Peacers

 

 

In Northampton's Pulaski Park, there is this multi-compartmental paper box. 

 

 

Unfortunately, there are so few papers, free or otherwise, published in our Valley these days that usually many of the compartments are empty. Therefore, people sometimes slip flyers for local events in the display slots in front. This one caught my attention last week. 

What on Earth? The pacifist Left has finally surfaced after being all but invisible during the entire past four months of the Ukrainian/Russian war. Even more remarkable, the poster specifically targeted North Valley Congressman and Democrat warmonger Jim McGovern. The protest was held in front of McGovern's office, and of course I had to check it out. Sure enough, there was a small but enthusiastic crowd standing outside, despite McGovern's office being closed. 

Not surprisingly, no local media covered the event, as nothing critical of McGovern ever is.

Meanwhile, South Valley Congressman Richard Neal was walking around the Capitol dressed up as Jame Joyce for Bloomsday, a commemoration of the life of Irish writer James Joyce and his controversial novel Ulysses. 

 

Some critics, such as H.L. Menckin believed the book to have been an elaborate joke pulled by Joyce on the literary establishment. According to the New York Times: 

Of James Joyce, Mencken suggested that his most famous work was, in fact, a voluminous joke.

'Ulysses' seemed to me to be deliberately mystifying and mainly puerile," Mencken wrote, "and I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a vengeful hoax. Writing excellent stuff in conventional patterns, he had got very little attention and was so hard up that he had to go on teaching languages to keep alive, but from the moment he took to the literary bizarreries of Greenwich Village and began to push them even further than Greenwich Village had ever dared, he was a made man."

Whether Congressman Neal has pulled a few political jokes on his constituents over the years I'll leave for you to decide. 

My neighbor is mad at the Supreme Court. 

This was a fantastic show I saw in Hartford in 1988. 

However, one aspect of the show could not be easily done now, as Petty in those days celebrated the Confederate flag and in Hartford wore a stars and bars coat onstage while performing with Dylan.