Who Will Know the Bluenose in the Sun?

  

 

 

Last weekend Emily and I saw the “Tall Ships” as they sailed into Boston Harbor. In 1976, I witnessed the first Tall Ships celebration in Baltimore, but I can’t recall much. You’d think I’d remember something like that, but Popeye the Sailor Man, I’m not.  (Toot toot!)

When friends envied me for seeing the ships in Boston, I smiled. In all truth, they’re not all that interesting if you’re a landlubber. By the time they come into close view their sails are struck because, well, they use wind power and you can’t approach a harbor that way. We could have seen them in full sail had we been on one of the Harbor islands, but that would’ve entailed arising at a time officially known as “Stupid Early” to make the 2-hour drive to a parking garage, grab the subway to Haymarket, and sprint to the ferry landing.

Plus, having seen “schooner” races, we know that sailing ships move slowly. Even “clipper” ships don’t go faster than 22 knots, which is 25 mph for fellow landlubbers. In Massachusetts, we drive faster than that in school zones. (I don’t mean nearby the school; I mean in the hallways.) I put “schooner” and “clipper” in quotes because they’re all just “boats” to me. I don’t sail, don’t like being on boats, and when forced aboard I think of all the sea shanties that commemorate wrecks. I had nightmares for a week after reading Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm. The thought of being hundreds of miles out to sea is that of pre-Columbian flat-earth mariners who marked the edge of the world with: “There be monsters.”

I’m not knocking those who enjoy sailing. I do wonder, though, why so many devotees have repeated the joke about the two best days of a sailor’s life: the day they buy a boat and the day they sell it. Whadda I know? I thought that a capstan was where you hung your beanie-copter and a barque something dogs do. But my eyes tell me it takes a lot of skill to sail a small craft, let alone one of those huge boats in the distance that made me grab Emily’s hand and cry, “We’ve only got half an hour to get out of here before the pirates land and commence pillaging.”

One ship, though, made me grin so hard my ears were hidden: Bluenose II. It’s a rebuild of the first Bluenose, which is legendary in Canadian history. It was a fishing schooner launched in 1917 from Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. It also raced and captured the first Fisherman’s Trophy by beating an American ship. Its crew held on to that trophy for the next 17 years, until engine-powered ships made sails obsolete. The Bluenose then plied the Grand Banks, a fish-rich region whose precise boundary between Canada and the U.S. remains under dispute.  

As you can imagine, anytime Canada bests the U.S. in anything, it’s a moment of pride. The Bluenose is commemorated on the Canadian dime, paintings, posters, stamps, legends, and a song written by Stan Rogers. He’s one of my all-time favorites. Bluenose I met a sorry fate. It was sold in 1942, was wrecked on a reef off Haiti in 1944, broke apart, and sank. No one died, but no one knows its exact location either, though many have tried to find it. Bluenose II was built in 1963, but had to be completely rebuilt between 2010-13. The steam-ferry and a catamaran between Bar Harbor, Maine, and Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, has sometimes borne the name M.V.* Bluenose, but few would confuse those boring boats with the real thing. (Even worse, the catamaran is infamous for its malfunctions.)

We were near the Charlestown section of Boston Harbor where Bluenose II put up its canvas to turn around. As it sailed by, people cheered and shouts of “We love Canada!” rung out. The crew was elated and began dancing and waving. It was a beautiful moment.  

Emily and I still dislike boats, though we’ve been on many.  We hope to get back to Prince Edward Island, but we will drive through New Brunswick–motto: “The Most Boring Province in All of Canada”– and drive across the Confederation Bridge. Apologies to all who love to sail, but being atop water makes me hum Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.”

 

Rob Weir

* MV simply means motor vessel.

 

Untamed Coast: Mystery and Thriller in Alaska

 

 

 

UNTAMED COAST (2026)

By Kevin C. Morris

Ballantine Books, 304 pages.

★★★★★

Available after 9/1/26

 

I have not yet been to Alaska, though I had an Alaskan friend when I was in grad school. She told me that it’s a hard place to live, but that once it gets in your blood, it doesn’t let go. I reckon that’s why it holds a reputation as a refuge for those who keep to themselves, value independence, and prefer to live in the rough. Still another friend spends part of her summer volunteering at Katmai National Park and tells me that words and pictures cannot do Alaska justice.

 

Author Kevin C. Morris takes us there in Untamed Coast, a debut novel that reads like it came from an experienced hand. It is at once, a mystery, a thriller tour through Southeast Alaska, women’s fiction (if there is such a thing!), a tale of missed signals and healing, and a wrong that took 80 years to resolve. Morris jumps us between three different time periods: 1938, the 1980s, and 2017. In the last of these, Marco(ni) Franco is along fishing from his boat Radio Flyer. Pay attention to names in this novel, as about the only thing Morris throws away are fish entrails before their cleaned bodies are tossed into the onboard freezer. Marco is one of those people who moved to Alaska to work out anguish of his wife’s death six months earlier. He’d be a recluse were it not necessary to interact with those at bars, equipment stores, and boatyards.

 

Morris doesn’t mechanically divide his novel into three separate periods; he trusts readers to connect the dots. The 1930s were part of the Great Depression. A man named Joe Baxter lives alone in Radioville, a communications island. His day job lies on a nearby island where miners pan for gold that will never be theirs. At the end of each day, Joe collects and tallies the gold the miners found. Security is tight and the boss’ network lets him know if anyone shows up trying to assay gold. Joe holds his job because he is scrupulously honest–until he’s not! Joe, Sam, and the oily Virgil hatch a scheme, though Joe also “banks” some gold in a unique depository.

 

In the 1980s we meet Anya, who’s not so sure about Alaska. She has known comfort, but she cut that possibility by marrying a loser. He didn’t seem that way at first to anyone except Anya’s parents, but he jumps from scheme to scheme and makes a hash of each. He has run up a large debt and convinces Anya to move to Alaska. Alas, he drinks heavily and violently abuses Anya. Try as she will, Anya can’t avoid being beaten–until she does!

The sections on the 1980s and 2017 allow plenty of space for Morris to expound upon the vastness of Alaska and its dangers. Radioville was abandoned in 1938. Bill Bryson once said of Australia that there were more things there than can kill you than anywhere else in the world. Alaska would probably rank a close second. Those who fish its waters generally pack a survival suit, but some never put them on because for much of the year the suits would not prevent hypothermia. We also read of abrupt killer storms; unpredictable calving glaciers; on-land carnivorous brown bears, and wolves; and winter snowfalls that can crush or asphyxiate the unprepared. Yet, when an old pal from Marco’s earlier life visits, the boat tour to which he is treated seems like an icy magic kingdom. By the time they enter a narrow passage near Radioville and Chichagot Isalnd, where miners once toiled, though, Marco’s friend is pretty sure that they are going to die in the rough seas, wind, and ice. Marco says otherwise, but he knows that there is a distinct possibility of that.

 

Radioville is the novel’s key. Marco once picked up an SOS on an obsolete radio band while fishing nearby, a woman calling for help. Who and where is she? No one else heard it and the Coast Guard has no reports of a distressed boat or missing person. Has the cold and grief made Marco as daft as some say he is?  

 

What a series tales Morris weaves. And weave them he does! Remember that Morris doesn’t throw anything away. A few readers have criticized the novel’s feminist ending, but I think they failed to connect a few dots.

 

Rob Weir

 

#UntamedCoast #NetGalley

 

Colorized photo; Film in B & W

 

 

SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950)

Directed by Billy Wilder

Paramount Pictures, 110 minutes, not-rated

★★★★★

 

Sunset Boulevard is a masterpiece. The Hollywood Establishment hated it when it first came out, but not because Billy Wilder directed a bad film; many thought Wilder had disgraced Hollywood. That was certainly the opinion of director/producer Louis B. Mayer. In other words, it rang too close to true. (When Mayer made an insensitive remark, Wilder told Mayer to commit an act which is physically impossible.) Time’s verdict is that Sunset Boulevard is among the greatest films Hollywood ever made.

 

Early cinema was silent until 1929, when The Jazz Singer added the term “talkie” to the lexicon. What happened to all of the actresses who never transitioned to sound? Think of such famous names as Clara Bow, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, and Norma Shearer. Even the principal character’s name, Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), was a mashup of silent stars Norma Talmadge and Florence Desmond. Swanson, of course, jumped at the part when offered as she was among the old stars put out to pasture. Was the picture a film noir, a searing drama, a black comedy, a period piece, or a faux biography? The best answer is to say Sunset Boulevard was all of those things.

 

The eponymous street was where oodles of silent stars built elaborate mansions. In the film, Desmond resides in a sprawling Neo-Renaissance/art deco estate occupied by just Norma, a pet chimpanzee, and her devoted butler Max von Mayerling (Max von Stroheim). Our first look at it is of murdered writer Joe Gillis (William Holden) lying face down in the swimming pool. Gillis is also the film’s narrator, though we don’t know from where, as he tells of the six-months before he became dead in Desmond’s pool! He suffered from writer’s block, took a drive, got a flat, and wandered into what he assumed was an abandoned property. He is stopped by Max, but Norma thought Joe was the underkeeper for her deceased chimp and is ushered into her presence. It takes Joe a moment, but recognition led to one of the most famous exchanges in movie history: “You’re Norma Desmond. You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!” She frostily replies, “I am big, it’s the pictures that got small!”

 

Joe hasn’t written a decent script in so long that his bank account is as dry as Death Valley. Before he knows what hit him, he’s in Norma’s employ, living in her home, trying to find time to write, and feeling creepy about the attention Norma sheds on him, not to mention that she thinks that Joe’s writing the part of Salome for her new film for Cecil B. DeMille. In private Joe calls her the “waxworks,” but he has no idea what’s next.

 

His eye is focused on Betty Schaefer, an aspirant screen writer dating his friend Artie Green (Jack Webb). Betty also thinks that Joe’s recent scripts are horrible, but with Artie traveling a lot, she needs a mentor to get her started, and she’s kind of falling for Joe. That too is bad news, as Norma has come to think of Joe as her late-in-life suitor. Though it revolts him, Joe becomes a de facto gigolo who shares Norma’s bed. When he tries to let her down easy, Norma slashes her wrists and becomes more and more delusional, even to the point of driving onto the Paramount lot to visit DeMille to discuss her role as Salome. (Paramount really only wanted to rent her 1929 Isotta Fraschini automobile.) Joe is trapped and returns to her boudoir.

 

Seldom has delusion and mental decay been so raw on the screen. Swanson’s performance is now recognized as a tour de force. The film garnered 11 Oscar nominations and won just three, but it truly a case of a movie that, despite its period-feel, has weathered better than it was received. Hedda Hopper’s customs were equally effective; she dressed Swanson in what might be called shabby elegance. Her garb was deliberately outdated, but just barely so. DeMille, Buster Keaton, Harry Warner, and gossip columnist Hedda Hooper played themselves, which lent the verisimilitude that so troubled Mayer. And check out the cinematography of John Seitz, who gave the film its noir gloss.

 

By the way, the butler did it, just not what you think he did. What more can one say about a film that concludes with another unforgettable line: “I’m ready for my closeup, Mr. DeMille.”

 

Rob Weir

A Tax on Dreams and a Very Unusual Movie

 

 

 

 

 

STRAWBERRY MANSION (2021)

Written and Directed by Albert Birney and Kentucker Audley

Music Box Film, 91 minutes, Not-rated

★★★

 

Strawberry Mansion is a film so bizarre that it makes Hundreds of Beavers seem like a documentary of the fur trade.  It is the brainchild of Albert Birney and Kentucker [sic] Audley and you can take your pick of what category into which to plug it: science fiction, comedy, surrealism, fantasy, or a warning shot across the bow. Unless you were at Sundance in 2021 or in one of the 27 theaters that screened in during its 11-week run, you’ve not seen it. It made just $54,762 during those 11 weeks and the only thing we can definitely say is that it is indeed an independent film. I can’t imagine taking any attempted synopsis of this film before a group of high-roller producers.

I don’t mean to imply I didn’t like it; it’s more a case of not having the foggiest idea of how to explain it as I’m not sure what just happened on my screen. The year is 2035 and the government has figured out how to tax people’s dreams. The film blurs the line between dreaming and being awake. Early on we see James Preble in an entirely pink room: walls, furniture, cups, utensils…. An obsequious pink-suited man called Buddy (Linas Phillips) comes bearing a bucket of Cap’n Kelly’s Chicken and a tall cup of Red Rocket Cola. He tries to entice James to try a chicken and gravy milkshake and, heaven help him, James likes it. What in the name of Col. Sanders is going on? Buddy reappears from time to time, always with chicken and cola to make James believe that he is James’ only friend. Is he, or is a glad-handed Satan as ad man?

James is a dream auditor. By 2035, all our dreams are recorded on a small stick that can placed into a computer to determine how much tax is owed. James is dispatched to the home of an old woman named Arabella–call me “Bella –Isadora (Penny Fuller), who lives alone with her turtle “Sugar baby,” and has not submitted her dream stick or paid her dream tax in quite some time. She lives a quirky remote home, the movie’s titular Strawberry Mansion, and Bella immediately offers pie and a place to stay while James does his audit. James tells Bella that she is supposed to keep track of all her dreams and she smiles and says she has; it’s all stored on tapes: cassettes, VHS, Betamax, reel-to-reel…. Stacks and stacks of them. To make sense of them he has to don a cross between a diving helmet, the head of a 1950s robot, and Australian bandit Ned Kelly’s iron mask. But James keeps seeing things: a young version of Bella, human-like creatures covered by green foliage, and occasional scarier images.

James learns from Bella that she and her late husband discovered that advertisers figured out how to infiltrate our dreams. Imagine if you were in the middle of a very pleasant or terrifying dream that was interrupted by commercials! Bella also recounts that she and her husband built a device to shut off the commercials. What happens next is so weird you’ll need to remind yourself that it might be dream logic. James will spend what seems like years being on a desert island with Bella, losing her, and seeking her. They will dine in a restaurant with a frog waiter, run away from Buddy, and then lose each other for “years” when James appears as a ship’s commander whose crew consists of two life-sized talking rats named Richard and Marcus. From time-to-time James encounters the terrifying Blue Demon. The Demon, like the Rats and the Frog wear what appear to be papier-mache heads. Getting hit on the head with a bowling pin presage some of these… what? Dreams? Shifts of reality? When he finds Bella again, she has to remove all the greenery he has acquired as one of the grass/foliage figures that line her property.

Is James some sort of chosen one to save humankind from rampant commercialism? Just a nerd who got in the way? A figment of his own imagination? There is an explanation of sorts and a possible happy ending, but who’s to say whether it’s just another flight from reality? Don’t ask me! All I can say is that Strawberry Mansion is my new standard of a weird movie.

 

Rob Weir

 

Rob Weir

Fallen Angel (1945): A Blend of Good and Silly

 

FALLEN ANGEL (1945).

Directed by Otto Preminger

20^th Century Fox, 97 minutes, not rated.

★★ ½

 

There are at least three other movies titled Fallen Angel, but his one is from 1945, just as World War II was ending. In American mythology, the troops came home to a booming economy. That’s not so; it took several years for the economy to convert to peacetime use. Fallen Angel stars, Dana Andrews as Eric Stanton, a veteran but also a drifter. He jumps on a bus headed for San Francisco, but is booted out in the small town of Walton, California, as he can’t afford the entire fare.

 

Stanton decides to stay in Walton for a while, because he’s a grifter as well as a drifter. He enters Pop’s Eats and bums a meal from Pop (Percy Kilbride) and overhears him telling Mark Judd (Charles Bickford), an ex-New York City policeman now working in Walton, that he worries about where Stella (Linda Darnell) might be. Judd tells Pop and others in the greasy spoon diner not to fret because Stella is a free spirit who will appear when she feels like it. Sure enough, the lusty Stella comes waltzing in as if nothing is out of the ordinary. She’s quite a looker, but is not impressed by Eric’s pick-up banter. Eric nonetheless identifies Stella as flirtatious and licentious, so he is not deterred by her rejection.

 

Eric needs money. At this point of the film, we have a drifter pursuing a femme fatale, classic film noir material. Alas, Director Otto Preminger stuck too carefully to the forgettable novel from which the script devolved. A contrived set-up leads Eric to the Faye sisters. He encounters Joe (Olin Howard) the “drummer” for a mentalist/fortune teller, but he’s a poor salesman. Eric grabs some tickets and hands out some for free, gambling that word of mouth will swell the box office. He’s right, but he also has to convince “Professor” Madley (John Carradine) to jazz up his show. Madley’s performance is trite, but when channels the spirit of Abraham Mills, everyone is drawn to his instant séance, as Mills was a beloved mayor and the richest man in Walton.

 

Eric continues to see Stella, but so too do other men (single and married). The implication is that Stella is also a hooker, but Eric finds himself falling for her. Stella’s morals aside, she has a clear goal; she wants to marry a handsome man who can provide her with a home of her own. That’s not Eric! He’s making some money from the professor, but not enough to buy a house. Eric tries another scheme to make money. The séance attracted the attention of Clara Mills (Anne Revere), the eldest daughter of the late Abraham Mills. She doesn’t think much of Eric, but his goal is to marry Clara’s younger sister, the naïve June (Alice Faye), the heir to most of the Mills fortune. If he can marry June and gain access to some of her dough, he can divorce her and provide for Stella. Sure enough, June is swept off her feet by the smooth-talking Eric. Their honeymoon evening is not exactly poems and flowers. Eric waits until June is asleep and goes to Stella. Big mistake!

 

That very evening, Stella is murdered and nearly every man in Walton who dated Stella, including Eric, is a suspect. Judd tries to beat a confession out of Dave Atkins (Bruce Cabot but he’s not Judd’s real target, and Eric knows it. He convinces June to flee with him to a dingy hotel room in San Francisco until he can work out who killed Stella. You might think that June would give him the bum’s rush, but she actually loves Eric.

 

Again, Preminger waded into water so shallow that Eric’s revelation of the true killer would scarcely get your feet moist. Preminger had a hard time getting this film made. Andrews was not his choice for leading man, but Alice Faye had been a big musical star for 20^th century Fox and wanted him. She was also promised she could sing a torch song for the film, but it didn’t make the final cut. Nonetheless, Faye called the shots, which perhaps explains the film’s unevenness. Andrew is actually very good as Eric, but so many things were over the top that we think of the film that could’ve been rather than what was.

 

Rob Weir

 

The Man With the Golden Arm Highlights Sinatra's Acting Chops

 

Preminger wouldn't allow anyone to replace the above design

 

 

 

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN ARM (1955)

Directed by Otto Preminger

United Artists, 119 minutes, Not-rated and Not-approved

★★★

 

Younger readers might not know that crooner Frank Sinatra was also a pretty good actor. He was the star of The Man with the Golden Arm, a 1955 movie directed by Otto Preminger. Perhaps only a director with the gravitas and moxie of Preminger could have made it. It was based upon a 1949 novel by Nelson Algren, and the first American film of the sound era to deal with heroin addiction.

 

The movie rights to Algren’s book were sold to John Garfield in 1949, who planned to star in it. The first script was rejected by the Movie Production Code Authority (MPCA) and the Catholic League of Decency (CLD). Garfield died in 1952, and when filming started as “An Otto Preminger Production,” Algren sued based his 1949 contract promising he’d get a large percentage of the royalties. (Algren ran out of money and dropped his suit.) Preminger began to shoot before the script got MCPA or CLD approval, which were not forthcoming. Preminger simply ignored them. Moreover, the script was sent to both Sinatra and Marlon Brando; Sinatra agreed almost immediately as he was still angry that Brando got the lead in On the Waterfront.

 

Sinatra played the role of Frankie Machine, an addict recently released from a federal narcotics farm in Kentucky. The old crowd welcomes him back to Chicago, including Sparrow (Arnold Stang), an oddball–perhaps mentally slow– who makes his living selling street dogs, even if he has to put shoe polish on canines for those who want a “black” dog. Sparrow, in turn, follows Frankie around like a puppy. In lockup, Frankie learned to play the drums and harbors dreams of landing a place in a big band jazz outfit. He also insists that he’s clean and wants no part of drugs, no matter how often street provider Zero Schwiefka (Robert Strauss) offers, or Frankie’s wheelchair-bound wife “Zosh” Sophia (Eleanor Parker) begs him to help her relieve her pain. She too clings to him like glue and, though he doesn’t love her, he feels beholden as she was injured in an auto accident when Frankie was driving while drunk.

 

Zero also wants Frankie to “deal” for him, by which is meant a card dealer for Schwiefka’s all-night, high-stakes poker games. Frank is also burning the midnight oil pursuing Molly Novotny, a stripper and escort. She was Frank’s flame before he married Zosh out of guilt. Band tryouts further exhaust Frankie and Schwiefka is only too happy to stick a needle in his arm to give him a boost or bail him out when he’s pinched in a suit stolen for him by Sparrow.

 

Preminger’s Chicago bears resemblance to the slums of Hoboken in Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront–gritty, filled with temptation, and easy-to-fall. As Zosh guilt-trips Frankie to the point where he’s smothered by her, he retreats to Molly’s first-floor flat and rekindles their romance. There’s a lot about Zosh that’s fishy, even as Frankie spirals downward into new addiction. Why, for example, has “Nifty Louie” Fomorowski (Darren McGavin) been hanging around with Zosh? Even as he becomes more and more dependent on a fix, Frank knows the wheels are about to fly off for him, though he’s on the eve of realizing his dream. When he tries to bum fix money from Molly, she proposes a different solution; she will help him if he agrees to go cold turkey. If not, she will never see him again.

 

The Man with the Golden Arm implies that the golden arm is Frankie’s drumming riffs, but we all know that the real reference is to injecting heroin and/or morphine. By today’s standard, the film is predictable and melodramatic, but Sinatra is terrific in it. His was one of the most extended and harrowing depictions of going cold turkey in cinematic history. Call it also a film with an A-level cast: Sinatra, Novak, McGavin, and Strauss were all big stars, even if the eccentric Stang stole a few scenes. The film didn’t do as well as On the Waterfront, but it did get three Oscar nominations and was added to the National Film Registry. The jazz soundtrack from Elmer Bernstein (not related to Leonard) was big hit, as was Saul Bass’s poster design.

 

Rob Weir

This July 4th Feels Wrong

What is July Fourth to a Progressive?

 

 

Americans are gearing up for the July 4^th holiday in various ways. For some it’s a way to express their patriotism; for others, a show of support for American troops or relatives in uniform. A hardy few want to revel in Donald Duck’s Trump’s warped view of American might and his lies about prosperity and global respect. I suspect, though, that most Americans simply see July 4^th as an opportunity to have a picnic, see fireworks, or–in that greatest of American spectacles–take advantage of retail sales.

My title is a riff off a famous 1852 speech delivered by Frederick Douglass titled “The Meaning of July Fourth to the Negro.” https://masshumanities.org/files/programs/douglass/speech_complete.pdf

Douglass reminded us that one’s standing in society is more important than bang-the-drum symbolism. I recognize that this July 4^th is the 250^th birthday of the United States. I recall driving to Boston to watch fireworks explode across the Charles and listen to the late Arthur Fiedler lead the Boston Pops in patriotic tunes. That was when Gerald Ford was president, and one year after the Vietnam War ended and Richard Nixon resigned as POTUS for his role in the Watergate coverup. (Let the last one sink in; even Nixon had more honor than the national embarrassment currently in the White House.) I was ready to celebrate after years of protest against the war. I was also glad to see the back of Nixon, though I felt a minor twinge of pity as he was clearly suffering from a combination of acute depression and alcohol abuse.

For the 250^th, I’m thinking of donning black mourning garb and lamenting America’s fall from grace. This year’s celebration will feature Kremlin-like military spectacles, White House bombast, and attacks on all I hold important and sacred. I’d not be surprised were molten gold to drip from Trump’s forked tongue. It’s this simple, I am a pacifist Quaker who believes truth matters, knows a conman when I see one, believe that starting wars to look strong is an evil act. Sending fishermen to their deaths and pretending they are drug smugglers is pathetic and immoral.

American might is a myth, as is Trump’s “leadership.” Some of what he says is risible; a lot of it is so dangerous that what Trump likes to call the “radical left” is not exaggerating in calling it fascism. During the Trump years I’ve made it a habit to vacation in New England, where sanity still reigns; Canada, where it never left; and Europe, which has an educated population that can detect BS. In New England, Trump is an annoyance in the way a carbuncle is an annoyance. We get grumpy because we can’t wait to have him excised. Canadians fear him because they think he’s after something and they are probably right; Canada has more than 20 percent of the world’s potable water. So does the U.S. but almost all of it is in the Great Lakes shared with Canada. Subtract the lakes, not coincidentally bordering blue states, and it drops to seven percent. Even deep aquifers are disproportionately concentrated in the Northeast, Middle Atlantic, and the Far West.

Most Western Europeans act as if Trump is irrelevant. Neither they nor Canadians hate Americans. They feel sorry for us and say so in private conversations. They can see that their countries have more services, a stronger infrastructure, better schools and, yes, more freedom. Aside from a handful of Baltic states with a history of authoritarian rule, few Europeans see the U.S. as enviable. Their primary fear is that military power is under the control of an impulse-driven manchild who confuses missiles with the size he’d like his phallus to be. Can you say Armageddon?

As for me, I’m tired of trying to explain things to hardcore Trumpanzees. I don’t think all of his supporters are uneducated hillbillies. Some dislike taxes and have made out well, the white working class correctly feels left out by Democratic technocrats, and some vote out of party loyalty. Perhaps the majority feel lost in modern America and fear for their futures. It’s not wrong, though, to see a large swarm of Trumpanzees as militaristic rah-rah boys, racists, end-of-the-world evangelicals, isolationists, misogynists, and losers. The hardcore is immune to reason and would turn back progress. On July 4^th I will mourn the loss of democracy.

RW