Spectator A.M. #2099

If Boxing Gloves Could Vote …

James Talarico’s “I appreciate you” response to the hostility of a Houston heckler demonstrates the primary, precise electoral defect of the Democratic Party: it lacks authenticity. When someone repeatedly boots you in the head, you tell a lie when you respond: “I love it when you kick me.” A normal person does not react to unprovoked hostility with a “that’s wonderful.” Politicians do that, and in the post-Trump political landscape, Democrat politicians disproportionately do that. When the high-decibel voice ordering around the white candidate comes from a black woman, Democrats appear especially hamstrung—and fake and emasculated. Playing punching bag is no way to win a popularity contest unless one limits the franchise to Everlast gloves.

‘Whenever You Find Yourself on the Side of the Majority, It Is Time to Pause and Reflect’

Ruth Franklin explores the obsession in Hannibal, Missouri, with favorite son Mark Twain. “Hannibal is a company town, and the local industry is Mark Twain,” she writes @ The American Scholar. “Just about every location associated with his childhood has been developed into a potential source of revenue. The Mark Twain Boyhood Home, filled with memorabilia, is bordered by a whitewashed fence like the one made famous in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in which Tom, a mischief-maker whose antics range from wickedly ingenious to borderline sociopathic, tricks his friends into doing a tedious chore for him by pretending it’s fun. There’s the Mark Twain Cave—where Clemens himself played as a child and which inspired the one where Tom is trapped for three days along with Becky, his sweetheart—now electrically lit and accessible to visitors on an hour-long guided tour. The list goes on: the Mark Twain Casino, Becky’s Old Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor & Emporium, Clemens General Store, and more. Even a bottled-water vending machine bears a quote from Twain: ‘High and fine literature is wine, and mine is only water; but everybody likes water.’” Her expose ponders in a rote manner the slave Jim, why Becky comes across with less color and personality than Tom Sawyer, and the inhumanity of frog races inspired by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County. We read Twain 116 years after his death because his water taster cleaner than the water offered elsewhere. The perfunctory race-and-sex criticisms of Twain—quite a racially enlightened fellow when you read Pudd’nhead Wilson or even Adventures of Huckleberry Finn—derive from a polluted pool. They ostensibly criticize a guy born during Andrew Jackson’s presidency for not complying with a 2026 Haverford College sensitivity training guide. They really say nothing about Twain and much about his critics, people either enslaved by presentism or a fear of offending those who mustn’t be offended. Even in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the well-traveled Missourian did not quite succumb to the former and in everything else he showed zero fear in offending whomever. Twain stimulates wonder. His critics anesthetize thought.

Do Any Real Queens Eat at Dairy Queen?

The New York Post reports that 56 Dairy Queens in the United States (out of 7,800 globally) shutter. The article cites rising food costs as a possible culprit. When I was 8, Dairy Queen offered something for $2.19 called the Full Meal Deal that consisted of a hamburger, fries, small fountain drink, and an ice cream. More accurately, you received a coin that you could redeem for an ice cream. I once saw a box full of those coins at a friend’s house. I wondered how his brother had saved that many coins. I later discovered that he did not save them as I occasionally did but instead stole them. I was scandalized. Possibly his early 1980s thievery unleashes price repercussions all these years later? A more likely explanation points the finger at government thievery, i.e., the massive inflation of our currency that transformed the dollar from 1981 into a quarter today.

Freddy ‘Boom Boom’ Cannon, RIP

Freddy Cannon, who appeared on American Bandstand more than any other performer, died at 89 on Friday. Between 1959 and 1965 he scored eight top-40 hits, which famously included the Chuck Barris-written “Palisades Park.” Cannon, who appeared frequently on Boston Ballroom before his long association with Dick Clark, understood the power of the visual to promote the audio decades before MTV came around. His last hit came from singing the theme song to Clark’s Los Angeles show, Where the Action Is. Other hits include “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans,” “Transistor Sister,” and “Tallahassee Lassie.” His fun, happy-go-lucky, black-and-white-TV America, somewhat cornball music seemed destined to perish once the audience stopped getting haircuts and viewed showers much the way the Wicked Witch of the West might. But Cannon undeniably possessed great vocal talent and a profound comprehension of youth culture. One could depict him as a poor man’s Del Shannon. But that does not do him justice even if a similarity exists (and since Cannon preceded Shannon on the charts, maybe the latter derived his style from the former?). Perhaps most accurately one can say Cannon sang in a style popular during his era (check out The Gentrys’ “Keep on Dancing”—try spotting professional wrestling manager Jimmy “the Mouth of the South” Hart on background vocals in the clip—for more evidence of the popularity of this way of singing). Alex Chilton hung a picture of Cannon in his home. He said of his idol, “Freddy Cannon’s shows always worked because he moved through life with ease.” After a short battle with cancer, Cannon no longer moves through life. But his music does. Freddy Cannon, the pride of Lynn, Massachusetts, whose high school sweetheart predeceased him after 65 years of marriage, rest in peace.

‘Vacation, All I Ever Wanted’

Folks, the prospect of combining vacation with work hits some speedbumps this week. For that reason, I will skip our morning meeting tomorrow and return with Spectator A.M. #2100 on Friday.

Worth Repeating

[F]or it is the business and duty of historians to be exact, truthful, and wholly free from passion, neither interest nor fear, hatred nor love, should make them swerve from the path of truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, storehouse of deeds, witness for the past, example and counsel for the present, and warning for the future.”

—Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote (Part 1), 1605