote at all in 2026.

• Mississippi’s population has the largest percentage of African Americans in the nation, roughly 37 percent. If 95 percent of them vote for the Democrat, it takes only about 24 percent of the white and other voters (55 percent of the population is classified as Non-Hispanic white, 4 percent as Hispanic, 3 percent mixed race, 1+ percent Asian) to reach a majority.

• As is being evidenced in South Carolina, Georgia, and other southern states, the essential obliteration of the Voting Rights Act by “Republicans” on the Supreme Court have black people in Mississippi outraged and highly motivated to vote.

• Scott Colom is an articulate, intelligent, and empathetic person. Cindy, whom some white Mississippians refer to as “Minnie Pearl,” not so much. If she agrees to debate him, he will likely win easily.

On the other side of the balance sheet:

• Mississippians rarely vote against incumbents.

• If Hyde-Smith is perceived to be in danger of defeat, Republicans and their billionaire allies can pour unlimited amounts of money into attacks on Colom, and they will not hesitate to make up anything they can think of to throw at him.

• Democrats, with much less money, are unlikely to send much to Mississippi (though a relatively small amount can go a long way in the state).

• An “independent” black candidate, Ty Pinkins, is in the race and could draw some votes away from Colom. It should be clear to everyone that a vote for Pinkins can only help Hyde-Smith. Surely Republicans will use some of their excess cash to promote him to voters otherwise likely to vote for Colom.

Four of five major political prognosticators have the Mississippi senate race as either “Solid Republican” or “Safe Republican.” In late May, though, The Economist moved Mississippi to “Likely Republican.”

I am of the opinion that the anti-Trump wave across America is rising to such a level that it can lead to Democratic victories in seemingly unlikely places.

However, Trump and his minions are also of that opinion and they are likely to take any action they can think of to prevent a free and fair election. That includes declaring a nonexistent “insurrection” and putting into effect the Insurrection Act and either cancelling the elections entirely or having troops and ICE agents at polling places to intimidate voters. Almost surely, such groups of Trump thugs as the “Proud Boys” will be hanging around polling places in precincts likely to vote Democratic.

I’ll have more to say about that and the history behind it in a later essay.

Here is my most insanely optimistic map for the 2026 Senate Races:

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My fellow Americans, see whether you can wrap your head around this one:

Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, Napoleon, Stalin, Mao, and Hitler. Donald Trump recited “the names of some of history’s most powerful figures” to Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, proudly “explaining how each fell short of his own power as US president.”

Trump was showing the writers working on their now published book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, a letter from someone he identified as a “presidential historian “ (who turned out to be a South African golf caddy), ranking Trump with dictators from Alexander the Great to Hitler, Mao, and Stalin (Trump said; the document says “Lenin” — more about that below), and saying that Trump is “by far the most powerful person that has EVER walked this planet.”

Apparently that message never reached the Iranian government.

Then Trump “truthed” the letter himself, gushing, “Sounds good to me!” You can read the letter by enlarging the image below.

(An interesting sidelight: Trump apparently read the golf caddy’s “Lenin” as “Stalin.” It is likely that Trump never heard of Lenin. Surely the caddy had, but seems to have confused him with Stalin.)

Elon Musk wants more money so that he can say, I’m richer than anyone else who has ever lived.

For his part, Donald Trump apparently thinks along these lines:

Mao, Stalin, and Hitler are the world champions in mass murder. That doesn’t faze me! They had POWER! This guy says I HAVE MORE POWER THAN ANY OF THEM!

That is the agenda of the creature that more than 77 million Americans voted to return to the presidency in 2024.

Just think about where we would be if ANY other president had said anything like this. There would be round-the-clock coverage. Demands for his removal would be coming from both parties. But Trump? Well, that’s just the way he is.

As Tony Soprano often put it with a shrug, “Whattaya gonna do?”

One thing we all must do is pledge to overcome all obstacles that Trump throws in our way and vote for Democrats in November.

Unlike Elon Musk, I am not a trillionaire. I am not a billionaire. I am not a millionaire. I am closer to a thousandaire. Paid subscriptions make a huge difference for me. Mr. Musk certainly would never pay for anything he could get for free. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day. If it would not be a burden on your budget, consider not being like Elon:

Jim Dolan, the billionaire owner of our beloved New York Knicks, spent decades making stupid player personnel decisions that never got the team to a championship and rarely even to the playoffs. Finally, he hired Leon Rose to become team president and make those decisions. The result is the amazing, unselfish, one-for-all Knickerbocker team that we just witnessed have the most extraordinary playoff run in NBA history.

It likely would have been even more extraordinary had Dolan not invited Donald Trump to come to the third game of the finals and first in MSG so the “president” could chomp on junk food and take a nap in the luxury box. The trump visit messed up the vibe and the Knicks lost, breaking a 13-game playoff winning streak, the second longest in NBA history. No Trump probably would have meant a Knicks 4-0 Finals sweep and a 15-game playoff winning streak that would have tied the 2017 Golden State Warriors for the longest playoff winning streak ever.

But the unflappable Knicks team won game 4 in the Garden and then went to San Antonio and won the championship in five games.

Then Dolan, obviously without consulting the players, publicly announced that the team had accepted his friend Trump’s invitation to visit the White House. No NBA Champion team has visited the White House when Trump has been the president.

In 2017, Trump invited the Golden State Warriors and Steph Curry announced that he had no interest in attending. Surely the same was the case with coach Steve Kerr. Trump then withdrew the invitation. When the Warriors won again in 2018, Trump gave no invite. In 2019, the champion Toronto Raptors players said they were a “hard no” on going to meet with Trump. In 2020, the Lakers won and Trump said he would not invite LeBron James. In 2025, the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship and both the team and the White House used the fig leaf of “scheduling conflicts” to cover the obvious fact that most players in the sport want nothing to do with a man who is blatant racist, created a Supreme Court majority that has eviscerated the Voting Rights Act, and is trying to end American democracy.

Now Jim Dolan wants to force “his” players to become the first NBA champions to visit Trump’s All-White House. Maybe they can shuffle and bow and call him “Sir.” Dolan wants the players to say, “Yessuh, Massa Dolan.”

It is an outrage and the Knicks players should adopt a slogan used by anti-Vietnam War protestors:

“HELL NO, WE WON’T GO!”

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Don’t Be Like Elon

Unlike Elon Musk, I am not a trillionaire. I am not a billionaire. I am not a millionaire. I am closer to a thousandaire. Paid subscriptions make a huge difference for me. Mr. Musk certainly would never pay for anything he could get for free. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day. Consider not being like Elon:

As Donald Trump marks his 80^th birthday, I realize that, barring Trump leaving office before next January 24, I will reach the age of 80 (gasp!) having had only one president who was younger than me. Barack Obama was born a month before I entered my sophomore year in high school and is fourteen years younger than me. Every other person who has been president in my lifetime is older than I am. That’s ridiculous.

For someone to be (approaching) the age of eighty to have had only one president in his lifetime who was younger is a striking illustration of why so many Americans yearn for younger leaders.

I decided to dig a little deeper into this phenomenon by looking into the dates of birth and ages they were when they became president of all the men (sigh) who have been president since the time when Mr. Trump was born. I found some remarkable facts.

Trump, W, and Clinton were all born in a period of less than three months

Perhaps most stunning to me is that Donald Trump, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton were all born during a span of nine-and-a-half weeks during the late spring and summer of 1946:

That’s right, in a period of nine-and-a-half weeks in 1946, as the postwar Baby Boom was taking flight, three future presidents — who (if Trump completes his second term) will have held the presidency for 24 years, nearly 10 percent of the history of the United States — were born.

When I checked on the dates of birth of all the presidents during the life of Donald Trump (and me), I found more interesting points.

Here are the data:

The inaugurations of the last three presidencies — Trump 1, Biden, and Trump 2 — have been of the oldest men ever to take office and the only presidencies to begin with the man in office over 70. Reagan was 69 when he first took office and 73 when he began his second term. We know where his mind had gone before he left office.

The average age of the president during the years since 2016 is 76.5.

There have been only three presidents in the post-World War II era who took office when they were under fifty: JFK (43), Clinton (46), and Obama (47).

There have been four Baby Boomer presidents, three from its first year and one from near its end.

There have at this point been no presidents from the generations since the end of the Boom in 1964, which includes all of Generation X (born1965-1980) and most of Gen Y/Millennials (born 1981-1996) who have reached the Constitutionally prescribed age of 35.

So the desire for younger candidates and leaders is entirely understandable.

That, of course, does not mean that a particular younger candidate would be better than an older one. Joe Biden and Donald Trump are in the same age range. Biden’s presidency was an overall success; Trump’s has been an unmitigated disaster. Biden made three major mistakes as president:

• He did not urge Attorney General Merrick Garland to begin investigating Trump’s many crimes early on, which almost certainly would have resulted in Trump today being in prison rather than the White House.

• He allowed a much-too-lax policy on the southern border before finally moving on the problem in his final year in office.

• He decided to run for a second term when he was much too old.

Trump, in stark contrast, has had nothing but failures and has American democracy on the verge of destruction. A listing of what he has done wrong would have to be book length.

And Biden was surrounded by highly competent people. Trump in his second go-round is surrounded by a collection of clowns, fools, money-grubbers, and incompetents who are not permitted to tell him anything he doesn’t want to hear.

As someone only seven months younger than Trump, I can testify that age is not deterministic. My mind is at least as sharp as it has ever been. My knees, on the other hand … And I certainly don’t have as much energy as I once did.

We need good, responsible, younger women and men who care about helping others and are not beholden to the hyper-rich and giant corporations to be running and getting elected. That is happening at other levels of government. We desperately need it in the presidency as well.

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Unlike Elon, I am not a trillionaire. I am not a billionaire. I am not a millionaire. I am closer to a thousandaire. Paid subscriptions make a huge difference for me. Mr. Musk certainly would never pay for anything he could get for free. If you can afford it, consider not being like Elon:

Even in the midst of the daily horrors of the Trump era, the above announcement from the Wall Street Journal on Friday is one of the most repulsive pieces of news.

Does anyone think this is a good thing?

It is utterly sick.

A trillion is a completely incomprehensible number. If you began counting and somehow could count a number every second, without pausing, breathing, drinking, eating, sleeping, etc.:

It would take 31,700 YEARS to COUNT TO A TRILLION

That is to say that if Elon began counting instead of trying his hand at cave art about 20,000 years before the invention of agriculture, about 26,000 years before the Book of Genesis says the world began, he would not have reached a trillion until now.

The estimated total wealth in the United States is about $175 trillion. So, one “man” now has more than a half of one percent of the wealth of a nation of almost 350 million people. The estimated total global wealth is about $475 trillion, so Elon now holds 0.2 percent of all the wealth on the planet Earth. Maybe he wants to go to Mars so he can find a place where he has more money than an entire planet.

It is unconscionable. But Musk has no conscience. This is a man who has let millions of people on his native continent die from hunger and disease by obliterating USAID. And he celebrated doing it, running around a stage with a chainsaw.

He doesn’t care about them. They have dark skin. He is a product of apartheid South Africa who fled to the United States, which he wants to make again a “White Man’s Country.”

I don’t know who created this meme, but it is perfect:

Musk says empathy is a sin and helping others will destroy civilization.

He thinks “doing good” is “girly.” He playacts at being a “Real Man,” which he thinks means not giving a shit about anyone else. Small wonder that he and Trump were attracted to each other. Both suffer from what I call AMID: Acute Masculine Insecurity Disorder.

Based on his actions and statements, the logical conclusion is that he is soulless.

On what level of Hell would Dante expect to find him?

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A week ago, I updated an essay I had written a year before about the need for a Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican senator who had the ovaries to stand up to Trump as she had done to Joe McCarthy. In it, I noted that Susan Collins has often tried to present herself as heir to MCS but has never even in the slightest bit been that. Indeed, Sen. Collins is most accurately portrayed as a negative image of Sen. Smith. I didn’t think at that time of offering that image. Here it is:

In that essay I made the case for why it is necessary to support Graham Platner against Collins. With more accusations against the presumptive Democratic Senate nominee having come out since, I want to revisit the rationale.

No Alliance with Stalin Likely Would Have Meant a Hitler Victory

I began writing this essay on June 6, the 82^nd anniversary of D-Day, a time when the fight against fascism was existential and, as a result, alliances with those who did terrible things were deemed necessary to ensure that democracy and freedom would survive.

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was among the evilest members of our species ever to walk among us — or at least among those to have achieved control over a major country. Estimates of how many deaths he caused, leaving aside the millions of Russians who died in World War II, range from six million to eleven million or more. He, like other totalitarian rulers seemed to define the individual human being as Arthur Koestler said the Leader in his 1940 novel, Darkness at Noon, did: an individual is “a multitude of one million divided by one million” — meaningless, just part of a mass. Stalin’s policies of collectivization led to the starvation of millions in avoidable famines. In the years before he entered the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1941, Stalin ordered the execution of about a million Russians, many of them his recent allies, in a massive purge of his enemies. (Apart from the executions, that may have a familiar ring in the United States today.)

Despite all that, when Hitler invaded Russia in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt extended Lend/Lease aid to the Soviet Union. The American president justified this aid by saying it was in American interests to have Russia fight Germany on the Eastern Front to prevent Hitler from conquering all of western Europe and Great Britain and then possibly moving on the United States.

When the United States entered the war following Pearl Harbor, Winston Churchill — a staunch anti-communist — and FDR, the former with more misgivings and the latter holding out some hope that his famous ability to charm and win people over could work on Stalin — saw cooperation with the devil he was as necessary to defeat the much more powerful threat posed by Hitler. During the war, Stalin was presented to the American people as “Uncle Joe.”

In retrospect, Hitler’s decision to invade Russia without having first defeated the United Kingdom is seen as a monumental mistake — akin to, but with even worse consequences, the Cheney-Bush Administration going to war in Iraq or Trump deciding to invade Iran this year.

The wartime alliance with “Uncle Joe” was essential to the Allies’ victory against the Nazis. Had Hitler been able to do what Napoleon had failed to do — successfully invade Russia — the Nazi Regime would have been able to move massive numbers of troops from the Eastern to the Western Front. It is very difficult to see how the Allies could have won under that circumstance.

Had the Roosevelt government placed a need to be “pure” above the need to defeat fascism, we might have been living under a fascist regime since before Donald J. Trump was even the proverbial twinkle in his greedy, racist father’s eye.

A Vote for Platner Is a Vote against Trumpism, Not an Endorsement of Some of His Past

That is the context in which I am weighing the Graham Platner situation. Democrats have an unfortunate proclivity for insisting on absolute purity in a world where that is not in great supply.

We are in a different sort of existential struggle with fascism today. The enemy now is within. It controls most of the levers of our own government. In some respects, that makes the threat even graver.

Whatever Graham Platner’s sins, he is not remotely a Joe Stalin. Or a Donald Trump.

I am a feminist and proud to say so. Much of what Platner did to and said about women over the years disgusts me.

But in trying to get him elected, we are not endorsing that behavior or even overlooking it; we are asking people to vote against Susan Collins and Trump to save democracy and freedom.

All hypocrisies are not equal.

What Platner is alleged to have done is in a different galaxy from what Trump has done and continues to do.

A Look at the Latest Accusations

Let’s take a quick look at the latest allegations against Platner. The New York Times article on Friday was based on interviews with a substantial number of women who have dated Platner over a period of many years. Many of them said that “while he may have been a bad boyfriend, he was, in fact, a decent guy.” The Times reports that “several women” its reporters interviewed on Wednesday described “Platner as a fun and caring partner, and saying they felt safe with him. Some remain friends with him to this day, years after their relationships ended.”

But the article goes on to say that in interviews over a period of two months, reporters found “three other women who had been romantically involved with Mr. Platner offered a far more complicated assessment, describing volatile and “toxic” relationships that were unsettling and at times emotionally wrenching.”

The one woman who described Platner’s behavior in the worst terms — but accused him of doing nothing physical to her beyond grabbing her by the shoulders — Lyndsey Fifield, is identified by the Times as having “worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns.” That is not to say that her accusations are false, but to put them in context. It is also worth noting that her relationship with Platner ended a decade ago.

Fifield described Platner as having a “warrior ethos.” You know, what faux masculine Pete Hegseth says everyone in the military should have. Platner is working to go beyond that; the Trump Regime is promoting it.

Susan Collins is “Troubled” — What Else Is New?

The June 5 article in the Times reports that ““revelations about Mr. Platner’s personal history have caused escalating discomfort within his party, while drawing intensifying attacks from Republicans [My emphasis].”

Let’s pause right there. The level of hypocrisy for Republicans, almost all of whom continue to support Donald Trump, who has done to and said things about women that are almost infinitely worse than what Platner is charged with, is mind-boggling.

Earlier in the day, Ms. Collins told local reporters that the allegations in the Times report were “troubling” and that Mr. Platner had “a lot of questions to answer.”

Ah, Susan Collins is “troubled.” That is her very faulty default setting.

Trump’s “Growth” as a Person Is in the Direction of Tom Hanks’ Character in Big

On Friday evening, Rep. Ro Khanna (D, CA), a Platner supporter, noted that the Maine candidate has acknowledged past “misogyny” and promised that he “grew as a person and as a man.”

Can anyone imagine Donald Trump, who we know beyond a shadow of a doubt, has done and said vastly worse things, saying those words? Of course not. “I don’t take responsibility at all,” he infamously said In March 2020 about delays in the fight against Covid, but the declaration has been his m.o. throughout his life. And Trump believing he wishes he had been better in his innumerable misdeeds is about as likely as him going into a church Jimmy Swaggart-style and proclaiming, with tears running down his orange cheeks, “I have sinned.”

Or Donald Trump having grown as a person and a man? Trump’s “growth” has been like that of the Tom Hanks character in the 1988 movie, Big — he becomes more of a child by the day.

Past misogyny is a synonym for the recorded history of civilization. Current Misogyny on a massive scale is what Trumpism is all about. It is to the long history of misogyny, racism, and other forms of subordination that it seeks to “Take America Back.” Supporting someone with an admitted misogynistic past who asserts that he has grown beyond it to be one of one hundred members of the Senate is far better than losing an opportunity to check a totally unreconstructed and unapologetic self-made-up “man” who is Misogynist-in-Chief.

The Choice Before Maine Voters Is Clear

The choice before Maine voters is not Graham Platner vs. the Platonic ideal of a political candidate. Nor is it even just Platner vs. Susan Collins. It is Platner vs. Trump, which means Platner vs. a fascist America … the preservation of the American Experiment vs. its interment.

I do not, of course, mean that Platner himself will save America. I mean that a Democratic majority in both houses of Congress is the only way to put a check on some of the Trumpian evil during the next two years.

If our forebears understood the need to make an alliance with one devil to defeat another, far more threatening, devil, we should be able to accept a candidate who has said and done some things we find reprehensible, but who is clearly not the devil in a struggle against Trumpism.

Seventy-six years ago today, on June 1, 1950, Maine Republican Sen. Margaret Chase Smith demonstrated the sort of courage in the face of an obnoxious bully and inveterate liar that others in her party then and now decline to do.

Almost a year ago, I wrote and posted the essay below about her and the speech she gave then. The need for more — many more — Republicans today to grow a pair of ovaries and save us from a man as ignorant, soulless, and care-less as Joe McCarthy, but vastly more dangerous because of the position of power he holds, is manifest.

The threat that man poses to the survival of the American Experiment is far greater today than it was twelve months ago.

I’ll add a few new points:

By any objective standard, the United States is presently facing the nation’s gravest threat in the lifetimes of most living Americans. As the days go by, it becomes ever plainer that it is the worst threat since the Civil War—or ever in our history. Donald Trump and his minions have undertaken an all-encompassing blitzkrieg on American institutions, values, freedoms, democracy, and common decency. And this week they seek to enact a piece of legislation that would further decimate much of the good the government does, rip health care away from millions of Americans, force the closures of numerous rural hospitals, take food from children, and massively increase the federal debt, among other horrors—all for the purpose of further enriching billionaires.

The enactment of the Project 2025 agenda in the One Big Beautiful-for-Billionaires Bill shortly after I wrote this essay has accomplished (that doesn’t seem to be the right word) a vast amount of destruction over the past year, making the emergence of courageous Republicans like Mrs. Smith even more imperative.

All of that will be so unpopular that it would almost certainly lead to a major defeat of the Republicans in the midterm elections next year—if we have free elections by then, which does not seem to be in Trump’s plans.

How can the end of the American Experiment in freedom and self-governance be averted?

The answer, I think, may begin by drawing attention to a speech that was delivered seventy-five years ago this month by a freshman senator from Maine, then the only woman in the upper chamber of Congress.

The only ones currently with the power to stop this unspeakable catastrophe are congressional Republicans.

Almost all decent, patriotic Republicans in Congress who are privately horrified at what the President is doing are going along because they fear losing office—or they or their families being assaulted by thugs who support the Leader.

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This is, though, not the first time a bully willing to say anything that would get him attention and to smear anyone who crossed him has had the erstwhile Party of Lincoln cowering in fear. It happened before, when Donald Trump was but a wee lad, at the beginning of the 1950s, and a courageous woman who stood up against it points us toward a road out of the far more perilous situation we face now.

Seventy-five years ago, as I discussed in a piece here in February, Wisconsin Republican Sen. Joseph McCarthy burst into nationwide headlines by making baseless allegations that the Truman State Department was riddled with known Communists. This sensational charge allowed McCarthy to jump to the drum major position at the head of a parade of charging people with being communists that had already been started by Richard Nixon and others.

McCarthy cared no more about the truth and no less about being the center of attention than Trump and his wild accusations destroyed the lives of many people. While a Democrat was in the White House, most Republicans were ready to suspend their consciences and go along with McCarthy’s baseless allegations both because they were politically useful to the party and because crossing McCarthy could end their political careers.

“Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Donald Trump would ask whenever he faced serious legal problems. Cohn, as a key advisor to McCarthy and later the mentor to Trump, teaching him the disinformation techniques that he has so effectively employed, is one link between that terrible time in American history and the present one. Another such connection has the potential to be much more positive.

On the first day of June seventy-five years ago, Margaret Chase Smith delivered her first speech in the United States Senate, “A Declaration of Conscience,” in which she denounced the reign of fear and cowardice that was allowing an ignorant bully to pervert the ideals of both America and the Republican party.

Like children—and women—in those days, freshmen senators were expected to be seen and not heard. Smith waited for some of her Republican colleagues to speak up against McCarthy, but the “great psychological fear ... spread to the Senate where a considerable amount of mental paralysis and muteness set in for fear of offending McCarthy.” She felt the need to take a stand.

“Too much harm has already been done with irresponsible words of bitterness and selfish political opportunism,” Sen. Smith said. Many of her lines from three-quarters of a century ago speak directly to us today. “I think that it is high time that we remembered that we have sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution,” she declared.

“Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism.”

In perhaps the most remembered line, which speaks directly to her party today, Smith said she wanted Republicans to win, “but I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

“We are Republicans. But we are Americans first,” Smith said in words that are so much needed from officeholders in her party in the present crisis. “It is as Americans that we express our concern with the growing confusion that threatens the security and stability of our country.”

So much of what Sen. Smith said on that day shortly before Donald Trump’s fourth birthday and just over 21 years before Elon Musk was born in apartheid South Africa seems as if it had been written about what they are doing now. A few more examples:

“a Republican regime embracing a philosophy that lacks political integrity or intellectual honesty would prove equally disastrous to the nation.”

“As an American, I want to see our nation recapture the strength and unity it once had when we fought the enemy instead of ourselves.”

“Certain elements of the Republican party have materially added to this confusion in the hopes of riding the Republican party to victory through the selfish political exploitation of fear, bigotry, ignorance, and intolerance.”

“It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques—techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

“Mrs. Smith read the ‘Declaration of Conscience’ from the floor,” the New York Times reported, “as Senator McCarthy sat white and silent three feet behind her.”

Six other Republican senators joined in signing the “Declaration of Conscience.” How many would do so in 2025? Sen. McCarthy dismissed Smith and her supporters as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” (A fixation on “dwarfs” appears to be another thing Trump shares with McCarthy.)

Drawing attention to Margaret Chase Smith’s courage and the points she made that speak so forcefully to us in the present crisis might help to persuade a few congressional Republicans to emulate her and stand up to Trump. Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins often portrays herself as a latter-day Margaret Chase Smith, but she has repeatedly made a mockery of that claim.

If some Republican, perhaps Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, could make a well-publicized “Declaration of Conscience” and get at least three other Republican senators and a small number of Republicans in the House to join her or him, it would constitute an important step in saving the American Experiment.

Republicans must ask themselves right now whether holding onto their offices is worth the price of going down in history as people who had an opportunity to preserve the American Experiment but chose self-interest instead. North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis made that decision over the weekend. Those who do stand up for what America has been at its best will be remembered by history as heroes, as Margaret Chase Smith is. Fourteen years after her first Senate speech, she became the first woman whose name was put in nomination for the presidency at a major party convention.

So far, though, today’s Republicans seem content to write their names in the thick history book titled “Profiles in Cowardice.”

I came to know Margaret Chase Smith in the 1970s and greatly respected her. Though it’s an exaggeration to say we were friends, we did get along wonderfully for the few days we were together and I’ll close with a riff on Lloyd Bentsen as a message to members of the Article One branch of government:

I knew Margaret Chase Smith. She was a friend of mine. And Susan Collins, neither you nor any other Republican senator and representative is a Margaret Chase Smith. The time to change that it NOW.

Where’s our Margaret Chase Smith?

What about Graham Platner?

The “deeply-concerned,” but oh-so-shallowly courageous Susan Collins — she is a negative image of MCS — is currently running for re-election to her Maine Senate seat. Her defeat, which is crucial to Democrats gaining control of the Senate and putting a check on Trump’s anti-American actions, seems likely. But her Democratic opponent, Graham Platner, while an excellent choice in terms of his policy positions, is increasingly in danger of being pulled down by his personal life, which includes getting a Nazi tattoo — and a particularly evil one: a Totenkopf, an emblem used by SS death camp guards. He says he got it when he was intoxicated while deployed as a young marine in Croatia and had no idea what it meant. He also made many outrageously misogynistic statements in his earlier life. He has covered the tattoo and apologized for it and his attitudes towards women, saying he a different man now. But over the weekend, it emerged that he had been, much more recently, sexting with several women despite being married.
These revelations cause problems for Democrats, who as a general rule are, unlike most “Republicans” these days, unwilling to brush aside such behavior.

To state what should be obvious, the current occupant of the presidency has said and done vastly worse things in his comments on and treatment of women, in his association with white nationalists, and in being Nazi adjacent, than Platner, yet Republicans overwhelmingly support him.

Beyond that, of course, Trump occupies the most powerful position in the world and Platner would only be one of a hundred senators.

Under these circumstances, it is clear that the thing to do is to denounce Platner’s past remarks and actions, but to vote for him. Why? Because voting for Collins or not voting against her is to vote for the far more evil and dangerous Trump.

I realize that most of my readers will not care much about my topic today. Consider it a “point of personal privilege.”

As a New York sports fan — and one who has always despised the Yankees — I have known disappointments too numerous to recount, beginning with the Mets’ first year in 1962, in which they set a seemingly unbeatable record for futility, finishing with 40 wins and 120 losses (we couldn’t even keep that record, with the 2024 Chicago White Sox posting a 39-121 record). It was a year that led manager Casey Stengel, who dubbed them the “Amazin’ Mets,” to ask rhetorically, “Can’t anybody here play this game?” The Mets continued to be pathetic for the next six years.

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Then there was the Jets, who following the miracle I’ll mention below have never been able to do much and currently have missed the post season for 15 consecutive seasons — an active record not just in the NFL, but across the four major North American sports leagues (NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL). I switched my allegiance to the New Orleans Saints around 1980, and have had a similar experience with them: one shining season and so many bags-over-the-head years.

And then there are the Knicks.

The reason I decided to write this post is that David Remnick’s New Yorker article today, “The Knicks: The Only Game in Town,” included below so much echoes my experience and feelings.

As he says, basketball is the New York game, and the Knicks are the New York team.

The Knicks had their glory years at the beginning of the 1970s. Then things declined. I distinctly remember on Sunday, May 12, 1985, during halftime of a Celtics-76ers playoff game (of course I didn’t remember the precise date or what teams were playing; thank you AI), watching the NBA draft lottery. When the Knicks won the first pick, I leapt in the air screaming with joy, startling others in the room. It was the year Patrick Ewing would be the #1 pick, and I foresaw years of Knicks championships. He played with the Knicks for 15 years and we had exactly zero championships. The best finishes were reaching the finals in 1993 and 1999, but losing both times. The 1990s Knicks were so frustrating.

There were, though, the glorious moments for all three of my New York teams, most of them in an amazing eighteen-month stretch in 1969-70.

First, the Jets won the AFL title in the 1968 season. It was still before the NFL/AFL merger, but it would be the third year of a championship game between the winners, the game that would come to be called the Super Bowl. The Jets would play the Baltimore Colts for the overall title. The AFL team had lost the first two title games badly, with the Kansas City Chiefs being drubbed by the Green Bay Packers both times. The Colts were overwhelming favorites. On January 9, 1969, three days before the game, Jets quarterback Joe Namath declared, “We’re going to win the game. I guarantee it.” And they did, 16-7. Bliss.

In the summer of ’69, Bryan Adams went to the five and dime and bought his first real six-string and the hapless Metropolitans were plugging along. The Amazins were ten games behind the Cubs on August 14, then won 14 of their next 17 games and 24 of their last 32 to finish eight games ahead of the Cubs. The Miracle Mets went on to sweep the Atlanta Braves 3 games to none in the first year of league championship playoffs and to defeat the heavily favored Baltimore Orioles in the World Series 4 games to 1. That fall was my first in graduate school and I skipped the first half of my Colonial America seminar to see the championship victory.

Willis Reed coming on the court before Game 7, May 8, 1970.

The 1969-70 NBA season was next. With Willis Reed and Walt “Clyde” Frazier —whom Anne and I had seen destroy the hopes of Rutgers, featuring Bobby Llyod and the eventually-to-be-legendary Jim Valvano, for Southern Illinois in the NIT semifinals in Madison Square Garden in 1967 — leading the way, reached the finals against a Lakers team with Hall of Famers Jerry West, Wilt Chamberlain, and Elgin Baylor. The series went to a seventh game in the Garden on May 8, 1970. As Remnick recounts below, Willis Reed, who had suffered a torn thigh muscle in the fifth game and missed the sixth game, shockingly hobbled onto the court, started the game, and hit his first two jump-without-much-jumping shots. Clyde scored 36 points and had 19 assists and the Knicks won, 113-99. It was the team’s first NBA championship. Another would come three years later.

And maybe … just maybe … a third next month.

I often say that the reason I like sports is that the highs from wins are so much higher and last so much longer than the lows from losses are. After a disappointing defeat, I soon just say to myself, Oh well, it’s only a game.

May the Knickerbockers’ series against the Thunder or Spurs on Wednesday be one of those everlasting highs.

Here’s what David Remnick wrote:

Willis Reed and Jalen Brunson

At the risk of deepening the polarization that has rent our precarious democracy to the point of collapse, it must be said, categorically, that the most triumphant moment in the postwar history of New York sports came on the night of May 8, 1970, when the Knicks’ captain and center, Willis Reed, his injured right leg numbed with cortisone and Carbocaine, limped onto the court at Madison Square Garden and, with two precise yet floor-bound “jumpers,” ripped the heart out of the Los Angeles Lakers and propelled his team to victory in the deciding game of the N.B.A. Finals. Reed, who had been listed as “doubtful” for the contest by the medical authorities, drew reasonable comparison that glorious night to the fallen El Cid, the medieval Castilian warrior, whose corpse, according to legend, was strapped onto his steed by his soldiers as they rode into battle outside Valencia.

The Lakers, despite the presence of three immortals in the their lineup––Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, and Elgin Baylor––had been spiritually vanquished by Reed’s display of courage before they could break a sweat. And, as the Knicks widened their lead, Reed hobbled off the court, never to return, leaving the inevitabilities to the ball handler, ball thief, and sharpshooter Walt Frazier, who went on to register thirty-six points and nineteen assists. That championship team, which soon added yet another star, Earl (the Pearl) Monroe, to its roster, won a second title (against the Lakers, again) in 1973. The Knicks of that era also featured Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Dick (“Fall back, baby”) Barnett, Phil (Action) Jackson, Cazzie Russell, and a lunch-bucket guard named Mike Riordan, whose job it was to go into a game to commit a deliberate foul. (We all have our purpose in life.) Coached by the unflappable Red Holzman, it was a unit as exquisitely coördinated as a school of barracuda or the 1965 Miles Davis Quintet.

Now, it is well understood that some scholars partial to the ancients will attempt to elevate the 1927 Yankees, led by the stoical Lou Gehrig and the epicurean Babe Ruth, as the finest of all teams to play in the city. Gridiron-minded boomers will assert that, in 1969, Joe Namath’s Jets scored, in Super Bowl III, the greatest of all Gotham miracles. (Or maybe it was the Amazin’ Mets of 1969. Or the Bill Buckner-assisted Mets of 1986.) Surely, the two Ali-Frazier fights of the seventies at the Garden were the most glamorous of all New York sporting events––for the first bout, Life sent Norman Mailer to write and Frank Sinatra to be ringside photographer––but it was the decisive third, held in Manila, that was the most memorable. Millennials will propose the Jeter-Rivera-Williams Yankees teams as the best thing since Katz’s pastrami. Whatever. Basketball is the city game. The Garden is its Mecca. May 8, 1970, was the night of all sporting New York nights. Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive! So proclaimed the voices of the Knicks: John F. X. Condon at the Garden, Marv Albert on the air. Case closed.

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Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

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(L) LBJ giving commencement address at the University of Michigan, May 22, 1964.

(R) 1964 Herblock cartoon depicting what Barry Goldwater’s movement was doing to the Republican Party in 1964. I have updated it show what has happened to that party in the 2020s.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

Click here to become a paid subscriber:

Sixty-two years yesterday, addressing the graduates of the University of Michigan, President Lyndon B. Johnson called for the building of a “Great Society.”

What LBJ said on that day captured the best of American ideals and aspirations. Six decades later, Donald Trump and his minions are dead set on destroying not only the accomplishments of the 1960s and early 1970s and those of the New Deal, but also those of 1776 and the whole American Experiment.

Here is what I wrote about the “Great Society speech in my 2022 book, The Times They Were a-Changin’—1964: The Year “The Sixties” Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn:

Lyndon Johnson was a big man determined to accomplish big things. He felt a need for a “big theme” to bring together all he sought to do. FDR had his New Deal and JFK his New Frontier; LBJ needed a catchy name for his program. In early April, he called on Bill Moyers and Dick Goodwin to come to the White House pool for one of the new president’s skinny-dipping sessions. There, the massive, naked chief executive told his bare-bottomed aides that he would have a program that would go beyond Kennedy’s—a “Johnson program, different in tone, fighting and aggressive,” than JFK’s. He wanted to present to the American people proposals that would move the nation “toward some distant vision—vaguely defined, inchoate, but rooted in an ideal as old as the country.”

Princeton historian Eric Goldman, who had come to Johnson’s White House as an adviser a few weeks after the assassination, suggested as a name for the new president’s program the title of Walter Lippmann’s 1937 book, The Good Society. Goodwin altered it to “Great Society” and drafted a speech on that theme. Johnson loved the draft speech and decided to have it expanded into the vision statement of his presidency. He delivered it as the commencement address at the University of Michigan on May 22. Johnson’s speech would combine the objectives contained in the civil rights and economic opportunity initiatives and place them within a grand vision for America’s future.

“For a century,” Johnson said, “we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people. The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.”

Johnson asked whether Americans would “build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time,” he said to the graduates, “we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the Great Society.”

“The Great Society,” the president proclaimed, “rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in our time. But that is just the beginning.” He spoke of beauty, nature, expanding knowledge, protecting the environment, and community.

The Great Society, the president said, “is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” It was “not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.”

“So,” he concluded, “let us from this moment begin our work so that in the future men will look back and say, ‘It was then, after a long and weary way, that man turned the exploits of his genius to the full enrichment of his life.’”

The crowd of eighty thousand received the speech with great enthusiasm, and a substantial majority of the wider public appeared to feel the same way. Johnson was euphoric. He was the man for the times in 1964. It wasn’t that most people believed, as Johnson himself apparently did, that poverty could be conquered. In a 1964 Gallup Poll that asked respondents whether they thought that poverty would ever be eliminated, “no” topped “yes” by a huge margin, 83 percent to 9 percent.

But, particularly in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, people loved Johnson’s confidence and enthusiasm, his clear belief that the United States could become much better. Americans were yearning for a call to idealism and betterment; many were tired of the materialism associated with the fifties. They might not—indeed, did not—believe that the “Great Society” could be achieved, but they liked the vision and optimism.

When the president delivered his speech in Ann Arbor, Mary Wells’s “My Guy” was in its second straight week at number one on the Billboard chart. Lyndon Johnson was increasingly becoming “Our Guy” to the American people. He was polling at a 75 percent approval rating, with only about 10 percent indicating doubts about his policies and performance.

The vision to which Johnson gave voice in Ann Arbor in May captured many of the hopes of those involved in the freedom quests of 1964. And much in the speech is recognizable as what large numbers of Americans are still struggling for in the 2020s.

“Our Guy” v. the “Me Guy”

Had LBJ not let his insecure masculinity lead him into Vietnam, he likely would have remained “Our Guy” and might deserve to be added to Mount Rushmore.

Now a man who openly says, “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. … I don’t think about anybody,” is destroying everything he can.

When LBJ was “Our Guy,” he had an approval rating of 75 percent. Today DJT is either “Their Guy,” in reference to Putin, Xi, and the billionaires, or just the “Me Guy” and has an approval rating of around 34 percent.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

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I have long had a theory that one reason Donald Trump keeps doing ever more outrageous things is that his malignant narcissism makes him fascinated by how many people are so ignorant and gullible that they will continue to follow him no matter what he does that he keeps pushing farther and farther to see what those who have turned their minds, souls, eyes, and ears over to him are willing to swallow. When they continue to go along, it makes him feel like a “winner” … albeit among losers.

Let’s review just a few of the innumerable examples:

• Despite being a terrible businessman — “My father gave me a small loan of a million dollars … I built a phenomenal company” (he actually received at least $413 million from his father and lost it all) and had six bankruptcies, including casinos, a business where the house always wins — he portrayed himself as a great businessman. And people believed him.

• Getting a podiatrist whose office was in a building his father owned to say he had bone spurs so he could avoid military service and later joking that avoiding STDs while he was having sex with so many women in the 1980s was “my personal Vietnam.” And still posing as a brave, moral patriot. Fine by his followers.

• Saying of John McCain, “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured.” Uh, okay, we guess.

• Boasting about all the women with whom he claimed to have had sex, many of them while he was married, boasting about how big his penis is and that “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. ... Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.” No problem for the “family values” crowd. Boys will be boys, ya know.

• He mocked a disabled reporter. Well … so what. He’s for us!

• He claimed, entirely falsely, that he saw “thousands and thousands” of Muslims in Jersey City celebrating on September 11, 2001, but his actual reaction on the day of the attack was: “Forty Wall Street [his building in Lower Manhattan] actually was the second-tallest building in downtown Manhattan, and it was, actually, before the World Trade Center, was the tallest. And then when they built the World Trade Center, it became known as the second-tallest, and now it’s the tallest.”

  Let that sink in: On the day of the worst attack on the United States since Pearl Harbor, the first thought of a man who was “elected” (sort of) president of the United States in 2016 was about how it made his building the tallest again. Everything is about him. But he loves us; he cares about us and about America!

• Lying almost every time he opens his mouth. Doesn’t matter to those under his spell. They believe him rather than their eyes and ears.

• Constantly charging others with what he is doing himself. His people will get angry at the outrageous behavior, such as “weaponizing government,” that he does but turn their fury on others.

• Consistently siding with war criminal Vladimir Putin. Well … Dear Leader must have some good reason to do that.

  There are just too many examples to enumerate or even remember. Here are some others:

  The racism, misogyny, cruelty, lawlessness, establishing a masked goon squad in ICE to intimidate the American people, concentration of all power in his hands, open corruption on a scale literally unimaginable in any past administration, turning against the traditional democracies that have been allies of the United States and siding instead with authoritarian regimes, undermining NATO, ending American humanitarian aid, placing clowns, fools, and incompetents at the head of government organizations, taking away health insurance, giving immense tax cuts to billionaires and corporations, running up the national debt as never before, denying climate change, opposing renewable energy and pushing fossil fuels, trying to imprison people who have opposed him or he just doesn’t like, seeking to rig elections through extreme gerrymandering, siding with giant corporations against people, imposing counterproductive tariffs without congressional authorization and often on his own whims, firing thousands of people in the government who know what they’re doing, particularly those responsible for preventing corruption, defunding scientific research, putting up monuments to himself at the public expense, pretending to be Jesus and then say the picture was a doctor … and on and on.

  And then there’s destroying the agreement Barack Obama and leaders of other nations had worked out with Iran to keep it from developing a nuclear weapon and going into an insane war in Iran without understanding that the reason his predecessors avoiding doing that was because they knew that Iran would close off the Strait of Hormuz, resulting in rapid inflation and the possibility of a worldwide economic collapse.

  Perhaps above all else, though, has been the Big Lie that the 2020 Election was stolen from him.

I COULD…

Invite a mob to invade the Capitol in an attempt to overthrow the American Constitutional Republic and keep me in power after I lost an election by seven million votes, try to hang my own vice president, attack members of Congress, assault police officers, defecate on the floors of the Capitol and smear shit on the walls, let a horrified nation see it all on television —- then tell them they didn’t see what they saw and the insurrectionists were patriotic picnickers. Then claim that the thugs were heroes. Then, after many of them had been tried by juries of their peers, found guilty of heinous crimes and sentenced to prison terms, pardon them all as soon as I got back into power.

And I would STILL not lose any supporters!

THEN I could set up a slush fund to pay anyone I say was wronged by the previous administration, notably the J6 insurrectionists. I’ll make the fund $1.776 billion to send these fools who follow me anywhere the message that the violent thugs are patriots. I’ll be paying them and sending the signal to others that if I call on them again to prevent or overturn an election, they not only will be pardoned, but they’ll be paid large amounts by the taxpayers for their service in destroying the American Republic.

AND, how ’bout THIS? Let’s top it off with a page that says the government is “forever barred” and “precluded” from examining my tax returns or those of my family, my company and “related companies.”

The damned fools have gone along with everything else I’ve done. This will be the ultimate — way beyond shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue!

But the indications are that the president and a Justice Department that he has made his wholly owned subsidiary establishing on their own nonexistent authority a massive fund of taxpayers’ money to pay off violent criminals who helped Trump try to overturn an election once and will do it again and to flat out say the president is beyond the reach of the law may be too much for many of his supporters — especially in the context of soaring inflation, a totally unnecessary war, and the president and his family raking in billions of dollars for themselves.

Keep hope alive.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue in Clearwater, Florida, eight days before the Hattiesburg stop. (I have been unable to find any photos from the Hattiesburg concert.)

Okay, those lyrics are adapted from another of my favorite music artists, the Four Seasons, “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night),” which have nothing to do with our subject here—except that the lyrics fit with what I experienced on the night of May 1, 1976 (not, to be clear, in the sense of the Four Seasons song).

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

Click here to become a paid subscriber:

{NOTE: If you know others you think might appreciate this piece, please forward it to them and suggest that they subscribe to “Musings & Amusings.}

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of a musical event that I still consider to be the best I have ever attended. And that says a lot. I had seen the Rolling Stones in 1966 and, later, five times since 2010. (They are much better now than they were then). I had previously seen the Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, Four Seasons, Simon and Garfunkel, and many other top artists. As I’ll mention later, since that May Day fifty years ago, in addition to the Stones, I have seen many more great concerts.

{NOTE: Near the end of this piece, you’ll find a link at which you can listen to almost the entire performance.}

When I was a freshman at Rutgers in February 1965, I had seen a notice that Bob Dylan was performing on campus. That was about five months before he exploded the musical world by going electric at Newport. I liked him and even more liked his songs, but for some reason I don’t remember, I decided not to walk a short distance to see him. In the ensuing years, I had come greatly to regret that decision. Only much later did I find out that Johnny Cash was also there, though not performing.

When we learned that Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue would be in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, about 90 miles away from our home in Jackson, I was determined not to make that mistake again. Joined by our friend Dan Hise, Anne and I headed to Hattiesburg.

The Rolling Thunder Revue became legendary. This night was part of the tour’s second leg, through the South and Southwest, from Florida to Utah. It was less of a carnival than the first leg, but was known for heavier electric sound and “raw, fiery arrangements.”

[This is not one of our ticket stubs—I keep stuff, but not necessarily in a way I can find them later. I found this one online. Photo credit: Dcurbow]

“Bob had just recorded Blood on the Tracks and Desire. He was at the absolute peak of his powers and completely generous, finding people on the street and putting them on his stage,” T-Bone Burnett recalled of Rolling Thunder.

“I’ve been seeing Bob perform since 1966,” Rolling Stone writer Larry Sloman has said. “I’ve never seen him as good as he was during the Rolling Thunder tour, night in, night out. He was just amazing, phenomenal energy, and incredible passion. They tried to go out and do something unique and they succeeded. It was just amazing music every night—the most incredible conviction and spirit.”1

Violinist Scarlet Rivera recalls that Dylan “had boundless energy and incredible strength of performance. … every song had a peak energy. … It was such a powerful and magical experience. … It was confirmed for me that I was with a living genius, on the level of Shakespeare of our time. Just profound, prolific and profound.”

Scarlet Rivera performing in 1976 (at New Orleans Jazz Fest, not the Hattiesburg show.)

I concur with those assessments. I saw and heard Dylan several times in later years. Sometimes he was superb; others not so much. He was magnificent that night half a century ago. Everyone else who performed was also outstanding, particularly Rivera, along with: Roger McGuinn, whom I of course knew from the Byrds, T-Bone Burnett, with whom i was not yet familiar, Mick Ronson (guitar), Bobby Neuwirth (guitar & vocal), Steven Soles (guitar), David Mansfield (steel guitar, mandolin, violin & dobro), Rob Stoner (bass), Howie Wyeth (drums), and Gary Burke (percussion).

And Joanie! We went mainly to see Dylan, though we loved Baez, too. If anything, she outshined him, but together they were fabulous. It was that night that we realized how much better she sounds in a live performance than on studio recordings. We soon purchased her live double album, From Every Stage, which had been recorded the previous summer and was released in January 1976. We have enjoyed it ever since.

“He was spectacular. It was a stellar performance every night,” Baez says of Dylan on the Rolling Thunder tour. “I went down into the crowd. Sometimes people noticed me, but I’d just look at them and say ‘Sssh’ and they’d not bother me.” She says she kept thinking, “‘What am I doing here?’ I had to find ways to keep people amused. I’d go out and dance.” To our delight, she did that in Hattiesburg.

The performance of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” was wonderful. Their preceding show had been in Mobile two nights before. I cannot say whether Dylan was thinking the same way about Hattiesburg. The song is the one I use to demonstrate what I often say about my “singing”: “I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life ... but I can do a passable Bob Dylan.” Not Bob Dylan on that night though!

Dylan performed a stunning rendition of “Lay Lady Lay,” and there were other remarkable songs.

But the highlight for me was Joanie joining Dylan for a breathtaking performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” She stayed for duets of “Railroad Boy” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” She returned to the stage do backup vocal for T-Bone on “Silver Mantis.”

The whole ensemble returned to the stage for an amazing finale with “Gotta Travel On.” Baez was again thrilling, as was the whole concluding performance, in which the various artists took turns on lead vocal. We departed in a glow.

I have been unable to find any video or images from the Hattiesburg stop but click below for a nearly complete audio of the concert on YouTube. The sound quality is not great, but if you listen through headphones or airpods, it sounds quite good.

Listen here:

Since that night, I have been to numerous great musical performances. I put together one myself for the fifteenth anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1979, including the SNCC Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger, Mary Travers, and many others, along with political comedy from Dick Gregory. I came to know Seeger and Travers and saw him perform later and Peter, Paul, and Mary several times. We attended a great Billy Joel concert in 1987.

In addition to the Stones several times, we have seen Willie Nelson on multiple occasions, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, James Brown, No Doubt, the Chicks, Aerosmith, Lionel Richie, Little Richard, Run-DMC, U2, Green Day, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Joan Jett, Garbage, Cher, and many music festivals with top performers. I “danced” and sang along with the Shirelles, my favorite group in the early sixties, with about twenty people at a Jackson high school.

I have fond—in some cases, ecstatic—memories of many of those nights and afternoons.

And yet: Dylan, Baez, and company in Hattiesburg on May 1, 1976, still sit at the top of my list.

Joan Baez and Bob Dylan during the Rolling Thunder Revue in Clearwater, Florida, eight days before the Hattiesburg stop. (I have been unable to find any photos from the Hattiesburg concert.)

Okay, those lyrics are adapted from another of my favorite music artists, the Four Seasons, “December, 1963 (Oh, What A Night),” which have nothing to do with our subject here—except that the lyrics fit with what I experienced on the night of May 1, 1976 (not, to be clear, in the sense of the Four Seasons song).

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

Click here to become a paid subscriber:

{NOTE: If you know others you think might appreciate this piece, please forward it to them and suggest that they subscribe to “Musings & Amusings.}

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of a musical event that I still consider to be the best I have ever attended. And that says a lot. I had seen the Rolling Stones in 1966 and, later, five times since 2010. (They are much better now than they were then). I had previously seen the Supremes, Temptations, Four Tops, Four Seasons, Simon and Garfunkel, and many other top artists. As I’ll mention later, since that May Day fifty years ago, in addition to the Stones, I have seen many more great concerts.

{NOTE: Near the end of this piece, you’ll find a link at which you can listen to almost the entire performance.}

When I was a freshman at Rutgers in February 1965, I had seen a notice that Bob Dylan was performing on campus. That was about five months before he exploded the musical world by going electric at Newport. I liked him and even more liked his songs, but for some reason I don’t remember, I decided not to walk a short distance to see him. In the ensuing years, I had come greatly to regret that decision. Only much later did I find out that Johnny Cash was also there, though not performing.

When we learned that Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Revue would be in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, about 90 miles away from our home in Jackson, I was determined not to make that mistake again. Joined by our friend Dan Hise, Anne and I headed to Hattiesburg.

The Rolling Thunder Revue became legendary. This night was part of the tour’s second leg, through the South and Southwest, from Florida to Utah. It was less of a carnival than the first leg, but was known for heavier electric sound and “raw, fiery arrangements.”

[This is not one of our ticket stubs—I keep stuff, but not necessarily in a way I can find them later. I found this one online. Photo credit: Dcurbow]

“Bob had just recorded Blood on the Tracks and Desire. He was at the absolute peak of his powers and completely generous, finding people on the street and putting them on his stage,” T-Bone Burnett recalled of Rolling Thunder.

“I’ve been seeing Bob perform since 1966,” Rolling Stone writer Larry Sloman has said. “I’ve never seen him as good as he was during the Rolling Thunder tour, night in, night out. He was just amazing, phenomenal energy, and incredible passion. They tried to go out and do something unique and they succeeded. It was just amazing music every night—the most incredible conviction and spirit.”1

Violinist Scarlet Rivera recalls that Dylan “had boundless energy and incredible strength of performance. … every song had a peak energy. … It was such a powerful and magical experience. … It was confirmed for me that I was with a living genius, on the level of Shakespeare of our time. Just profound, prolific and profound.”

Scarlet Rivera performing in 1976 (at New Orleans Jazz Fest, not the Hattiesburg show.)

I concur with those assessments. I saw and heard Dylan several times in later years. Sometimes he was superb; others not so much. He was magnificent that night half a century ago. Everyone else who performed was also outstanding, particularly Rivera, along with: Roger McGuinn, whom I of course knew from the Byrds, T-Bone Burnett, with whom i was not yet familiar, Mick Ronson (guitar), Bobby Neuwirth (guitar & vocal), Steven Soles (guitar), David Mansfield (steel guitar, mandolin, violin & dobro), Rob Stoner (bass), Howie Wyeth (drums), and Gary Burke (percussion).

And Joanie! We went mainly to see Dylan, though we loved Baez, too. If anything, she outshined him, but together they were fabulous. It was that night that we realized how much better she sounds in a live performance than on studio recordings. We soon purchased her live double album, From Every Stage, which had been recorded the previous summer and was released in January 1976. We have enjoyed it ever since.

“He was spectacular. It was a stellar performance every night,” Baez says of Dylan on the Rolling Thunder tour. “I went down into the crowd. Sometimes people noticed me, but I’d just look at them and say ‘Sssh’ and they’d not bother me.” She says she kept thinking, “‘What am I doing here?’ I had to find ways to keep people amused. I’d go out and dance.” To our delight, she did that in Hattiesburg.

The performance of “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” was wonderful. Their preceding show had been in Mobile two nights before. I cannot say whether Dylan was thinking the same way about Hattiesburg. The song is the one I use to demonstrate what I often say about my “singing”: “I couldn’t carry a tune to save my life ... but I can do a passable Bob Dylan.” Not Bob Dylan on that night though!

Dylan performed a stunning rendition of “Lay Lady Lay,” and there were other remarkable songs.

But the highlight for me was Joanie joining Dylan for a breathtaking performance of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” She stayed for duets of “Railroad Boy” and “I Pity the Poor Immigrant.” She returned to the stage do backup vocal for T-Bone on “Silver Mantis.”

The whole ensemble returned to the stage for an amazing finale with “Gotta Travel On.” Baez was again thrilling, as was the whole concluding performance, in which the various artists took turns on lead vocal. We departed in a glow.

I have been unable to find any video or images from the Hattiesburg stop but click below for a nearly complete audio of the concert on YouTube. The sound quality is not great, but if you listen through headphones or airpods, it sounds quite good.

Listen here:

Since that night, I have been to numerous great musical performances. I put together one myself for the fifteenth anniversary of the Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1979, including the SNCC Freedom Singers, Pete Seeger, Mary Travers, and many others, along with political comedy from Dick Gregory. I came to know Seeger and Travers and saw him perform later and Peter, Paul, and Mary several times. We attended a great Billy Joel concert in 1987.

In addition to the Stones several times, we have seen Willie Nelson on multiple occasions, Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, James Brown, No Doubt, the Chicks, Aerosmith, Lionel Richie, Little Richard, Run-DMC, U2, Green Day, Barbra Streisand, Neil Diamond, James Taylor, Joan Jett, Garbage, Cher, and many music festivals with top performers. I “danced” and sang along with the Shirelles, my favorite group in the early sixties, with about twenty people at a Jackson high school.

I have fond—in some cases, ecstatic—memories of many of those nights and afternoons.

And yet: Dylan, Baez, and company in Hattiesburg on May 1, 1976, still sit at the top of my list.

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

Click here to become a paid subscriber:

These charges are absurd:

An indictment of James Comey for a photo he took and posted of an arrangement of shells on a North Carolina beach into “86 47.” 86 is a common expression for throwing out someone, such as an unruly drunk from a bar. Whoever added “47” was referring to the 47^th president and calling for the patriotic goal of throwing Trump out of the presidency and thus saving American democracy. The Trump Injustice Department claims that it was a threat to assassinate the president. Why? Because Trump hates Comey (BTW, without whom he never would have been president).

What does “86” mean? Let us turn to no greater an authority than Matt Gaetz, the aficionado of underage girls and rightwing “Republican” former congressman from northwest Florida whom Trump wanted to make Secretary of Defense (and might have been even worse than Whiskey Pete):

All of those not-so-gentle men were still alive and … well, not so well, yet Gaetz said they had been 86’d.

(Let me be clear: I am no fan of Jim Comey. Twice in 2016 he provided huge assists to Trump by issuing unnecessary and unjustified commentary on “Hillary’s emails.” How quaint that seems now, in light of the utter corruption of Trump, his family, and their associates. But this charge is patently absurd.)

Last week, Jimmy Kimmel did a routine on what he would say if he were the comedian at the White House Correspondents Dinner. He included saying that Melania Trump had a “glow like an expectant widow.” Of course, it was a reference to the great age difference between the two and the likelihood that Trump’s third wife may not miss him much when he is gone. The Trump Crime Family professed outrage, saying it was a call for the president’s assassination. (Technically the call for reviewing ABC’s broadcast license is that they practice “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” when MAGA wants Uniformity, Inequity, and Exclusion.)

Let me remind readers that Donald Trump does praise political violence. Often. He repeatedly mocked the hammer beating nearly to death of Nancy Pelosi’s husband. He made fun of a man with a debilitating disease. He has referred to his opponents as “vermin.” He denounced John McCain for being taken prisoner in a war that Trump had stayed out of by getting a note from a doctor who was a tenant of his father saying he had “bone spurs” (which he did not). He said he considered avoiding STDs from the “landmine vaginas” of all the women he was fucking to be “my Vietnam.” He supported—and still does support—the thugs who attacked the Capitol on January 6, 2021, in an attempt to end the American Republic by keeping him in office after he lost an election, supported the thugs who were trying to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer because she is against him. He has called for the killing of Republican arch-conservative Liz Cheney. He never condemned the murders of a Democratic Minnesota state representative and her husband. To the best of my knowledge, he never criticized the ICE thugs who killed two American citizens in Minneapolis for no reason. There is much more. And, oh yeah, BTW, less than three weeks ago, Trump said that he was ready that very night to cause “a whole civilization” to die ... never to be brought back again.”

Trump has often called for people who oppose him to be executed.

And, lest we forget (as Trump expects all his followers to do), On J6, Trump’s thugs were shouting “Hang Mike Pence!” and trying to find and kill House Speaker Pelosi and others. Trump sat enjoying the spectacle, suggested that maybe his vice president deserved hanging, and on his first evening back in office in 2025, pardoned all of his violent supporters. And he reposted a video showing President Biden hog-tied and being carried off in a pickup truck by MAGA guys.

Just another afternoon in Trumplandia.

Get a grip, Americans.

In another move to counter Trump’s attempt to keep the House even if the Democrats win a large majority of the votes by extreme gerrymandering in Texas and elsewhere, Virginians voted yesterday to adopt a House redistricting map that is likely to give Democrats four more seats from the Commonwealth.

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Today, an AP/NORC poll found absolutely devastating numbers for Trump and Republicans:

Take a quick look at items I highlighted. More than three-quarters of independents disapprove of him. Only 21 percent of independents approve of his Operation Insane Fury against Iran. He is 61 points underwater with independents on the economy and an astounding 75 points underwater with independents on the cost of living. Even among Republicans, almost as many of those polled disapproved of Trump’s handling of the cost of living as approved.

Those are numbers that point toward a massive blur tsunami in November.

As I often say, I am an optimist, all the evidence to the contrary notwithstanding. Now, the evidence is beginning not to be to the contrary. Here is my current view on the Senate races:

And I may soon move more states in a Democratic direction.

That’s great news. But the worse it gets for Donald Trump, the more likely he is to try a full fascist takeover.

Add the huge rejection by Hungarians of Viktor Orbán and Trump realizes that he has no hope of winning a free and fair election. He is likely to try everything he can think of—claiming there is an “insurrection,” putting his ICE and Proud Boy goons in the streets on Election Day, cancelling the election entirely, claiming the election was “stolen” …

All believers in America have to be on high alert and stop whatever he tries.

“When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

That statement has often been attributed to Sinclair Lewis, but no one has found evidence that he ever said precisely those words. There is no doubt, though, that they express his message in It Can’t Happen Here (1935), a novel meant to alert Americans to the fact that it—a fascist takeover—can happen in the United States.

A quotation attributed to George Carlin makes the same point: “When fascism comes to America, it won’t be wearing jackboots. It will be wrapped in the stars and stripes and carrying a Bible.” As with Lewis, it is a misquote. Here’s what he actually said:

George Carlin was a brilliant man who had a remarkable talent to put deep wisdom into simple—albeit often obscene—language. He made the above statement on Real Time with Bill Maher in September 2005, shortly after Hurricane Katrina had, to use the new word Trump recently learned, obliterated the Mississippi Gulf Coast and inundated New Orleans.

As we can now see, Sinclair Lewis and George Carlin were on target. Donald Trump and the “Christian” nationalists who are rapidly dismantling American democracy and replacing our Constitutional Republic with a fascist dictatorship are waving American flags and thumping bibles—though, of course, Trump also has his jackbooted thugs in the streets.

Trump has taken the Bible part to a new level by posting an image that indicates he is Jesus.

Though he has said he has never read the Bible, Trump will participate tonight in an “America Reads the Bible event.” Der Führer will read a verse from 2 Chronicles:

Of course, while Trump preys constantly, he never prays. The chances that he will turn away from his wicked ways are zero.

Here are a few examples of Trump’s complete disregard for what Jesus said:

Let’s take back the flag and what Jesus taught from the charlatans who have stolen them.

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{NOTE: A slightly different version of this essay, “Trump’s Iran Policy and the Curse of King Croesus,” was published this morning on Lincoln Square.}

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

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Among the stories told by Herodotus, often referred to as the first historian, is one of great relevance to us in April 2026.

King Croesus of Lydia, a kingdom that controlled western Anatolia in modern-day Turkey, was the Elon Musk of the sixth century BC. Croesus is often listed among the richest people who ever lived. “Rich as Croesus” is still used to indicate someone who is “filthy rich.” According to Herodotus, Croesus was as arrogant as he was wealthy.

Thirsting for ever more power and wealth, Croesus wanted to invade Persia. Wondering what the result of such an attack would be, Croesus did as folks did in those days. He journeyed to Delphi on Mount Parnassus northwest of Athens, a spot that was considered by ancient Greeks to be located at the navel of the world. There, the god Apollo could be consulted through his Oracle, the Pythia. Croesus had previously sent a large amount of gold and silver to Delphi.

Delphi in 2017 (photo by Robert McElvaine)

He asked what would happen if he invaded Persia. The Pythia’s response seemed to be just want Croesus wanted to hear:

The arrogant Croesus was elated. But he had neglected to ask the Oracle which great empire would be destroyed. It turned out to be his.

Eagerly returning to Lydia, Croesus soon mobilized an army and invaded Persia. It didn’t go well for him. His army was defeated and the Persians took the Lydian king prisoner. The Persians were in the process of executing him when Apollo took pity on him and saved him, but his empire was destroyed.

This story came to mind on Tuesday, after Donald Trump, who fancies himself to be “rich as Croesus”—or would, if he had ever heard of Croesus—and is getting there through his massive corruption, “truthed” that “a whole civilization will be destroyed tonight, never to be brought back again.” He meant the Persian civilization of Iran.

It was already clear that, whether he actually went ahead and caused “all Hell to reign [sic] down on” Iran and “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” he was destroying a whole civilization: the American civilization.

Trump’s surrender to the modern-day Persians on Tuesday evening does not change that outcome.

Before going into his Operation Epic Insanity against modern Persia, the only oracle Trump consulted was Bibi Netenyahu. If Croesus had a group of his lackeys with him at Delphi, none of them would have dared to tell their king that he misunderstood the Oracle’s response. The same was the case with those around Trump in the White House Cabinet Room with the false prophet from Israel, several of whom knew the self-styled King of America was being led into a disaster.

Having no idea what he was getting into, Trump went ahead, apparently not even aware that the Iranians could and would close the Strait of Hormuz. Untold billions of dollars, several American deaths, the standing of the United States as good and decent country shattered (along with NATO and the world economy both severely weakened) later, the modern Persia is ruled by even more radical crazies, more determined to resist and not to believe the United States. It is in control of the Strait and talking about collecting payments for ships going through it, selling its oil much more readily than it could before.

The whole civilization of America has not been destroyed, but it has been severely damaged. The Persian Empire of today has been strengthened.

And the big winner is Vladimir Putin. Unless helping Putin was Trump’s objective all along, Operations Epic Insanity was a total failure. Either way, it was a disaster for our nation.

If King Donald finds himself on a political pyre, where he certainly should be, Apollo should not save him.

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Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

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With attention on whether the Madman’s Operation Epic Insanity would go into mass murder last night or TACO would cave, you may have missed the latest and most stunning shift of the vote to the Democrats in a US House special election. In the extremely red Georgia district vacated by Marjorie Taylor Greene having come to her senses, the vote shifted to the Democrats by 25%. The above graphic shows the stunning shift to Democrats in every US House special election since the maniac returned to office in January 2025.

Also yesterday, a liberal won a decisive victory in an election for the Wisconsin state supreme court, the third such liberal win in two years. Liberals now have a 5-2 majority on the court. In some rural counties Trump carried by 16 to 20 points in 2024, Chris Taylor, the liberal candidate, won.

In state legislature special elections across the country since Trump returned, Democrats have flipped 30 seats and Republicans have flipped zero.

These are not opinion polls. These are people voting. Small wonder that Trump is ever-more-desperately trying to prevent a free and fair election in November.

Keep Hope Alive.

“A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”

What kind of madman said that? The deranged creature is pictured above. But the civilization he is trying to wipe out is not only that of Persia, but also that of the United States.

Here is his “Truth” this morning:

The one thing he has always been great at is keeping attention on himself, and he certainly has that today. Tonight, he writes, will be “one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the world.” Though he knows virtually nothing about that history, he would secure himself a major place in it alongside the most horrible mass murderers. He would complete his project of transforming the United States from the land of freedom and hope to that of an outlaw state, an international pariah—like his good friends Vladimir and Kim.

Any American who does not unequivocally condemn him and call for his immediate removal from the presidency is not worthy of our nation. What are “Republicans” in Congress saying? Hardly anything so far.

If he actually orders these strikes, the leaders of the United States military are obliged to refuse those unlawful orders. What if he tells them to use “tactical” nuclear weapons, an idea he toyed with in his first term? That would be a way for him to go down in history! He would definitely be Time’s Person of the Year! Hitler was chosen in 1938.

A vast majority of the American people totally oppose this evil. He does not speak for us. He should be taken away to an institution for the criminally insane.

With JD Vance in Hungary campaigning for Putin and Trump’s fascist buddy Viktor Orbán, the 25^th Amendment seems an unlikely option today. In that case, everything—and I do mean everything—will depend on the American military leaders, which is why Secretary of War Crimes Pete Hegseth has been firing all the top generals likely to refuse unlawful orders.

That may leave TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out) as our only hope.

Welcome back to “Musings & Amusings,” and greetings to those of you who are new.

Musings & Amusings is a reader-supported publication. If my writing helps you through these terrible times or gives you a needed smile from time to time, remember that I depend on paid subscribers to do my work. If you are financially able to do so, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It costs less than 14 cents a day.

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