Failure of America’s politicians to deal with and solve the ongoing Social Security funding issue is an example of the lack of states- manship and leadership by the country’s national representatives.

SELF-SERVING HOT-AIR PROMISES
WITH FEW SPECIFICS ON HOW
TO MAKE THINGS BETTER

Social Security funding issue is an example
of America’s failure to correct a program
that is easily fixable and should be done

STATESMANSHIP AND LEADERSHIP
IN SHORT SUPPLY IN U.S. POLITICS
 
By David Maril
 
With local and national elections on the horizon, it’s time to gear up for a year of politicians pandering to voters with self-serving hot-air promises and few specifics on how to make things better.

With all the courage of barking dogs hiding behind trees, politicians on one side will attempt to demonize the other side. Frank, responsible discussions of the long-term issues figure to be in short supply.

One of many topics you won’t hear anyone address is funding of Social Security. That won’t happen until a decade down the road when the program is ready to go broke.

Instead of tweaking it now and making things easier for future generations, it’s easier to concentrate on pleasing wealthy lobbyists who have access to lavish campaign funding.

In the meantime, Social Security is referred to as part of our growing problem related to funding “entitlements.”

Many conservative politicians and commentators pronounce “entitlements” with disdain in their voices while wearing a sneer on their faces.

Right-wingers accuse their lefty counterparts of spending the country into debt, cultivating a nation of softies dependent on their entitlements.

The left accuses the right of being callous and intent on stripping entitlements away from the most vulnerable segments of the population who need them the most.

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Maglev train uses magnetic levitation in lieu of wheels to travel at lightning speeds without touching the ground. Mary- land Gov. Larry Hogan wants taxpayers to fund a Maglev line between Baltimore and Washington that would reduce one- way travel time between the two cities to just 15 minutes.

NEVER HAVE SO MANY LIGHTWEIGHTS
DECIDED IN A SINGLE ELECTION
TO RUN FOR PRESIDENT

If Hillary Clinton occupies the White House,
will she ever hold a press conference?

REASONABLY PRICED MARC TRAIN SERVICE
BETWEEN BALTIMORE AND WASHINGTON
IS EFFICIENT, AND GAINING POPULARITY
 
By David Maril
 
While wondering if a White House with Hillary Clinton as president would ever host a press conference, it’s interesting to note the following:

 So much was made of Gov. Larry Hogan’s being swept off his feet in Japan riding 300 miles per hour in a high-speed Maglev train, dreaming about 15-minute service between Baltimore and Washington, two obvious questions were never asked:

Is the Governor even aware that affordable and, for the most part, efficient rail service exists on MARC trains? And if he is, has he ever boarded one of these trains and taken the smooth, comfortable trip from Penn Station or Camden Yards in Baltimore to Washington’s Union Station?

If the new Governor is into rail service, he doesn’t need to go all the way to Japan to take a ride. He should stop all of his tap dancing and delaying and approve the Red Line Light Rail system for Baltimore and Maryland.

His plan of applying for $27.8 million in Federal Railroad Administration funds to study the feasibility of the $10 billion Maglev rail line to D.C. is a waste of time and money. This train proposal is old news. It’s been discussed and debated for decades. The fact Japan is so eager to sell and build this type of system that it will kick in half of the money needed doesn’t make it any more feasible.

It’s true the Maglev system is intriguing and it would be a major achievement to establish a futuristic, high-speed and environmentally friendly rail line connecting the busy Northeast Corridor.

However, to achieve this costly, mammoth objective would require a regional, large-scale approach to coordinate and secure the service through Washington, Baltimore, Wilmington, Philadelphia, Trenton, New York, Providence and Boston.

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The Father of Our Country looks out from the top of Baltimore’s Washington Monument — the first in the nation dedicated to honor George Washington — as if to survey the city and its environs. The monument is currently undergoing a two-year renovation.  On Armistice Day 1918 the fictitious founder of “Rooby Tawr” climbed up to the monument’s top and sat on Washington’s arm.   (Ya gotta read the story. —Ed.)

A Voice of Baltimore Feature, an excerpt from

ROOBY TAWR, a novel in progress
set in mid-20th Century Charm City

By Joel Foreman

In the months before the U.S. entry into WWI, Reuben Michael’s old man decided the teenager had enough schooling and apprenticed him to a German-American plumber named Max Rudiger.

It didn’t take long for Rudiger to be pleased with the boy’s work and to fully expect him to be admitted at the end of his training to the noble ranks of those who serve to protect mankind from pinholed pipes, corroded valves, rust, leaks, and the many other pernicious rebellions of water.

Despite the worrisome surge in anti-German propaganda and a rising tide of anti-German feeling, Rudiger was damn proud to be one of Baltimore’s 90,000 German-Americans.

Proud that the minutes of the City Council were published in both English and German. Proud his Baltimore gefährten included the home-run-hitting Babe Ruth and the famous H.L. Mencken, whose Baltimore Evening Sun “Free Lance” columns Rudiger read regularly until they were suspended in 1915.

Too many readers didn’t like the journalist‘s pro-German sympathies.

“Thank God for Mencken!” Rudiger told his apprentice as he fed a snake into one of the clogged lavatory pipes at the Bromo Seltzer factory. Mencken had spoken the past weekend at Rudiger’s church, the Otterbein United Methodist.

“That man knows what he’s talking about!“ Rudiger continued. “He’s got the facts,” which Rudiger then summarized:

1) The Brits started the war because they feared losing their empire to the more industrious German nation.

2) President Woodrow Wilson, an Anglo-Saxon, was obviously biased toward England.

3) The ships German U-boats were torpedoing in the Atlantic, including the Lusitania, were fair game as they were all carrying munitions to the Allies.

“Mark my words,” Rudiger told Ruby, “Wilson will renege on his promise to keep us out of Europe.”

But that seemed to the 17-year-old like something happening on another planet. He believed it had nothing to do with him until Rudiger told him that if Woodrow Wilson and the arms manufacturers had their way, “Boys like you will be food for powder.”

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Margo Christie, first-time author of the semi-autobiographical novel These Days: A Tale of Nostalgia on a Burlesque Strip, grew up performing on Baltimore’s once-famous “Block” before moving in 1999 to Denver, where she recently got married, and is now moving again, this time to Tampa.  She reviews for Voice of Baltimore first-time novelist Nickolas Butler’s Shotgun Lovesongs, a thoughtful study in fiction somewhat reminiscent of the iconic You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe.

The book’s title, Shotgun Lovesongs, refers to the album that has brought fame and fortune to the lead character, who is modeled loosely on singer-songwriter Justin Vernon of the indie folk band Bon Iver, who Butler went to high school with — and also to the forced marriages in the story that resulted from the various characters’ premarital escapades.

Christie comes back frequently to Baltimore — the place she still calls “home” — where the some- times violent and disconcerting events of the past month led her to contemplate the deeper meaning of returning to one’s roots, in the context of Butler’s novel.

—————————       —————————       —————————

Shotgun Lovesongs, a first novel by Nickolas Butler, is reviewed for Voice of Baltimore by first-time novelist Margo Christie.

A WRITER FROM CHARM CITY
FINDS PATHOS IN NEW NOVEL
SET IN RURAL WISCONSIN

Where they don’t always take you in

EVENTS OF PAST MONTH IN BALTIMORE
CAUSE LOCAL NOVELIST TO RECONNECT
WITH HOME SHE LEFT 16 YEARS AGO

Home is the place where,
when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.
—Robert Frost | “The Death of the Hired Man”
 
By Margo Christie
 
I grew up in Baltimore.

A metropolis once known for steel, in the 1960s it was the sixth largest U.S. city. Today, at approximately 622,000 residents, it hangs in there at No. 26.

Little Wing, Wisconsin, the fictional setting of Nickolas Butler’s debut novel, Shotgun Lovesongs, is a farming town of about 1,000.

Its pastures and cornfields, dissected by forests, rivers and lakes, stand in stark contrast to the blocks upon blocks of Formstone row houses in Baltimore that provided the backdrop of my youth.

Still, I can fully relate to the love Butler’s characters feel for the place that shaped them.

Love of home is universal and ageless. Though Shotgun Lovesongs was released more than a year ago, recent events in Baltimore moved me to review it just this month.

Unless you’ve been in a cave or far abroad, you know what’s been happening in Baltimore. Protests following the death of Freddie Gray, a young black man whose neck was broken while in police custody, turned violent. Stores were burned and looted, police cars smashed with bats and stomping feet.

Watching CNN’s Anderson Cooper prepare for a live telecast before Baltimore’s Penn Station with the seething throngs in the background, I remarked to my husband:

“Anderson Cooper, no less. Baltimore’s on the map, and it ain’t good!”

But let me make clear that this snappy observation was made from afar: I left Baltimore 16 years ago for Denver, then Denver this year for Tampa.

In my heart, I know Baltimore as a town of mostly hard-working people whose leaders made some damaging decisions. Still, I can’t see an image of her signature row houses – the well-kept blocks of homes with marble steps gleaming or the graffiti-tagged ones whose steps were long ago stolen or salvaged – without feeling the tug of the place I call home.

Such is the case for a group of childhood friends in Butler’s debut novel.

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Macy’s week-long Memorial Day Sale is typical of specials offered throughout the three-day holiday weekend origi- nally designed to honor America’s veterans & war heroes.

ESCAPE FROM REALITY, AND VACATION
WIN OUT OVER HONORING SACRIFICES
MADE BY THOSE IN THE U.S. MILITARY

MEMORIAL DAY SALES ABOUND
 
By David Maril
 
It’s easy to lose sight of what we are commemorating on Memorial Day weekend.

With this past weekend a national holiday, most of were preoccupied for several days with travel plans and quick getaways, trying to avoid crowded highways and mobbed airports.

The agenda for many was a long weekend at a resort area.

I had a truck transport company take a shipment of artwork for me in Baltimore up to New York on May 21st, and they showed up an hour early, at 7 a.m.

“There’s a four-day holiday coming up and we want to get an early start on it,” was the driver’s explanation.

At beach resort areas, Memorial Day Weekend is becoming an adult version of Spree Day or Spring break for over-the-hill celebrators who want to relive their college Florida getaways.

One beach hotel complex manager I know on Cape Cod told me that from her standpoint, Memorial Day Weekend is the worst holiday.

“We have more trouble with accidents and out of control behavior,” she explained.

“A higher percentage of people just show up to party, have a good time and do crazy things.. A few years ago I had guests staying here ending up in the hospital. One person crashed through a window and another fell off an upper deck balcony,” she said.

To be realistic, the majority of us do not give much thought about why there is a holiday, or honoring all those great Americans who sacrificed their lives for our country in war.

There are parades and speeches for those who served and  those who  were directly impacted by the loss of relatives and close friends. But for most of us, escapism has been the major goal.

We are committed to relaxation, excitement and fun. We’ll do anything to avoid reality for an extra day or two.

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