Time for your “meds” Jack, ya’ need to settle down …
… the President of the United States is being admitted
(3 min)
We need Nurse Ratched in the White House!
The 1962 book by Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and the 1975 Academy Award winning movie of the same name, is a marvelous, entertaining depiction of art imitating life. A story of fiction running on the edge of reality. And today, reality is running on the edge of disbelief. We have a home invasion at the most important house in America, and if ever the cliché was appropriate, “the inmates are running the asylum.”
Of course, when the book was written, no one knew the real-life story of little Donald Trump. He was just a troubled, rich kid from Queens, barely out of adolescence, a dime-a-dozen, privileged prick filling his need for love and attention with fear and anger (psychological diagnosis: He has never evolved beyond his empty, childhood-adolescent upbringing).
Donald’s father would have seen, and admired, “Big Nurse” Ratched as a doppelgänger, a cold-hearted, passive-aggressive bitch who intimidated, manipulated, punished and lobotomized the people she was supposed to care for. Is it possible that adolescent Donny saw the movie (he sure as hell didn’t read the book) and decided to emulate Nurse Ratched?
“Show me screwed up kids and I’ll show you screwed up parents.”
“I want Nurse Ratched, she’s beautiful. She likes me … I’m the President.”
What Ratched did to those poor souls in the asylum is very similar to what Trump is doing to the poor souls in America – actually more terrifying – as well as creating terror around the world (e.g., USAID, economic lunacy, citizens in terrorist prisons). The real terrorists are in the White House.
Free Will (pun intended)
Will Sampson, the famous indigenous actor, plays the character Chief Bromden in the movie and symbolizes oppressed peoples’ futile pursuit of freedom. In the context of today’s asylum-like White House and the oppression of American’s rights and free will, the Chief is exactly who we need to stand up to our very own Nurse Ratched.
Problem is, so far, no one in America has stepped forward and stood – face-to-face – with Trump. Not one leader has shown “any guts.” Sure, a lot of hand wringing and yelling from Mount Democracy but no hands-on action. Millions of citizens protest in the streets while so-called leaders yammer on TV. Where are they (Obama, Romney, Cheney, Shapiro, Bloomberg, Whitmer, Cotton, Thune, Cruz (forget him), Lankford, Blackburn, et al)? If they’re playing the old political calculus and “keeping their powder dry,” the fight will be over before they lock and load. We can only hope (such a weak word) they’re acting like the Chief, pretending silence, pretending to be “gutless nuts,” then, like the Chief, do what no one else would, risk everything for freedom.
“But we mustn’t overlook the fact that this man has had extensive psychiatric treatment.” – Nurse Ratched
(video 1:44)
“I’m not a fish, I’m a bird.” – Chief
America, look at yourself
Right now, you’re a fish out of water, flippin’ and floppin’ to nowhere. Dying on the beaches of times past (MAGA myths). Listening to nursery rhymes lamented by purveyors of hope and yet, becoming “authoritarian followers” complying with dictators who promise you water then drain the ocean.
“The only thing necessary for evil to flourish is for good men to do nothing.” – JFK, Edmund Burke, and many others
Fish don’t fly and Mother Goose is just another fictional character that can’t fly, let alone get over the cuckoo’s nest. But that doesn’t mean a whole helluva’ lot of good men and women can’t get up off their tiny plot of America-the-Beautiful and do something – anything!
Three geese in a flock
One flew East
One flew West
And one flew over the cuckoo’s nest.[origin of title]
In the fictional story, the Chief was the one – the only one – who “flew over the cuckoo’s nest.” In today’s reality, does anyone have “the guts” to follow his example?
“Houston, we’ve got another problem”
The near-catastrophe aboard Apollo 13 was nothing compared to what Captain Space-X and his orange crew chief are now launching in America
(11 min read)
“Houston, we’ve had a problem.” Jim Lovell, American astronaut, April Read more…
This is us …
still trapped in Plato’s cave!
“The prisoners would mistake the shadows for reality.” – Socrates, The Republic, Book VII
(20 min)
About 2,376 years before Fox News was founded (1996), Plato wrote his renowned Read more…
“People are the worst”
Coming 2026
My personal history is the stuff they write books about. And that's what I am doing. The working title, "Chains of My Father: Marry White."
"The ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds." - Barack Obama
This perspicacious line from the Prologue of Barack Obama's "Dream from My Father" wrenched my aspiration into action. I started writing, furiously. Unlike Obama's perspective, my pain had been for the opposite reason: I was not seen by whites as a "tragic mulatto," rather I lived every day of my childhood hoping whites were not "searching my eyes for some telltale sign" that I WAS mulatto. This is my story.
It's historical fiction because I cannot find enough records to substantiate all facets of the story. I've combed the genealogy, traveled to my father and grandmothers' birthplace, walked the graveyards, searched the churches and ... well, all the facts aren't there. I have written three books based on the genealogy of other families but my ancestors emerged from a journey that left too few records – slavery.
My paternal, great grandmother was a "freed slave." My grandmother, Amelia, was born to a mixed race slave named Mary (we do not know her last name) and a white, French plantation owner, the Count de Poullain, in Grenada, West Indies. Amelia was raised in the "Big House" and in adulthood, in an attempt to escape her black heritage disowned her mother, telling her, "Get out and never come back." Amelia, as a mother of twelve children, enshrined into the family commandments, "Marry white." Many did, including my father. My mother was a lovely, white, Anglo-Saxon protestant born in England. They met in Canada where my dad studied and became a doctor.
It has taken five generations for the descendants of Mary to free themselves from the stigma of their black heritage but today my children embrace it. Unfortunately, the past 250 years have been a wasteland of bigotry, racism and bullying. But, on closer look, we see not only the brutality, fear, violence, and murder but also the self-respect, dignity, love, kindness, perseverance and indomitable spirit.
As of the spring of 2025, the depth of historic perspective and the sweeping inspiration of oppressed people has created a two-volume duology of which I have only arrived at the middle of the 19th century. 1840 is the year my great grandfather was born, the beginning of Volume II, and he's pushing me to make sure our story is published by the summer of 2026.
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