ArcaMax

Let's start out by putting a floor under this column.

I was raised to believe that you did not wear the American flag as clothing. The reason my teachers and my parents gave me was that if you had an American flag on your T-shirt, you would eventually spill gravy on the flag. Just as bad, sooner or later, your flag T-shirt would end up in the ...Read more

I had a pickup truck. Her bloodline is not important, though I will say she was a 2001 and white in color.

Her name was Evangeline. I'm of French descent, and all my vehicles have French female names. Suzanne. Therese. Suzette.

And Evangeline, who last week would no longer start and so was towed away as junk.

These last few years, her air ...Read more

"Some of us are illegal, and some are not wanted,

Our work contract's out and we have to move on;

Six hundred miles to the Mexican border,

They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves."

--"Deportee" by Woody Guthrie

Woody Guthrie, by God, that Commie Okie, the troubadour of the Dust Bowl. It was Woody who gave me the ...Read more

As the election slouches rudely toward the Russian-monitored polling place in your town, there is much to be argued.

But...

Quit arguing about Hillary Clinton going to jail. She's not going to jail. Bill Clinton's not going to jail. They're not going to be locked up.

No matter how convoluted your math, Mexico isn't paying for the border wall,...Read more

As I have written before, groundhogs live in my yard.

They're fat, furry, graceless, beaver-faced things and they live well in and out of their hole, feasting, not just on what grows, but on birdseed that's fallen from our bird feeder, and food thrown to them from the second-story window by my wife, Deborah. I think they also eat some of the ...Read more

The United States of America has always traded with Britain, though sometimes it was less of a formal trade, and more of a swap.

We stole our whole country from the British, and they invaded us in 1812. But, we sent Americans to help Britain in two world wars. Call it even.

They sent us The Beatles. We sent them The Doors. Even.

They sent us ...Read more

I heard Robert Mueller's statement on Wednesday, sitting in front of a dead microphone in the studio of WSAR, an AM radio station in Somerset, Massachusetts. I do a talk radio show four days a week.

Just before the 11 a.m. break, during a commercial, our newsman stuck his head on the door and told us he'd switch to the live feed of Mueller at ...Read more

I've been Trumped, obstructed, Korea-ed, Iran-ed, Alabama-ed and Mueller-ed nearly to death in the last few months, just like any newspaper columnist whose weekly column isn't titled "Gardening Tips From Rose" or "Church Doings."

I've spent 36 years in the Trade of Despair, as I call what some people call journalism, and I've sounded the alarm ...Read more

As near as I can understand Alabama's abortion law, it arises from two things:

1. It's in the Bible.

2. The school system in Alabama stinks.

Still, it's an interesting idea, praise Jayzus!

If it has a heartbeat, you can't kill it.

That's a pretty good idea of law, and there is precedent. If I stab my neighbor Frank, I will be jailed/...Read more

I've already seen naked pictures of Pres. Donald Trump's wife, so why won't he let me see his taxes? Pardon me. I was educated by nuns. In the 1960s. Their laser focus on sin never left me, not even when I was sinning.

For me, a child of a repressed, orderly age, the idea that you might value the sight of your tax return more than you value the...Read more

If you add all the Americans who take Xanax to all the Americans who drink beer, and all the Americans who use cocaine, and all the Americans who smoke meth, and all the Americans who use heroin, and all the Americans who use prescription pain killers, it's a wonder anything ever gets done around here.

Which it does not.

I often think that the...Read more

Someone who may not have spent enough time sitting on a folding chair at a school committee meeting once wrote that small town politics are so serious because the stakes are so low.

This is a wise-sounding saying that has no basis in the reality of school board meetings in towns of 20,000 people, only 1,500 of whom voted in the last election.

...Read more

I watched Notre Dame de Paris burn from my couch, located in my house, located one block from a 100-year-old Catholic church that is 80 percent empty on Sundays. In the back of the church is a redbrick Catholic school, abandoned for decades.

And I was baptized in Notre Dame de Lourdes in Fall River, Massachusetts, a huge granite church built ...Read more