Posted on

Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

A drummer boy surfaced in my pocket change this week, on a quarter so worn his tricorn hat has gone soft at the edges. The Mint struck him by the hundreds of millions for the Bicentennial, Jack Ahr’s little colonial drummer with the dual date 1776-1976 stamped beneath his heels, and fifty years later he still turns up in laundromats and bodegas like a veteran who never quite made it home. I was eleven when that coin was new. Holding it on a Tuesday in Jersey City, the day the country turns two hundred fifty, I felt the whole distance between that summer and this one settle into my palm, small and cold.

Continue reading → Two Hundred Fifty Years of What, and What For?

Posted on

The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Every writer carries a verdict he never agreed to. Mine was two words long, written in red marker across the title page of a play I cared about, by a historian whose judgment I had asked for and could not afford to ignore. BAD DRAMA. No note beneath it, no argument, no second page. I was in my twenties. I put the play in a drawer and told myself I had learned something useful about my own limits. It took me forty years to understand that I had learned the wrong lesson, and that the right one would take an entire book to say.

Continue reading → The Magnificent Loser: The Book I Wrote to Answer Two Words in Red Ink

Posted on

Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.

Continue reading → Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

Posted on

The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

When I was sixteen, I had a television show called Kidding Around on KOLN/KGIN-TV in Lincoln, Nebraska. It was 1981. I was a teenager hosting a teenager-aimed program on a commercial CBS affiliate, three blocks of which I have no doubt were paid for by advertising for Pepsi and Levi’s and the Lincoln car dealerships that kept American local television alive in the early Reagan years. The format was loose. The show featured kid interviews, viewer letters read on air, and unscripted segments of the kind that the FCC’s mandates for “ascertainment of community needs” were supposed to encourage and that the FCC’s 1981 decision to deregulate radio, followed by the parallel television deregulation of 1984, was designed to kill. Kidding Around did not survive into the late 1980s. It was a casualty of a specific federal policy decision documented in the book I published earlier this year, Selling Saturday Morning.

Continue reading → The Station Across Town: A Lincoln Boyhood, the Federation I Did Not Watch, and the Second Half of a Television Diptych

Posted on

Wilma’s Boy

My mother, Wilma Jean Boles, died on June 24, 2024. She was 85-years-old. Her death was unfortunate, and unnecessarily gruesome in that, in the end, she chose not to walk, or eat, or take her medication after a major surgery; the only thing she desired was a quick death. My mother always fought for what she wanted, and sometimes what she wanted is what nobody else wanted, including her death. Wilma never really recovered from elective surgery she had on May 23, 2024 to fix a perforated diaphragm where half of her stomach and part of her colon were stuck in her chest cavity, placing pressure on her left lung. Her surgeon believed she’d been living with that condition for more than 25 years; and he also believed there was “no good reason” for her not to recover and get better. As I have worked to come to terms with Wilma’s death, and the first 23 years of our life together, I am surrounded by — and often hunted with — the memories of my mother’s life, her successes, her disappointments, and her ability to continually confound the unwary. I have also realized, but not quite yet accepted, that no matter how hard I try, or how fast I may run, I will always be “Wilma’s Boy.”

Continue reading → Wilma’s Boy

Posted on

What the Hell Happened to Nebraska?

I grew up in Nebraska. Then I escaped to New York. When I lived in Nebraska, it was a pretty good place. North Loup. Scotia. Lincoln. The University. Bob Kerrey. We had stamina, hard work, and a future, and we were kind to each other because we believed in the Good Life. Then, over the last 30 years since I’ve been away, something broke, and a red-hard Republican named Pete Ricketts, decided to ruin the state in an ego-driven run for the governorship just so he could ultimately become a thug in the Trump Covid-19 Death Cult along with Ted Cruz, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott. Thankfully, there are still some sane people in Huskerland who can use their power to do goodness — as in getting the Nebraska Covid-19 Dashboard reinstated:

Continue reading → What the Hell Happened to Nebraska?

Posted on

1983: Year of the Big Glasses

Yes, 1983 was the — “Year of the Big Glasses” — as you can see preeminently evidenced below in the 1983 promotional newspaper advertisement for “KFOR, Radio 1240, The One You Turn to For News.” I am in the lower right corner, aged 18, and in my Senior year at Lincoln Northeast High School in Lincoln, Nebraska. I was not alone in my Big Glasses accoutrement. Three others were with me, but none of my coworker cohorts also had the keen, brown, tint-a-wheel of The Big Glasses Transitions lenses of 1983!

Continue reading → 1983: Year of the Big Glasses