Soda or Pop or Poem

 

Sodapop Press has made me their first published poet. Here is The Station Approach, about entertaining for the holidays.

The Big Windows Are Open for a Hinge, Ok?

 

The Big Windows Review has allowed me to publish a poem about a certain dating site. 

The Conventional Outlook with Benjamin Nardolili

 

Three poems in Rethink Magazine. Click the issue, put a $ value from 0 or more for the PDF, download it, and read.

On the Democrats, or Down with Will Rogers Thought

 

“I am not a member of any organized party — I am a Democrat,” comedian Will Rogers spoke these words almost a century ago. Back then it was a tongue-in-cheek good natured ribbing of a party that had just come out of a convention that required 103 ballots to nominate a presidential candidate. Yes, you read that right. In 1924, the delegates to the Democratic National Convention had to vote 103 times to nominate a man who would end up losing in a landslide to Calvin Coolidge. At least the Democratic Party of that era could contain its chaos to one gathering every four years. Today, the party’s disarray is on display 24/7. It is disorganized at every level of government and jurisdiction, at least where it can manage to get elected at all.

I know. Out of the Democrats’ recent defeat, a thousand think pieces have bloomed. Yet, most of them seem to ignore the essential issue Mr. Rogers' diagnosed a hundred years ago. They would rather focus on that nebulous term “messaging.” Among other issues with this analysis, it makes one crucial mistake: it assumes the Democrats have some secret message that they keep failing to deliver. They are otherwise unified and organized and at the same time forgetful of what needs to be expressed.  If only the Democrats could just put the right words together, the America people would fall over themselves to vote for any name with a donkey next to it. Extending this logic further,  maybe the Democratic Party can make a game of it, sending every American a decoder pin so they can figure out the “messaging” of the next election cycle like Ralphie in A Christmas Story.

All of these postmortems focus on messaging because it is convenient for the people posting them with their bylines attached. It requires no deeper reckoning with what the last two hundred years of the Democratic Party’s disorganization has led to in the present. They are also in line with the class interests of those who write them. On a personal level each one of these authors is hoping that their specific diagnosis will pique the interest of the party so they can get a gig consulting for it. Beyond that, on a more philosophical level, it helps to justify their whole line of work. Since they make a living trafficking in words, they have every incentive to promote the idea that a political party’s fortunes are tied to matters of vocabulary.

But the problem cannot be reduced to messaging while the party is such a mess of contradictions. We have seen that anything promised by one wing of the party, gets shot down by another. Or the so-called Parliamentarian gets to reject this and that proposal (you remember voting for them, right?) The Democratic Party has too many competing factions whose interests cannot be fundamentally reconciled. It is the party of billionaires and unions, landlords and renters, peaceniks and neocons, tree huggers and frackers, Zionists and Muslims, Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter More. In short, the Democrats are trying to serve both Mammon and the masses and failing at both. Any attempt to salvage the Democrats has to begin with meeting this problem head on.

Of course, contradiction is nothing new in the Democratic Party. At certain times the party managed it for a generation or so. They did it after Jackson and then after FDR. But these partisan constellations were only able to do this for two critical reasons. First was the opening of new economic frontiers that allowed competing groups to get a cut of a growing pie. Second was the lack a national issue that could divide the coalition. Eventually both of these advantages ended and the Democrats fell apart. In the case of Jackson's Democrats, they were undone by the very national issue of slavery. For Roosevelt Democrats, their coalition collapsed from the pressures of confronting racism and war in Vietnam.

It seems unlikely that the Democrats will find themselves in such a fortunate position again. The era of free real estate is over and the era of free refills is coming to a close as well. As for national controversies, the Democratic Party can no longer sidestep these. Politics in America have become homogenized thanks to TV and the Internet. Take, for example, People running for school boards. They are no longer focused on the picayune details of lunches and bus routes. They run on the red meat buffet of culture war issues such as transgender rights and so-called historical revisionism.

For the Democratic Party to win in these conditions, it has to reinvent itself. It has to become a party that either Will Rogers or his present incarnations cannot make fun of for a lack of unity. Think about it this way: if the Democrats were a serious party with long term goals, Trump's people would have been running their own version of ads warning about a "Democrat Project 2025." Or 2029. But of course, they did not. And will not. This is but one small piece of evidence the alleged party of the people needs to reorient itself in order to fight the rightward lurch of the country. Because what is at stake is more important than which gang of politicos holds office. The installation of a complete oligarchy is at hand. 

Unfortunately voters have been presented with few choices to stop this. The Republicans are the party that will make this transformation happen on purpose. Meanwhile the Democrats of the current cycle have become the party that will let it happen. Whether on purpose or not, the effect is the same. What kind of Democratic Party (or any party for that matter) would be better suited for the challenge of the day? The answer is predictable if you know me, but I do not care. The best version of the Democratic Party is one that has a solid base in the multiracial working class and is built around their representative organizations. While there will disagreements here and there in this model, at least this party will not be haphazardly built on top of known and active political fault lines.

Now for my most controversial drop. The historical and current iteration of this Democratic Party, amounts to little more than a rent seeking entity. It is run by a consulting class that inserts itself between activist groups and the avenues of power. Those who want to improve conditions for labor, minorities, women, or the environment have to go to this party, hat in hand, and beg for them for promises of change. As a result, those who run the current donkey show demand increasing contributions of cash, political labor, and votes when a simple majority is claimed to be not enough. 

It is helpful to compare the trajectory of the Democrats with the Republican Party, a party that fears its activists and works aggressively from election to election to enact its agenda. Whether they win or not is not the immediate issue. Commentators have rightly noticed the aggressively ideological character of today's GOP, though what they fail to remember is that the party was created as an explicitly ideological project. Of course that free soil, free labor, and free men ideology is in no longer in force among Republicans. Nevertheless, there was a clear political objective at one point and it echoes through to the present day. Today's Republicans have learned from that era. They have a party setup to deliver specific results. 

Know this. Unlike the Democrats, the Republicans can point to a specific time and place (1854 Ripon, Wisconsin) when their party was established. They can also explain what led to this event, the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act. But what do Democrats have? A party built on various patronage networks, unifying urban sachems and rural courthouse gangs. It is a party that was founded by Jefferson, or Burr, or maybe Andrew Jackson, or quite possibly Martin Van Buren. It was not even consistently called the Democratic Party during all the times of its apparent founding. 

The Democrats of that era, the Democrats of Will Rogers' day, and Democrats of today have tried to pretend their messy big tent approach to politics is a secret strength that allows everyone to somehow feel represented. It should be increasingly evident this is not working. Creating a big tent in American politics ultimately leads to a sideshow, with figures like Manchin and Sinema gumming up the works. A real party with actual aims would be able to discipline these prima donna types, or better yet make sure they did not feel at home in the Democratic Party to begin with.

As it stands, the Democrats are awakening to see themselves restricted to coastal enclaves, a handful of cities in the interior, and the Black Belt in the South. Former strongholds in the Rio Grande Valley are going red, along with the rural upper Midwest. Appalachia is completely gone and if the Democrats are not careful they might start losing New Jersey in presidential and senatorial races. In the face of these changes, a complete structural reorientation is needed. The party needs to become a new kind of machine that is controlled by working class organizations, mobilizing working class voters across race and gender, to delivers real change to all working class Americans. 

Or the Democrats can continue on their current path. It is certainly easier emailed than done. Crying wolf to fundraise and waiting for the Republicans to screw up so much that it puts the Democrats back into power. Unfortunately this time around, if they continue with this approach they may find themselves joining the Whigs and Antimasons in the graveyard of American politics. Who knows what else they will take down with them when this comes to pass. Maybe a little Free Soil will be there to help ease the journey with Henry Clay Charon.  

 

On Childless Cat Ladies

 

You start out in 1954 by saying, "N****r, N****r, N****r." By 1968 you can't say "N****r"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "N****r, N****r."

- Lee Atwater

For those unfamiliar, this is a quote from Lee Atwater, a Republican political operative from the 1980s and one of the architects of the Southern Strategy. Thanks in part to his work, the once solidly Democratic South became a bastion of the Republican Party. It wasn't all him of course, and this process occurred before and after the 1980s. Nevertheless, this quote feels strangely relevant in light of the recent rise and fall of the phrase "Childless Cat Ladies." 

In the past couple of months, it passed from J D. Vance's tradcath mouth into the memesphere and has largely dissipated. When the phrase still emerges, it is in an almost ironic context (like “deplorables” two elections ago). I have seen men appropriating it for themselves, and so-called CCLs in real life mentioning it for a laugh in bars. Good for them. But it is important to unpack how something like this could gain any kind of currency in the first place. Its present ridiculousness can obscure the potentially serious division the Right seeks to exploit in the future. 

Returning to the Atwater quote, we may be at the N-word stage of the process the deceased operative outlined. The Childless Cat Lady occupies its place with gender swapped in for race. That is not to say the term is anywhere near offensive. Only that it is similarly clumsy, ridiculous, and to the detriment of reactionaries, obvious. It too easily reveals what they are appealing to. In Atwater's case, it was racism. For Childless Cat Ladies it is sexism. This campaign cycle, it has been to the benefit of liberals and others that such terminology was chosen. It gives them a good laugh and allows people like Vance and his ilk to be portrayed as "weird."

Well until the VP debate. Now it seems that "weird" has been put to rest. However, that other term, Childless Cat Ladies (which has its historical antecedents) may have its afterlife (or nine) too. Not in a literal sense. Rather, a sentiment behind it might provide a fertile ground for future reactionary politics to cultivate. That is why the phrase cannot be fully dismissed. Liberals and their coalition need to be vigilant. The sentiment in question is a resentment that could very well rear its head in more coded language. Echoes of “Childless Cat Ladies” reverberating through the campaign trails of the future.

And no, I won’t speculate on what those terms will be. I’m not going to help them. It must be remembered that resentment is the bread and butter of reactionary politicians. They are constantly sizing up society to find what might be bubbling under the surface and can be lanced for their benefit. The whole CCL nonsense is no different. It’s an attempt to explore and exploit tensions between the portion of women in this society who raise children, and those who do not. The distinction isn’t as clear as the phrase makes it out to be, but when has the Right ever allowed subtly, or reality to get in its way?

Obviously, throughout history not all women have had children (or children that survived infancy) but the numbers of women who decide to not pursue some form of motherhood (or guardianship) are higher today than ever before. Meanwhile the cost in terms of money and time for children keeps increasing and is also born more and more by the individual family unit, however it may be constructed. 

(Despite the wide diversity in parenting structures, there’s little chance of the Right trying to appeal to them all. It’s why this essay is discussing things in terms of heterosexual cisgender women. This is in no way meant meant to ignore LGBT heads of households. But they occupy a different place in the discourses of Right-wing politics. In theory, transgender men with children could be celebrated by reactionaries as a way to put down CCLs. In practice they, along with others who do not conform to their supposed ideal, will merely be put down as an aberration who should not be allowed to have children in the first place. It’s another clue, among many, of how the Right isn’t actually interested in the welfare of children as an ends, but rather as a means to assert control and slot people into their “proper” place.)

Now is this particular resentment there? It is hard to imagine any useful polling that might shine a light on its dimensions. How widespread is the feeling, and how deep does it run for those who feel it?  One might have a tinge of resentment for something but it might also not bother them much. But I think it's worth an educated guess to assert there's a strong potential for it. 

In a healthy society that manages to be both empathetic and rational, there would be no conflict from those who have chosen one path over the other. Women who do not want to have children, would feel no pressure to do so, and not have their decisions over their body denigrated. They would have access to contraception, abortion, and the education to know how to use and access these options. Meanwhile, for those who choose to have children, they would have childcare, health care, flexible working situations, and affordable housing. 

But America is far from being an empathetic country and its conception of rationality is stuck in the amber of 18th century metaphysics. In short, it is a country that makes it hard to be a mother, and is trying to make it equally hard to not be one either. In such a situation, it’s only natural for a reservoir of resentment to build up. In particular, those who have taken up the responsibilities of motherhood can begin to feel like they’re providing a valuable service for a society that ultimately turns its back on them.

This feeling is not going to be universal, because motherhood is not experienced the same by everyone. Some people are under more of a strain than others. The kinds of resources available vary widely. In many situations, women with children are directly supported by their relations and friends who don’t have them. Nevertheless, I don’t think it takes much of a stretch of the imagination to see the potential for a growing divide.

As with most cleavages, a politics of solidarity would bridge it. In their absence, the divide only grows. It’s a common enough process across all kinds of social struggles and contradictions. The divide begins in a gap between what people (in this case mothers) need versus what society provides for them. Then this divide moves, switching from a “vertical” focus to a “horizontal” one that strikes out against another group of people perceived to be contributing to the issue of inadequate provisions. In time, and with enough focus and ire, this division deepens until it becomes a trench in a culture war. 

The last stage rarely happens spontaneously. It come about through a process of messaging that is both subtle and overt from reactionary forces. In this case, “Childless Cat Ladies,” is quite overt. It’s hard to think of anything that could be more on the nose. One would have to reach deep into the recess of old misogynistic lore to find it. Harridan? Maybe “Queen of the Harpies.” Yet as with CCL, these terms carry such a ridiculous, over-the-top quality that they easily become coopted into badges of merchandisable pride. 

We could be become a society that supports both groups, along with all kinds of parents and guardians. To embrace a politics of family choice that would challenge the current the system of benefits and the present work-life balance. There’s no reason to raise up one group at the expense of the other, since both experiences overlap. Plenty of women make the decision to have and/or raise children at a later date in their lives. Others with children make the choice not to have any more. This blending and entwining of paths offers proofs that politics of resentment over who is and is not a mother is nowhere near inevitable.

Unfortunately, liberalism is inadequate in creating the politics that can diffuse tensions in society through material improvements. It has a grave-digging inability to grapple with the very concept of resentment, often confusing this feeling on the Right with the rage and revulsion expressed by the Left. Liberalism believes it is above recognizing such things. The ideology treats emotion in politics as a stain on what should be a sober calculation in the minds of the citizenry. 

Which is why, when the champions of liberalism do try to get “emotional,” the attempts feel half-hearted and come off half-baked without about follow through. The “Politics of Joy” is only the latest attempt at trying to do liberalism with a human face. How quickly that seemed to fizzle out. 2024 isn’t 2008. A campaign of “Hope” or “Change,” is only sustainable when people believe actual material improvements are around the corner. When they fail to well, materialize, the collapse is hard. Both heart and mind feel betrayed.

Maybe the child/childless divide will not provide much fodder for the future Right. Reactionary forces might decide this line of attack is not worth pursuing and instead focus on cracking the African-American vote. They have been recently trying to do it by cultivating resentment against immigration. Or perhaps one day a clever operative will come along and they (and it could very well be a lady Atwater) will see the potential to seize on the underlying resentments I’ve previously outlined. The GOP has a problem with female voters and this might bring more of them into the Republican fold. Nothing helpful will be proposed or enacted. Just the cultivation of resentment with a little pandering rhetoric thrown in as a treat. 

It will not lead to the kind of natalist policies the European Right proposes. Their Right was stitched to Capitalism in a shotgun wedding presided over by NATO after World War II. Meanwhile, our Right’s true love is Capitalism. High school sweethearts, who were Homecoming King and Queen. Our Right would hate to see support mostly going to non-White women as well. A story with a familiar refrain in this country. White Antebellum Americans were perfectly fine extolling the virtues of motherhood while selling the children of mothers they enslaved (and sometimes even fathered). 

No, under this manifestation of resentment politics, mothers will be made to feel elite and “seen,” by punishing all the single ladies. Taking away abortion rights, restricting contraceptives, outlawing no-fault divorce, and censoring any information about this (one of the chief uses of obscenity laws in the past). Children will not receive any better healthcare; their mothers will be forced to work longer hours. The cats, more or less, will probably be fine.

Kafka, Asbestos, & Prose

 

Image by Frank Jackdaw

Good news, I won a small writing contest. This one was held to promote the work of Robin Hemley's new novel Oblivion, an "after autobiography" where a recently deceased writer gets to encounter Franz Kafka in the afterlife. Read my entry and enjoy.

You Might Not Be Able to Handle These Poems

They are extremely not politically correct. Read them here.

 

I'll Be at a Reading in Time Square

UPDATE: I'll be part of a reading on Sunday, May 22, 2022. It is called "Poet Voice Sucks: Funny Poetry From Writers, Comedians & Actors" and is being put together by Christine Stoddard. Several poets and performers from the tri-state (try to guess which states) area will be involved. There will be only FUNNY poems. This might be the first time I've been mentioned in Eventbrite. 

Literature for the Masses

 

Apparently I've written it. A poem about urban development and renewal is up at Class Collective. It was inspired by my times catching the bus near the Javits Center. Good times, I mean, no, not good times. Hence the poem. 

New Wine In New Issues of Wine Cellar Press

 

Happy New Year. 2022 is here. To stay? We'll see. Wine Cellar Press is out with its latest issue: Gressive. It's broken down into different categories, each one named for a different kind of wine. Under the heading for Rossi, is a poem by me. It is titled "Gernika," the Basque name for the town that served as the inspiration for Picasso's Guernica. 

Eisenhower on the Beach

Enter through the gift shop

In search of outdoor activities to do in the time of Covid, I came upon the Eisenhower Memorial in DC. The Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial that is. Yes, I too was surprised it was for him and not his college presidential powerhouse of a brother Milton S. Eisenhower. For years I had heard about it being planned, entailing the usual fights between designers, architects, historians, locals, and the family of the honoree. When I moved to Brooklyn, it seemed to still be in the ether between drawing and argument. Now it is finished, completed and dedicated by America’s real president. That’s right, Joe Manchin.

A bird's eye view. Explains the lack of pigeons.

This is the Lay of Ike. The memorial is located south of the National Mall, near the Air and Space Museum. I suppose it is fitting. The man helped build suburban mall culture and he established NASA. Not that you would learn anything about that from the spread of metal and marble in front of the Department of Education. More on that later. The Memorial has no central point. Its elements are scattered across a plaza without a central point of focus. Instead, there are two bas-relief sculptures and two large columns at either side of the park. Behind them is a sort of mesh fixture elevated above the plaza. At night it is supposed to light up and depict the Normandy Landings (D-Day, not Hastings). 

The recent toppling of Rebel monuments has begun a conversation about the nature of memorialization itself. Not just who is to be honored, but how and to what purpose. Unfortunately, the planning for the Eisenhower Memorial happened before these issues came to the forefront of public debate. Not that those responsible for constructing the site are ignorant of them. Debates about memorials were present in academia before they became prominent in the summer of 2020. Still, one wonders how this memorial would look given the fallout of the George Floyd protests. Not that Eisenhower was a unworthy subject who should have been ignored. Then again, he has been absent on the National Mall for decades and Americans seemed more or less able to go on without pausing to remember him. 

blah, blah, blah tell us about the MIC!

Personal merit, necessity, or legacy aside, there other questions to consider behind the purpose of a memorial. At one time, the idea was to provoke a kind of reverence in a secular temple. Think of the Lincoln Memorial, which brings one up a series of steps to stand under the imposing figure of Lincoln. All white and made of stone, he sits in judgment of the country. After one is done bowing and supplicating below the 16th president, it is time to look elsewhere. Now the view centers on the moving text of the Gettysburg Address. The whole process transforms Lincoln into a holy figure for the nation. He is the martyr who managed to midwife the republic through the birth pangs of a new freedom. 

Gradually this approach fell out of favor. An emphasis on movements, particularly involving Women and People of Color emerged. When the “great men” (and women) of history were so memorialized, their monuments became less about reverence and more about education. This might occur through symbolism, or more often than not, actual text, preferably from the speeches of the person being depicted. The FDR Memorial and the WWII Memorials come out of this development. The experience is not of one central figure or architectural feature, but of many disparate elements.  Gone is the temple or shrine. They have been replaced by open-air museums. This does pose a new set of challenges. How do you convey so much information about a figure or an event without overwhelming the spectator?

Will it get some wind for the sailboat?

The Eisenhower Memorial goes with a minimal approach. It deals little with public perception of Ike, the details of his life, the context of his times, or the effects of his presidency. Eschewing all that, the man’s life is condensed to a couple symbolic vignettes. The approach can be likened to the opera Einstein on the Beach, where snippets of Einstein’s life and work are abstracted to the limits of recognition. Here, Eisenhower is a boy in Abilene. Then, he is a general. Finally, he is a president. Three acts with no drama.

What war did he win? It isn’t clear. Who did we fight? It wasn’t mentioned. Why did we fight? A mystery. According to the available statuary, Eisenhower was simply a general raising a fist at beleaguered troops. The effect is not inspiring. He reminds one of the blowhard officers from Catch-22. His presidency is a foggy recollection in bronze as well. The two decent things he did in office, enforcing desegregation, and condemning the military industrial complex (which, to be fair, he built) go unmentioned. All we see of Eisenhower c. 1953 to 1961 is standing around with people from his administration in the midst of doing something presidential. The firm of Nixon & Dulles & Dulles is nowhere to be seen, presumably off in the distance plotting Operation PBSuccess. 

The site is being worked on and in development. The trees they planted are still growing. I presume there is time for other things to be added to the plaza. Maybe they will figure out a way to be nicer to the people working in the Department of Education. Once they had windows looking out on the Mall, and now the view is blocked by a post-modern Bayeux Tapestry. It displays an event they might deal with teaching, but they didn’t carry out! Meanwhile in Langley, their view isn’t obscured by a steel lattice depicting the Bay of Pigs. 

The littlest toilet

If you do want to learn more about President Eisenhower, there is a gift shop. Inside of it are many books with many words and pictures. There are footnotes and citations galore. Maybe that’s the real purpose of the memorial. Show the inadequacies of stone in order to bring people back to the page. Step one: draw tourists in who recognize the name. Step two: confuse them about the life of Ike. Step three: push people into buying books to explain why people liked him. One of the oldest scams in the…um…book. The site also has restrooms. I don’t know how the ladies’ side of the divide is, but the men’s room has the smallest toilet I’ve ever seen in DC. So it’s got that going for it.

Who cares about the founder of the highways, go look at some model trains instead

Follow the Flight of the Dragonfly

 

Two poems of mine are at Flight of the Dragonfly. They've got a Classical theme of sorts. 

Also, I'm in the inaugural issue of Whimsical Poet, edited by Sara Altman, for sale on Amazon.

Windows 96: Product Review

No, I'm not discussing a recently rediscovered lost Microsoft product from the Gold Age of Gates. The Windows 96 in question is both the name of a musical act, and the name of a poem I wrote about it. 

More specifically, I used the reaction of listeners to the music. My medium? Cutting up the comments they posted under the YouTube video for the album pictured above. A lot of nostalgia, as you can imagine. 

While the Comments Section lit mag is the first place to put this poem out in print or online, I actually read an earlier draft of this work at a reading hosted by Christine Stoddard at Unnamable Books in 2019.

A Wafer-Thin Slice of Anxiety

Just a tiny, tiny little bit of anxiety, via a poem I wrote for A Thin Slice of Anxiety

The History in Prospect Park

 

The Hanging Gardens of Babylon c. 562 BC

The Battle of Salamis c. 480 BC

Balboa sights the Pacific c.1513

The Battle of Lepanto 1571

The First PEZ Dispenser c. 1927

Woodstock (not pictured: Hippies) 1969

A Power Grab by Ben Nardolilli

The best I could do for a public image for "power grab"

Not a grab for power, but a poem called "Power Grab," which you can read here in Flashes of Brilliance. Your mileage my vary on how much flashing it does. 

The Great British Candy Bar Review

Time for something sweeter in place of all the sourness in the news. Last Christmas, I got an assortment of British chocolates as a present. For the most part, I had never had these particular candy bars before. Now, some of you reading may be thinking to yourselves, “Christmas? You mean it took you until September to finish these chocolates? You have that much willpower? Didn’t they go bad?”  Let me start by saying, yes it took me that long. Yes, I do have that willpower. No, they didn’t go bad. 

Okay, I should confess, it wasn’t all willpower. I had these candies in my desk at work when quarantine hit and only just now was able to access them once again. There were only two bars left, but that was all that stood between me and finishing this review. Before we begin, I need to say that British chocolate is better than the standard American fare from things like Hershey’s and Mars. We may be better at putting things in chocolate, yet when it comes to plain bars, Cadbury has them beat. Maybe someplace is able to bring these two skills together to create the best of all possible candy bars, perhaps Canada.

Now onto the confectionary!

Curly Wurly

First up we have the Curly Wurly, which may or may not have been named in honor of the 1977 Song Blinded by the Light. This candy bar looks like barbed wire Willy Wonka would use to keep the Oompa Loompas in his factory. It consists of three strands of chocolate-coated caramel that wind together in a sort of double helix pattern. It’s quite possible this is what the genome of the cacao bean resembles. 

Eating it is not exactly pleasurable. It is a delicate piece of candy and breaks easily in the packaging. The caramel-based nature of the confection also leads it to stick to one’s teeth, not ideal either. I tried it with coffee to see if that would change the experience, and it did. The heat of the drink dissolved the chocolate nearly instantly, leaving behind the caramel, so that it could stick to my teeth more easily. 

I give it a 5 out of 10, if I unknowingly got this on Halloween, I would eat it, if I couldn’t trade it. To quote Blinded by the Light, when eating a Curly Wurly, it feels like “the calliope crashed to the ground.”

Flake

Despite being a British candy, this bar was obviously named in honor of former Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who seemed formidable in his opposition to Trump, but over time ended up crumbling, breaking down, and leaving a mess everywhere. Or maybe it’s named after the structure of the bar. It is nothing but chocolate, yet there’s a twist! No, not an actual twist like with a Curly Wurly. The Flake is filled with tiny perforations, like coral. 

So that makes it a light treat in a sense, though I’m sure the calorie, fat, and sugar counts are the same as any other standard chocolate bar, at least from Britain. I didn’t experiment to see if it sinks or floats like a pumice stone. For sure, it must pass that test. The chocolate itself is incredibly sweet, maybe the sweetest of all the candy bars I had in the assortment. Then again, it might just be because the chocolate taste is more concentrated instead of being spread out. 

The candy is a bit dry, and difficult to savor because the bar does in fact flake. So, the name works to describe the candy as both a noun and a verb. I thought it has a nice-looking wrapper. Trying the bar with coffee failed to improve the experience. Unfortunately, despite the collective holes in it, one cannot use a Flake as a chocolate flavored straw. Everything melts before the drink can reach your lips. I could try next time with an iced coffee, I suppose. Dunking it does make for an easy, instant mocha.  Six out of ten, because it didn’t stick to my teeth.

Double Decker

This is the double filling bar. It’s probably meant to evoke those red two-level buses you read about in children’s book set in London. The two flavors that Cadbury uses? The top is nougat, and the bottom is…well, it’s crunchy. I’m guessing some kind of puffed grain. Rice would be my guess. It’s strange not to have the nougat on the bottom, so one thing this candy bar does is give nougat its time to shine. It tasted okay, I like nougat, I like puffed ambiguous grains, and I like Cadbury’s chocolate.  

It doesn’t go well with coffee, which is crucial for me. It has a weird mouthfeel as well. The solid, chewy nougat and the pop of the grains didn’t sit well in my mouth. The way the bar is composed in a cross-section resembles the way some roads are laid out, with asphalt on top of a mixture of ground up rocks. This could be a further homage to the fabled red buses of London. After all, what do they drive on? Roads, or as the British spell it, Rhodes. 

nougat top and crispy bottom" is what it says on my Tinder profile

Overall, not a favorite of mine. Five out of ten, only good for strange cravings for nougat. The combination doesn’t make much sense to me. It combines two ingredients that go into other candies all the time, but almost never share the same chocolatey blanket.  The Double Decker is ambitious, I’ll give it that. But ultimately it embodies a poor synthesis, an example of Adorno’s “negative dialectic.”

Crunchie

British candy bars have such utilitarian names, don’t they? The legacy of Jeremy Bentham lives on it them, and not just as a stuffed corpse in a university hall.  On the other hand, it is far more golden than its name would imply. You see, The Crunchie bar is on a higher plane than the Krackel. Instead of mere rice pieces, the Crunchie has golden honeycomb encased in milk chocolate. It may make the same sound as its American cousin, but it is on a higher alchemical level. 

“Get that Friday feeling with Crunchie” is what the advertising says. I’m not sure how many people celebrate the weekend with honeycomb, golden or not. In the UK things might be different. Honey on everything while hitting the public house with the mates I suppose. The inside was light in the middle and it melted in my mouth. On one level it was reminiscent of a Butterfinger, or astronaut ice cream, (now I want a candy bar made out of that childhood treat).

It is fragile, though it has more structural integrity than a Flake. When added to coffee, the bar dissolves easily. However, it doesn’t quite go with the drink. Being honey-based, it would probably be better to dip into tea. I wouldn’t know though, I’m not a tea man. My American taste buds can’t stand that weak stuff. We got rid of those leaves and brought on the beans during the revolution. Back to the Crunchie, I give it an eight out of ten. If I got it for Halloween, I would probably save it for later.

STARBAR

I wasn’t sure if it’s meant to be in all caps, or that’s just a stylized rendering for the wrapper. When contracts for the candy are finalized do they say Starbar, or STARBAR? The world of chocolate is filled with many a mystery that is not Wonka related. The wrapper promises the eater a chewy cosmos of peanut and caramel. Maybe this is supposed to be a reference to the Milky Way without borrowing the name of that American candy?

Structurally, the STARbar (let’s compromise on capitalization) is flat on the bottom and round on the top, with the filling packed inside. It’s built less like the celestial cosmos and more like something subterranean: the London Underground. It is chewy and it evaporates in your mouth with you eat it. Unlike your standard American candy bar, it needed more of the advertised peanuts. Clearly Britain needed its own version of George Washington Carver. It gets a six out of 10 from me. I’d trade it on Halloween for a Snickers.

Wispa

By the time I got around to eating this bar (I didn’t eat them all in one sitting, have some faith in me) I realized that British chocolate bars seem to advertise their prices prominently. I don’t know why that is. This one costs 55 pence, in Freedom terms, that’s 70 cents. Don’t read this post and fly to the UK with seven dimes in your pocket, hoping to get one of these babies though. With Brexit, that number may change. Remember how that thing is still going on?

The Wispa is an aerated Cadbury milk chocolate bar. Unlike a Flake, it has more of a dense, lattice-like structure. The Chocolate isn’t folded or bunched up together, but seemingly punctured. It’s light, which is to be expected. Imagine putting holes in something and making it heavier. When you let a piece of it sit in your mouth, the holes speed up its dissolving. Occasionally they tickle the tongue. 

A Wispa seems shorter than a Flake bar, and it’s way less messy. They don’t just break up in your hands. When exposed to coffee, the Wispa is a real delight. The bubble feeling that the hole creates is much more pronounced. Once you get a hang of it, you can swish the coffee around in your mouth to feel the liquid go through the holes. I suppose you can use lots of other things this way to enjoy your Wispa. Milk, for instance, or whiskey. I give it an eight out of ten, a little plain in taste, but amusing in texture.

Twirl

Onto our next candy bar. It is twirling towards freedom perhaps, but is it twirling towards taste? I want to believe so and give this Twirl a whirl for what the wrapper promises will be an intense Cadbury milk chocolate hit. This confection comes with company. Open up the wrapper and you will find two sticks to enjoy. I guess it gets its name from the way the chocolate is structured. It is bunched up and folded around in a way that’s like a Flake. The major difference is the folds are more circular, and covered with another layer of chocolate.

The chocolate was certainly fine. I was expecting another ingredient to be part of the bars. You know, a real twirl of caramel, nougat, or peanut butter. When mixed with coffee, it creates a nice taste behind in the mug. It’s superior to a Flake in that regard. Looking at the two bars though, it’s hard not to compare a Twirl with the American Twix. Which one comes out on top? I have to side with the U.S. of A on this one. To be fair, it does manage to do more with its chocolate than a Twix and doesn’t cheat with cookie and caramel, the steroids of the candy world. 

Compared to my Platonic idea of a candy bar, Twirl gets a seven out of ten.

Cadbury Dairy Milk Caramel

First things first, this is not to be confused with a Caramello, which was my favorite candy bar as a kid. The Dairy Milk Caramel (DMC) is a different candy of candy. It even has its own mascot, the Caramel Bunny. Apparently, it was voted the third sexiest cartoon character of all time in a 2009 poll. It was only beaten out by Jessica Rabbit and Betty Boop. Make of that what you will about the sexual proclivities of the average British male. Of course, it should be noted that the poll was conducted by Cadbury.   

The bar in question here is made of bumpy pieces fused together. Each one is filled with caramel. Unlike a Caramello, each piece is completely segmented off from the others, like the famous compartment system under the Titanic. Does that make this candy bar unsinkable? The caramel does not come out when you break off the pieces. I’ll admit they look a little like pills, or un, suppositories. As for the chocolate itself, I found it a bit dry compared to what’s in a Wispa, for instance. I guess the caramel is supposed to counteract that, like gravy on mashed potatoes. 

When I tried the candy bar with coffee, it dissolved quickly, leaving a mass of chewy caramel behind. That could be fun for some. Overall, I’d give it eight out of ten.  

Picnic

We’re coming up to the last two of the bars I tried. I ate them last week, after going back to the office where I was storing this candy. Quarantine interrupted my survey, but in a return to normalcy, I was able to resume it. America is opening up and back for business, baby! Nothing tasted off, like it had passed an expiration date. This is something to keep in mind when stocking up for disasters. Forget beans, just buy candy. 

Anyway, time to shake it up with picnic, as the wrapper says. This candy bar comes in a very colorful wrapper. It is not a picnic to look at, more of a circus to be honest. It describes itself as a crunchy chew and fruity feast, all covered in Cadbury milk chocolate. Taken out of its wrapper, it looks like a Baby Ruth candy bar. That means don’t have a picnic in the pool, if you catch my drift. 

 It's a light candy bar. It has a crispy texture due to what seem to be rice puffs. It also doesn’t have too much fruit, which it good. According to the wrapper it contains “dried grapes.” They tasted like raisins. I don’t know if it’s a legal thing or a British thing to say dried grapes instead of that. I could see myself eating one after the other and not realizing how much candy I’ve had until it’s too late. 

I like the way it tastes just plain. With coffee the fruit ends up becoming separated from the rest of the bar and it lingers around. So you end up with a mouth full of “dried grapes” wondering why the British just don’t say “raisin.” Let me be clear, I’m not attacking the general taste of fruit here. It’s just the fruit in this candy bar, which is good in small doses. After all, we are talking about something put inside a chocolate dessert. It doesn’t need to be the ripest and juiciest thing in the world.

I give this one a nine out of ten. To be eaten right after Trick or Treating, or maybe during if you want to feel like having a “picnic” while dressed as a witch, vampire, or insurance salesman. 

Dairy Milk:

Finally, the end of the sampler and variety pack. The classic Cadbury candy bar. The name has always thrown me off. Why the need to emphasize the milk as “dairy?” Is it supposed to imply freshness? Like, straight from the dairy and into the vat (or river) of chocolate? It makes me wonder if the milk is real. Did these crafty Cadbury types actually add “malk” to adulterate these bars instead?

A Dairy Milk is a solid bar of milk chocolate. It is made of pieces that can be broken off. They are smooth, without jagged edges. The taste is velvety and there’s no bad aftertaste as with a Hershey’s bar of milk chocolate. No embedded ingredients are necessary. I suppose one could break off a piece, savor it, and return to the others at a much alter date. I did not do that, but it could be done. With coffee, a Dairy Milk slowly dissolves, making a mocha in your mouth. 

A good solid bar (in more ways than one). Let’s give this one a nine out of ten and bring our confectionary adventure to an end. 

Quote the Raven in its Cage: "Here's Your 5 Poems, Evermore"

Don't let the skulls put you off. I have five poems in issue 48 from Raven Cage Zine. Click on the link to read them. Another literary mention of Ditmas Park thanks to me. (Scroll down on issue 48 to see my works)

The Worst Monument in DC

In this age of statues coming down their plinths, and places being renamed, calling something the “Worst Monument in DC” brings to mind the usual culprits. However, this monument is not bad because it honors a Confederate, a slaveowner, or somebody who did medical experiments on enslaved women. It is also not problematic like the statues honoring the Emancipation Proclamation. You know the kind: they show a helpless and shirtless Black person in chains being uplifted by a very starch-shirted Abraham Lincoln.

No, this infamous title belongs to a monument because of its aesthetics, not its politics. At least with those other kinds of statues you know what they are supposed to represent. I don’t mean on a deeper level in terms of just dog whistles, but on a surface level as well. A statue of General Robert E. Lee on a horse shows General Robert E. Lee on a horse. You can get offended by it because you know who you are supposed to think of when you look at it. One could argue a monument that’s too abstract might even be worse, because it doesn’t even let you get angry.

One such monument exists in DC. It is little known, though hundreds of thousands of people drive past it every year. Most of them hardly get a glance of it, and even fewer know that it is legally in DC, despite being on the right bank of the Potomac (in case you didn’t know, Columbia Island, that strip of land next to the Pentagon is part of DC). It is near another monument which people might recognize, but it is a hundred times better than this one. That competent monument is the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. The bad one? It’s called the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac.

A monument to Idaho

Just the length of the name should tip you off that something isn’t right. A good memorial is succinct and named for one person, group, or event. Think the Lincoln Memorial or the Washington Monument. The Emancipation Memorial is another one, so long as we’re talking names here and not set-up. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac is the opposite of all that. It contains too much, which the same might be said for old LBJ. I doubt that was the intention though. Instead we have a confusing mess that tells us what kind of memorial it is and the river it is on. Off the top of my head I don’t think any other monument in DC has that designation.

It's not the easiest memorial to get to either. You have to drive onto the island, park, and walk a bit until you hit the right grove. But that could be said of plenty of landmarks in the city, and I won’t count that against it. The memorial to Teddy Roosevelt requires quite a hike to the middle of his eponymous island. It doesn’t detract from the way it is set up and the possible educational value of the site. I know it’s not a textbook (what monument is?), but one can at least clearly meditate on and contemplate the subject.

This is not the case with the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac. There is little in the design or the artwork chosen that conveys anything about LBJ and his achievements. Approaching the memorial, all one can see through the pine trees is a large hunk of pinkish granite. No, it isn’t a statue of our 36th President, as much of a hunk he was. The granite is simply a large rock, stuck in the ground. A prurient mind might say it’s a memorial to Johnson’s Johnson, the infamous “Jumbo.” How could they know any better? The rock is not shaped, cut, etched, or hewn into anything with a recognizable pattern. It isn’t even a menhir.

Johnson's Johnson, the Jumbo of the Capitol Hill Zoo

The area around the megalith isn’t any more informative or inspiring. There’s a small sign that gives a basic outline of the memorial and its function, along with a recording of Lady Bird Johnson that doesn’t work. When I pressed one of the buttons for it, I hoped that instead I would get to hear LBJ ordering pants from his tailor. It’s more Taylor though, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The device is broken, along with many of the paving stones near the central rock.

Adjacent to it are a handful of slabs of granite, made of the same exact shade as the central stone. On each of them are selections from speeches LBJ gave during his life. None of the selections are particularly memorable or illuminating. They say little about the man himself, his times, or the issues he was championing. I know the man wasn’t the most gifted speaker, but the designers could’ve chosen something more inspiring. He had Bill Moyers to work with. Something he said after JFK was shot perhaps? Or his speeches to Congress on Civil Rights? There’s another issue with the slabs too. They are difficult to read, thanks to using that foreskin-colored granite.

At the right angle, one can get a nice view of the Potomac and the other monuments that dot the skyline of DC. It only serves to remind the unlucky visitor, of how much worse Johnson’s memorial is compared to the ones for Lincoln, Jefferson, and Washington. It makes one wonder if this is actually a site dedicated to Andrew Johnson, and that this is all a sick joke to embarrass our 17th president for botching Reconstruction and buying Alaska.

Not pictured: wasp nests

In the same park is a monument that is much better and more interesting, the Navy – Merchant Marine Memorial. It honors those who have died at sea and rare for a war memorial, it doesn’t show the people lost. No names are etched on it and no human figures are depicted. There are waves and seagulls (along with wasp nests tucked inside the waves, but those are a later addition) made of metal, sitting on a small plinth. They depict the watery resting place of those lost, and remind us that many are gone forever with no recovered remains. It also has bubbles.

Perhaps the Lyndon Baines Johnson Memorial Grove on the Potomac represents the conclusion of the memorial as traditionally understood. Our presidents are too big and contain too many multitudes of contradictions to be reduced to a statue. Constant revision of their legacy and shifts in historical opinion also make it difficult to come to any final consensus about them. In that sense the giant rocks is fitting, as the reputation of LBJ has waxed and waned over the decades. Now it appears to be waxing, in part because we are nostalgic for a time Congress and the President could work together to pass major pieces of legislation. But it will wane again, when we reconsider the costs of Empire.

A Poem As It Ought to Be

A poem of mine is in the literary journal As It Ought To Be Magazine. It comes from my time as a paralegal dealing with clients from upstate New York. The name of the poem is "Large Bull Thistle" which is also what the name of Chenango County translates to.