Stealthy GOP(HERS)

It is rare, but not impossible for me to anticipate any GOP moves, having partially grown up in a spatial juxtaposition that is now facing the nation.

Named after “Mary B. Fletcher,” an English female preacher who convinced Methodism’s Founder John Wesley that women should preach in public born in 1897

First, I left home at sixteen and ran away to Congress, winning an essay contest that gained me entrance into the now defunct Congressional Pages on the GOP side. (No Democrat ever won this seat). But, second, I spent more of my life in Santa Barbara, or SB for short, which abuts the county of Kern, and was my parents choice, wanting to be near family in Weedpatch as well as Bakersfield and the Valley in Los Angeles, which also abuts Kern County which is now represented by the wanna-be Speaker of the House good ole’ or the honorable Kevin McCarthy.

Why honorable? Well we were trained to all all members of Congress honorable, not because we didn’t want to engage in a bracing heated argument or better yet, watch the members do, before and during debates.

What I’m getting at is everything in California is not as cut and dried as members of Congress representing SB, Kern, or any district within LA would like to admit. Nor is American foreign policy. Here, though this summer I got lucky.

Visiting Albania, which I told my travel companions was the North Korea of Europe — being so isolated and dominated by the totalitarian state. What is more, I called attention to the fact that a former Vice President (Pence) was in the country to none other than my husband’s political magazine — the National Review. They had invited or X us to write partisan pillow talk or dinner table discussions, all of course respectful or our own version of honorable that we practice when articulating our ideas about all sides of American domestic and foreign policy, whether it be from the left or the right.

In fact, former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, who was a gifted statistician told me on the ride to the floor at Hunter College where they were giving me a Disability Community Outreach Award that rarely went to CUNY faculty or staff-I quickly explained why I asked my husband, Frederic Halper O’Brien (née Schwarz) to wish off my two sons, who while they came in matching polo shirts that they purchased together just before no logo Target were 13 and 15 years old. It wasn’t that a Deputy Managing Editor of the National Review would make faculty nervous. Loads of CUNY political scientists have written for them before. CUNY has faculty who write about all aspects, left, right and center. No, it was the CUNY PR nightmare I witnessed upon my arrival to CUNY 18 years earlier — and that was Heather MacDonald’s dreadful racist book about the College on a Hill.

Indeed, in 2004 the State Department had me read it. I was appointed the Director of a Summer Institute for Fulbright, which brought in 18 professors and scholars appointed by their own countries. Only four were from Europe, the rest came from China, India, Tibet, Russia, Romania, and the Ukraine . . . and I introduced them to the 42 scholars in the United States that spoke about our theme “neos & isms” America as Empire the way Amy Kaplan, as a former President of American Studies viewed the U.S. of A.

I was to read MacDonald’s book the acting director of the cultural part of the State Department, now deceased, told me so that I could understand the real purpose behind Summer Fulbright institute I directed alone, after being solicited by Peter B. (not Beinart)

This meant I had to know the backstory. Backstory, I told this director, is my favorite part of the assignment whenever I direct or administer anything. To me, there is nothing better than knowing the long, complex functions of an institution that exists beyond one generation, at least. as we congressional pages were taught to call all members of Congress sitting on the left or the right or any party in between.

Being a far west Frick and a Penelope Stout returning over 380 years later the very county she and Richard receives a land grant from the Duke of York means there is lots of backstory and that’s why it has taken me so long to finish American neotribalism from my own app or American Political Perspective, not Perspectives took so long to unravel and unwind. As the author of New Netherlands wrote teaching a seminar at Baruch College said the only thing one knows about their own family’s lineage is you’ve got it all wrong.

Ruth MacKay Finlayson around 18 years old, born in Polk County in the city of Des Moines where her father was an MD, had a JD and a BS from Bellevue and the University of Michigan respectively. He took the professorship of medicine and surgery in 1895 when Ruth was approximately 2 years old.

CUNY Graduate Center Historian (Recently Retired) Distinguished Professor David Nasaw wrote

Kudos, David Nasaw! What a wonderful and insightful analysis, albeit a scary one.

Living on the late-nineteenth-century female muckraker journalist Ida Tarbell’s island– Roosevelt Island — which is under the 59th Street Bridge (as those in Manhattan call it, as opposed to the Queensboro Bridge, as those from Queens call it, though it was relatively recently renamed the Ed Koch Bridge after the late former New York City Mayor), gives one a lot of APP (American Political Perspectives).

The wet, dirty muck that Ida raked occurred after she checked herself into what was known as “Damnation Island” due to its appalling conditions and the way inmates from the all-male prison on the island took “care” of some of the women along with white male priests.

While now it remains Roosevelt Island, Cornell Tech dominates it. Former Mayor Mike (or Michael) Bloomberg awarded approximately 37 acres to Cornell, the only private-public Ivy League institution of higher learning.

So, I think I can speculate that Elon has been here at least once, if not more, and who knows? I might bump into him on the street.

I can envision Elon rallying or the bolstering the idea of creating Cornell Tech given its unique location, being controlled by New York State though operated by New York City and technically part of Manhattan. Perhaps he supported getting all tech, especially “tech” education, off the “left” coast and in the financial capital of the world — New York City in New York State, rather than any land mass “down under.”

As Cornell Tech changes Roosevelt Island, I’m glad to know I can count on insightful analysis by a CUNY Graduate Center historian, now retired, since I know his work on Hearst as well as Mellon and can rest assured that his historical analysis will include astute comments or make culturally appropriate comparisons to Robber Barons from one and two centuries ago, and how they dominated the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

In a word, Gail, it’s Gramsci

One of my cousins asked me a fun question. We were talking about Frick and Stout family artifacts from Iowa, Jacksonville Illinois, Des Moines, Grundy, and Polk Counties, all in Iowa, as well as Hopewell and Amwell, New Jersey, where Colonel Thomas Johnson Stout’s son left to head West.

See David Forgacs, "Gramsci Undisabled" Modern Italy, 2016 doing:101017/mit.2016.33
See Critical Studies of Education, Vol. 5 “Antonio Gramsci: A Pedagogy to Change the World” Nicola Pizzolato and John D. Holst, Editors (Cham, Switzerland, 2017)

My baby sister Kathleen even has the china washbowl this single man brought with him all the way to Morgan County, IL The pitcher had long broken, our grandmother Ruth Finlayson Frick explained, along with the Dutch family tradition of giving the most prized artifacts to the last daughter married. On the back of that bowl in very discolored paper is an explanation of who Col. Stout was.

Not only was he George’s (Washington) aide de camp, but he was a professor of religion and helped start Brown University too. But most of all, reading different newspaper accounts, the Colonel wanted nothing to do with receiving any Revolutionary War pension. Sure, he qualified, but he took it as an affront that anyone would think he would take money reserved for the poor.

Antonio Gramsci didn’t think like Thomas Stout. And I am not even sure I would label his left-right politics partisan, yet. That said, he may have been honoring Revolutionary War widows and orphans. To me this means, like Gramsci 250 years later, Thomas Stout recognized the family and the hegemonic power within the family like Gramsci, who not only supported women’s rights but also those of children, unlike his Marxist and Communist and Anarchist or Syndicated Anarchist did with his particular preoccupation with culture and all the jarring juxtapositions that exist and do lead to change, like the changes we are seeing in the United States of America today.

%d bloggers like this: