"Calumnies are answered best with silence."
Feeling a little pudding headed this morning, after a tad too much mulled wine out on the porch handing out Halloween candy last night. Yesterday was filled with work, so it was a scramble in the moments before sunset to assemble the holographic corpse bride projector, so our decomposing beauty would float creepily past our bedroom window, put out chairs and candy, pair the Bose speaker with my iPhone and find some suitably creepy haunted house audios on Spotify for the front porch, all the while running back-and-forth to the kitchen clear at the back of Tara to work on the butternut squash soup and mulled wine I'd prepared as a surprise for P when she got home for work. But in the end we pulled it all together in the nick of time, and sat at the top of the new porch steps waiting for the flood of trick-or-treaters.
Except, this being 2023, the flood was more of a trickle. I've noticed this trend for years--forget the "War on Christmas", there's been a relentless "War on Halloween" for at least the last couple decades. First it was rumors of poisoned candy or razor blades in apples. Then it was the religious right moaning about how dressing up as a princess was satanic (particularly for a little boy, it seems), and urging us to go to their sanctuary for some bullshit "Harvest Festival" (didn't those once involve ritual sacrifice? So much for our "heritage") or trunk-or-treat.
Mostly, though, I think the tradition has faded as we've grown either to outright distrust our neighbors, or to pretend they don't exist. I used to love seeing the kids from down the street arrive at the door dressed as superheroes or werewolves and marvel at how they'd grown, while talking up their parents about life in the neighborhood--maybe the only time I'd have a conversation with them all year. That sort of neighborhood camaraderie is long gone now.
So instead P and I handed out a little candy to the kids and parents who braved the frosty conditions, got a little tipsy, then moved inside for soup and a movie.
Which leaves me in a morning funk, yet again. I guess a couple things are floating around between my ears, besides the mulled wine sludge. First, it occurred to me that I sound more like I'm 79 than 59 when I talk about my life, with too much past tense and no next thing, no goal. My dad told me several years ago, around the time he was ending his participation in the workforce, that the thing he hated the most about aging was that he didn't have anything for which to strive, that there would be no company to turn around or new purchase to validate himself. Over the years I've shed aspirations of high military command, being a high-powered lawyer or an inspirational priest or a widely cited academic, or ascending to the bench as the apex of a brilliant legal career. All that's gone now, and I'm just a nearly sixty-year-old in pajamas and a Charleston Law sweatshirt talking to myself on this blog. If we are that to which we aspire, I'm rapidly becoming inconsequential.
But I suppose one upside of descending into anonymous mediocrity is that I'm not worth defaming anymore. Twice in the last three days I've gotten calls from friends in PC asking, "What in the hell did you do to piss off Burnie?" I strained memory to recall who or what they were talking about the first time, until I remembered the local podcast host in Bay County who'd made a theme of his show attacking me personally. But good grief, that was four years ago. Why is this little man back at my doorstep, spewing invective to his little podcast audience of devoted right-wingers?
The story began when he focused on another target, a nice lady with whom I served on a nonprofit board. She'd been in the news for her work on a public works project, and our antagonist had broadcast an extended tear against her personally over a period of several days. She wanted to sue for defamation; I thought she had a case but also believed a lawsuit would just give the other guy a vehicle to trash her with even more fervor. She decided to sue anyway, then after a couple years rolling in the mud with this man-swine she found herself muddy and poorer with little prospect of getting a penny out of him. So she dismissed, four years ago almost to the day.
But that wasn't the end of it. Now our small town Tucker Carlson had a new whipping boy on his show: me. Now he'd gone toe-to-toe with the lawyer who thought he was all that and a bag of chips, a former law professor no less, and WON! Of course, that's not what happened--she simply dismissed without prejudice (meaning she was free to refile), and we never reached the merits of the case. The truth was never much of an impediment to this fellow's broadcasts, however, and so day after day, for weeks, I heard second-hand about how I'd been painted as a hack and a loser by a guy who never seems able to rise above near-poverty through his vocation as a professional provocateur.
And now he's back. I understand the impetus was my acquaintance and former neighbor James Finch's acquittal in his federal bribery trial last week. I had nothing to do with all that, of course, except to wish James the best, but this verdict somehow led to a new theme on the show of how stupid and arrogant lawyers were in pursuing an innocent man, and this in turn led to a discussion of the speaker's thumping of yours truly in his version of events. None of it true, but that doesn't matter.
At least now I know why I'm getting anonymous packages at the office proclaiming that I'm a "douche". He has a wide following among the deplorables in Bay County. This happened the last time, as well.
I guess what troubles me this go-around is that I'm hearing about all this from folks who didn't exactly strike me as culture warriors. One might surmise that they're listening to his podcast as well, which means the rot in the panhandle is a lot more widespread than I'd let myself believe. There's discernment in all that, and in the fact that there is no analogous demagogue of whom I'm aware up here. The two societies really are radically different; it's not just me.
It's a shade above freezing out there this morning.
Soft, partly cloudy skies are starting to give way to a high stratus layer, with a dusting of snow promised later this afternoon. We'll see.
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