Catholics

On a heat-dome addled Monday in Tewksbury, MA, Ronnie and Rocinante slid into a local convenance store for fuel and to replenish the ice chest. As Ronnie was interacting with the generously inked and dreadlocked counter attendant, his manager, clearly the owner of this mom & pop operation, looked Ronnie in the eye and said, “Do you have an accent?” Now, Ronnie had just returned from another provisions outlet where he overheard a conversation between associates.

“I think this point of sale terminal is malfunctioning in ‘cash mode.'” she said, “I’m gonna set it for cad-only.'” Now, is that a typo on our part? NO! She said “cad,” but what she meant was “card.” So, Ronnie remains a bit perplexed as to whom exactly has the accent.

Ronnie, responding to the convenience store owner said, “It seems nobody has an accent till they get around people with a different one.”

Truer words.

Anyway, we’re in Rhode Island for this post, and for some reason, Ronnie had experienced some sleep irregularities. Not the norm mind you, but it happens and when it does some wild dreams get remembered (example?). Case in point, Day #2 in Coventry, another invasion of Ronnie’s peaceful sleep cycles… a sort of blathering screed about that mostly coastal postage stamp of a state. And who’s the narrator? That cartoon fat man, a walking testament to the American diet and the utter collapse of television censorship, Peter Griffin. Jesus Christ, is this what we’ve come to? There must have been something weird about that clam chowder Ronnie got from the local grocery? The horror, the horror…

Peter, in a fit of fiery indignation, started in on one of the state’s founders, “This Roger Williams character. A refugee, they say. Fled persecution. Bullshit! He was probably just too goddamn weird even for the Massachusetts Puritans, and that’s saying something. He bought some land, probably with a handful of cheap beads and a bottle of rotgut whiskey, and declared it ‘Providence.’ A sanctuary! For who? For the ‘weirdos and misfits,’ the ‘guys who do a little this and a little that.’ Sounds like a goddamn convention of the criminally insane, doesn’t it? ‘Rogue’s Island,’ they called it. More like Rage Island, or Rancid Island, a Petri dish for every festering perversion known to man…” Suddenly, a voice from the men’s restroom, “Giggity!” Then silence.

He continued, “And the Constitution! Oh, the glorious, blood-soaked parchment of American liberty! While the rest of the nascent republic was trying to cobble together some semblance of order, Rhode Island was apparently sittin’ on the couch like, ‘Nah, I’m good. I’m readin’ the Farmer’s Almanac.’ Good Christ!” Peter was on a roll. “The sheer, unadulterated laziness of it! Not principled dissent, mind you, but pure, unadulterated apathy, only stirred into action by the threat of losing their ‘beer money.’ This wasn’t a fight for freedom; it was a shakedown, a desperate scramble to avoid the inevitable taxation that always follows the grand pronouncements of liberty.”

Peter signaled the bartender for another round and pressed on. “‘Ocean State,’ they crow. Four hundred miles of coastline! Fourteen percent water! As if this is some grand revelation. It’s a goddamn island, you morons! What did you expect, a desert? It’s like boasting your bathtub is full of water. It’s a transparent attempt to distract from the real stench, the profound, unsettling truth about this place.”

In the hazy mist of the dream, Ronnie wasn’t a hundred percent sure to whom Peter was directing his rant, but the outlines of his Afro-Cuban neighbor, Cleveland, began to materialize, a half-empty beer in front of him. Peter, looking skyward in righteous reverie continued, “And the slavery, oh, the slavery! ‘First to abolish,’ then ‘Just kidding!’ A legislative sleight of hand, a cynical wink and a nod to the rum distilleries and the triangular trade. Six point three percent of the population enslaved in 1774, almost double the New England average. Don’t tell me about ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ when the very foundation of your prosperity was built on the backs of stolen lives. It’s the same old hustle, isn’t it? Preach the gospel of freedom while your pockets are stuffed with ill-gotten gains. The hypocrisy, man, it’s enough to make you chew your cartoon arm off.”

“I like rum,” Cleveland said, his deadpan delivery barely audible in the wake of Peter’s fog-horn tirade.

“Rogue Island,” Peter lampooned, “first to tell England to buzz off, last to join the Union. A pattern emerges, doesn’t it? A chronic inability to commit, a perpetual state of adolescent rebellion, always wanting to be the special snowflake, until the big boys threaten to cut off their allowance. It’s not courage; it’s just plain pig-headedness.”

“And the voting! Jesus… the goddamn voting! You needed $134 in property, for Christ’s sake! By 1840, only 40% of white men could vote. It’s a system rigged from the start, designed to keep the unwashed masses in their place, to ensure that the propertied few could continue their grotesque charade of democracy. And this ‘Dorr Rebellion‘… a pathetic, localized spasm of outrage, quickly squashed, leaving the fundamental rot untouched. The Supreme Court, naturally, ‘wouldn’t touch that.’ Why would they? It’s all part of the grand, unspoken agreement to keep the boot on the neck of the regular folks here at the Drunken Clam.”

The rest of Peter’s drinking buddies began to materialize. Peter soldiered on, “then the vampires! Good Christ, the vampires! Tuberculosis, they say, but the rubes, the goddamn rubes, they saw bloodsuckers. Digging up bodies, burning hearts. It’s not just a historical footnote; it’s a profound metaphor for the state of the superstitious soul. When faced with the inexplicable, we resort to primitive rituals, to burning and fear, rather than confronting the cold, hard facts. And a ‘vampire heart’ for a couple of beers? That’s the kind of logic that gets you locked up in a padded room with a straightjacket.”

“The Civil War, the Gilded Age, the KKK burning a school for black children… a relentless parade of entitled ugliness. Industrial might built on exploitation, wealth amassed by robber barons, and the persistent, festering cancer of racial hatred. And the Catholics! The most Catholics! Just another demographic shift, another wave of huddled masses yearning to breathe free, only to find themselves crammed into textile mills and subjected to the same old Capitalist grind.”

Peter was beginning to sound like a Billy Joel song, “Bike paths, clam chowder, johnnycakes… meaningless diversions, crumbs thrown to the masses to keep them from noticing the true horror. And the mob! The Patriarca family, running New England from Providence for forty years. Now that’s the real power, isn’t it? Not the politicians, not the courts, but the silent, brutal efficiency of organized crime. It’s the only thing that makes sense in this goddamn asylum.”

“And the ultimate indignity?” Peter was starting to sound magnanimous, humble, even. “The state’s defining cultural artifact is a cartoon, a crude, blustering, ironically lovable cartoon with absolutely no redeeming qualities.”

Peter Griffin, working at the Pawtucket brewery, lampooning the very place he inhabits. It’s the final, damning indictment. Rhode Island, a place so steeped in its own absurd contradictions, that its best legacy is a perpetual punchline delivered by a cartoon with a metric ton of ironic jokes, none of which are too good to be driven into the ground or, “the bottom of Greenwich Bay you landlubbers.” Say what you will about Rogue Island, it can’t get weird enough for Ronnie & Rocinante… they love it here.

Onward through the fog… Rohlfie

When the Puritans…
Come off too venomous…
You’ve Rhode Island…
For your providence…
Four hundred miles of…
Shore line restlessness…
Meet me and Griffin…
At the Drunken Clam.

We have the “West”.
We have the “Midwest”.
We have the “Southwest”.
We have the “Post-Jim-Crow South”.
We have the “New England” colonies.

All of these regions have their unique character. However, there is a place where this variety gets brewed into a delicious stew. That place is called Maryland. Sorta like “spiral motion physics,” where the motion around a source of attraction forms spiraling patterns toward the source like a whirlpool. That point is DC, and the American stew is at its diversity-best in the surrounding area, Maryland. And it’s not just the people as the geography is also representative of this diversity. Maryland may not be one of the largest states in the US, but with its variety of culture, climate, topographical features, and temperament, some would say…

Maryland is America in Miniature

Now… it’s impossible to speak of Maryland in the year of our lord 2025 without mentioning the apparent shifting in nature of that cultural/political source of gravity in DC. It is a brazen spectacle to behold, our present-day republic teetering on the precipice of a descent into a veritable kakistocracy. A governance of the witless and the fearful as outlined in the so-called “Project 2025.” This ponderous tome, a testament to the enduring American appetite for sanctimonious nonsense, imagines a future so bleakly uniform, so relentlessly scrubbed of the invigorating cacophony of realpolitik, that one is almost moved to pity the authors for their impoverished imaginations. They pine for a nation remade in the image of a white-washed sepulcher, a monotonous ethno-state lorded over by a monarch of their own anointing.

In moments of such profound national heartburn, it is instructive, and indeed, affirming, to cast a backward glance at the decision to remove the federal government’s seat from the feverish grasp of Philadelphia to the relatively blank slate of Maryland and what is now known as the District of Columbia. This was not merely a geographical relocation, but a providential compromise of competing interests escaping the miasma of a political homogeneity that then, as now, threatened to asphyxiate the nascent republic in its sleep.

One need only consider the character of Maryland, that delightful America in Miniature, to appreciate the wisdom of our founders. Here is a state forged in the crucible of religious tolerance, a haven for England’s persecuted Catholics, who, though a minority, were granted the revolutionary courtesy of coexisting with their Puritan tormentors. This early experiment in pluralism, though not without its lamentable “plundering times” at the hands of Cromwellian zealots, set a precedent for the rich and varied tapestry that is modern Maryland. It is a state where, to this day, the descendants of indentured servants and the progeny of freed slaves live and work alongside a vibrant influx of souls from every corner of the globe – Africa, Asia, Central America, and the Caribbean. Indeed, it stands as one of a handful of states where the so-called “minorities” now constitute the majority, a demographic destiny that sends shivers down the spines of the Project 2025 Christian Nationalist hierarchs.

The very soil of Maryland seems to reject the notion of a monolithic culture. From the salt-laced air of the Chesapeake to the rolling hills of the Piedmont, the state’s varied topography mirrors the diversity of its people. It is a place where the first American-born saint rests, a testament to its Catholic roots, yet where Protestants and the happily godless now outnumber the papists. It is a “Free State” not merely in its defiance of Prohibition’s follies, but in its very essence – a haven for the unconventional, boasting one of the highest concentrations of those who defy the rigid taxonomies of gender and sexuality. Let us not forget that the first American to proudly proclaim himself a “drag queen,” the courageous William Dorsey Swann, hailed from these parts, a pioneer in the eternal struggle for the right to be oneself, however flamboyant.

Contrast this vibrant, chaotic, and ultimately more interesting reality with the sterile vision of the Project 2025 evangelists. They yearn for a nation of one political philosophy, one creed, one stultifying set of beliefs, a landscape as flat and featureless as their own intellectual horizons. Theirs is a philosophy born of fear – fear of the other, fear of the new, fear of the messy and unpredictable nature of a truly free society. They would dismantle the very administrative state that, for all its bureaucratic bungling, provides a framework for our collective endeavor, and replace it with a system of pay-to-play patronage and ideological loyalty tests. They would, in essence, turn the clock back to an imagined golden age that never was.

The historical record of Maryland stands as a powerful rebuke to this retrograde fantasy. It was in Maryland that the ideals of the Revolution led to the liberation of thousands of slaves, a moral awakening that, while imperfect and tragically delayed, pointed toward a more just future. It was on Maryland’s soil, at Antietam, that the tide of a bloody Civil War, fought over the very soul of the nation, began to turn. And it was Maryland that, in the ashes of that conflict, abolished slavery and extended the franchise to its non-white citizens. This is not the history of a people wedded to a single, exclusionary identity, but of a people grappling, often violently, with the complexities of building a society out of disparate and often conflicting parts.

The proponents of this newfangled ethno-nationalist monarchy would do well to study this history. They would do well to observe the thriving economy of Maryland, buoyed by its proximity to the very federal government they seek to corrupt. They would do well to visit its public libraries, those bastions of self-directed education that offer knowledge to all, regardless of station or background.

In the final analysis, the decision to plant the nation’s capital in the embrace of Maryland was a stroke of genius. It was an implicit recognition that the strength of this republic lies not in its ability to enforce a bland uniformity, but in its capacity to absorb and celebrate its manifold diversities. The future of this nation, if it is to have a future worth mentioning, will not be found in the sterile pages of Project 2025, but in the noisy, vibrant, and gloriously untidy reality of places like Maryland. Let the hollow sycophants preach their gospel of homogeneity; the rest of us, the free human beings in this republic, will continue to draw our strength from the rich and fertile soil of our diversity.

And that’s all we have to say about that.

Onward through the fog… RH

You can’t just waltz by…
The state of Maryland…
Too much to see…
Too much to do…
Get on the Metro…
To the Fed. Triangle…
And don’t forget…
To hydrate properly.

Loopcircus

Loopcircus

This Land: Rhode Island

This Land: Maryland