history – South of Town: Notes and Scenes from Texas' Upper Gulf Coast

A Re-interpretation of the Declaration of Independence for Americans Today

open.substack.com/pub/borowitzreport/p/a-new-declaration-of-independence

Andy Borowitz writes political satire on Substack, in books and, once upon a time probably, on his desktop in his junior high school. But this was offered in all seriousness as food for thought for all of us on Independence Day. You will note the subtle changes.

The flag is flying at our house today, by the way. I will always be proud of the things Americans have done to make the world a little more caring and sharing. I have lived long enough to have seen our failures in holding to those values as well as the valiant efforts of many to bring us back to what I believe is our moral center.

I have faith that we will always strive. I think of it as part of the great commission.

Have a fun and neighborly Fourth of July. And don’t play with firecrackers.

Observing Flag Day, June 14, 2025

The president has demonstrated a distaste for anything that limits his power — the rule of law, the Constitution of the United States, courts that refuse to be used by him, and the free press which constantly reports “fake news”. The list goes on — foreign aid, immigration law, noncompliant Republican legislators, whistleblower protections, checks and balances, climate science, trade agreements, NATO. Those are only a few of the things that trigger him. (Do you like that word?)

Beyond that, he has insulted or abandoned allies that America has developed over many decades — some, for over a century. He has admired the leaders of Russia and North Korea when they rolled out tanks and rockets to demonstrate their power to the people of the Earth — but, most importantly, to their own citizens.

He has spoken derisively of the American men and women who loved their country and its democratic values enough to sacrifice their lives to protect those values from people like him.

Yet he loves his flag. He wears it on his lapel. He embraces it — literally.

I fly the American flag every day to show respect for those very things that justly limit his power.

Flag Day should be a special day. But no, he uses Flag Day to give himself a military parade through our nation’s capital to celebrate his birthday. Of course it is only a coincidence that Flag Day falls on his birthday, a day which in 2025 also happens to be the 250th anniversary of the United States Army.

What a convenient tri-incidence: Flag Day, the Army’s semi-quincentennial, and his 79th birthday. Why in the world would you have three parties when you could throw just one? We should be able to pull that off for a mere $45 million.

So, as the president debases the flag on this Flag Day, I will honor it by removing it from the front of our home, hopefully leaving a very noticeable blank space in our neighborhood where our friends and neighbors have long been able to count on seeing the red, white and blue on proud display. But at this address, our flag will not be associated with the most openly corrupt and illiberal American political leader in our nation’s history.

The colors will go back out the next day. I will once again fly it proudly as a symbol of devotion to democracy and the rule of law, the things that have made America a great nation, admired around the world, and a chosen destination for migration from all distressed nations — just as it was for most of our own forebears since the 16th Century.

We pride ourselves on America’s soft power — the ability to strengthen our influence by striving after peace, love, understanding, sharing and hope throughout the world. Sometimes we fall short, but still, it is the flag I celebrate every day of any year that our freedom endures — except when it is being used for authoritarian purposes.

“Confirm thy soul in self-control, Thy liberty in law.”

Read the words. It’s a beautiful hymn to God and country.

Sometimes

There is a little poem by Sheenagh Pugh called Sometimes. I first encountered it in the book Good Poems collected by Garrison Keillor. I have called it up as a Thanksgiving prayer of gratitude a couple of times in this blog and over our Thanksgiving celebrations with family and friends. I leave it to you to find it with the search tools you undoubtedly have at your disposal. It is difficult to give you the kind of post I would like to if I were working from my desktop at home so I leave it to you to do some digging.

Yesterday was one of those days — for me. The Astros won a game in Seattle after losing three in a row and Justice won out over the bullying threats of an ex-president. Set aside the Astros. There is always next year. But for the brave citizens that prosecuted, judged and read the facts of this case, I shall always be grateful. Their courage and understanding of duty is a model for us all.

The bullying ex-president was held accountable for the first time since appearing on our national political stage and maybe for the first time in his life. After hearing the verdict he faced the cameras for the first time in his business and political career with eyes that betrayed his fear of Justice. He showed the clear countenance of a loser.

Except for that, there was no reason for this to be major news. White collar crime in Manhattan is probably not so unusual as to deserve headline coverage in the New York Times. Sentences are usually light for white men gone astray. They can remain heroes in the world of finance and pass on fortunes to the kiddoes like Jared Kushner.

The ex-president’s misbehaving has probably only begun. A light sentence, say probation, provides a stage for him to challenge the judge lock him up. He would love the theater of it.

But there must be a way to let him stew over questions like guilt and innocence, crime and punishment. Maybe he could be assigned reading in the classics of American governance and jurisprudence and required to turn in short essays on what he has learned from the reading. His essays would undoubtedly repeat his tired chants about witch-hunts and how unfairly he is treated by the same Elites that administer death penalties on the streets to people of color.

Judge Merchan would give him a very public and embarrassing “F” and require him to re-read the assigned prompt until he starts to deal with fact and logic and maybe even admit that his own treatment and that of George Floyd is a false equivalence of the worst kind. Another “F”. Maybe even a zero on the assignment. Require him to strain his eyes and read again, and again. Maybe from his seat in that cold Manhattan court room.

I have very little concern for the ex-president and his feelings about the day. To me it was one of those days when things went right. Celebrate a win for Justice and the people.

But remember his followers. There are so many ways we have failed them.

We have reduced public education in most places to shallow measures of the transmission of “content” at a time when the world begs for thinkers who have explored ideas like justice, truth, fairness, and personal responsibility as starting points for better understanding of a structure of government that promotes these ideals.

We have given them hundreds of cable television channels that offer up drivel for tired and lazy minds twenty-four hours a day. Mixed into that stew of nonsense there are a few that offer journalism from the old school where there is no room for “true facts” versus facts. Just facts. Observable and undeniable facts.

We have given them gun-rights when they needed moral leadership. We have given them video games when the same technology might have been used to teach more deeply the meaning of religious traditions rooted in love, empathy and the revolutionary value of stepping back and listening to each other.

We might have given them the ability to read — to read deeply and critically. We might have given them good nutrition instead of the empty calories of fast food.

For now, they are our charges (or we, theirs?) and we need to co-exist without destroying a system of government that has held dictators at bay for over two centuries while other systems have produced authoritarian leaders that goaded us into wars and sacrifices that were necessary for the survival of the idea of freedom.

So, enjoy the day when a few things went the way they should. But do not forget the needs of all the folks who show up for the ex-president’s rallies.

Listen to them. Help them. They need the moral leadership of thinking people. Who really knows how that can best be provided? But it is a conundrum worthy of our own best thinking and effort.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all, / from bad to worse.

A Workshop Made to Order for SOTLJ Readers

The Brazosport Fine Arts Council is sponsoring a workshop by Ron Rozelle that is designed to help people with memoir writing.

It will be held online with remote sessions via Zoom. Mr. Rozelle is a published memoirist and historian. I have signed up and I hope readers of sotlj.com will also sign up. If you are serious about writing interestingly of your own life for the sake of your children, grandchildren or just for the sake of satisfying your ego, it will be worth a hundred bucks or so. (It will be $125 if you are not a member of BFAC.)

Mr. Rozelle has done it successfully and I am sure he can help us. Here is a link to the workshop information and registration. Please join me there on January 2.

I can see us all having a great time and learning a lot from Mr. Rozelle and from each other. The writing should make for some interesting sharing among some of the most interesting people who inhabit this charming South of Town place we call home. I know a few of you who read here and I know that you have had interesting lives and careers. I would like know more about you.

If you don’t know Ron Rozelle, just Google the name or, better yet, put it into an Amazon book search. You can read samples of some of his writing. And you will wish you were able to write like him.

https://bcfas.org/event/ron-rozelle-memoir-workshop/2022-01-02/

Sehon Warneke, the Legend of Lake Hardware

When I was growing up in Houston’s industrial suburbs, “town” meant Houston and more specifically, the downtown district. You know – tall buildings. After relocating to Lake Jackson in 1982, I never lost that almost automatic reference to “town” as my way to refer to Houston. And it was easy to tell old friends that we had moved south of town to a place called Lake Jackson, hence this journal goes under the heading of South of Town, Lake Jackson.

Lake Jackson was a bit of a culture shock. After all, I was nearing forty and had never experienced life in a small-town on an extended basis. People were polite. They smiled as they took turns, even at the uncontrolled intersections in its curvy, crazy little downtown.

But the single most shocking thing I saw happened in a little store three short blocks from my house, the Lake Hardware store on Oyster Creek. (It’s no longer there. Fire took it a week ahead of 9/11, but they quickly re-located and re-built.) You need a lot of little things when you move into a new residence. There were all the little things that broke, new things that needed to be installed, and the tools and supplies to handle all the jobs of homeownership. I had quickly learned that Lake Hardware was the place to go.

My Lockdown Binge: Downton Abbey.

While others may have felt cut off from the rest of the world during the lockdown year, I was using it to catch up the things other Americans were doing in the 2010s. Back then, some of the Americans I know best were studying the lifestyle of early 20th Century British peerage as revealed in Masterpiece Theater’s Downton Abbey.

Having lately been of a mind to ask the Brits come run things again, I thought maybe I should catch up. I have dropped that notion since the successful election of a candidate faithful to democracy and rule of law. Still, we may yet have a need if the skewing of the census has the intended result.

So, I binge-watched Downton Abbey. I had avoided it even as the rest of my family in three different states bathed in it every week for six years. It seemed too much like soap opera. Will Edith attempt to attract another of Lady Mary’s suitors in their lifelong drama of sibling rivalry? Will Cousin Violet succeed in imposing her will on “those other Crawleys” and find a way to keep the fortune under His Lordship’s control? That sort of thing.

Even as members of my family urged it on me, I had resisted until the most wise Amazon Prime algorithm informed me that I should watch it. I have learned to trust the Algorithm. It knows what I buy, what I browse, what I watch and listen to and read. (Thankfully I don’t have one of those speakers that report private conversations to Mr. Bezos.) With all that information to crank through the Algorithm, I felt that Amazon must know, better than I know myself, that Downton Abbey was right for me and I was right for Downton Abbey.

So I spent a few weeks watching one or two episodes a night until, about four or five episodes in, I caught myself talking to the characters on the screen, advising them what to do or, more often, what not to do. To the gentlemen — be careful around Lady Edith. Or to anyone — watch out when Lady Cora dip-tilts her head forward and to the side a notch and peers at you through her eyebrows. And since that is the way way Lady Cora looked at everyone all the time for all six years of the series, I suppose the message was to always be careful around her. She can drag a secret out of anyone and she can’t keep one longer than one episode.

On the subject of secrets, the entire household — from lord to footman — seemed to fuel their lives around secrets. They simply couldn’t be level with one another. It made for a dysfunctional family upstairs and a toxic workplace downstairs, but they all loved their king. There you have all the makings of a good soap opera and a stable society where people can live together in peace and happy servitude.

After watching the assault on the Capitol by Trump’s brown shirts, the soap opera life of the Earl’s household seems an attractive alternative to rule by the Bad Boys. Maybe the Queen would have us back as members in good standing of the empire. At any place in the social strata, peer to pig farmer, life would surely be better than under rule of the American insurrectionists.

And maybe this is the simple wisdom revealed in Downton Abbey: pig farmers and peers had something in common that bonded them into happy little towns that made British society work. Wrestling sows in the mud was a livelihood for one and, for the other, a duty involved in preserving the ancestral line and estate.

Well, I’m being unkind to Lady Mary. Strike that last sentence.