Not another one

It's a fact of life that crimes are way disproportionately committed by men. Mass murder. Serial killing. Breaking & Entering. Assault & Battery. Drug possession. Drug dealing. Fare jumping. Disorderly conduct. 

You name it. 

Boys will be boys; men will be men.

Sadly, women have been gaining in many categories, and without seeing any actual data, I'm guessing that corporate fraud is one of them.

After all, fraud is non-violent (so more lady-like), and with more and more women in business, there's more and more opportunity for fraudsters of the female persuasion. 

Even in the way back, there was Enron treasurer Lea Fastow, who got caught up in that fiasco. As I recall - and Enron is now two decades in the past - she and her Enron CFO husband Andrew got to stagger there prison terms so that one of them got to stay home with the kids. 

And anecdotally, it does seem that a ton of the embezzlement cases you read about involve women.

Then there is, of course, the poster child for women in business gone bad: Elizabeth Holmes, who despite trying to weasel out of her sentence because she has two babies, was set to start her hefty sentence yesterday.

Just last week, I posted about two senior women at Magellan Diagnostics who have been indicted for fraud. (The Magellan scheme is something of a "Theranos light" situation. Like Theranos, the Magellan case involves fudging test results (Magellan: lead; Theranos: blood), but there was a lot less money involved. We'll see where that one goes.)

And now there's the criminal fraud case being brought against Charlie Javice. 

Javice is the Wharton School grad who in 2016, when she was still in her early twenties, founded Frank, a company that helped ease the process for students filling out financial aid applications. Although she'd experienced a few bumps along the way, in 2021, Javice sold Frank to JP Morgan Chase for $175M. (Those bumps along the way? According to Wikipedia - and have they ever let me down - the US Department of Education claimed in 2017 that Frank was misleading customers, letting them think that the outfit was connected to the U.S. government, as a result she had to make changes to Frank's website; and in 2018, she got in a wage theft wrangle and had to pay $35K.)

Charlie Javice made $21M on the sale to JP Morgan Chase, and was looking at an equal payday as part of a retention bonus for staying on.

Turns out JP Morgan wasn't going to be all that interested in retaining Javice. They started to smell a data faking rat who had provided them with a fake list of customers to get them to buy her company, fired her in November 2022, and filed a lawsuit against her.

Part of what had driven the application was JP Morgan's interest in developing relationships with younger consumers. All those millions of Frank users were natural prospects.

Turns out that, when JP Morgan tried marketing to them, they found that millions of the emails were fake, and all those prospects never even existed. 

And now it's not just JP Morgan chasing Charlie Javice down:

The Department of Justice filed criminal fraud charges, which were unsealed Tuesday [April 4], against Javice, Frank's founder and former CEO, alleging she "engaged in a brazen scheme" when she sold her company to JPMorgan Chase in 2021.

The Securities and Exchange Commission separately announced its own fraud complaint against Javice on Tuesday, seeking a variety of punishments including civil penalties and a ban on her being a corporate officer.

Both federal prosecutors and the SEC accused Javice of defrauding JPMorgan into believing Frank had 4.25 million users, when in reality the number was less than 300,000. (Source: ABC)

It's one thing to marketing fudge a bit. Eighty clients can become "nearly 100." But to claim your user base is more than an order of magnitude greater than it is? Wow, just wow.

Paying $175M for 4.25 prospects is a far cry from paying $175M for fewer than 300,000 prospects.

Javice pushed back on the JP Morgan claims. 

She denied in court filings in February that she ever fabricated or misrepresented user data and merely told JPMorgan that her platform "had engaged with at least 4.25 million students."

"Engaged with?" I'd love to see what's in that number. 4.25 eyeballs on their website? 4.25 students at the colleges and universities they targeted? That "engaged with" sure was doing a lot of heavy lifting. And didn't JP Morgan poke at that number at all? Nah, Javice says. They just plain didn't do any due diligence, and that during their negotiations, Javice had warned her acquirer that student privacy requirements shouldn't be violated

Shame on JP Morgan if that's the case. How negligent not to have drilled down on that 4.25 number; how stupid not to have figured out whether those privacy stipulations would prevent them from marketing to the Frank users, which was, of course, a big point behind the acquisition. But it doesn't seem like much of a defense.

JP Morgan doesn't seem to think so. They maintain that:

...when Javice provided a spreadsheet with a column titled "FAFSA in Process" it indicated that more than 4.25 million students had opened accounts with Frank and provided detailed personal information to support that.

And then there's the Feds:

Federal authorities think the fraud went beyond a mislabeled spreadsheet column and that Javice tried to get her director of engineering to fabricate a data set. Javice then went to an outside data scientist to generate the fake data, according to allegations in prosecutors' criminal complaint against her.

 We'll see where this one ends up, but it looks like Charlie Javice may have had a bit of larceny in her heart.

Who knows? Maybe she'll end up cellmates with Elizabeth Holmes, or one of the Magellan Two.

We've come a long way, baby, but I'm not all that thrilled that one of the categories we're reaching parity on may well be business fraud.

Yet another obsolete profession.

Back in the day, if you needed a phone number but weren't home with access to your 12-pound phone book, you could dial 4-1-1 and get the number from someone working in directory assistance. If you wanted a long-distance number, you dialed 555-1212. 

And, of course, back in the day, we were actually dialing. 

I think you can still dial those information numbers, but I think they charge you for what was once a free privilege. So I didn't give it any sort of a whirl to test things out.

Whatever they charge for tapping the expertise of directory assistance workers - and for all I know, it's all automated through speech recognition - I don't imagine there are all that many jobs left in the directory assistance profession. 

Same goes for adjacent phone-related profession: switchboard operator. Why use a human when if you know your party's extension, you can access it directly through phone tech. 

Theaters no longer have projectionists to change the reels, because there are no reels to change.

I can't remember the last time I saw an elevator operator, who were a staple in the department stores of my childhood

How about cab drivers? How many of them are still out there who don't moonlight and daylight as Uber and Lyft drivers? 

And then there's another profession that's becoming obsolete.

That is, if ticket scalping was ever a profession.

Anyway, if it whether or not it ever had been a true profession, part of the game-day experience of going to Fenway Park (or likely any sports venue, especially urban ones) was running the gauntlet of scalpers jumping at you from Kenmore Square to Fenway. Got tickets? Need tickets? Got tickets? Need tickets?

These days, those fellows - and I can't recall ever encountering a woman scalper - are few and far between. 

Of course, there are still "legit" ticket resell companies, like Ace Ticket and StubHub, where you can get tickets if you're willing to pay crazy prices. (Or if you're willing to wait until the last minute and take a chance that you can get a sharply discounted ticket for well below face value.)

The teams are getting in on the act, too. Seasons tickets holders can put seats they're not going to use up on their team's website. (I don't know if they can sell tickets for anything above face, however.)

Just don't get me going on Ticketmaster for concerts. Yikes!

But we're talking sports here; we're talking baseball here; we're talking Fenway here. 

And on Opening Day, there were actually a few scalpers trying to make a buck. 

Ticket scalping is ostensibly illegal, but, as The Boston Globe noted, scalping is illegal like jaywalking is illegal. It's not exactly enforced. A Globe request for information found that only three citations have been issued in the last five years.

Ticket resellers are supposed to be licensed, but that's for outfits like Ace. Then there are the regulations about how much a reseller can charge:

There are also rules about how much a ticket reseller can charge: no more than $2 over face value, but crucially that doesn’t include service fees, which may include “costs attributable to resale” such as postage and long distance phone calls. (Source: Boston Globe)

Not to mention costs that are somehow "attributable" to whatever the market can bear. 

What's buggy-whipped ticket scalpers is the advent of the Ace Tickets of the world, and the digitization of tickets.

Although from the pictures in The Globe, I saw that the scalpers had physical, paper tickets, it's really difficult to get those paper tickets. 

If you buy online from the Red Sox (or any other baseball team), you have to have MLB Ballpark on your smartphone. I know that you can go to Fenway and get a paper ticket, but I'm not sure how you get your hands on them if you don't live in the city. I'm guessing it can be done via phone for those few and far betweeners who don't have a smartphone. But they make it a PITA.

And paper or digital, venues are making it more difficult to create counterfeit tickets that look like the real thing. For baseball tickets, the barcode isn't issued until a day or so before the game. With Ticketmaster, you get a barcode, but it's wavy, so that someone can't take a pic of it.

The one big benefit of using an agency is that you're protected against fraud. Ace Ticket's CEO had this to say:

“It’s buying a Rolex watch on the street versus a Rolex watch dealer,” he said in a phone interview.

Well, I wouldn't go quite that far, but I'm not the CEO of Ace Ticket.  

Meanwhile, halfway through this post it occurred to me that "scalping" and "scalpers" may be words that are going the way of the buggy whip. After all, they're a reference to Native Americans cutting the scalp off of an enemy, so those words may be something that Native Americans understandably find offensive. Hmmm. The Globe article does use scalping, but - not to be too PC - I think I'll switch to "ticket hawking."

Anyway, the Fenway ticket hawkers are well aware that they're dinosaurs, losing their turf to the online agencies and the overall digitalization of everything in the world that can possibly be digitized. But if they're still out, they're still making money. Just not as easily as in the good old days. 

“In the ‘80s, there was tons of money to be made,” said one man asking the crowd if they needed tickets. “No StubHub, no Seat Geek.”

He lamented how much it costs for beverages inside Fenway, and, gesturing toward a team box office, remarked: “They’re the real scalpers.”

Okay, this guy used the word scalper. And I've got to agree with him that, given the price of refreshments at Fenway, he's got a point that, whatever you call price gouging, the Red Sox do it. 

Anyway, if there's still money in ticket hawking, it's not the lucrative game it used to be. 

One of the big changes, of course, is that fans can look online at anytime and see what the market is for tickets. If a ticket hawker asks them for $X, the fan can see immediately what a similar ticket would cost through an online agency. Consumers these days have information that they didn't used to have access to, and that gives them more negotiation power. Also, a ticket from an agency can be immediately transferred to the fan's phone, and which is guaranteed.

The article I saw followed a fan who came ticketless to Fenway, hoping that - given the weather (the windchill that day was about 30), and given how awful the Sox were in 2022 - he could get in last minute for cheap. 

He talked to the ticket hawkers, then checked online. He was able to get a pair in the bleachers for ten bucks a piece. 

Sure, this represents a loss for the agency, as they no doubt paid more than ten bucks each for those tickets. But an agency's loss is spread over thousands upon thousands of transactions, most of which make them money.

A lone wolf ticket hawker has fewer transactions. He's on his own. And nothing's going to make his situation better anytime soon.

Not much of a future for ticket hawkers, I guess.

To protect and serve? Really?

A familiar trope of the family dramas of my childhood was the boy having to "man up" and shoot the rabid family dog. I guess it was supposed to teach us - including us city slickers who lacked both guns and rabid dogs - that life was tough, that life was unfair. And that at some point in our lives, we (especially the boys) all might be called on to do something shattering, something emotionally devastating, for the greater good. 

Old Yeller, anyone?

Fast forward all those decades, and we get the sad story of a nine-year-old little girl in California who raised a goat as part of a 4H project for the Shasta District Fair. As part of the program, families purchase goats (kids?) for their kids, and the kids (humans) learn about how to take care of animals - and what farmers and ranchers do. Which is raise animals for slaughter. Part of the deal is that the animals are auctioned off and transitioned from pet to food. 

But Jessica Long's daughter became so attached to her goat, Cedar, and so distraught at the thought of Cedar being killed, that Long decided to go ahead and violate the rules. 

She what-the-helled it, and kidnapped Cedar from the fairground barn. Cedar had already been auctioned, so Long offered to repay whatever the lost revenue would be. 

Of course: Rules are rules. Long's family knew what they were signed up for. And all of us meat eaters have to live with the fact that there are actually living, breathing, and - let's face it - at least somewhat sentient creatures that have to lose their lives so we can enjoy a BLT or some chicken nuggets. Or whatever it is that's made with goat. 

And it's not like I'm a big fan of coddling children, and wrapping them from the facts of life. (I went to my first funeral at the age of 8; I went to my first wake unaccompanied by a parent at the age of 11.) Kids are resilient. Kids are aware. Kids are tough. 

But, but, but...This is a little girl. A very little girl who had lost three of her grandparents in the past year, and who found solace through raising Cedar. 

The Shasta District Fair wasn't having any:

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” [Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie] Silva wrote back to Long in an email reviewed by The Times dated June 28, 2022. “Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.” (Source: LA Times)

So instead of attempting to find a resolution that was kind and compassionate, or at least give the Long family more time to adjust, the Shasta District Fair, after tsk-tsking Jessica Long, called in the sheriff's office. Armed with a search warrant, detectives put out some sort of caprine APB and drove over 500 miles around Northern California in their goat hunt for Cedar. (The Long family had found a home for Cedar on a farm. They live in a residential area and could not keep the goat with them.)

Echoing language used when law enforcement search a home for drugs, the warrant allowed deputies to “utilize breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers” and to search all rooms, garages and “storage rooms, and outbuildings of any kind large enough to accommodate a small goat.”

Oh, FFS. Or as a lawyer involved with animal rights had it:

“It’s shocking,” said Ryan Gordon, an attorney with Advancing Law for Animals. “It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.”

This situation is coming to light now because Jessica Long is suing Shasta District Fair officials and the county:

... arguing it committed an “egregious waste of police resources” and violated her and her daughter’s 4th Amendment and 14th Amendment rights protecting them from unreasonable searches and seizures, and due process. Long and her attorneys allege the dispute was a civil matter she was willing to resolve.

But the Shasta officials were hard-assing it from the outset, telling Long from Day One that they were going to call the cops on her. (Remember, they weren't just ticked about the rules violation; they were aggrieved about the "negative experience" that they'd had on social media. A boo anda hoo.)

Side note: the person who had purchased Cedar at auction was fine with not going ahead and slaughtering the goat. 

And another side note: a child in California is allowed to back out of a contract within a reasonable time period.

But, for the Shasta Fair, that mattered not.

Vengeance is mine, saith the Shasta Fair officials. 

What a group.

At minimum, they should have waited for things to play out, rather than rush right in and get the goat. Or they could have made this moment to improve their process. Maybe they should spend more time with the 4H children explaining that their animal would be slaughtered for meat. Maybe they should offer a couple of options: raise your goat for meat, or raise your goat for milk and cheese. (Not that I know much about animal husbandry, but I guess this option would only apply to girl goats. Not clear whether Cedar was a B or a G.) Or raise the goat and let it go on to frolic on a goat farm, helping make more goats. 

In any case, sending in armed police men to seize a little goat seems like a pretty over the top response. Who and what are they protecting and serving here? How about they spend their time looking for bad guys. 

Maybe adults should be the adults, and not take their rigid fantasies about how to toughen up little kids out on those little kids. Nine-years-old. FFS.

And, by the way, if Old Yeller had to go - which he did - maybe, if they make a contemporary version of it, the mother can send the young Travis into the house and shoot the damned dog herself.

Oh, the places you'll go

It was not the first time I'd been on a plane. Just the first time I was aware of flying. (My first time, I was almost two years old, flying back from Chicago where the family had assembled for my grandfather's funeral.)

So, my first real time on a plane.

I didn't know how to work the seatbelt.

My college roommate and I had gotten tickets to London on BOAC (precursor to British Airways) - date of departure, April 25, 1973; date of return, open-ended. The tickets cost $206 because, back in the day, if you were a student or under the age of 26, you flew for cheap. Of course, when you factor in inflation, those tickets weren't all that cheap. That $206 was the equivalent of $1,400+ today. And this week I could get a ticket to London for about seven hundred bucks. 

But fifty years ago, people didn't fly as much. 

Today, most middle class kids would have flown a few places by the time they were 23 - which Joyce and I were. Back then, not so much.

So we had our tickets, our new passports - the old green ones with the black & white mug shots - and our American Express "wallets" with a thousand dollars worth of Travelers Checks. Because back in the day, you really didn't leave home without them. 

For some reason, we had decided not to go the typical American young folk route and get a Eurail Pass to train around the continent. We had a vague plan that we'd hitchhike. We had vague plans about where we were going to stay. Camping or whatever. We weren't exactly sure where we were going to go. Lots of places.

We had two guide books: Arthur Frommer's Europe on Five Dollars a Day, and the young folks travel bible: Let's Go Europe! The Harvard Student Agencies. I don't think in our travels that we came across any American kids who weren't traveling with Let's Go. This isn't the 1973 version - I couldn't find that one - but the cover was pretty much the same. I think ours was blue, but I'm pretty sure the logo with the hitchhiker thumb was on iy.

Joyce and I had spent the prior year waitressing at Durgin Park; doing our own version of Route 66, traveling cross country in Joyce's Karmann Ghia rather than in Tod Stile's Corvette; and waitressing at Durgin Park to make the money for THE BIG EUROPEAN ADVENTURE.  

We were traveling light: what we could fit in a backpack. 

We'd both gotten good packs: Kelty's, the top of the line back in the day. We packed rain jackets. Mine was a forest green one from LL Bean. Joyce's was khaki green - I can't recall the brand. We each brought two pairs of pants (one jeans, one heavy cotton); a long sleeve shirt; two tee-shirts; a long underwear top; a sweater (I still remember mine: a very pretty dark fuchsia). One bra, five pairs of panties, five pairs of socks, one nightgown, one pair of shoes. (Mine were Wallabees, quite comfy but not great when they got wet.) A bandana, a pair of gloves. We each brought a dress for going out, and for visiting the Vatican. (Mine was a nylon blue and white checked mini-dress.) And a pair of flipflops to wear with said dresses. Oh, and a bathing suit.

And that's what we had to wear for over three months. 

We also had a tent and sleeping bags. After a few weeks in the U.K. and Ireland, we had figured out that we'd be doing a lot of camping, and at a camping goods store in Paris we bought a Mini Gaz Bleuet cook stove and some cooking gear (collapsible pans and cups, plates and cutlery). A couple of days after sleeping on the hard ground in a campground along the Seine, we went back to the camping goods store and got grey eggcrate mattresses. 

WHAT. AN. ADVENTURE.

It's nothing that you could pull off these days. Mostly we got around by hitchhiking, with an occasional train or ferry trip thrown in. We stayed at B&Bs, camped, and hosteled. Sometimes we stayed with people we met along the way.

We sent postcards home, and once during the 3+ months we were away we called home.

We got letters at American Express offices, which is where we also ran into American finance nerds who advised us on what currency we should transfer our Travelers Check "currency" into. We took what turned out to be their very good advice and were thus able to stretch our $1,000 apiece out to the tune that we each returned home with $600 in our pocket. (About $4,000 in today's dollar.)

We got around: England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Lichtenstein, Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia, and Turkey. We hit the big cities and the tourist spots, and stayed in obscure towns that no one had heard of.

There were plenty of times when we were wet, cold, and scared. But mostly what both Joyce and I remember is how much fun we had.

The other day, we were strolling down travel memory lane, and she reminded me of the time outside Oslo when it was cold and raining, and no one was stopping to pick us up. She remembered that she was near tears and completely discouraged, but I cheered her up (or pissed her off) by telling her, "Someday you're going to look back on this day and wish you were back there again."

As Joyce just told me, I was right.

Fifty years...

Where does the time go?????

That was some role play

If I had to come up with a Top Ten list of things I despised in the workplace, one item making the cut would definitely have been any roleplay situation that was part of a training program. Talk about fear and loathing.

I didn't care whether I was playing the prospect or the salesperson, the client or the project manager, the whoever and the anti-whoever. 

Roleplay/schmoleplay. If I'd wanted to be an actor, I'd have signed up somewhere along the way to do community with some footlight players club. But I never wanted to belt one out as Mame, or long for the "gentleman caller" in Glass

Menagerie. And I never wanted to do any acting out in a roleplay corporate setting, either. 

Giving my feelings about roleplaying, I was colossally amused when I read about a recent Defense Department training session where a the roleplay ran amok. The training session was a joint event  - "essential military training" - between the US Army Special Operations Command and Boston-local FBI agents. 

Problem was, when the trainees got into their role playing commando, they went to the wrong room. Instead of detaining a roleplaying bad guy, they rousted a hotel guest, an employee of Delta Airlines.

Imagine being in your hotel room at 10 p.m. and having the door battered in by a bunch of FBI agents?

Yikes!

When I was traveling on business, here's what 10 p.m. in the hotel looked like:

I'd have finished going over whatever I needed to go over for the next day's work, and I would have been sitting in bed, eating a bag of M&M Peanut and reading People, probably with the TV on. 

When the FBI - or was it the US Army? - barged in, no doubt armed to the teeth, I'd have either been screaming my head off, screaming some version of WTF, OR having a heart attack. 

I'm betting that the Delta employee was going with the first option - WTF - because if they'd been having a heart attack, that would have made the news. 

Lieutenant Colonel Mike Burns at U.S. Army Special Operations Command said in a text message on Wednesday evening that “this serious incident” is under review.

“First and foremost, we’d like to extend our deepest apologies to the individual who was affected by the training exercise,” Burns’ statement said.

“The training was meant to enhance soldiers’ skills to operate in realistic and unfamiliar environments,” Burns said. “The training team, unfortunately, entered the wrong room and detained an individual unaffiliated with the exercise.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Boston PD was called in - but they didn't arrive at the hotel until 12:20 a.m., when they were able to confirm that the whole meghilla "was indeed a training exercise."

I'd have liked to have been a fly on the wall between the break in at 10 p.m. and 12:20 a.m. when the BPD strolled in. 

Was the Delta employee trying to convince the marauders that they weren't part of a roleplay? Because, after all, part of the roleplay could have been an "actor" protesting that they didn't know WTF the FBI/US Army was doing in their hotel room.

“The safety of civilians in vicinity of our training is always our number one concern,” Burns added. “We are reviewing this serious incident with our partners and no further details will be released at this time.”

No further details? That's no fun! I'd at least like to know whether the guy got his room comped.

Anyway, that was some roleplay. No wonder I never liked them. 

 

What does this even mean?

I love NY. New York City, anyway.

I truly do.

As a senior in high school, more than 50 years ago, I made my first trip to New York City. I went with my friend Kathy during our spring vacation week. We stayed with her Aunt Mary - a "career gal" who worked for Pan Am and lived in Queens - and trekked every day on the subway into Manhattan to play tourist. Climbing the Statue of Liberty. Seeing the Rockettes. Hitting a museum or two. Just walking around and taking it all in.

I still remember exactly how I felt when our Trailways Bus turned onto Amsterdam Ave in Harlem and headed on down to the Port Authority bus station.

There was nothing about New York City I wasn't enamored with.

A few years later, I spent a year in grad school at Columbia. Nominally, I was in a PhD program. Practically, I just wanted to experience New York.

I've been to New York City dozens of times over the years - it was my husband's favorite place on earth, plus I went there plenty on business - and was never not excited to come over the 59th Street Bridge in a cab. 

Sure, in the early days it was dirty. And it was always chaotic and noisy. And yet... The excitement of walking both the teeming commercial streets, and the quiet ritzy residential environs. The hustle, the buzz. The diversity. The dynamism. The Chrysler Building. 

I haven't been there all that often since Jim died - a trip there was one of our last one, when he was in the process of dying, but still a few months away from death - and I haven't been there at all since covid (my last trip was May 2019, for a wedding). This August, I will be happily reacquainting myself with the Big Apple. Can't wait!

Boston, of course, has always had a peculiar relationship with New York. But we all know that, by however many measures we're better, we'll never be the IT city New York has always been. 

Yes, I'd rather live in Boston. It's a lot easier living. I love that dirty water. And there's no arguing that, since the dawn of the 21st century, the Red Sox have been a better, more successful team than the Yankees in terms of winning the World Series.  

Still, there's always a bit of an inferiority complex thing going on, living here in New York City's shadow. (In much the same way, my home town of Worcester has always and understandably been "not Boston" - and suffered for it. There's a reason I fled Worcester when I hit the age of reason.)

And I've always felt that, in general, New York tends to occupy more of the average Bostonian's mindspace than the opposite. In other words, they matter more to us than we do to them.

So what are we to make of a new ad campaign that includes the following message:

Admittedly, New York is famously the city that never sleeps, and Boston infamously closes up shop early, but does New York get up earlier in the morning, too? This I never heard.

And what does it even mean?

Collect more trash? Transport more computers? Hedge more hedge funds?

In the aggregate, New York City will always get more done than Boston. The population of NYC is about 8.5 million; Boston's is 654 thousand. Even if you just look at Manhattan, it's got a million more people than Boston does. 

So how could New York not get more done than us?

This ad is part of a new ad campaign that's supposed to:

...“cut through the divisiveness and negativity” that has plagued the city since the pandemic. True to its unifying goal, it quickly featured a swipe at Boston.

Introduced last week, the “We ❤️ NYC” campaign is meant to represent a new era for the city, reminding people they can come together no matter their individual background or what community they hail from, campaign promoters told the New York Times. (Source: Boston Globe)

Twitter, of course, exploded.  

These are a few responses from the pro-Boston Twitterverse:

One person assessed the ad in simple terms on Twitter: “They hate us cuz they ain’t us.”

“If they’re name-checking Boston, we’re living rent free in their heads just a wee bit,” another observed. “Sorry to me this reads like an ad for Boston,” a commenter agreed.

New Yorkers weren't exactly in ❤️ with the new campaign:

“This negates the whole premise — that Boston is never even on our mind!” one person pointed out.

Exactly! 

Another accused the city of having a bullying problem and that the advertisement defeats the purpose of the campaign.

“Sure go ahead pick on a city less than 1/10th the population of their own city. This does nothing to promote NYC,” the person tweeted. A Bostonian quickly responded, “1/10th the population [but] 2x the intellect.”

Hah. I say hah, hah. (Okay, I don't know about that 2x intellect thing, but hah, I say hah, hah.)

While we're at it, here's the original wonderful I-Heart-NY from 1976, and the updated, "we the people", sans serif version that's featured in the new campaign.

The original is still the greatest!

Meanwhile, that ad campaign...

What is it that a New Yorker would say?

Fuhgeddaboudit!

Hey, lady!

Vito Perrone had been offered his dream job: superintendent of public schools in Easthampton, MA. He was in the contract review stage, and that's when he made what turned out to be a fatal error. In sending an e-mail to the chairwoman of the School Committee and her (female) assistant, requesting some contract changes, Perrone addressed the two women as "ladies."

Apparently Committee Chair Cynthia Kwiecinski no like. 

Perrone said Kwiecinski later told him addressing the pair of women as “ladies” was a microaggression, and “the fact that he didn’t know that as an educator was a problem.” (Source: Boston Globe)

Perrone apologized for having caused unintended offense, but next thing Perrone knew, the offer had been rescinded. 

“I was shocked,” Perrone told the [Hampshire] Gazette. “I grew up in a time when ‘ladies’ and ‘gentlemen’ was a sign of respect. I didn’t intend to insult anyone.”

The School Committee hasn't commented on this matter, so there's no explanation out there for the revoked offer, other than the "ladies microaggression." But so far, two-plus-two does seem to be four.

There's been plenty of uproar over this issue.

Perrone, who had earlier in his career been Easthampton's high school principal and football coach, has a lot of community support behind him. The local teacher's union has come out and held a rally in his defense. Many are asking the School Committee to revisit its decision; many are decrying that the vote change happened behind closed doors. And many aren't happy that the Committee is jumping in on cancel culture. 

There's also a lot of feeling that this situation could have been handled better. Maybe Perrone shouldn't have spilled the tea so publicly; maybe the School Committee - who better? - should have used it as a teachable moment. Especially since the offense seems so picayune. Come on, Easthampton, it's not as if he called the women hos or bee-otches. 

Those crying microaggression believe that the use of the word "lady" is never appropriate in a professional setting. It's condescending, infantilizing, patronizing, diminishing. 

Ladies.

It's a bit old school, but microaggression?

Not my viewpoint, but I'm an old who came of age in a decidedly non-PC world, where using the term "ladies" would have been the least of anyone's worries. It's just not up there with ethnic, religious, racial, geographic, gender slurs. IMHO.

Ladies. 

I do take umbrage - and did even when I was young - with anyone using the term "young lady." That I do find condescending, infantilizing, patronizing, diminishing. And just plain stupid. Because I always get the impression that the men who use it think it's a bit flattering, when it is, of course, solid BS. (Amazingly, men still use it on me occasionally, mostly in the homeless shelter where I volunteer. I'm 73. I don't know anyone who doesn't find the "young lady" nonsense ridiculous.)

But ladies?

I probably wouldn't use it in a professional setting. Now, anyway. (I may well have in the past.)

But I use it plenty.

When I'm out with women - family and friends, we're "let's go, ladies." I'm on an alumnae committee at my college which, when I was there was "girls" only. When we email back and forth, when we're meeting, we use it all the time. 

In truth, if we didn't use ladies in emails, we'd probably use "all."

In truth, if we didn't use ladies in person, we'd probably use "guys." 

Guys.

That's become another word non grata. 

Another word us olds grew up with. I guess we were just used to the male words being universal. Mankind. No man is an island. Everyman. 

The (then) alma mater of my all girls high school used the word "brotherhood" in it. (One of my close friends wrote the lyrics.)

But ladies. 

It seems friendly, warm, affectionate, maybe a bit ironic. Because, after all, no one I know wants to be associated with the nicey-nice connotations of lady -  ladylike, act like a lady. There ain't no one I know who came of age in the 1960's and 1970's who wants to be associated with. 

Girls who were "ladylike" were saccharine, cloyingly sweet, insipid, boring. What we would have called "pukey."

But ladies? Using the word "ladies?"

How can that possibly be a firing or non-hiring offense?

Yes, I get that some ladies guys folks may not like it. But isn't the right thing to do - the kind (dare I say ladylike) thing - would have been to bring Vito Perrone up to date. Let him know that a word that might work among family and friends is inappropriate for the workplace. And not just rescind an offer for a job that he was deemed best suited for (among the candidates in contention). 

It's not that little things don't matter. But, but, but...

In a world where people are mowing down kids with AR-15's, etc., it sure does seem we have bigger things to focus on.

Turns out, Elizabeth Holmes may not be a one-off

As of this writing, Theranos-founder and convicted fraudster Elizabeth Holmes is scheduled to begin her prison sentence later this month. She has asked the court to allow her to stay out of prison pending her appeal, basing her request on her ties to the community, her "good character," and the fact that she's the mother of a newborn and a toddler. Not clear whether a judge will allow her to be a stay-at-home mom, but there are plenty of mothers - most not from privileged backgrounds, of course - who also have ties to the community, "good character," and newborns and toddlers, and who are serving prison sentences. 

Anyway, however white collar and country club the prison she lands in will be, Holmes is facing serious time: a sentence of 11+ years. 

Who wouldn't want to avoid that? Especially with two little ones to care for.

Of course, as Baretta (Robert Blake) told us back int the 1970's: don't do the crime if you can't do the time. 

Oh, well.

Maybe Holmes shouldn't have conned investors into thinking that her miraculously disruptive blood testing technology worked when it didn't. 

I was thinking that Elizabeth Holmes was something of a one-off - after all, most CEO's are men; and, thus, most white collar criminals are men -  when I saw a piece in The Globe on Magellan Diagnostics.

Magellan Diagnostics is a local company that, like Theranos, makes a miraculously excellent machine for testing. In this case, lead. Like Theranos, their testing process was going to decrease the time it took to get results. The Feds are now alleging that the results were bogus. 

The former president [also CEO] and two former top officials of Magellan Diagnostics, Inc. are now facing federal charges for knowingly selling defective lead testing machines between 2013 and 2016 that generated inaccurate results for tens of thousands of children whose caregivers worried they faced lifelong health issues due to lead exposure, authorities said. (Source: Boston Globe)

Two of those three former Magellan employees - Amy Winslow and Reba Dauost (who was director of quality assurance) - are women. 

Winslow, who is now the CEO of a company called NanoImaging Services, has credentials that are even more sterling than those of Holmes.' Holmes was a Stanford dropout; Winslow graduated from Brown and Harvard Business School. Although Winslow, at 51, is older than Holmes, her picture in her LinkedIn profile shows her to be an attractive blonde. 

Winslow and her colleagues:

...are accused of knowing the machines — then marketed under the names of LeadCare Ultra, LeadCare II, and LeadCare Plus — had a manufacturing flaw that generated false negatives that left caregivers wrongly believing children were safe, according to the office of US Attorney for Massachusetts Rachael Rollins.

The allegations are pretty serious, claiming that the trio lied to both their customers and the FDA about just how reliable their tests were.  

All three are charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to defraud an agency of the United States and introduction of misbranded medical devices into interstate commerce with intent to defraud and mislead, according to Rollins’ office.

Supposedly, the three Magellan executive knew that the devices didn't work in 2013, but went ahead and sold them anyway. And sell they did, reaching 50% market share for U.S. lead testing by 2017. The Feds further allege that they deliberately kept information about the flawed machines from the FDA. (The devices were recalled by the CDC and FDA in 2017.)

The suggestion is that the Magellan crew sat on news that their machines didn't work because they were hoping to get acquired. The company was acquired in 2016, and Winslow's piece of that pie was $2M. 

“It is alleged that Winslow told a Magellan employee to stop studying the malfunction in LeadCare II devices because Magellan needed to maintain ‘plausible deniability,’ ” federal prosecutors allege. The FDA was finally notified of the flaws in 2017 after the sale, but Winslow allegedly sent a “false timeline” to the FDA that did not include internal test results from 2013, prosecutors said.

Winslow's attorney has issued a statement denying the allegations, and it's certainly possible that her deniability may be entirely plausible. We'll see.

At this point, the story is missing some similarities to that of Theranos. It's certainly not mentioned anywhere that Winslow charmed Henry Kissinger, George Schultz, and other old (and not so old) goats into falling in crush with her and her company, as Holmes did. And the Magellan story lacks the salaciousness of Holmes and her (bed)fellow Theranos exec, erstwhile lover boy Sunny Balwani. (He's facing a sentence similar to Holmes.') And the money swirling around Theranos was orders of magnitude beyond the measly $66M that Magellan was sold for. Holmes was a paper billionaire at one point. 

But it sure sounds that, at the core, Magellan was a lot like Theranos. 

Interesting that Elizabeth Holmes may not be a one-off.

A classic case of FAFO

Last Friday, Airman Jack Teixeira was arrested, picked up by a squad of heavily armed FBI agents at his childhood home in the sleepy rural town of Dighton, Massachusetts. 

Teixeira was arrested for leaking classified documents he'd had access to through his work as an IT guy at Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod.

Even with all the puerile nonsense, the gun-nuttery; even with the racist memes, the antisemitic slurs, the Nazi imagery, I still have a wisp of sympathy for Teixeira. He's only 21, a man-child with a pathetic need to be "the man," or at least the Peter Pan to an online tribe of lost boys in desperate need of the calming influence and common sense of a Wendy. He and his online band of hapless brothers - mostly teenagers - gathered in a group named Thug Shaker Central, weren't conspiring to create mayhem IRL, to blow up power stations or slaughter innocents with their AR15s. Mostly, they were just being assholes, playing video war games and trading nasty memes and gun worship, with Teixeira happily assuming the role of lead asshole, a slightly older show-off getting off on the hero worship.

Just pathetic.

Just how pathetic? 

One of the ways they were able to identify Teixeira was because pictures he'd snapped of the documents showed a background that was matched to pictures of the granite countertops in his mother's kitchen that were found on social media. 

So far, the reasons for Teixeira's leak - which may prove harmful, maybe even disastrous, to the Ukrainians; and which may compromise the US's ability to continue to capture Russian military planning info, an ability that has been so helpful to the Ukrainians in their conduct of the war - do not appear to be ideologically or monetarily motivated.

Teixeira's beliefs seem to be some amalgam of Christian fervor, libertarianism, Waco-Ruby Ridge level paranoia, and gaming. And he wasn't looking to make a buck.

No, Teixeira wanted to impress this gang, showing them that he had access to information way beyond the dreams (yeah, I almost went there with wet dreams) of the gun and gaming nerds who looked up to him.

It started as long daily memos with complicated and, at times, confusing summaries of international events that members of the group found difficult to follow. Sometimes he would admonish his younger friends for not taking the information seriously, [group member with the screen name of] Vahki said.

Around October last year, his frustration led him to start posting original documents, including detailed battle maps from the war in Ukraine marked “TOP SECRET.” From October to March, Vahki said, the airman posted about 350 documents to the group. (Source: NY Times)

Teixeira apparently didn't think that the info he was sharing would go beyond the cyber confines of Thug Shaker Central. 

Then a 17 year old Thug Shaker who went by Lucca started doing his own posting in another online group holding convos about the Ukraine war. From there, it eventually found its way into the hands of supporters of the Russian war efforts, and to the intelligence community.

Teixeira realized the jig was up.

In a call with his group, he was pretty frantic:

“Guys, it’s been good — I love you all,” Airman Teixeira said, Vahki recounted. “I never wanted it to get like this. I prayed to God that this would never happen. And I prayed and prayed and prayed. Only God can decide what happens from now on.”

I don't think it's God that's going to be deciding what happens, son. I think it's the U.S. Government. And I can't imagine none of it's going to be good.  

“He was very freaked out,” Vahki said. “This isn’t something like an ‘oopsie-daisy — I’m going to be reprimanded.’ This is life-in-prison type stuff.”

I have no idea whether this crime - stemming largely from immaturity, braggadocio, and stupidly - merits life in prison. But I don't imagine that it's going to be any sort of home confinement, where he can have his afternoon snack on the granite countertop of the island in his mom's kitchen. He's probably looking at serious time in Leavenworth. Time that will mean missing out on his most formative years in terms of personal relationships and career. 

His only hope may be that some of the crazier right-wing nut jobs have taken up Teixeira's "cause" for no other reason than to crap on Joe Biden and the Democrats. Not surprisingly, Marjorie Taylor Greene is leading this ridiculous charge, claiming that the only reason Teixeira was arrested is because he's "white, male, Christian, and anti-war" and an "enemy of the Biden regime."

While it's unlikely that Trump will be back in power, with MTG as his VP, it's at least vaguely possible. And under that grim scenario I can see Jack Teixeira being added to the right-wing pantheon of wronged you, alongside Kyle Rittenhouse, and freed from whatever prison he's doing time in. (Note: my wisp of sympathy for Jack Teixeira is more than I have for Rittenhouse.) And I can see Jack Teixeira being pardoned.

But that's a remote possibility.  (Gulp: at least I hope so.)

So I'll end with this: if ever there was  classic case of FAFO, this may well prove to be it.

I Got Nothin' (Happy Patriots' Day)

Patriots' Day is just about my favorite holiday. In the Pink Slip way back, I blogged about why this day is so wonderful, and I really can't improve on that post of yore. So - assuming that "we" don't get rained out - I'm taking the day off from bloggery and taking the Red Sox game in. (Bonus: on the stroll to and fro

Fenway, I'll get to see a bit of the Marathon madness.)

So, enjoy Why Patriots' Day Rules and enjoy Patriots' Day, even if it's big nothing where you come from.

And, assuming the Sox play AND win, I'll be enjoying it, too. 

Happy Patriots' Day!

Tomorrow makes it ten years on....

Tomorrow, we'll be observing the tenth anniversary of the Boston Marathon Bombing. 

Hard to believe that tomorrow makes it ten years on...

I still have very clear memory of that day...

My husband was in chemo, hoping that second time would be a charm for a cancer recurrence. Turned out, it wasn't, but at the time we were guardedly optimistic. On the morning of April 15th, Jim and I had been over at Mass General Hospital's infusion center in the Yawkey Building. We followed our usual routine: Jim dozed while the chemo dripped in; I sat next to him reading - both of us swathed in the lovely heated blankets the nurses always issued in that way too cool infusion center.

On the way home, as was our custom, we stopped for lunch. 

That day, we ate at Scampo in the Liberty Hotel, right next door to MGH.

We had our usual: a wonderful scallop dish (no longer on the menu: just checked) and a peach Bellini.

Sounds odd to go out to a fancy lunch (and Bellini) just after chemo, but on Day One of a chemo week, Jim was always pumped with steroids and had more energy than he was going to have for the next little while. And he always felt pretty good on Day One, before the poison kicked in.

Anyway, we got home, and I went down for a nap. (C.f., peach Bellini with lunch.) Jim stayed up (c.f., steroids) watching TV.

Later in the afternoon, he woke me up. 

Something was going on at the Marathon.

We glued ourselves to the news. Mostly. Every half hour or so, I'd look out the front door and spot runners milling around in the mylar heat shawls that made them look like baked potatoes. (Boston Common, just outside my front door, is a staging area for the Marathon.) That and cops. Lots of cops.

Here's something I wrote a week later, which still holds up. 

But what a difference ten years makes.

My husband died in early 2014, so by the first anniversary of the Marathon Bombing, I was a widow. A week or so after that first anniversary, I lost my oldest and dearest of friends, also to cancer. (Is there a widow word for bereft of a much-loved high school friend?)

Then there are the changes in the country since then, and I'm having a hard time coming up with anything that's improved since 2013. We are fractured, on edge. Too much pluribus, not enough unum. The terrorists we're worried about aren't evil Chechen refugees who don't care who gets in their way when they're trying to make whatever angry, confused/confusing point they're hoping to make. Instead, it's right wing domestic terrorists (and a handful of crazy leftists) who are armed to the gills with weaponry and conspiracy theories. And whose points are as angry, confused, and confusing as whatever it was the Tsarnaev Brothers were trying to prove with their terror spree.

But I'm not going to dwell on these mf's. Not today, anyway.

I'm going to think of the victims of the bombings, especially that sweet child, Martin Richard, blown to bits at the age of 8, leaving us to heed or ignore his sweet please "No more hurting people..." 

The Richard family decided to memorialize their beloved child with a little gem of a park in Boston's Seaport District. I walk by or through it every once in a while, always pausing to think of Martin, his family, and the terrible day that was April 15, 2023.

Hard to believe we're ten years on...

Closer to home. (On the nightshift.)

When I think about child labor in the US, my mind goes to olden days when poor (often immigrant) children routinely toiled under harrowing conditions in factories, or to more recent days when poor (always immigrant) children toil under harrowing conditions in factories. The ones I've read the most about are Midwest packing factories, where workplace safety and child labor violations are rampant. And which I've blogged about as recently as last November. 

But these terrible working conditions, this god-awful treatment of kids - to my parochial, smug little mind - always happen somewhere else. 

Sure, it happened in Massachusetts, but that was in days of yore. 

Oh, I knew a bit about it. After his father died - my father was 11 years old - he got a part time job, through pull (his uncle was a factory foreman), in a knitting mill in Cherry Valley, Massachusetts. He wasn't actually a factory worker. He was a "candy butcher," selling sandwiches and candy bars to the "girls" who ran the looms. This was in 1924, and a knitting mill was nowhere near as perilous as, say, a steel mill or a coal mine, but there was plenty of danger: exposure to chemicals, crowded conditions, machines that weren't designed for safety. And this was only a bit more than a decade away from the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire in NYC, which killed well over 100 workers. 

Still, my father wasn't working overnight shifts. He wasn't manning (boying?) a machine. From the stories he told, he rather enjoyed himself. He worked for a couple of hours after school, a couple of days a week and on Saturdays. It didn't get in the way of his schoolwork, his participation in sports, or his overall boyhood (which, in his telling, was an unfettered adventure). 

Nonetheless, it probably wasn't the best idea on the face of the earth to let an 11 year old kid work in a factory. 

Anyway, the knitting mill chapter of my father's adventurous boyhood took place nearly 100 years ago. That was then, this is now. And kids are working hard shifts in factories and other workplaces in Massachusetts.

One kid - a Guatemalan refugee named Walter - worked in a plastics factory in Central Massachusetts. 

From 7 p.m. to 7 a.m., Walter trimmed plastic with sharp knives and retrieved hot molds stuck inside machines, then went straight to Framingham High School, bleary eyed, often falling asleep in class. He later got a job at a massive commercial greenhouse, cleaning machines that planted and harvested produce, sometimes working until 5 a.m. In warm weather, he worked 50 hours a week — using his earnings to pay rent and help his family back home, as well as a 16-year-old sister who recently arrived here. (Source: Boston Globe)

Interestingly, I had a number of high school and college friends who, back in the late 1960's/early 1970's worked in plastics and other ghastly factories in places like Central Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Hampshire. (I spent a summer in a boot factory.)

There were a lot of factories in New England back then, and it didn't kill any of us to work in them. But we were all doing it as a summer job, working day shifts, and knowing we were going back to school in September. 

I would have thought that low-skill factories in Massachusetts would have gone extinct by now. After all, we're high tech, biotech, financial machers, big brain consultants. And this is true. 

Massachusetts has fewer large factories and meat-packing plants than other states, and advocates say egregious labor trafficking is less common here.

But still, migrant children are processing fish in New Bedford, roofing houses in the Boston suburbs, toiling deep into the night in greenhouses in Central Massachusetts, and working in restaurant kitchens everywhere.

Many of these kids are "unaccompanied minors," sent by their families to get away from violence and support the family back home. A good portion (over 25 percent) of the 2.700 "unaccompanied minors" (many ending up working in factories) who showed up in Massachusetts in 2022 are under the age of 15. Many of these kids owe money to the "coyotes" who smuggled them in. Being undocumented and away from home alone, let alone under the age of 15, makes the child worker issue more complicated. (Undocumented workers are less likely to report terrible, unlawful working conditions for fear of being deported. Plus they and their family need the money. Hovering over the already terrible conditions: cartel involvement.)

In many cases, teen employment violates laws regulating hours and exposure to risky jobs in risky workplaces. But these regulations aren't all that well-enforced. 

Even if the existing regulations are threadbare in terms of enforcement, there are a number of states trying to undo the guardrails that are nominally in place. 

In Arkansas, the state’s labor department is no longer required to certify workers under 16. A bill introduced in Iowa would allow children as young as 14 to work in meat coolers and industrial laundries, while a Minnesota measure would allow 16-year-olds to work on construction sites.

Then there's the shame of Massachusetts:

In the seafood-processing plants that line the New Bedford waterfront, largely immigrant workforces use sharp knives to filet fish and operate powerful machines to extract shellfish, often in freezing temperatures. At one plant, two workers were killed within five years after getting caught up in the machines.

Manuela was 15 when she began working in a fish processing factory, Finicky Pet Food. The pet food might have been finicky, but the working conditions suggest that the factory owners weren't. Manuela worked: 

...feeding fish into a machine 12 hours a day, five days a week, for the next five years. The floor was slippery with water and blood, the fish bones cut into her hands, and the cold made her fingers and toes go numb. Her male co-workers leered at her.

Welcome to America, kiddo.

My father's stint in the knitting mill was always presented to us as a fun gig. My father would entertain us by acting out his sales technique. "Sang-wiches. Get your sang-wiches." And bragging about his promotion to bobbin boy, bringing giant bobbins of yarn to the women working the looms. The women who tipped him better got bobbins that didn't have any knots in the yarn that could slow down the weaving and hinder a weaver's ability to achieve her piecework rate. 

But that was then - and a not so terrible then at that, at least for my father at work in Duffy's Mill. This is the terrible now.

Shame on these companies that allow anyone to work under such terrible conditions, let alone kids. 

I'm all for kids having low-key part time and summer jobs. And I'm not all that bothered if those jobs are ill-paid. But kids working a full, grueling nightshift in a dangerous workplace? Shame on the companies who are exploiting children in this way.

I'm embarrassed for my home state letting companies get away with this, and for not doing enough of anything to help these poor kids out.

What's wrong with us?

Let's run this one up the flagpole. Way up.

Columbia Falls is a small town in the middle of nowhere Maine. Actually, it's not in the middle of nowhere. It's in the middle of the poorest county in the state.

But even the poorest, middle of nowhere places have prosperous locals.

The Worcesters of Maine's Washington County own the Worcester Wreath Company, which sells general-purpose wreaths, and also runs Wreaths Across America which, each December, decorates graves at Arlington National and other veterans' cemeteries.

The Worcesters are big on patriotic gestures - and, don't get me wrong, the holiday wreath gesture is sweet - and they'd also like to boost their poor, middle-of-nowhere community. (And, I guess, turn a buck or two while they're at it.)

What they'd like to do is:

...turn hundreds of acres of wilderness into a billion-dollar patriotic theme park — complete with a flagpole that, if built, would rival the height of the third tallest building in America...

...if built, the Flagpole of Freedom Park would take the family’s mission to honor veterans to new heights. Its namesake flagpole would soar 1,461 feet high (exactly 1,776 feet above sea level), and become the tallest in the world by several hundred feet. It would fly an American flag the size of one-and-a-half football fields.

The pole itself would be a multi-story building topped by an observation deck with views of Maine in all directions.

The surrounding park, as envisioned by the Worcesters, would feature theaters, restaurants, a hotel, stores, hiking trails, museum exhibits, and ticketed rides and educational attractions like the “Halls of History” and “Village of Old Glory,” that tell the story of the nation’s wars. Visitors would be ferried on gondolas criss-crossing above the trees... 

...“This will be a place that’s known as the most patriotic place there is,” Rob Worcester, the project’s cofounder and managing director, said in a promotional video last year.(Source: Boston Globe)

Hmmm. If I were going to build a theme park - patriotic or other - I don't think I'd build that theme park in a location that, however beautiful, gets crappy weather most of the year. But maybe that's just me.

Not to mention that most of the folks who live within somewhat easy driving distance (Boston is five miles hours away) are not the kind of folks who would make even an easy-peasy drive to see the world's tallest flagpole. Sure, if they were on their way to somewhere else in Maine they might drop by to check out a roadside attraction. But Flagpole of Freedom Park as a "must see" destination? I just don't see it.

Then there's that "most patriotic place" notion. The Worcesters can claim all they want that they're looking for a non-partisan means to unify the country, but, for better or worse, "most patriotic place" falls on these decidedly blue-state ears as right-wing codespeak.

Yes, we should all agree that we owe the veterans who have served the nation some modicum of respect AND (more important, at least to me) decent treatment: first-class healthcare, especially when dealing with both physical and mental wounds; assistance transitioning (education, jobs, housing) back to civilian life; discounted shopping at the PX.

But I believe it is foolhardy to worship at the altar of the military.

Here's what the park has to say about their purpose:

Flagpole of Freedom Park is an initiative of historic scale and scope fueled by love of country, respect for veterans, and a thirst for this country’s storied history. At the heart of this apolitical destination is a purpose driven company whose core goal is to help build unity and pride for America. (Source: Flagpole of Freedom)

When I read "storied history," I interpret this as the sort of picking and choosing that the powers that currently be in the State of Florida seems to have in mind when they mindlessly attack "CRT" and "wokeness." A crusade that has produced the idiocy of a group of editors proposing a revision of the story of Rosa Parks that omits the somewhat salient fact that she was asked to give her bus seat up because she took a "whites only" seat, not because someone else just happened to want that seat. 

There is so much more to patriotism than serving in the military. There are so many more ways to express patriotism without signing up. 

And, of course, there is so much more to our storied history than just the good stuff. And there is plenty of good stuff. 

The genius of the Founding Fathers. The brilliance of the Declaration of Independence. A pretty good track record when it comes to democracy, even in these challenging times. The welcome mat historically put out for immigrants - at least for European immigrants, a group that includes my Irish great-grandparents and my German grandparents (and toddler mother), who were fleeing poverty and, in the case of my German grandparents, who emigrated in the 1920's, war. 

Also great? The industrial might that helped win World War II. The Marshall Plan that rebuilt a devastated Europe. 

The creation of a large and prosperous middle class - achieved by those immigrant great-grandparents and grandparents, and passed along to their children and grandchildren.

There's also all the good stuff around our history of discovery and innovation; the brilliance of a culture (music, film, literature, art...) that perpetually fires shots heard round the world. 

But there are also a few not so grand and glorious things we need to learn about: treatment of native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, Know Nothingism, the treatment of Japanese citizens during World War II, our shameful refusal to allow Jews in when the Nazi handwriting was writ large on the wall. Our gun culture, our record on incarceration, racism....The sad dismantling of our middle class, which sadly was never available equally to all Americans to begin with. 

If every student in Germany can learn about the Holocaust, while also learning about the good of their nation, our kids should be able to learn about why Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus. 

Anyway, as it turns out, when the Flagpole of Freedom project ran it up the flagpole, the citizens of Columbia Fall voted to put any plans for such a large development on temporary hold. This would give town officials some time to decide whether the benefits (jobs) outweigh the negatives (overwhelming the area, costly infrastructure).

The Worcester family hasn't yet given up all hope that the project will go forth, and acknowledges that the town should exercise caution when it comes to such a major development. 

The plans for Flagpole of Freedom strike me as a bit extreme. But go big or go home, I guess. That and some wishful thinking along the lines of 'if they build it, they will come.'

In real life, I don't think "they" will.

Meanwhile, there are certainly plenty of places where Americans can go to learn about American history (including the not so grand and glorious stuff). There's the Freedom Trail in Boston that takes you by Old North "One if by Land" Church. The battlefields of Concord and Lexington. (I defy anyone to visit Concord (North) Bridge, where patriots "fired the shot heard 'round the world," and read Ralph Waldo Emerson's beautiful poem "Concord Hymn" and not experience a bit of a patriotic tingle.

Learn about the Salem Witch trials. Visit Newport and see where the swells lived in the Gilded Age (and compare and contrast it to current times). Climb the Statue of Liberty. Look for my mother's name on the Wall on Ellis Island.

See Gettysburg. Go to all the monuments in Washington, including the Vietnam War memorial, covered with names in a way that's not joyful like those on Ellis Island, but which tells a big, terrible part of our history. Visit the Capitol Building. And your state's state house. Visit the Museum of African American History. And the Smithsonian. Walk around Arlington Cemetery. I'm sure that walk would be especially moving when the Worcester wreaths are there. 

Etc.

There's really no end to historic places throughout our country, places that tell the full story of who and what we are and how we got here in ways that I don't think that Flagpole of Freedom ever will. 

Now I just need to think of a place I'd like to see this summer.