ON THE AVENUES: I’m invisible, so will you stop insisting you see me?

Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is the central figure in Kurt Vonnegut’s 1962 novel Mother Night. Campbell is an American by birth who comes of age in Germany between the wars after his father is relocated for work.

When his parents move back to the United States, Campbell -- now as fluent in German as he is in English -- remains in Berlin. He makes a living as a playwright and marries a suitably Aryan woman (her father is chief of police) with whom he is passionately in love.

Entirely and almost narcissistically apolitical, Campbell learns that leading Nazis admire his plays, and as conflict again draws near, he is approached by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, where soon he is employed, eventually becoming the wartime radio voice of American pro-Nazism -- think Tokyo Rose, Lord Haw-Haw and Axis Sally.

However, just before the onset of open hostilities, Campbell encounters a mysterious American from the War Department named Frank Wirtanen who urges him to become a double agent. At first Campbell refuses, but later changes his mind.

Consequently, throughout World War II, in the act of broadcasting on behalf of the Nazis, Campbell regularly passes coded messages to American listeners by means of deliberate pauses, coughs and other audible signals. He never knows exactly what information he is conveying; he merely conveys it via these artful inserts.

In other words, the fictional double agent Howard W. Campbell, Jr. manages to transmit crucial facts in the struggle against fascism while using neither words nor pictures. No essays, memes, polemics, or Photo Shop cleverness. Not even numbered ciphers. Only sounds and cadences, an inflection or two, the clearing of the throat -- maybe a purposeful mispronunciation.

I need a crash course in this covert and subtle way of communicating because it seems I’m back in lockdown when it comes to (clicks tongue) about (wheezes), not to mention (hums opening chord of Bob Dylan’s “Idiot Wind”) and (hiccups).

Did you catch all that?

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Remember the Chinese guy with the bag facing the line of tanks 31 years ago in Tiananmen Square?

Substitute “Hauss” for “Tiananmen” and replace the sack with a six-pack of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense Ale, and that’s me in Nawbany. Everything I do and say is being watched, even when I’ve done and said nothing. Even my silence speaks volumes.

Therefore, in an ill-fated effort to avoid the summer’s newfound HEAT from (taps Keith Moon’s signature drum roll from “I Can’t Explain” on the microphone stand), I’ve been hammering the other side of the political aisle with nasty polemics … as with this tweet.

Welcome to 2020, when the rapturous tones of the GOP's robber baron capitalist death cult blossom into fun and games for all. "Die for Jesus and the economy" doesn't have quite the pull of "Remember the Alamo," but they don't write or read, do they?

After all, I actually AM a socialist, and maybe if some harsh invective is hurled against the Right, the Left will give me a reprieve, except they don’t, and even more obtusely, in spite of it all, I continue to have marvelous conversations with local Republicans, with whom I often disagree -- but yet we’re able to chat substantively in a fashion eschewed by the (lisp), who (oink oink) and grease the trap door.

Tanks for nothing. It is highly frustrating, and tantamount to a sort of exile-in-place. There are so many things going unaddressed that I want to write about, but unless -- wait a minute -- what’s that monotonous sound, the whirring from high up … damn, there’s a helicopter right above the house, and footfalls on the ceiling …

There are some Swedish meatballs in the fridge if anyone’s hungry.

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Let’s play a different game.

If I were to begin a column with just this small list of titles, entirely alone and without explanation, what sort of point do you think I’d be trying to make?

Death Throes of the Dipshits
Nadir for the Know Nothings
Twilight on the Turds

Plainly there’s not enough information to judge, but you would, anyway. You’d automatically think it had something to do with that politician fellow whose name I can’t mention aloud for fear of the first tank operator deciding to drop it into gear.

For your information, these three titles refer to my forthcoming book about the GOP’s numerous self-inflicted wounds, something that should endear me to the area Biden cadres.

It won’t.

As a side note, I’ve been resting my speaking voice for more than three months, imagining that it might enable me to sing Freddie Mercury’s parts.

It didn’t work, either.

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Six months have passed since my first column of 2020, which dropped on January 2. Here’s a quick recap.

ON THE AVENUES: On patience, grieving, puzzles and a necessary sabbatical.

… For a very long time I’ve been threatening to alter my terms of engagement and involvement with local affairs. Admittedly, these previous resolutions have been miserable failures. As with the fictional mobster Michael Corleone, just when I think I'm out, they pull me back in.

More accurately, I willfully pull myself back in, but not this time.

After 15 years, it’s time for a real sabbatical, at least six months to start and then with various options for renewal.

I couldn’t have selected a more chaotic juncture to issue myself a report card. Looking back from where we are right now, January seems like an Eden-like vignette from another dimension on a different planet.

Since I wrote the above words America has experienced the onset of a pandemic, courtesy of a nasty novel virus, at first encroaching and then exploding. COVID has settled in for a long stay, and rather than deal with it in any coherent fashion, we’ve leaped with both feet into an unprecedented, hopeful movement to at last deal with racial and social justice – and, of course, what’s hopeful from one perspective is brutally reactionary in another.

Boy, is it. But we don’t have problems like these in Nawbany, you know, like in those OTHER places.

Did I mention that as these happenings have rendered the country even more divided and fractious than before, we still have a presidential election to contest?

Listen, contrary to popular opinion I believe my sabbatical has gone quite well, thank you. The sabbatical has been so marvelous that it’s being renewed through year’s end, because the problem remains as it was when I penned the year’s first column: there’s nothing one can do when there’s nothing to be done.

And when they all have such abysmally thin skins.

My disengagement has proceeded swimmingly. I haven’t attended any city council or bored with works meetings, either live or via Zoom. Mentions about key elected officials have been reduced 80% or more at this portal. By and large I’m resisting the temptation to comment about the chicanery and corruption. When I have, they've been shadows of my former brilliance.

I’ve been a good boy, overall. The clique has to be delighted. They’ve blocked, muted and systematically excluded me from public dialogue, and I’ve voluntarily accepted their verdict.

I’m no longer a factor. Why, then, are the engines revving again?

But it's okay.

Admittedly there are times when it isn't easy living with the Groucho creed ("I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member"). Silence, whether voluntary or enforced, is little more than tacit acknowledgment of patience; one cannot come back without first going away.

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Recent columns:

June 18: ON THE AVENUES: Anything except common, that Kentucky Common.

June 11: ON THE AVENUES: Some enchanted evening, you may see a stranger.

June 4: ON THE AVENUES: There, there. People are dying, so you may have to wait until 2021 for your pork chop sandwich.

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: The late, great Lee Kelly -- by Matt Nash.

You've heard of the Tank Man of Tiananmen Square? Here's the Truck Girl of Spring Street.

Tiananmen in Czech also means repression.

Tiananmen Square: briefly, anything seemed possible, at the Guardian on-line.

My spring of 1989 was devoted to putting homefront affairs in order prior to leaving for seven months in Europe. I was aware of the pro-democracy demonstrations in China, but it would be inaccurate to suggest that my knowledge of events there was anything more than rudimentary. I had a job to quit, belongings to pack, banking tasks to complete and goodbyes to say. Occasionally, there was time for beer.

On June 4, 1989, I was still on the front side of a full month’s stay in Prague, which of course was the firmly Communist capital of Czechosolvakia, a Warsaw pact stalwart, with the coming autumn’s breathtaking Eastern European collapse barely imaginable, if at all.

My first inkling of the bloody Tiananmen Square crackdown came a day or so after it occurred.

I was indulging in what became a daily ritual of endless walks through the beautiful and utterly dilapidated urban milieu. It was early in the morning, and I saw what appeared to be hastily mimeographed broadsheets stuck to various inanimate features of the cityscape. The language was Czech, and yet the intent was plainly decipherable even without a dictionary.

As I recall it, there were the words “Tiananmen” and “Wenceslas,” the latter being the name of the central Prague square, plus the “=” sign, and plenty of question marks – or something similar. The proof needed to establish that these posters were not approved by the local authorities was that by the time I thought to photograph one of them, they had all disappeared from view.

The point?

I didn’t know what the signs really implied, because there was nothing approximating news available to consult. What had happened in China? I considered asking my host, the uncle of a dear friend who previously had defected to America and providentially washed ashore in New Albany.

However, me friend’s uncle was a Communist party functionary, and for obvious reasons, this wouldn’t have been a good idea. A breaking story was not the sort of thing you’d expect to see emblazoned on the cover of the official Communist newspaper, at least until there’d been time to spin the massacre according to Marx and Engels. There was neither a handy Internet nor cell phones. The information was underground, and I was an English-speaking outsider.

Another day passed, and I walked to the American embassy, presented my passport, and retreated to its wonderful library for a bout of timely reading. Only then, with the International Herald Tribune in hand, was it clear what had just happened in Beijing.

Later, in December of the same year, after I’d gone back home and the Berlin Wall had crumbled atop history's ever-expanding ash heap, the Chinese scenario began unfolding back in Prague, and the protesters filled Wenceslas Square. It had happened before, in 1968. This time, it was assumed that Comrade Gorbachev would not intervene with Soviet troops from Kazakhstan who’d be willing and able to pull their triggers. Even though there was violence in the Czech and Slovak lands, there was no massacre as occurred at Tiananmen. It was called the Velvet Revolution.

Had the Communists in Czechoslovakia known that Americans relied on Czech and Slovak goods to stock Wal-Mart shelves in Topeka, would the outcome have been different, and Wenceslas bloodied just like Tiananmen?

As Americans, that’s a question for all our consciences, assuming we still have any.