No Kings 2.0

We went to our county’s No Kings 2.0 protest which conveniently took place within walking distance for us. I am still getting over COVID so I participated wearing an N95, and didn’t do the entire march. It was a very good crowd; I saw an estimate of 4,500 people.

The goofy-eyed inflatable frog has become an icon of the resistance in the past several weeks, and I saw several of them at today’s protest. Going after Portland might have been a strategic mistake by the administration, as Portland’s penchant for weirdness has generated a lot of good resistance iconography for everyone to use. Sarah Jeong wrote an interesting essay several days ago about the significance of the frog, and how it has been an effective counter to the aura farming of the militarized federal agents.

The Frog is ludicrous. The Frog makes no sense. The Frog is a viral symbol of resistance against the Trump regime, and the key to understanding what has happened to discourse in the second Trump presidency.

Save Our Signs

I went to a Zoom session yesterday for the Data Rescue Project that featured a presentation by organizers of an effort entitled Save Our Signs. On 27 March 2025 Trump issued an executive order (“Restoring Truth And Sanity To American History”) that directed the National Park Service and other land management agencies to remove and replace content that “inappropriately disparages Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times), or, with respect to content describing natural features, that emphasizes matters unrelated to the beauty, abundance, or grandeur of said natural feature.” A subsequent order gave the park administrators 120 days to remove and replace such content, which worked out to the date of 17 September 2025.

The organizers of Save Our Signs, who are librarians and public historians at the University of Minnesota, realized something had to be done, and launched a crowdsourced effort to photograph as many of the signs in the National Park System possible. By September 15 they have received 8070 photographs from well over 300 parks. They have already documented some alterations for instance to signage in Muir Woods.

I am appalled and horrified by the wholesale erasure of history that is underway, but at the same time I am inspired by Save Our Signs and related efforts to keep history and memory alive, and hope to find my own niche in this domain.

Footnote: in my YouTube feed there just appeared a news story from WBOY 12 in West Virginia entitled Certain exhibits being removed from Harpers Ferry under Trump administration order which says that they “are removing references to slavery” in Harpers Ferry National Historical Park. Harpers Ferry is the site of John Brown’s famous raid: it’s kind of hard to tell its story without mentioning slavery!

The Queen of Passports

I have been reading Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, American Prometheus, the long tome that was the inspiration for the recent movie “Oppenheimer”. At one point the book discusses the Berkeley-based chemist Martin D. Kamen who in 1940 together with Sam Ruben was the first to synthesize carbon-14 in a cyclotron and who went on to use this carbon isotope to investigate the biochemical reactions involved in photosynthesis in 1941. He then was recruited to work on the Manhattan Project, but in 1944 a couple of incidents led him to be unjustly accused of espionage, and he was blacklisted for many years until finally winning his legal battles in 1955.

One of these battles was getting his passport back, which was revoked in 1947 by one Ruth B. Shipley, the head of the Passport Division of the State Department. It turns out that between 1928 and 1955, all decisions about issuances of passports ran through Mrs. Shipley, and they were not subject to judicial review. Depending on one’s perspective, she was both greatly admired and feared. Franklin Delano Roosevelt praised her as being a “wonderful ogre”. In the era of anti-communist hysteria she denied passports to many people in addition to Kamen, including the actor Paul Robeson, the playwright Arthur Miller, and the chemist Linus Pauling. She retired in 1955 at the mandatory age of 70, and at this point her power was starting to wane. The denial of the passport to Linus Pauling elicited the wrath of Senator Wayne Morse, and Pauling did obtain his full passport to be able to travel to Stockholm to receive his Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1954.

Jeffrey Kahn discusses Mrs. Shipley’s career in an article in the Connecticut Law Review published in 2011. He compares the reign of Mrs. Shipley with contemporary screening systems. Kahn views today’s systems e.g. the Terrorist Screening Database and its subset the No Fly List as the digital descendants of Mrs. Shipley’s files. But there is no longer a single authority governing who is in these databases, and responsibility for them has disappeared into anonymity.

Happy Birthday to Me

Yesterday was my birthday. I’ve been thinking about the lettering for my Mister Ginger comic and don’t have a satisfactory italic nib. This pen writes like butter and I think it was a great choice!

Numenius gave me a gift, a way to get us through some very troubled times. Keep your claws sharp….

Artists Support the Protests

On Saturday I attended the weekly Freeport, Maine protest against the current administration and its erosion of American democracy with my sister. We grew up in a fascist country and as the gentleman on the left is pointing out (his sign is not very visible), “Remember Germany 1933.” It was a pleasant way to spend a morning but we were all wondering what good it was actually doing… Lots of cars beeped in solidarity; some also shook their heads or worse. This is the point: we agree they have the right to disagree.

This protest coincided with the local arts & crafts fair, and one of the artists offered us all a notecard to thank us for showing up. I went over afterwards and talked with her: she is a farmer whose livelihood is being threatened by the administration’s cuts to the USDA… I loved her work and bought some more notecards. I gave the still life of just-pulled beets to my mother, who loves beets.

Othering Oneself

Black Like Me, by John Howard Griffin, was published in 1961. It chronicles the journey of a white man who had his skin darkened to pass as black in the American deep South. I’ve known two people personally who have done a “passing” experiment and written a book about the experience: Ted Conover had already published his account of riding trains with hoboes, Rolling Nowhere, when he attended Cambridge University’s Centre of Latin American Studies to study for an M.Phil while I was the secretary there in the early 80s. The second was Norah Vincent who was a work colleague at Harvard University Press in the early 90s and who subsequently spent a year as a man, as told in Self-Made Man.

I have been reminded of this by a sentence in Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia about needing to look like a revolutionary militiaman in order to blend in in Barcelona in the early months of the civil war, and then needing to look bourgeois once he was on his way home through France after being wounded. From what I’ve read of Orwell, he could move comfortably through these different spheres, always being a little on the outside of them. When Orwell was on his way to Spain he dropped in on Henry Miller in Paris, who thought he was absolutely nuts to go and fight fascism in a country where he didn’t even speak the language—that he must be propelled by guilt or obligation. (Orwell wasn’t alone: thousands from all over the world volunteered to fight in Spain.)

And this is my big question: why do I feel the need to join the fight for those outside my group? For African Americans who have faced centuries of enslavement, discrimination, and police violence, for Mexican Americans who right now fear for their livelihoods and indeed lives? For those with less privilege than I have? A friend raised a possible answer this morning: this is what constitutes civilization. Most, if not all, animals are propelled by instinct to ensure the survival of their offspring even if it means endangering others in their own species. We have evolved as humans to become altruistic when it is in our interest to protect the group beyond our own family. But when we expand this outside the group, expand our definition of community to include everyone, this gets us labelled lunatic fringe lefties.

In a sense I’m continuing a political fight I had with my father while growing up, and he dead for more than 25 years now. The decades have taken a toll on my enthusiasm but they have never stopped my feeling that this is where, as a moral person, I ought to stand. What action to take is always the question, but it doesn’t stop the need for it. It is a comfort to know I’m not alone in feeling this way.

Homage to Orwell

I had never read Homage to Catalonia before, and I just finished it. What’s astonishing about it is its raw power in the writing: a first-hand account of someone who volunteered to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War but who was so determined to be honest in his writing that accounts of his time in the misery of the freezing and terrifying fray got interspersed with analysis of what was going on at the time, especially in Barcelona, despite the utter impossibility of anyone ever knowing this. His account of the infighting among the factions on the left — the wholesale annihilation of the anarchists by the communists, for example, because when uncle Josef is paying the bills for the guns, you are 100% loyal — gives a sad picture of wasted energy. What if all this aggression had been directed at Franco’s forces?

The book came out in 1938, a full year before Franco’s victory, a full year before the decades of the dictatorship. Orwell was badly wounded in the fighting and was able, after a long and tortuous bureaucratic journey, to leave Spain with his wife. There are many passages that struck me, but one in particular, the final sentence of the book, a warning to all of us in 2025, is clanging a bell in my head. May we rise out of the deep, deep sleep of bread and circuses.

Down here it was still the England I had known in my childhood: the railway-cuttings smothered in wild flowers, the deep meadows where the great shining horses browse and meditate, the slow-moving streams bordered by willows, the green bosoms of the elms, the larkspurs in the cottage gardens; and then the huge peaceful wilderness of outer London, the barges on the miry river, the familiar streets, the posters telling of cricket matches and Royal weddings, the men in bowler hats, the pigeons in Trafalgar Square, the red buses, the blue policemen—all sleeping the deep, deep sleep of England, from which I sometimes fear that we shall never wake till we are jerked out of it by the roar of bombs.

Drawing the Erasure of Memory

History is, famously, written by the victors. When the victors are long-lived autocrats, the omissions scream across the generations: the state apparatus of information control and terror silence any dissent. In the case of Spain, the horrors of a prolonged civil war on the very eve of World War II made the suffering worse, because powers that might have been prevailed upon to help at least with food aid were already concerned with fighting a determined aggressor and protecting their own populations.

I grew up just to the north of Madrid in the 1960s and 1970s, a mere 5 miles away from Franco’s palace in El Pardo. His motorcade was a familiar traffic inconvenience. As foreigners we were unaware of the questioning and torture of prisoners in the now-infamous cuarteles of the Guardia Civil. See nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. Silence.

I tried to capture some of this in a six-page comic that was published in an anthology last year. I’m grateful for the work of Hillary Chute, author of Disaster Drawn, for giving me the idea for this comic. As we were reminded by the recent viewing of Good Night, and Good Luck and are reminded daily by an administration slouching towards tyranny, the time for the courage to speak up is NOW.

No Kings In Woodland

Pica and I today went to the No Kings protest up in Woodland, our county seat, which is a town of 62,000. We didn’t know what to expect, but were heartened by seeing people marching when we were approaching to find a parking place. This was a short march of about 4 blocks from the new courthouse on Main Street, to the old courthouse one street to the north, a building with a proper plaza in front of it. The energy was very good at the demonstration. People kept arriving from all directions, and cars driving down Main Street were honking and waving at us. We only saw one truck come past with a Trump/Vance sign; they were roundly booed.

This year I have been to two protests at the State Capitol in Sacramento; the one today felt perhaps more connected to the surrounding community than the ones in Sacramento. The space in front of the capitol building is large and protesters seem to disappear into the space. Also, Sacramento is a city with very little life in it on weekends. The protest today would have been difficult to miss by anybody headed into downtown Woodland this morning. I’m seeing an estimate of 3700 people all told today at the Woodland protest. What I am most hopeful about is how there were protests today all across the city from the largest cities to the smallest towns. There were 170 protestors today out of a total population of 912 in Bodega Bay, the fishing village on the Sonoma County coast where Pica’s mum used to live.

Good Night, and Good Luck

We had lunch a couple of weeks ago with Numenius’ family. His stepbrother is an actor and plays the part of cameraman in the George Clooney version of the above play on Broadway. This was streamed live today by CNN and we were able to watch it.

The media are very different now than they were in 1954… but scaremongering by those insatiably hungry for power is sadly still with us. Glad we saw it. And glad we saw Andy as Charlie on a screen seen by millions around the world!