The Northcountry Chronicle

Joe Manchin’s Pipe Dream

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by Jim Hightower Rube Goldberg would marvel at Sen. Joe Manchin’s wacky, convoluted machinations to rig the system so fossil fuel polluters can run roughshod over nature, local people, and democracy. Goldberg was a master of satirical cartoons, drawing hilarious schematics of convoluted contraptions to do silly tasks. His “Self-Operating Napkin,” for example, involved a spoon, cracker, toucan, skyrocket, sickle, and a pendulum attached to a napkin—all operating sequentially to automatically wipe the chin of a soup eater. So here comes Joe with his own sequential machinations to (Zip! Ping! Sproing!) push his pet corporate boondoggle into law. Manchin’s Mountain Valley Pipeline would ram a …

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Lifting the Lamp Beside the Golden Door

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by W. D. Ehrhart As I write this—July 4th, 2023—our nation is celebrating the 247th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.  English settlers had first arrived along the Atlantic seaboard in 1607, and were soon joined by Dutch, Swedish, French, and more English settlers.  The Spanish had already colonized Florida and what is today New Mexico.  William Penn attracted Welsh and a large number of German settlers.  Early on, others began arriving from Africa in chains. Even the people who were here when the Europeans arrived came from somewhere else, though a lot earlier.  We are indeed, as has so often been said, a nation …

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Phillis Wheatley: “the Surprising African Poetess” *

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by W.D. Ehrhart In 1990, I spent a semester as the Visiting Professor of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston. My office was in a building named for Phillis Wheatley. I’d never heard of her, but discovered that she was an African-born slave whose Boston owners had brought her up as a “house servant” and allowed her to learn to read and write. She had even published a book of her poems. I tracked down some of her work, but didn’t find it very interesting. Like so much of the poetry written in English in the later 18th century on …

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Happy Birthday, Henry the K

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by W.D. Ehrhart Henry Kissinger, the former U.S. National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, recently celebrated his 100th birthday.  Marking the occasion, all sorts of public figures have been praising his long lifetime of accomplishments and contributions to our nation. CNN’s David Andelman noted enthusiastically that Kissinger is “still teaching us the value of ‘Weltanschaung.’” Roughly translated, it means “how the world works,” also known as “realpolitik,” or “if you’ve got the power to do what you like, screw morality or justice or right and wrong; just freakin’ do it” (my translation). International Olympic Committee president Thomas Bach called Kissinger “a great statesman” and …

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History Repeats Itself

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But sooth is seyd, go sithen many yeres, That “feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres.” – Geoffrey Chaucer, “The Knight’s Tale” The old saying goes that fields have eyes and forests ears; no secrets could be kept for long in olden times: not murders, robberies, infidelities, what have you. All came to light eventually, justice finally for the guilty, balance restored. Would that it were so in Chaucer’s day or in our own. Where should I begin? Injustice is a fact of life. Ask George Floyd, Emmett Till, Joe Hill, Little Turtle, or Rebecca Nurse. The list is endless, and keeps growing. What …

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Tweedledum and Tweedledee?

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By W.D. Ehrhart So now we find out that Republican mega-donor Harlan Crow paid the private school tuition of a boy Clarence Thomas and his wife were raising “as a son.” We can add this to Thomas selling his mother’s home to Crow, who promptly sank thousands of dollars into the house to refurbish it, and then let Thomas’s mother live there rent-free. Oh, and there are the decades of luxury vacations, luxury cruises, and luxury private jet travel, courtesy of Harlan Crow. None of this was, as required by law, reported by Thomas. And then there’s his wife, Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, a stridently vocal …

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