Harry’s Diary

As I mentioned in a recent post this blog has elements of a diary about it. Look to the long list of topics on the left and you will find that as one of the tags. For four nights in a row I’ve woken up in the middle of the night, early morning really, and not been able to fall asleep. This was a condition I got very familiar with during the last year of my Red Plan fight. Its not very healthy and I take it as a sign of stress, as always, self generated.

This is not the sort of thing that most people in the public eye like to talk about and yet its part of the human dimension that can be helpful in understanding why things in life, art, politics happen as they do. The human factor. Why did Senator Choudery (“Chowder Head” to me for the past week) introduce self-serving legislation at the request of St. Louis County Commissioner, Dennis Fink, to let his friends and neighbors catch more walleyes on the lake where he has a cabin? Fink has made the likely honest answer that he couldn’t benefit from this because he rarely fishes. And yet using your office to make friends happy is a great temptation. I suspect that is the chief motivation and sin for this tempest which has gotten both men bad publicity on the eve of their relection campaigns. Its a matter of justice. Its not fair, even if its not that big a deal, to use your insider powers to give yourself more than others are permitted to have.

So, this blog is my attempt to open the lens on my thinking. In the past I’ve been criticisized by my own allies for divulging too much about our activities to give the other side a chance to out flank us. To this I have to plead guilty. Certainly the biggest secret, if it was that, that I dropped led to the removal of the attorney who was representing the taxpayers from our case. That will be an interesting chapter in my book and one which could get me hauled to court (but it won’t) for violating my agreement to keep my mouth shut about something possibly embarassing to the powers that be.

I have an almost preternatural inclination to uncover the dust and debris that others have swept under the rug. Knowledge is power and that is why powerful entities greedily keep others in ignorance so as not to share that power. That can be my not so pithy epigram of the day.

I woke early in the process of composing a chapter of the book about Kerry Leider, the School District’s man in charge of the Red Plan. You can do a search in Lincoln Democrat’s search engine and you will find his name in many previous blog posts. I would not have woken up if I had eaten less Bulldog Pizza last night and not consumed a couple glasses of red wine before going to bed. I haven’t been swimming five miles a week for over a year now and lots of my muscles have grown slack including those that keep acid reflux at bay.

Actually, I’ve been enjoying my break from the Red Plan fight. Reduced stress but not eliminated stress, because I still feel a huge obligation to get my book written. As I said before when I begin the writing in earnest in August it will come easily and quickly. This for instance will be a very long post and I’ve resolved now not to edit it after completing it but to leave it with typos and awkward phrasing just as I plunked it out. Its not a very important entry either to my campaign form the Senate or for a history of the Red Plan. Its just a bit of “undigested potato” as Scrooge said in the Christmas Carol.

The enjoyment has come from the time I’ve been able to spend reading books. I’ve resumed reading them out loud to Claudia. I began with Hundredth Meridian when we traveled after last fall’s school board election and the dismissal of the taxpayers case. Recently I read a very funny and wise travel book on Australia the “Sun burnt Country” or something like that. And of course I’m now reading Ann Frank’s (revised) Diary. Its 30 per cent longer than the originally published version which Claudia and my daughter read aloud to each other when the latter was a junior high school student.

I suspect that the portion I read last night was not in the originally version about Anne’s comment that she often was called back to clean her public hairs from the communal bathroom after she bathed herself.

That indelicate description is not how Anne put it, of course, but it was a startling discovery for me in Anne’s diary. You won’t be reading that kind of stuff about me in the blog. Acid Reflux is about as graphic as I’m willing to get. Count your blessings dear reader.

I’ve got a couple other books I’ve been nursing along. Craze Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason is one, I could only get the title right because I’m pounding this out in our sun room as doing it in my office next to our bedroom would keep my better half awake what with the squeaking of my secretarial chair. (Damn old age, can’t think of the common name of a spinny, tilty chair at the moment)

Craze is about what the author describes as the first urban drug addiction which incredibly cheep gin made possible in the London Slums a couple generations before the American Revolution. I think it will be useful as I think through my attitude about the decriminalization of drugs to empty out our God-awful expensive and anti productive prisons.

A more felicitous book is “Lincoln, the Biography of a writer” by Fred Kaplan. I’ve heard other Lincoln biographers mention the books he steeped himself in in the backwoods of Kentucky and Illinois and what he learned from them but that is the sole topic of this book. Thirty years ago I read the extremely unhelpful and hagiographic Sandburg biography of Abe and was annoyed at the veiled and suggestive comments about things the author obviously knew but was only able to mention if he made his comments obscure. The same sort of select editing that neutered Anne Franks originally published diary.

While I was waiting to read Frank to Claudia as she put the Tan Man to bed I picked up Bio of a Writer and discovered that an early “poem” written by Lincoln and circulated in his community was all about homosexuality and that Lincoln was quite familiar with the subject. I’d read about the poem in question and knew at one time that it made a veiled reference to male on male coupling but this story was more fully explained.

Lincoln had a grievance against his sister’s husband who he blamed for the death of Sarah, the member of his family he felt closest to. As a feud grew between Lincoln and his Sister’s in laws the Lincolns were purposely not invited to a double wedding of the in-laws kin. When it was reported that there had been a mix up in the bridal suites Lincoln used the story to pen a vicious satire of the male newlyweds in each other’s bed. Thus a mildly embarrassment backwoods event was elevated to public ridicule and Lincoln’s poetry was so satirical that the locals considered it proof of his exceptional intellect, even the humiliated subjects of the poem.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea the book did not portray Lincoln as gay an idea that has recently gained a lot of attention. (He occasionally slept with a soldier he liked a lot during the Civil War) If anything the bio made it clear that in backwoods America, in the years leading up to the Civil War, homosexuality was often a topic of rough humor and that Lincoln was quite happy to use it as fodder to punish the family who let his sister die by not calling for a doctor in time to save her.

So, in just one hour yesterday (without finding it on the Internet) I got a more human picture of both Anne Frank and Abe Lincoln. In fact, of the twenty pages I consumed on Lincoln this was not the insight I found most interesting. I found the explanation for the origins of Lincoln’s famous indifference to religious piety more compelling. This is in part because like the story championed by gays that Lincoln was gay the religious right is championing the nonsense that Lincoln was a deeply pious man. It would be much fairer to say of Lincoln what he said of his own religiousity. Abe pointed to an old man who had explained, in Lincoln’s words, “that when he did good he felt good, when he did bad he felt bad. That . . . is my religion-deeds done in the body.”

Lincoln was a talented and humorous mimic. At an early age he amused his friends by climbing on tree stumps and imitating the local preachers. He had made his antagonism to religious piety so public that it nearly prevented his election to the state legislator when his opponent, a Methodist preacher, accused him of being an atheist.

Well, I just looked up. Its light out and I didn’t even get to my cat Moloch. I was going to write about how he always stops me twice a day, just before I retire for the night and when I rise to demand a thorough petting from me. That’s all I’ll write about it now. I will however mention one more A Lincoln thing I found interesting.

Apparently Lincoln was very kind to animals. He took great exception to a common youthful prank in his neighborhood of setting fires on the backs of turtles. When I was a kid I was appalled to see cars swerve on rural roads to run over turtles that were attempting to cross roadways. I’ve identified with the Great Emancipator for so long that it is gratifying to find yet one more instance of our parallel thinking.

Oh Geez, that was hardly worth getting off my chest. I would have preferred a couple more hours sleep.

About the author

Harry is a ferociously good natured eccentric in Duluth Minnesota who detests traitors dressed up as Uncle Sam. You can find somewhat better edited writings of his at the Duluth Reader "contributors." page. The URL is:

https://duluthreader.com/contributors/h/84/284-harry-welty