Blazoned Days

The first time I landed in the United States, I flew in to Idlewild Airport (now JFK) in New York. As I waited for my luggage it was hard to miss a huge billboard exhorting us to KEEP GOD IN AMERICA.   Was God about to hop the next flight out? Over the years I have come to realize how ubiquitous this kind of easy religiosity is in the United States.   It is easy to proclaim KEEP GOD IN AMERICA, but what does that entail? I say easy because it seems to require little more than spouting simplistic aphorisms and feeling self-righteous.   It parrots mindless adages about morality and good and evil without actually considering the actions that would make them meaningful.   It is on a par with platitudes like “America, love it or leave it.” “America right or wrong.”   How do people think they are contributing to the well-being of their country or themselves with simplistic jingoism, be it religious or nationalistic? Watching some films from the 1950s, I would guess that this kind of piet

  The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) guaranteeing equal rights to all Americans regardless of sex, has been shuffling through the halls of power, waiting to become part of the U.S. Constitution for 99 years. According to the Women’s League of Voters, Alice Paul, a suffragist, wrote the Amendment in 1923. It was passed by Congress almost 50 years ago in 1972 and was finally ratified in January 2020. The full text of the Amendment is: Section 1: Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.  Section 2: The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article. Simple enough. But it has yet to be added to the Constitution because the National Archivist, was instructed by the Trump administration to block its certification.   I heard about this obstruction on the radio as I was driving to babysit my grand-daughter.   When Congress first passed the Amendment I was a

  I had no particular reason to go to San Francisco in 1975, but a friend had moved there and was feeling very much at home, so I decided to join her.   I had dropped out of the PhD program at the University of Washington, having decided that teaching college English was a cutthroat business and not what I wanted to do. Spending some winter months in Montreal convinced me that it was not for me.   I was at loose ends, and San Francisco was as good a home as any. My work experience up until then was editing engineering journals and law books, so I started sending out resumes to any company that was remotely connected to those fields.   I landed a job as a “technical editor” at large engineering firm, which meant I was responsible for writing proposals in response to requests from prospective clients.   The technical editing department was quite large, about a dozen of us, managed by a staid man, who I later learned was gay, and he had hired several gay men and a bunch of women and a f