O P I N I O N
TIMELY WRITER
by John Angelo
After 16 seasons of working Holiday retail hell, six of which I was forced to listen to a looping disco Christmas tape, I run with all possible haste away from Black Sabbath Friday and Soul Sacrifice Cyber Monday.
Instead, I offer a more substantial but totally unattainable Holiday and New Year’s wish list:
I want Ghislaine Maxwell’s Bradford, New Hampshire, hideout to be converted into a retreat center for survivors of sexual abuse and trafficking. Anand Giridharadas, author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, spoke to the courage of the Epstein and Maxwell Survivor Sisters on Democracy Now!: “I would respectfully correct something the late Virginia Giuffre said. She said she was trafficked to a bunch of leaders. I would say that she was a leader trafficked to a bunch of cowards. All of these women have proven themselves to be the actual leaders.”
May J. D. Vance and Ka$h Patel come to realize that The-Man-Who-Shall-Not-Be-Named (SNBN) is dismantling the same DEI programs and scholarships that were instrumental to their secondary educations.
Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy is a well-written swan song to Appalachia penned before he defected to the Dark Side. At one time the dimly-lit Patel was selling bogus supplements to override the perceived deadly effects of COVID-19 vaccines. My student-teaching supervisor was Tom Meath, a post-polio man who navigated a wheelchair by puffing into a plastic tube. He painted landscapes using a mirror on his iron lung while holding the brush with his teeth. Tom was two years older than me. Upon his death in 1976 we learned that he was an eye donor. With his creative brain and his generous heart, those were the only three parts of him that worked. I got the polio vaccine. Tom didn’t. Vaccines work. You might recall one New Hampshire legislator claiming there were microscopic octopus-like creatures in the COVID-19 vaccine. He read it on the internet.
I want wrapped with a bow a three-wheeled wagon for the still non-contrite Maxwell to transfer from a Texas spa to Alcatraz.
May SNBN spare our eyeballs and learn to WRITE without USING the bells AND whistles of 4th grade grammar !!!!!!!
I want Manchester’s Creepy Santa to reform himself to rain peace, toys, food, housing and medicine over Gaza.
May we all read and listen to Giuffre’s Nobody’s Girl. It’s an unsparing and seminal book. No coincidence that Andrew, who Giuffre nails in the book, became a ghost prince the week the book came out. Major takeaways from Nobody’s Girl: Epstein was a monster and Maxwell is the Bride of Frankenstein, but they had plenty of nefarious help from both sides of the aisle, royalty, a former premier and a former cabinet member. Academia don’t make out none too good either. MIT stands out here. May they all be made to pay. Netflix’s Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich describes the abusive burning ring of fire as a “sexual Ponzi scheme.”
I and many others want everyone to spend two weeks each as a teacher, police officer and social worker.
May all put in perspective hooded ICE agents seeking to rid our country of the dangerous immigrant flavor of the month at $17,000 a pop. May we stop destabilizing Central and South American countries and then wonder why their people need to flee for their lives. Google Operation Condor. Over our history the Irish, Greeks, Italians, Native Peoples, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Jews, Germans, Chinese, Nicaraguans, Afghans, Muslims, Japanese, Filipinos, women, Blacks, LBGTQ+ people, handicapped people, developmentally challenged people and others have been been perceived as the “Them” or “Those People.” Institutions. Executions. Barbed wire. Eugenics. Espionage and Sedition Acts. The War on Drugs. Exclusion Acts. It was all “legal.”
Legendary steel drivin’ Freedman John Henry was sent to prison for 10 years in the 1870s for the usual bogus felony. Under the “legal” Black Codes he and hundreds of other Black convicts were paid $1 a day, dying before 40 from exhaustion, injury, explosions and coal dust. You can look it up.
I want Atkinson’s Karoline Leavitt and her family to get a tryout with the New England Patriots. Husband Nicholas Riccio (60); Karoline (28); Godson and nephew Michael Leavitt, Jr. (11); Baby Niko (1)…Hike! Stay tuned for the half-time show. Michael’s mother Bruna Ferreira, a Brazilian national, was picked up in Revere, MA, by ICE and sent packing to a Louisiana detention center before being released on bond. Boy, do I feel safer! Who’s foolin’ who? Look for an obfuscated press release soon about a forthcoming redacted press release.
May SNBN let his Darth Vader mask down just enough to emit a single chuckle of humility. You, sir, are no Richard Nixon. At least he tried talking with war protesters one night and created the EPA. The rest? Not so good.
I want the under-construction and ostentatious East Wing ballroom to be converted to a more fitting and fun use. I’m thinking a roller derby arena.
May we realize woke needs to trump (oops!) this administration’s belief that ignorance is a virtue.
I want SNBN to grok that his cooing and fawning over Putin at Helsinki was a new level of betrayal and that the back slapping continues. I imagine Putin calling SNBN regularly and asking, in the immortal words at the end of Animal House addressed to foe Dean Wormer, “Can you see your way clear to giving me just one more chance?” Vladimir Putin=the aggressor and bad hombre. Volodymyr Zelenskyy=good man defending his country.
May New Hampshire NPR and PBS receive all the funding they need.
Charlie Kirk. Josh Shapiro. Mark and Melissa Hortman. Brian Sicknick. Donald Trump. Joe Biden. Barack Obama. Paul Pelosi. Hillary Clinton. I want political assassinations and attempts to end. The United States is not a banana republic … yet.
You can reach John Angelo at timelywriter@hotmail.com