The Northcountry Chronicle

After the Sixties, Came the Counter-Revolution

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by Jean Stimmell I was born in the 1940s and grew up in the 1950s. The ’50s was a strange chapter in American life: banal, antiseptic, and claustrophobically conformist: swearing or even mentioning sex was forbidden. If you questioned anything about America, you risked being called a Communist. That’s not just my opinion. Andrew Hartman writes that the 1950s were more coercive than before or after, exhibiting “an extraordinary degree of conformity.” “An unprecedented number of Americans got in line—or aspired to get in line—particularly white, heterosexual, Christian Americans.”⁠ 1 I rebelled: I wanted freedom! I found it as a teenager through Sigmund Freud. Through …

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Grant Me the Serenity —

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by W.D. Ehrhart I had an unusual experience this week. Very rarely does our Alleged Editor decline to publish something I’ve submitted to him. But a few days ago, he passed on not one, but two essays I sent. One about Trumpasaurus’s various cabinet choices because he has elected to write on that topic himself in his Fortnightly Rant. The other because it was too long. He suggested editing the long one, which dealt with how, though the elevation of Dolt .45 to Dolt .47 is perceived by many people as the end of democracy in the United States, in fact our country has never …

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What Now?

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by W.D. Ehrhart The election of Donald J. Trump as president of the United States of America in 2016 was bizarre enough. Unimaginable almost up to the moment his election was confirmed. His defeat by Joseph Robinette Biden in 2020 seemed to indicate that the nightmare was over. But that illusion was quickly dispelled long before Biden was inaugurated, and the nightmare went on and on day after day after day for the next four years, culminating now in the return to power of the MAGAMonster and his Minions. How does one explain it? I think it was a perfect storm of misogyny (a female …

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“They’re Eating the Dogs!”

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by W.D. Ehrhart I recently drove on a major thoroughfare through Chester County, Pennsylvania, one of the most reliably Republican counties in the United States. Somewhat to my surprise I did see more than a smattering of Harris/Walz signage along with signs for Pennsylvania’s incumbent Senator Bob Casey. But by far the overwhelming political signage was for Trump, Trump/Vance, and Casey’s challenger, David McCormack. There were stretches of highway with dozens of Trump signs every five feet. Most amazing of all were signs that read: “Trump: Safety; Harris: Crime,” “Trump: Low Taxes; Harris: High Taxes,” and “Trump: Low Prices; Harris: High Prices.” All three of …

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The Holy Land?

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by W.D. Ehrhart Just over a year ago, Hamas launched a surprise attack on Israel that killed about 1,200 people, two-thirds of whom were civilians. At the same time, Hamas took about 250 people hostage. It was a bad day to say the least, and there seems to be no end in sight. Over the course of this past year, over 42,000 people have died in Gaza at the hands of Israeli Defense Forces or from disease, exposure, and starvation. Another 97,000 have been injured. On the West Bank, over 700 Palestinians have died with more than 5,700 injured. Eleven hundred Israelis have died, and …

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Why I Don’t Watch Political Speeches

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by W. D. Ehrhart I stopped watching major political speeches fifty-two years ago in the wake of Richard Nixon’s televised announcement in the spring of 1972 that he was mining Hai Phong harbor in North Vietnam. It made me so angry that I pulled off my boot and threw it at the president. This was back when televisions were boxlike things with all sorts of vacuum tubes and stuff like that inside. The television exploded. Glass all over my college dorm room, and the television’s insides popping and sparking. I’m lucky I didn’t start a fire. And the television wasn’t even mine. I’d borrowed it …

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