Germantown’s Carnegie didn’t look as if it had aged a day since it was built over a hundred years ago. It was in pristine condition, but it’s beauty was undermined by the jarring “The Historical Society of Germantown” sign covering its original identity as a library.
The town maintained an aura of small town Norman Rockwellian idyll complete with two girls selling lemonade and nary a fast food franchise. When I asked the girls if the lemonade was cold one ran inside and returned with a cup full of ice. She put the ice in my water bottle and filled it with lemonade, all for fifty cents. I was able to unload a couple of quarters I had found at a railroad crossing a few miles back. The girls had had a good day, nearly emptying their container that had started the day full. They were very happy with their day, but hoped to do better the next day.
They had nary a concern, seemingly oblivious to a world in crisis. Michael Moore is in a tizzy wanting to dismantle police forces and abolish prisons. He learned that George Floyd’s birthday is right around Columbus Day, so proposed renaming it George Floyd Day, siding with the Native Americans who toppled a Columbus statue in Minneapolis, accusing him of ruining the world he discovered and being a generally despicable person. Maybe so, but Floyd wasn’t exactly exemplary, having served five years for armed robbery of a pregnant woman as well as twice doing time for possession of cocaine.
I felt fortunate to have gotten to the Columbus Carnegie before it is stripped of its name. If Columbus Day goes, next could be anything bearing his name. Would the city of Columbus take Floyd’s name as well? While they’re at it, anything with the name of Jefferson or Washington, both slave-holders, could likewise be banished. Trump might even go along with it if the capital was given his name. How much longer can their monuments last in DC, especially the phallic one? What next? Reparations for all descendants of slaves? Would a million dollars to every African American be enough? Nah, make it two. Zuckerberg and Bezos could cover it.
Moore has no objections to HBO withdrawing “Gone with the Wind” even though he was in full censorship rage for nearly two weeks when his latest documentary “Planet of the Humans” was made unavailable by YouTube for its portrayal of various environmental groups. It had already had eight-and-a-half million downloads since it was released a month ago. In box office terms it would have been the second highest grossing documentary of all time. He called “Gone with the Wind” a racist film and “Casablanca” too for its portrayal of the black piano player. Tarantino’s proclivity for the n-word could get all his films banned. Vigilantes could be going door-to-door checking people’s dvd collections.
The world has become an arena where everyone is vying to be the most outraged over whatever injustice they can concoct. There is an unending supply. Don’t forget adjunct professors and the pittance they are paid compared to full professors despite teaching similar classes. And an end must be put to the discrimination that bicycle messengers suffer, relegated to freight elevators because they are too unsavory to share regular elevators with the more respectable.
Give me Germantown and unconcerned ten-year old girls selling lemonade. All seems tranquil and at peace out in rural, small-town America, other than the occasional shrine to Trump.
Pedaling through small communities filled with people minding their own business and quietly going about their lives is a perfect tonic to the anger and rage convulsing the planet. The flag reflects pride in country on many homes, only a few of which are accompanied by a Trump sign.
It is an ideal time to be out of the maelstrom pedaling all day and spending the night in a tent in a quiet forest as if it were pre-Columbian times and property rights were an alien concept. Each campsite is such a beauty I hope I’m not hurting their feelings for making them just one-night stands. After such intimacy, they deserve full devotion. I head off each morning expressing my appreciation and hoping for another time.
It was a long sixty-seven mile jag from Germantown to the next Carnegie in Mount Sterling. If I hadn’t missed Germantown two weeks ago when I was just five miles from it when I visited the Carnegie in Miamisburg, I could have quickly zipped up to Mount Sterling from Washington Court House, seventeen miles due north. But those girls probably weren’t selling lemonade two weeks ago, and I wouldn’t have wanted to miss them. The long ride back took me through Xenia again. I was hoping it’s library might have reopened since then, but no such luck.
But the Carnegie in Mount Sterling had and with full hours, the only library in the county to have reopened. It had an addition to its rear doubling its size. It retained its original light fixtures and wooden tables. It offered another relaxing refuge from the chaos.
The only reminder of the times were plexiglas slabs guarding the circulation desk and the librarian wearing a face shield.
Mount Sterling was the 29th of the 53 Carnegies I had yet to get to in Ohio. Just 24 to go.
4 comments:
Planet of the Humans was a manipulative pile of garbage which I’m sure people lapped up, as long as they didn’t check any of the facts.
I have to agree with you on the sentiments above George. There seems to be a frenzy of recategorisation of behaviours that in the past were acceptable but now are worthy of censorship or demonisation. And from over here it appears that the US is also taking this as an opportunity to tear itself apart while the president cheers on the chaos.
I’ve never heard you rant before. Washington is generally given credit for freeing his slaves when he died, not so Jefferson. Columbus Day functions as Italian American Day like St Pats does for the Irish, but the irony here is that there was no Italy until three centuries after he died, he would have called himself a Genoan as there were only city-states then, and he sailed for Spain which was a country then. But the Spanish royalty that he sailed for were the same people who started the Inquisition which was really an attempt at ethnic cleansing of the Spanish Moslems and Jews.
History is written primarily by the winners, and I think in this instance, it is a good thing that the losers get to rewrite or remind us that they have a history that is entirely different.
Now you’ve heard my rant.
Oh, and a film suggestion for when you get home , do a DW Griffith retrospective starting with Birth of a Nation followed by Intolerance.
George, I hope you live forever, riding in the idylls of America. Your blogs are like the Internet version of your lemonade stand to me; a refreshing stop-in on a world at its still center, the crust whirling about it on the outside, in madness and chaos. Keep the rubber side down!
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