RichardHowe.com – Voices from Lowell & Beyond

Snarky versus Markey by Marjorie Arons-Barron

The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons-Barron’s own blog.

Bay State Democrats have arranged themselves in a circular firing squad, leaving voters to choose between a senator who is old (80) but effective, or a congressman who is younger (47)– and gratuitously snide. Monday night’s televised debate between incumbent Senator Ed Markey and 6th District Congressman Seth Moulton was a contentious, unpleasant exchange that revealed few ideological or substantive differences and raised a fundamental question about what, exactly, a generational change in this race might mean for Massachusetts.

The question beneath the debate was whether Moulton had a coherent case for replacing Markey. On policy, the two agree on most issues; where they differ — health care financing, the pace of progressive change — the distinctions are matters of timing and mechanism rather than fundamental direction. Moulton’s legislative record, while respectable, notably on veterans’ and mental health issues, is thin compared to Markey’s decades of accomplishments, especially on consumer, energy and climate issues.

Moulton’s own record carries vulnerabilities: a public apology, offered during the debate itself, for 2024 comments on transgender athletes that drew enormous backlash in Massachusetts; persistent questions about his investments in defense companies while sitting on the House Armed Services Committee, where he exercises oversight of those very industries; and a career whose national ambitions — a 2020 presidential run, a challenge to Nancy Pelosi’s leadership — have periodically drawn attention away from the constituents he represents, the same charge he leveled at Markey.

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The strength of the generational change argument depends on the office. For executive positions — governor, president, district attorney — where leadership style and decision-making drive outcomes, it carries real weight. For the United States Senate, it cuts the other way.

More than any other major elected body in the country, the Senate explicitly rewards seniority, institutional relationships, and procedural expertise accumulated over decades. When a senior senator retires or loses, that accumulated leverage largely disappears overnight.

Replacing a senior incumbent on grounds of age alone, when the incumbent remains engaged and effective, costs a state institutional influence and, typically, federal resources. That tradeoff might make sense if the senator were disengaged, rarely initiating legislation, or struggling to communicate. None of those conditions describe Markey’s record or his performance Monday night.

If Moulton were a successful challenger, his institutional seniority-enhanced powers would presumably grow over time, but it doesn’t replace what the state loses on day one.  What does Massachusetts do in the immediate term?

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A challenger with a narrow margin in policy differences and a much thinner legislative record faces an obvious strategic problem: the affirmative case is hard to make. What fills the vacuum is what we saw Monday night.

The greatest takeaway from the debate was Moulton’s attempt to smear Markey with an unsubstantiated connection to convicted child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Pressed for specifics, Moulton went full innuendo. He alluded to a meeting Markey had with a lobbyist representing Epstein. According to PolitiFact, what actually happened is this: Markey met with lobbyist Bob Crowe about a matter related to the son of the then-president of Senegal — legitimate foreign-relations business for the ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on Africa. Crowe later forwarded details of the meeting to Epstein. A Crowe colleague also included Epstein on an invitation to a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee lunch at which Markey was among a group of senators listed as “special guests.” There is no evidence Markey ever knew Epstein nor had any connection to either the Senegal matter or the fundraiser. Markey — who has been one of the loudest voices demanding the full release of the Epstein files — flatly denied ever meeting Epstein, said he had nothing to do with him, and called Moulton’s tactics reprehensible. PolitiFact found no basis for the broader insinuation.

What Moulton achieved was a distraction from any substantive, positive contrasts available to him. What he sacrificed was something harder to recover: the credibility of a candidate who had positioned himself as the younger but all-grown-up alternative. The attack belongs to a recognizable tradition in American politics — one that runs from Joseph McCarthy’s “I have here a list of names” to Lee Atwater’s Willie Horton ad to the social media era’s weaponization of the Epstein files themselves. The common engine in each case is the same: a kernel of technically-adjacent fact, an accusation left implicit so that the audience fills it in, and deniability intact for the attacker if the smear is challenged. McCarthy’s lists couldn’t be examined. The Horton ad was run by an independent PAC so the Bush campaign could claim clean hands, even as campaign manager Lee Atwater boasted he would make Willie Horton Dukakis’s running mate. Moulton’s version — “your name appears repeatedly, I’m not going to get into all the details” — follows the same blueprint: insinuate, decline to specify, let “Epstein” and “Markey” sit in the same sentence and do the work. The Justice Department has itself noted that names appear in the Epstein files “in a wide variety of contexts,” that many are witnesses, staff members, and people with no connection to his crimes, and that no one named in the files beyond Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell has been charged with anything. What Moulton deployed as a weapon is part of a document release the DOJ has explicitly warned cannot be read as an accusation list — and that Markey had already been demanding be made public.

This is not the first time Moulton has reached for this tool. In the 2014 Democratic primary, running against incumbent Democratic Congressman John Tierney, Moulton pressed the fact that Tierney’s wife had been convicted of tax evasion related to her brother’s offshore gambling operation — an operation Tierney maintained he knew nothing about. The House Ethics Committee investigated and in 2013 unanimously voted to take no action against Tierney. What was notable was Moulton’s willingness a year later to attach a congressman to a family member’s crime in a race where the underlying policy differences between the two candidates were similarly narrow. It worked: Tierney lost. The tactic of connecting an opponent to wrongdoing through a third-party association — with plausible deniability about how far the charge actually extends — is, for Moulton, a proven instrument. Monday night it looked less like improvisation than repertoire.

Whether it works twice is what the September 1 primary will answer. In 2014, the target was a low-profile, serious, workhorse incumbent weakened by a genuine ethical cloud. In 2026, the target is a high-profile and resilient 80-year-old senator with a formidable legislative record, a long career free from scandal or public wrongdoing, whose clear denial about any Epstein links is unequivocally supported by PolitiFact. The attack in 2014 was not effectively contradicted. In 2026 it contradicts itself — deployed against a senator who had already demanded the release of the very documents being weaponized against him.

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Moulton is a decorated Marine with expertise on defense, national security, and transportation issues. He has rightly criticized Democrats for not discussing politically difficult topics, asserting they should be willing to acknowledge nuance in policy debates. Markey has been faulted by moderates for being too doctrinaire liberal, repeatedly taking agenda-setting leadership roles on causes dear to progressives, especially as a national leader on the existential issue of climate change. He joyfully touted endorsements he’s received from Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Ayana Pressley. Moulton is hard to define ideologically: is he a national security Democrat? A centrist progressive?  Unlike most of the other generational contests this year, the younger candidate here is clearly the more moderate choice–– but in the debate he frequently avoided using thoughtful nuance to distinguish his views from Markey’s. Did he think it was the wrong time to discuss the subtleties of difficult topics?

The two candidates agree on most policy questions. Where Markey genuinely shone during the debate was on legislative accomplishment. He cited specific dollar figures for Massachusetts industries and communities he has helped, most dramatically in renewable energy. Against that record, Moulton’s signature achievement — his role in establishing the national mental health crisis hotline — is real and meaningful, but thin as the centerpiece of a case against Markey’s long history of legislative success.

On health care, Markey is one of the original sponsors of single-payer Medicare for All. Moulton supports a public option — “Medicare for All Who Want It.” However idealistic Medicare for All may be as a long-term goal, the transformation faces significant financial and political obstacles. Moulton’s approach, by contrast, may be too incremental to address the urgency many Massachusetts voters feel. Viewers could have benefited from a more serious discussion of how each would make health care both affordable and accessible; they got neither candidate’s best thinking on the question.

Their discussion of healthcare, however, indirectly addressed Moulton’s central rationale for challenging Markey: that it’s time for generational change, the idea that Massachusetts will benefit from new, younger representation in the Senate.  Markey directly confronted the question of what Massachusetts gains by replacing him when he noted that, if Democrats retake the Senate majority, he (Markey) would become chair of the subcommittee dealing with health care, a position with direct and immediate power over legislative outcomes. Even in the minority, as ranking member, Markey’s seniority provides substantial powers. That is a specific, verifiable advantage that no freshman senator, however bright and energetic, can replicate at any time in a first term or possibly for years to come.

Perhaps their most revealing policy contrast–– which never came up during the debate––is on cryptocurrency. Moulton voted in July 2025 for both the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act — the first major federal crypto legislation ever passed — framing his vote as a matter of regulatory clarity and American competitiveness. Markey voted against the bills and has spent years approaching cryptocurrency from the opposite direction entirely: as an environmental and consumer threat. In 2022, he introduced legislation requiring EPA to study crypto mining’s energy consumption and mandate greenhouse gas reporting from large mining operations. Markey argued that bitcoin’s incentive structure demands ever-increasing electricity use at precisely the moment the country needs to use it more efficiently. The two votes represent a genuine philosophical divide — Moulton sees digital finance as an innovation race to be won, Markey sees it as a climate, consumer and financial liability to be managed— and it is, arguably, a cleaner ideological distinction than anything the debate produced on other matters. Organizations aligned with the crypto industry have rated Moulton as strongly supportive. They see Markey as a crypto skeptic, targeted for replacement.

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Markey has now publicly committed to this being his final term. Massachusetts has a deep bench of potential replacements — including several House members already positioned with their own congressional seniority — who benefit from knowing an open seat is coming. A future race without an incumbent to displace is more likely to be competitive, more likely to draw the strongest candidates, and more likely to produce a successor with a genuine mandate rather than one, if Moulton wins, whose first act was a fratricidal primary against a senator with a praiseworthy 50-year congressional record.

Ed Markey, freed from re-election pressure, with full seniority and committee power, can arguably accomplish more than a freshman building from scratch. The pledge not to run again doesn’t weaken the case for Markey. Deployed correctly, it strengthens it.

Lowell Politics: August 9, 2026 – City Manager biographies

There was no city council meeting this week so today we have more Lowell political history . . .

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Over the course of four weeks earlier this summer, I posted mini biographies of those who have served as mayors of Lowell since the receipt of the city charter in 1836. (Lowell was a town in its first decade.) In 1943, the people of Lowell adopted the Plan E form of government which featured a city council elected by the voters and a city manager elected by councilors. Today, I am posting sketches of the eighteen individuals who have served as city manager since that office was created in Lowell. (I have not included those who filled the office temporarily, as City Clerk Michael Geary has done on several occasions.)

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John J. Flannery was Lowell’s first city manager. He was hired on January 4, 1944, and resigned on November 18, 1952, having held the job for nearly nine years. Flannery was born in Lowell in 1898. At age 17, he began working at the United State Cartridge Company where he remained until the company closed in 1927. That year, he became the Permanent Secretary of the Lowell Lodge of Elks. In 1940, he became the city treasurer, a position he held until being hired as city manager. His salary was $15,000 and he never took a vacation in his nine years as manager. Flannery died in Lowell on February 1, 1958, at age 60. He is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery.

Ulysses J. Lupien was Lowell’s second city manager. He was hired by the city council on November 29, 1952, and began work on December 1, 1952. The council that took office a month later clashed with Lupien who was fired on November 11, 1953, by a five to three vote. Lupien was born in Wayland, Massachusetts, on December 12, 1883. He grew up and went to school in that town then graduated from Harvard. He was hired by Lowell Textile Institute to teach mechanical engineering which led him to move to Chelmsford where he bought a home. He taught for ten years then became the head of industrial relations for the Pacific Mills in Lawrence. In 1939, he was hired to be the state’s Director of Civil Service, a position he held until 1944. He continued to live in Chelmsford after his time as city manager but died in Lowell on August 15, 1965, at age 81. He is buried in West Chelmsford Cemetery in Chelmsford.

Frank E. Barrett was Lowell’s third city manager. He was hired on November 18, 1953, and was fired on January 2, 1962, during the council inauguration ceremony (something commonly done in the early days of Plan E). Barrett was born in Lowell on January 19, 1907, and graduated from Lowell High and the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester. He briefly worked as a banker in New York City but returned to Lowell and worked at several jobs until 1940 when he was hired as a reporter at the Lowell Sun. In fact, he was the newspaper’s City Hall reporter when he was hired as city manager. After his time as manager, he owned and operated Frank E. Barrett Real Estate Company. He died in Lowell on October 14, 1988, at age 81. He is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery.

Cornelius F. Desmond was Lowell’s fourth city manager. He was hired on January 4, 1962, and retired on October 29, 1963, upon reaching the mandatory retirement age of 70. Desmond was born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on October 4, 1893. His family moved to Lowell when he was a child, and he graduated from Lowell High School. He served in the US Army during World War One, then worked in the circulation department of several newspapers in New York and Boston until the 1930s when he was hired to be a supervisor in the New Deal’s WPA program. In 1940, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives where he served for eleven terms. (For nearly a year after being elected city manager, he continued to serve as a state representative until that term ended.) He died in Lowell on October 1, 1974, at age 80. He is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery.

1963. Harold Ready was Lowell’s fifth city manager. He was elected on October 29, 1963, and began as city manager on November 1, 1963. He retired as city manager in November 1966. Ready was born in Lowell on April 12, 1900. He graduated from Boston University Law School in 1920 and practiced law in Lowell for 60 years. He served as legal counsel for the Lowell Housing Authority and the Town of Billerica before being hired as the Lowell City Solicitor in 1942. He remained city solicitor until 1952 and then returned to that position in 1962. Upon the retirement of Cornelius Desmond as city manager, the city council immediately hired Ready, who was serving as city solicitor at the time. Ready died in Lowell on January 5, 1987, at age 86. He is buried in St. Patrick Cemetery.

Charles A. Gallagher was Lowell’s sixth city manager. He was elected on November 23, 1966, by a seven to two vote. He resigned on August 10, 1970. Gallagher was born in Lowell on September 14, 1914. As a young man he worked in the Hillsboro Mills in Wilton, New Hampshire. He was hired by the Lowell City Treasurer’s office in the late 1930s and, after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, became City Treasurer. He was in that position when hired to be city manager. In 1971, less than a year after leaving the manager’s position, he was elected to the city council and served two terms. He died in Boston on April 6, 1993, at age 78. He is buried in St. Mary Cemetery in Tewksbury.

James L. Sullivan was Lowell’s seventh city manager. He was elected on September 29, 1970, and resigned on March 29, 1974, to take the job of city manager of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Sullivan was born in Somerville, Massachusetts, on December 11, 1925. During World War II, he saw combat in the Pacific while serving in the U.S. Navy. After the war he graduated from Boston College and became a schoolteacher. While teaching, he earned a master’s in public administration from B.C. and then became the assistant town manager of Arlington, Massachusetts. From that job, he was hired to be Cambridge City Manager, however, after two years, he was fired from that position. Lowell then hired Sullivan who served as city manager until 1974 when he was hired back by Cambridge where he served as manager until 1981. Thereafter, he was the president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce until his retirement in 1991. He remained a resident of Lowell until very late in life. He died on September 26, 2012, in New Jersey. He is buried in the New Hampshire Veterans Cemetery in Boscawen, New Hampshire.

Paul J. Sheehy was Lowell’s eighth city manager. He was elected on April 24, 1974, and served until September 5, 1975, when he resigned. Sheehy was born in Lowell on November 1, 1934. He graduated from Keith Academy and Lowell State Teachers College (now UMass Lowell). While teaching school in Lowell, he attended the night program at Suffolk University Law School. After passing the bar, he began practicing law and was also elected as a state representative. He served in that office until 1972 when he ran for Congress (he lost the Democratic primary to John Kerry who lost the general election to Paul Cronin). After serving as Lowell City Manager, Sheehy worked in the Congressional offices of Joseph Early in Worcester and James Shannon in Lowell. In 1984, Sheehy was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate and served three terms. He died in Lowell on March 10, 2014, at age 79. He is buried in Lowell Cemetery.

William S. Taupier was Lowell’s ninth city manager. He was elected on October 14,1975 and resigned on May 23, 1979. Taupier was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, on September 24, 1936. He graduated from Boston College and returned to Holyoke where he was elected as an alderman and then, in 1967, the city’s mayor. He served as mayor until 1975 when he chose not to run for reelection, although he was still mayor of Holyoke when he was hired to be Lowell City Manager. After finishing in that position, Taupier remained in Lowell and was self-employed as a real estate and business consultant. In 1995, he was elected to the Lowell School Committee and served two terms. Taupier died in Lowell on December 3, 2014, at age 78. He is buried in Mount Saint Benedict Cemetery in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

1987. Joseph Tully was Lowell’s tenth city manager. He was elected on June 20, 1979, and served until his resignation in early 1987. Tully was born in Lowell on January 4, 1927. He graduated from Keith Academy and served in the U.S. Army Air Force during World War Two. After the war, he worked as a manufacturer’s representative, doing business as Tully Associates. He moved to Dracut and was elected as a selectman. In 1970, he was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate where he served until becoming city manager. After his time in that office, he was self-employed as a business consultant. He died in Lowell on November 1, 2015. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Dracut.

[NOTE: sketches for former city managers who are still alive may contain fewer biographical details since I have obtained much of that information about deceased city managers from their obituaries.]

James J. Campbell was Lowell’s eleventh city manager. He was elected on January 7, 1987, and served until his resignation on September 6, 1991. Campbell served as Assistant City Manager under Joe Tully. When Tully resigned, the council elected Campbell to succeed him. In August 1991, Governor William Weld appointed Campbell to serve as the Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Industrial Accidents.

Richard Johnson was Lowell’s twelfth city manager. He was elected on November 26, 1991, and resigned on July 19, 1995. Johnson got his start in politics in Taunton, Massachusetts, as an assistant to the mayor of that city and as director of the Taunton Housing Authority. In 1981, he was elected mayor of Taunton and was reelected to four more two-year terms. He was defeated in 1991, however, and soon after leaving office was hired in Lowell. After resigning as Lowell City Manager, he became a vice president of Veolia Water North America, a global water and waste management firm.

Brian Martin was Lowell’s thirteenth city manager. He was elected on August 25, 1995, and resigned in June 2000. Martin was born in Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School and UMass Amherst. He was a teacher and athletic coach at Greater Lowell Vocational High School. He was elected to the Lowell City Council in 1981 and served as the city’s mayor in 1984-85. He left the council in 1988 to become an assistant city manager in the James Campbell administration and continued serving under Richard Johnson. When Johnson left, a unanimous city council selected Martin as his successor. After leaving the office of city manager, Martin became a senior official at Lowell-based Joan Fabrics. In 2005, he became athletic director of the Lowell Public Schools and in 2013 was selected to be the Lowell High School head of schools, a position he held until his retirement in 2017.

John Cox was Lowell’s fourteenth city manager. He was elected on July 7, 2000, and resigned in April 2006, effective July 26, 2006. Cox was born in Lowell and graduated from Lowell High School, Salem State College, and New England School of Law. He practiced law in the city and was elected as a state representative in 1982. He served in the Massachusetts House until 1994 when he did not seek reelection. He continued practicing law both before and after serving as city manager.

Bernie Lynch was Lowell’s fifteenth city manager. He was elected on June 30, 2006, taking office on July 31. He resigned on January 7, 2014. Lynch was born in Ashland, Massachusetts. He graduated from UMass Lowell and then received a master’s in public administration from UMass Amherst. He was hired by the town of Chelmsford in 1986 and became that town’s first town manager in 1989. He served there until he was hired in Lowell. Since he left the office of Lowell City Manager, he has owned and operated a municipal government consulting firm with an extensive roster of clients throughout Massachusetts.

Kevin Murphy was Lowell’s sixteenth city manager. He was elected in April 2014 and served until his retirement in April 2018. Murphy was born in Lowell and graduated from Keith Academy, Boston College and Suffolk University Law School. He worked as a legislative aide and then practiced law in Lowell, including as an assistant city solicitor. In 1996, he was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives and served there until he was elected city manager. After leaving the manager’s office, Murphy resumed practicing law in Greater Lowell.

Eileen Donoghue was Lowell’s seventeenth city manager. She was elected on March 28, 2018, and served until her retirement on April 11, 2022. Donoghue was born in Holyoke, Massachusetts, graduated from UMass Amherst, and moved to Lowell while attending Suffolk University Law School. She worked as a federal public defender and then established her own law practice. She was elected to the Lowell City Council in 1995 and served until 2007 when she did not seek reelection. She also served consecutive terms as mayor in 1998 and 2000. In 2012, she was elected to the Massachusetts State Senate and served there until 2018 when she was hired to be Lowell City Manager. After leaving the manager’s office, Donoghue resumed her Lowell law practice.

Thomas Golden is Lowell’s eighteenth city manager. He was elected on March 30, 2022, and took office on April 28, 2022. Golden was born in Lowell and is a graduate of Lowell High School and UMass Lowell. He was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1994 and served there until being elected city manager.

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This week in my Seen & Heard column, I reviewed the book Rasputin: The Downfall of the Romanovs; commented on a story about the late US Senator Lindsey Graham; commented on The Vergecast podcast episode, “You can’t ignore Google Zero anymore;” and mentioned an edition of the GBH newsletter on Lowell has an art destination.

What Haberman and Swan’s New Trump Book Gets Right

What Haberman and Swan’s New Trump Book Gets Right

Rev. Steve Edington

[Text of this op-ed as it ran in the July 17, 2026, issue of the New Hamshire Union Leader]

I tried to purchase a copy of Maggie Haberman’s and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change at my local Barnes & Noble the day after it was released. It was sold out. I got one a few days later via special order. According to the book’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, 300,000 copies were sold in its first week out.

“Regime Change” is an incredibly well researched and documented work that roughly covers the time from Donald Trump’s re-election up through March of this year. It includes some face time the authors got with Trump.

There is no way I can realistically delve into all the minutia of the book’s 400-plus pages. What I’ll do is offer a few takeaways that jumped out at me.

Takeaway 1: I found, for openers, no evidence that Donald Trump felt that taking on the Presidential Office means answering to a higher calling. By “higher calling” I mean an awareness that to become President is to be summoned to think and act well beyond the bounds of the self. Indeed, this goes for any public office and is all the more crucial for a US President. What one gets in Regime Change is a description of a President whose use of the Office is primarily, if not entirely, to serve his own ends, needs, and desires.

This comes through most pointedly in the largest section of the book titled “Retribution.” It is about a third of the entire work and describes incident after incident in which Trump uses the powers of his office to settle scores with perceived enemies. None of his efforts had anything to do with attending to the greater good of the country he is supposedly serving.

Just one example. In expressing his displeasure with then Attorney General Pam Bondi, Trump said to an aide, “I don’t know why I picked her…she doesn’t want to do the job.” As the authors point out, “’The job,’ in Trump’s mind, was to bring cases against his targets.” Not cases, mind you, the served the greater interests of the United States, but cases against Trump’s targets.

Takeaway 2: Related to the above, another thing that came through with my reading was Trump’s lack of any kind of a North Star. By “North Star” I mean some anchored-in-place set of beliefs, values, principles, and moral precepts that guide our lives and our decision making. The contents of our North Star may vary over the course of our lives (I know mine have), but most of us, in one way or another, look beyond ourselves to some higher sources of guidance and meaning in our lives. These sources are often of a religious or philosophical nature and, at their best, they serve to call us to our better selves and to provide guardrails for us when we act from our less than better selves.

In reading “Regime Change” the only North Star I could detect for Donald Trump was, and is, Donald Trump. He is his own North Star and feels that that is all he needs. The book’s cover has a quote from Trump’s first term where he invokes Article 2 of the Constitution in this way: “I have an Article 2 where I have the right to do whatever I want as President.” That, in a nutshell, is Trump’s North Star: A President who can do anything he wants. Of course, the Constitution grants no such Presidential authority, but why should that be a hindrance to Trump’s personal North Star?

Takeaway 3: One of the more intriguing parts of the book I found was the authors’ ability to reconstruct some of the conversations Trump had when it came to his making certain crucial decisions. He would listen (or act like he was listening) to a variety of opinions, but his technique was to eventually wear everyone down to the point that they no longer had the will or desire to challenge him, and he got what he’d wanted to begin with. In the end, no one wanted to cross him and become yet another target of his retribution.

Just before I bought this book, I came across a passage from a novella titled “Hadjii Murad” by Leo Tolstoy. In it, Tolstoy offers a description of the Russian Emperor, Nicholas 1, who ruled from 1825 to 1855. Tolstoy’s words fit right in with this takeaway:

“Continual brazen flattery from everyone around him in the teeth of obvious facts brought him to such a state (that he) was quite convinced that all his orders, however senseless they might be, became reasonable, just, and mutually accordant simply because he gave them.”

A final takeaway: Never in our country’s history has there been a greater need for regime change than right now.

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Rev. Steve Edington is the Minister Emeritus of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Nashua. He is also a past President and current Treasurer of Lowell Celebrates Kerouac and the author of three Kerouac themed books, including his latest one, The Gospel According to Jack—Tracking Kerouac in My Life.

Long Purples by Paul Marion

My wife Rosemary and I live in a townhouse condo atop a former ski slope in Amesbury, Mass., just uphill from the compact but busy downtown. Called Powwow Hill for the original residents in this area, the 330-foot hill is crowned with a small public park and woods that are home to foxes, deer, and all kinds of birds. Across the road from our home is a wide swath of grasses and wildflowers, including purple loosestrife which blooms along an engineered drainage ditch that follows the road. Seeing the purple streaks among the dense growth with daisies, black-eyed Susans, and Queen Anne’s lace, I was reminded of this prose poem from many years ago.

Long Purples

PEOPLE WRITE LETTERS TO WRITERS, and sometimes the mail is a gift. Not long ago, Bill Martin wrote to tell me that he’d read a poem of mine that begins with an image of purple loosestrife growing between the stones in the Merrimack riverbed. He described the genesis of purple loosestrife in the valley, the flashy plant that runs wild every summer.

     A beekeeper who worked in a local mill learned that bees were drawn to purple loosestrife. “When a large shipment of wool bales came from Australia, he knew it would contain loosestrife seeds,” Bill explained, “Australia being the only place on earth that grew this wonderful plant. He swept the floors after the bales were opened and washed, took home bags of dirt and seeds from the floor, and piled it around his hives. That year, plenty of loosestrife grew, and he sold the seed around the world through a beekeeping magazine, becoming quite famous in those circles.” The farm was in Chelmsford, near the cloverleaf of routes 495 and 3.

    That’s not the only story of the origin of the loud purple flowers. Historians say the seeds were embedded in wool shipped from England to the valley’s textile mills. Long purples, as they are known there, grow in the English countryside. Shakespeare mentions the wildflower in one of his plays. A writer-friend says her mother in Dracut calls the plant “mill weed” and seconds the Australian wool story. My oldest brother swears he was told the seeds had come east on the wings of airplanes flying across country from California during World War II.

     The Latin words for the plant are Lythrum salicaria. Loosestrife itself is a translation of lysimachia, a genus of plants named for Lusimakhos, the Greek doctor credited with its discovery. The plant was used as a tranquilizer for animals and a nerve tonic for people—a remedy for stress. North American field guides call it an “alien plant” or an “imported European.” The sturdiest type thrives in southern Canada, the American Midwest, and throughout the Northeast. Local naturalists despise the invasive loosestrife for the way it crowds out native species.

     When a friend of mine from Los Angeles visited in deep summer, she praised the strange, prolific plant. Seeing the rocky bed of the river streaked purple, she said the loosestrife should be on the town seal. Some folks consider loosestrife a weed, not purple tuning forks vibrating with the memories of no-school seasons. I know a teacher who says the ugly color signals the end of vacation.

     The flowers rise in July, just before native corn hits the stands. Patches decorate side roads. Purple veins trace a brook into the woods. Like dog-day torches of summer, loosestrife ignites the ditches and flares across fields of wild grass and brush. I almost expect to hear the sirens of fire engines rushing to extinguish the blazing color.

     The mill that beekeeper worked in was the same mill in which my father worked as a wool grader for most of his life. The mill was a hot, stinking place in July. When I was eighteen, I tended machines in the basement for two days before quitting. My father brought home colorful foreign stamps torn from sample bags of wool shipped to the mill. Another man found the seeds of purple loosestrife.

—Paul Marion (c) 1991, 2019