Lee Marcus's Blog

 My father didn’t die in Italy during WWII, but the rest of his unit did (all but one), and it happened in one night—the same night he witnessed the burning of the church with all the Italian villagers locked inside, screaming for help. Two nights later, he suffered another battle almost as horrifying as that one. The Nazis were determined to shed all the Allied blood they could as they withdrew into the Alps, defeated. My father was unable to put these atrocities behind him and only lived to the age of 55, never explaining to his children about that bronze star or any of the rest. He did have some good times in his life, in spite of what was missing—that thing most of us take for granted: peace of mind. My father had seen and heard and felt things no one ever should. Things the human heart cannot reconcile. 

 

My mother lost a brother she adored, her next younger sibling and best friend. A handsome, well-liked Hornell boy, John Long went missing in the South Pacific and was never found. My mother could not talk about this loss. I’m not sure she ever stopped waiting. 

 

I miss both of my parents, but I cannot not wish them back. When I think of the sacrifices they made for their country, of how ferociously they believed in the righteousness of the American cause—well, my heart sinks. I would not, could not wish them here to see what has become of their legacy. I am ashamed. Mortified.

 

The nation that pitched in every resource, every ounce of purpose and resolve, e pluribus unum, is now a hot mess of discord and division. We have a president and vice president who have signaled that they do not subscribe to the peaceful transfer of power, the very bedrock of the American experiment. Armed vigilantes have been told to stand by, and the country holds its breath as if on the verge of disintegration, threatened not by foreign invaders but by the vigilantes themselves, self-appointed guardians of America’s closet with its renounced and rotting skeletons: white supremacy and patriarchy. 

 

This could go either way. The forces of darkness are jonesing for civil war and a return to the bad old days. The other side is building toward breakthrough: some kind of rainbow dawn involving atonement, reparation, forgiveness, and healing. Then the march onward together to beat back climate change and realize a more perfect union, ameliorating extreme poverty and obscene greed. A future molded of justice and what we used to call brotherly love.

 

I don’t know what to expect. But I do know that what I saw in my parents and their generation is what I’m looking for now as we head into the election of 2020. In a word, character. It’s old news that elections have consequences; now it’s been drilled home that consequences are a function of character. We ignore character at our peril. You don’t say, you might say. 

 

The importance of character is the very thing that makes character assassination such a handy tool for candidates whose records are too weak to run on. These guys are easy to spot from their advertising. They skip the part about what they’ll do for their constituents, because they don’t want us asking what they’ve done so far in the many years they’ve been in office already. They vandalize the photographs and reputations of their opponents, spewing hot-button epithets: liar! extremist!—also vandalizing democracy in the process. These are little men.

 

Meanwhile, this time around, we are rich in options. Energetic new candidates high on vision and purpose, and most of all: character. I am leaning in, heart and soul, for two in particular: Tracy Mitrano (for Congress) and Leslie Danks Burke (NY Senate). By now I have come to know them both pretty well, and for me, these women are a source of real hope—the same hope embodied in the poetry of our nation’s founding documents. All men are created equal. Liberty and justice for all. That may sound corny, but right now, we can’t afford any more cynicism. A once-great nation is on its knees and the church is on fire. Help get us out of this. Choose character, up and down the ticket. 

 

Children’s literature has a parable for our times in The Emperor’s New Clothes, by Hans Christian Andersen. It goes like this: the emperor engages two clever but lazy weavers for a new suit of clothes. The weavers promise His Majesty a suit that will be invisible to anyone who is stupid, incompetent, or unfit for his position. They make sure that word gets out about it. When at last the emperor parades his new suit before his subjects, not one of them dares to admit that he or she sees no suit. Who wants to be called stupid? In the end, it is a child who cries out, “But he isn’t wearing anything at all!”
I remember as a child thinking how implausible this was. How does anyone deny what she sees with her own eyes? 
Well, children’s stories are meant to be fantastic, so no harm done. But later in my childhood I began to hear stories from World War II. Something called a “holocaust,” involving another “emperor,” who decided to murder millions of his own people. He began by belittling those people. Calling them names. Accusing them of hating their country, of being selfish, of doing harm. He loved to regale the public with rhetoric invoking hyper-patriotism and hatred against minorities, especially Jews. Then when he felt he had sweeping acceptance, he began his murderous campaign, and the people looked the other way.
As a young person I was incredulous! How could the German people have allowed Adolph Hitler to murder millions of people in their name? It just wasn’t feasible. “Never again,” exclaimed survivors and horrified bystanders the world over. But for some, that sentiment morphed into something more comfortable: “It can’t happen here.” I believed it myself. The holocaust was so horrific, the German people so … what’s the word … gullible? Anyway, it obviously, certainly, unquestionably CAN’T HAPPEN HERE.
Except now, I think it can happen here. Over the weekend of July 13-14, we all suffered a tweet storm in which the president attacked four freshman congresswomen of color with the perennial racist trope “go back where you came from.” (All four are American citizens, three of them born here.)
A few days later we watched coverage of the president stirring up a crowd in Greenville, NC. He woefully misrepresented the speeches, the policies, and the motivations of all four of the women, singling out Congresswoman Ilhan Omar for the worst of it. The crowd loved it. They ended up chanting, “Send her back!” 
This president is deliberately tearing at the fabric of our nearly-all-immigrant nation. In an article entitled, “Trump Goes All In On Racism” (July 15, 2019), Atlantic writer David Graham decries Trump’s “…willingness and eagerness to place racism at the center of his political platform in a run for reelection to the presidency.” The article led with this: “The president’s tweets are an invitation to a racial conflict that pits citizen against citizen, under the calculation that racism itself is a winning political strategy.”
Congress voted to censure the president for his racist remarks, but our local representative, Tom Reed, voted against the resolution."Having developed a relationship with the president,” he said, “interacting with him firsthand, I am confident in telling you that I do not believe he is a racist." (Buffalo Evening News, 7/16/19)So I have a question for Congressperson Reed. What is a racist? Not, apparently, someone who tells people of color, “Go back where you came from.” Mr. Reed, tell us then. What is a racist? And once you get that formula worked out, I’d like to see you tell it to the experts, in person. Tell it to an audience of African Americans, Native Americans, Latino Americans. Go down to the “camps” at our southern border and explain to the refugees sleeping on concrete floors that our president is not a racist. Say it in the mirror, if you can keep a straight face. And, while you’re at it, explain it to your God.
Lee Marcus is a playwright and author of “Hearts Afire: The Story of Moonwhistle School.” She lives in Arkport.

(The following column appeared in The Evening Tribune in Hornell, NY on June 14, 2019.)

At a recent town hall meeting in Hornell, Congressman Tom Reed, when asked about the policies of our president, said he appreciates Donald Trump as a disruptor. Isn’t that the cutest? (deflection)
What’s not to love about the way our president cozies up to murderous dictators (Kim Jong Un, Vladimir Putin), abandoning our nation’s long-standing advocacy for human rights and pretending that North Korea and Russia are our friends? After all, Kim sends him beautiful love letters; and Vlad strongly denies that he attacked our federal election process in 2016—so our intelligence agencies are just flat out wrong. Oh, that’s precious.
After Trump called white supremacists in Charlottesville “very fine people,” hate crimes increased by 17% nationally. With Kavanaugh in place on the Supreme Court, several states have passed laws that completely overthrow women’s constitutional right to bodily autonomy. And in what can only be explained as ODS (Obama Derangement Syndrome) Trump has reversed every rule and regulation he could find pertaining to climate change mitigation, making our country a threat to the world. That is downright adorable!
Trump has replaced hard-won trade agreements with tariffs that hurt our farmers and could destroy our alternative energy industries, lying about who will pay those tariffs and telling us our country is raking in millions of dollars. In fact, American consumers are the ones shelling out millions of dollars to cover the tariffs in what is basically a tax on all of us and a death sentence for the family farm. That’s our guy, disruptor through and through. 
Congressman Reed could stand to learn from his hero and do some disrupting of his own. How about demanding that Congress rein in the pharmaceutical companies that are extorting millions of dollars from Americans who must choose between food, shelter, and drugs just to survive diabetes or cancer? How about disrupting the mass murders of children in our schools by supporting sensible gun policies and removing weapons of war from the marketplace? How about disrupting the Kool Aid party and telling your constituents the truth about the Mueller Report? 
There must be 1000 ways Mr. Reed could be a disruptor in his own right and do something that’s actually good for our country. Call for a halt to our president’s attack on the CIA and FBI (including his recent announcement that they will not be allowed to do their jobs vis á vis N. Korea). Kindly ask him not to collude with our enemies in the next election (even though he has already announced that he intends to). Demand, on behalf of the millions of people now under water in our heartland, a serious approach to climate change. I could go on and on.
The 23rddistrict needs a representative in Congress who is rational in the good old-fashioned way where right is right and wrong is wrong, where there is such a thing as truth, and facts actually matter. Most of the people out here are not fooled. We can see that the emperor has no clothes, and the “disruptor” dodge is gas-lighting. We are insulted by this, and we deserve better.

What a week. Angry white man mails 14 pipe bombs to top leaders of the Democratic party plus CNN, a liberal philanthropist, and an actor. Oddly, this is the same hit list the president calls on in his raucous, sometimes frightening rallies across the country. Days later another angry white man attempts to attack an African American church, but fails, only to go to a supermarket and kill two people there. And on Saturday, another angry white man attacks a Jewish synagogue during services, killing eleven worshipers. The president, unable to stick to his teleprompter, blames the victims for not having armed guards protecting the congregation. In other words, right of way belongs to the shooter.

Where have we heard this before? In the Kavanaugh hearings we learned (as usual) that right of way belongs to the would-be rapist. If the victim didn’t run immediately to the police, or if she doesn’t remember the address where the attack happened, then not only is the accusation unproven, the accused is proven innocent. There will always be a mitigating “if,” because in Trump’s view, right of way belongs to the white male, period.
Okay, how did our regional leadership respond to these events? Did Congressperson Tom Reed offer his female constituents any kind of reassurance that would help to break the silence we all maintain as the bitter pill, the only option, when recovering from sexual discrimination or assault? No.
Did he decry political violence as un-American and unworthy of his party? No. Tom Reed’s response to our current political malaise is to run an ad full of lies so brazen that anyone who knows anything about Tracy Mitrano is almost forced to laugh out loud. But the ad ends with images of a TV monitor, on which Mitrano’s face appears, being ripped from the wall, thrown through a second-story window, and smashed with what looks like a cell phone. Right of way to the angry white man. 
This isn’t the America for which our fathers and grandfathers fought and died 75 years ago. It is, sad to say, the America millions of indigenous people, African Americans, gays and lesbians, and women have died for. This America’s byword is All White Men Are Created Special. (Everybody else, dog eat dog.)
We seem to be on a precipice. I’ve been on a precipice myself before, and I know it takes extreme will to get back to safety. Let me suggest something.
The Haudenosaunee (also known as Iroquois) Nation, right here in New York State, has a well-worn tradition that I believe could help us now. It is called a Thanksgiving Prayer. Of course, our traditional Thanksgiving holiday is just around the corner. As Americans we take one day each year to come together and share our thanks for the blessings that surround us. Members of the Haudenosaunee tribes do this every time they gather. In a series of poetic pronouncements they thank the Earth under their feet for the food it grows; the water for nourishing life; in turn the wind, the sky, the animals, the sun, the moon, and so on. After each message of gratitude, they declare, “Now our minds are one.”

Imagine it. Here’s where we stand. Here’s what we have to be grateful for. And now our minds are one.
It would be hard to turn on each other after an invocation like that.
I would like to point out that the huge crowd in Pittsburgh that gathered on Saturday night shared their grief over the synagogue shootings with a chant. Did they call for revenge? No. They chanted, “VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. VOTE.” This means we still have leverage.
If you visit the wonderful Ganondagan State Historic Site in Victor, you will discover that the founders of our fledgling nation borrowed shamelessly from our indigenous neighbors even while attempting to exterminate them. The result was a version of democracy that set forth principles of equality and human rights, even if its authors didn’t really mean to suggest that all people were equally human. White women in the Finger Lakes region later took as a revelation the discovery that their female indigenous neighbors lived lives of equality, respect, and power. It is doubtful our foremothers could have conceived the robust Declaration of Sentimentswithout this connection to the Haudenosaunee tribes.
America, at last, seems to have gone sour. Can we muster the humility to borrow a cup of sugar from the neighbors, again? Something like: 
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all people are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now our minds are one.
If we were to share these words at every gathering (instead of the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem, both of which have been all but weaponized), maybe we could begin to imagine a national story again. An American identity. And people who cannot accept this American premise would at least recede from public life, even if they cannot be persuaded. I hold out this hope.

Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and maybe nonvoters, too, mourn this week the death of Senator John McCain of Arizona, war hero and statesman. Through the media we find ourselves reliving moments we all remember where Senator McCain stood apart as he stood up for the ideals of the country he loved so much. Most of us, even if we differed with him on policy matters, can agree that McCain was a leader for whom we can be grateful, of whom we can be proud, because he not only served his country honorably, but he represented America at its best.
Moving tributes to McCain from journalists, historians, and politicians on both sides of the aisle remind me of the death of Ted Kennedy, ironically on the same date, and by the same cause, in 2009. The two men were friends, and each has been memorialized as a “lion of the Senate.”
Are we still producing leaders like McCain and Kennedy? If so, who are the ones we will lionize 10 years from today? Where do they come from? Is leadership a gift they’re born with, or do we, as citizens, play a part in nurturing them?
I’m going with that last nugget. I remember the night back in 2004 when Barack Obama spoke at the Democratic National Convention and declared. “…there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America.” It was obvious to many people that this man was loaded with talent, patriotism, and purpose. None of that would have made him the leader he became if we hadn’t elected him president. Put a person of talent in the proper arena and, with a little time, greatness can blossom. 
It makes a strong case against term limits, which could whisk away burgeoning leadership exactly when it is needed most. Term limits, as a half-baked notion, is right up there with the slander that all politicians are crooked, so we should throw the bums out and never elect another one to office. If our recent history hasn’t cured you of that idea, I take it you’re hiring a plumber for your next colonoscopy. Oh, sorry. I don’t mean to be a pain in the— 
As for diversifying our leadership pool, I’m all for it, but I still want the ballot box to steer the ship of state. And we could stand to fortify our elections, making it easier for Americans to vote, harder for Russians. That said, we’re coming up on a couple of elections right now: state and local primaries on September 13; federal midterm elections on November 6. We should think about creating a lion or two to add to the pride.
Two candidates in our region have caught my attention: Tracy Mitrano, who is running for Congress (23rddistrict) to unseat Tom Reed; and Amanda Kirchgessner, who is running in the primary for the chance to unseat Tom O’Mara in the New York State Senate (58thdistrict).
I spotted Mitrano over a year ago at a candidate forum at Stony Brook State Park. It was her first appearance on the campaign trail, and she caught my eye as someone well along the path toward important, national leadership. Her career in higher education plus a law degree create a formidable resume, not to mention her specialty in cyber security policy, something most of us agree is badly needed just now. But it’s something else, that “X” factor that’s captured my imagination. 
In Mitrano I hear a distinctly Western New York voice, one deeply connected to the struggles of our farms and our little towns, to our threatened natural splendor, even to our instrumental place in history from Six Nations and the founding of democracy to abolition to women’s rights. (Did I mention she has a Ph.D. in history?) Mitrano wants with all her heart to represent us, to bring opportunity to our region, stability to our lives, security to our families, to be our voice for change. It comes through, see for yourself. She can’t wait to get started. Maybe we’ve got a potential Lion of the House on our hands.
Amanda Kirchgessner is in a different category. She would bring to the statehouse in Albany the voice of the down-home, blue-collar worker. The young person who struggles to make ends meet, who gets up early, comes home late, works a lot of hours for not enough pay, who juggles student loans, health insurance, and keeping a roof overhead, God willing and the creek don’t rise. You could say she’s ordinary. Or you could say she’s extraordinary. Start up about your troubles, and the look on her face tells you she knows. She knows. Amanda’s done a lot of thinking about what’s gone wrong, and she’s got the focus of a fighter. I like to think we’ll be sending her off to Albany in January.
Yes, it is hard to see the passing of decent, passionate politicians, especially if you suspect they are an endangered species. Maybe the media’s coverage of the life of John McCain will inspire us to elect new leaders who will fight like lions for American ideals. Please do your part. 


Lee Marcus is a former staff writer for the Evening Tribune and author of “Hearts Afire: The Story of Moonwhistle School.”

the chipmunks had a partyon the patiofeatured: my strawberries
oh, the thievery
the red ripe evidence
one nibble perand just for giggles:
two turds’ gratitude
on the arm of the benchI like strawberries
but I love mischief

your appearance among us
was something
you had the goodswe, uninitiated, brought 
only our plain selves
you craved our wonderment
we idolized your cool competence
big ideas, leaps and boundsme? gobsmacked
once, forever
and especially
when word came down
that you wanted to see
everything I wrotenot used to being taken seriously,
I soared
over years, fascination
carried forward
like a slow weave
lives too disparate
for intricacy
destiny’s high art
still, now and then the thread …until you said
what you said
I took the unsubtle hint
not sure
you wanted me to disappear
forever, but
oh well

girl, take off those shoes and socks
you’d say
it’s raining, let’s go!
we’ve got puddles to findwhen you found me snooping
around your dressing table
you’d say
let’s get dolled up!
patting the bench
beside you
lipstick, rouge, perfume, high heels,
earrings, hat and gloves
mirror, the two of us
Grandpa, look!every day, a nap
starting with a story
from Redbook
or your horse and buggy childhoodyou saved greeting cards
for me
for drawing paper
and Betsy McCall paper dolls
to cut outI loved your molasses cookies,
your refrigerated water,
your slabs of tomato
with sugar on tophow you talked to the birds
on the back porch
to the neighbors on the frontyou taught me to love children
and how to love children

badass
like the explosion,
that first chomp into a Macintosh appletender
as a finger flick
on a blossom of birdsfoot trefoilyou plied me with potato chips
to scratch your back
while we watched Gunsmoke
you liked Miss Kittyand also Miss America
Burt Parks’ Here She Comes
you cried a littleNov. 22, 1963
early home
I found you bawling
on your bed
my breath caught
heart pounded
how you took it so personallybroken and abject,
how could you have known
of my imprinting:
ah. this.
now I see.but dad,
midlife was as far as you could get
from Italy
before that young man’s war
caught up with you
upended your calm
your claim to happiness
the marriage frayed, then
cancer found you
and you were doneso much knowing went unknown
after Feb. 4, 1975
so mean, the way the world went on
without you
I was stunned by it, thinking
I belonged much more to you
than to the world

it’s all just too muchtoo much sunor raintoo much greenboth sides the fencenot just an embarrassment of richesas they saybut abundance that promisesblithely to consume us 
bushes pushing aside the window’s prospectsroots sabotaging foundationscracking wallsvines choking the chosenand cherished, the lilacsthe hemlockthe old fashioned roseremembered from long agothe one our young mother loved
we have to stay on itmowingsawing and loppingbeating back this riotof pure intentphotosynthesisgone apeshitspurred on, no doubtby our ennuigreening galore, ohgrinning greenlyat our hapless aesthetic