By and large, most people are pretty good about not cheering for anyone’s death — if not for reasons of tact, then at least for reasons of not wanting to inadvertently curse oneself or any loved ones. But there are some notable exceptions. For instance, people were pretty delighted when Henry Kissinger finally kicked it.

Yesterday, UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot in broad daylight. I wouldn’t say that people were necessarily happy that he was murdered (okay, maybe some people were happy), but I would say that a fairly large number of them were conspicuously not sad about it. Certainly, no one was really straining to imagine what the motive could possibly be. After all, while all health insurance companies are pretty evil, UnitedHealth bears the distinction of being the health insurance company most likely to deny claims.

Thompson was one of the highest paid executives in the business, with compensation totaling over $10 million a year. His net worth was estimated to be somewhere around $42.9 million. Perhaps more notably, there have been at least 10 articles with headlines along the lines of “What was Brian Thompson’s net worth?” since yesterday, suggesting that a lot of people have been looking for that particular information.

Thompson was also under investigation by the Department of Justice for insider trading, as he and UnitedHealth Group chairman Stephen Helmsley, Chief People Officer Erin McSweeney, and Chief Accounting Officer Tom Roos sold a combined $101 million in stocks just prior to the company being investigated for violating antitrust laws. He was also sued for this by a firefighter’s pension fund earlier this year.

Here is just a small selection of the responses on TikTok to an ABC News video on the shooting:

“My thought and prayers are unfortunately out of network.”

“Claims for thoughts and prayers are denied at this time…. Hospital he was taken to is not in network and ambulance will not covered due to no prior referral.”

“Sad, now I have to go back to figuring out how to pay for chemotherapy.”

“Sending thoughts and prayers to that poor man…I sure hope he gets away.”

“I guess lead wasn't covered under his policy. That's another 250 a month.”

“What did United Healthcare do to the man for him to go to this extent????”

Those are just the comments from one article. There are about a thousand (million?) other responses on social media saying more or less the same things. It’s not because people are cruel and uncaring so much as they are hurt and they are angry. They are furious — fairly — at a system where this motherfucker is raking in $10.2 million a year to run a company that puts people in debt for getting sick.

I’m sorry, but it’s true. It’s obvious! If we weren’t getting totally fucked over in this system, Brian Thompson would not have been making $10 million a year, because all of that $10 million would have gone towards paying for people’s health care. Health insurance companies draw a profit by taking your money and not giving it back to you when you need it. That is the whole system! That is how it works!

It’s become increasingly clear that people were correct in assuming that the motive had something to do with the shooter or someone they love being denied care. Words like “deny,” “delay,” “defend,” and “depose” were reportedly written on the bullets — a clear reference to the ways insurance companies try to get out of paying claims. In fact, there is even a book titled Delay, Deny, Defend: Why Insurance Companies Don't Pay Claims and What You Can Do About It.

I’d like you all to take a moment and go back in time with me to 2020, when all of the sneering pundits who considered themselves the “adults in the room” demanded to know how Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders expected to pay for their Medicare for All plans. And I’m going to tell you that Elizabeth Warren’s plan was estimated to cost $20 trillion over the next decade and Bernie Sanders’ plan (in which all healthcare would be free at the point of service) would have cost $32 trillion. Then, I’m going to tell you that, in 2023, Americans spent, in total, $4.8 trillion on healthcare. Is $48 trillion (a low estimate, by the way, given the rising costs of healthcare) more than $20 trillion? Is it more than $32 trillion? I am not a math expert, but I’m going to say that it is.

I’m also going to point out that one of the biggest benefits of Medicare for All is that not is there no need for $10 or so million be carved out to pay CEOs like Brian Thompson (each), but that no one needs to pay anyone to figure out how not to give people their money back, either!

One survey found that a quarter of Americans say they didn’t call an ambulance in an emergency because they couldn’t afford it — which is not surprising given that the average ambulance ride costs in between $940 and $1300. And that’s just the beginning. People often get the worst news of their life accompanied by the news that it will also financially devastate them or their family.

A search for “UnitedHealth cancer” on GoFundMe turned up myriad pleas from desperate people who had been told their chemo meds were not covered, or that their doctor or hospital had recently become “out of network,” or that they had to pay an extremely high deductible before they could get any coverage.

It’s not just UnitedHealth that is appalling, of course. This week, Anthem BlueCross BlueShield announced that — and I am not making this up — they will not cover anesthesia past a certain time. This means that if something goes wrong with your surgery or the doctors just need a little bit more time for you than for someone else, for whatever reason, than the insurance company itself has deemed necessary for your operation, they will not pay for your anesthesia. This means that your options would be to pay a whole lot of money for anesthesia or to, I guess, have your anesthesia cut-off mid-operation — the latter of which, I would imagine, would make for a lot of deeply unpleasant open-heart surgeries.

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It takes a lot, I think, for people to break the “don’t speak ill of the dead” taboo — so while killing is never justified, it’s certainly worth considering that things must be pretty goddamned bad out there for people to feel this way, to be pushed that far. That needs to be taken more seriously.

It’s nice to think that we have a social safety net because we genuinely care about people, and for many of us that’s true. But the fact is, there is a reason why the most famous fictional account of the French Revolution was titled Les Miserables — and it is, in part, because people only have so much of a threshold for misery before the unreasonable starts to sound reasonable. We have a social safety net in order to keep things from getting to the point of guillotines.

As much as people like to roll their eyes and accuse those of us who believe that healthcare is a human right of being naïve and idealistic, the true naïve idealists out there are the ones who actually believe that this can go on forever without consequence.

PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!

Good news for those of us who are indiscriminate fans of ancient languages; I quote the Altorientalisches Institut – Universität Leipzig’s Facebook post:

We are delighted to announce the launch of a new long-term dictionary project!
The Leipzig Akkadian Dictionary (LAD) at the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig will start in January 2025. The 17-year project aims to create a new, up-to-date digital online dictionary of Akkadian.
The existing major Akkadian dictionaries, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary and von Soden’s Akkadisches Handwörterbuch, are outdated. Numerous cuneiform texts have been published since their completion, containing new words and facilitating more detailed and precise descriptions of known words.
The LAD will collect the vocabulary of Akkadian in its entirety. It is a reference dictionary that not only translates the words into English, German, French, and Arabic, but also documents their contexts, uses, and etymologies. The existing print dictionaries will be digitized and integrated into LAD. Links will lead to glossaries and indices of other online projects. The digital publication is based on a database structure and allows the vocabulary to be analyzed one corpus at a time rather than alphabetically. The first intermediate objective is to analyze the vocabulary of Akkadian literary texts (including royal inscriptions).
The project is headed by Michael P. Streck at the Institute of Ancient Near Eastern Studies at Leipzig University.

The full press release (in German) is here.

On January 27th, 1925, enduring the bitter cold was the last thing the 600 or so residents of Nenana, Alaska had on their minds. But, that evening, in -40°C weather, “Wild” Bill Shannon and his team of nine huskies prepared to take on the first leg of a gruelling journey to deliver serum to treat a diphtheria outbreak in the isolated town of Nome more than 1000km away, and attempt to avert a devastating epidemic predicted to all but wipe out the population if the serum could not be delivered in time.

The tiny town of Nome was the largest in Northern Alaska, just a couple of degrees from the Arctic Circle. The population had boomed to nearly 20,000 due to a gold rush at the turn of the century, but the bitterly cold weather and isolation left it dwindling to around 1500 residents, a mixture of native Alaskans and settlers from overseas by 1924. From July to November, the town was connected to the rest of the country by a port with access the Seward Peninsula, but, due to icebound conditions during the winter months, the 1500km Itarod Trail to the nearest port in Seward was the only thing that served as the town’s touchstone to the outside world.

Nome was served by just one doctor, Curtis Welch, and a handful of nurses who worked out of the nearby Maynard Columbus Hospital; shortly before the port was icebound for the winter, Welch noticed that they were out of diphtheria antitoxin, the previous batch having expired during the preceding summer, and placed a telegram to request more. Though there seemed to be little reason to fear an outbreak of diphtheria, Welch had his reasons to be cautious. Just a few years before, between 1918-1920, the influenza pandemic tore through the Northern Alaskan population, leaving thousands dead, and tearing through around 50% of the native population in Nome.

In December of 1924, shortly after the final ship had left the nearby port for the winter, Welch began to notice a trickle of complaints in local children. A sore throat here, tonsillitis there – they were hardly the highly-contagious and devastating symptoms of diphtheria. However, within a few weeks, it became clear that there was a more serious problem at hand – two children had died, and cases of tonsillitis were higher than would normally be expected during the winter season. By January, Welch had identified a telltale membrane in the throat of three-year-old Billy Bartlett, confirming his illness to be diphtheria – the next day, the child was dead. Desperate, Welch tried to use the expired antitoxin on another patient, a seven-year-old girl, but she died mere hours later.

Welch swiftly made contact with Nome’s mayor, George Maynard, who called an emergency town meeting; a quarantine was agreed upon in an attempt to contain the highly-contagious illness in the face of an incoming epidemic. Diphtheria was a pressing issue in the United States at the time, with estimates ranging between 13-15000 mortalities to the disease over the course of the 1920s – most of them children. Despite efforts to contain the illness, twenty more cases had been reported in the area by the end of the month, with another fifty possible exposures. Without treatment, Welch feared that the 10,000 or so residents in the surrounding area could fall ill, and, without the antitoxin, mortality could be close to 99%.

Welch sent out a radio telegram towards the end of January to the surrounding towns and to the US National Health Service in Washington, warning them of the impending disaster: “an epidemic of diphtheria is almost inevitable here”. But, due to the town’s isolation, factually getting the antitoxin to Welch and the residents of Nome seemed like a painfully distant prospect. A million units of the serum were located in Seattle, but, by the time they had been shipped to Alaska and then delivered to Nome, the disease would have had a better part of two months to proliferate. 300,000 units were unexpectedly uncovered in Anchorage, Alaska, some 800km away, and delivered to Nunana.

Debates sprang up around the best way to handle the impending epidemic – some proposed that the serum be delivered by plane, but the harsh weather conditions and limited capacity of the available vehicles would have made it dangerously difficult, if not impossible. Maynard suggested an alternative: using a relay of mushers to deliver the serum to the stricken town before it was too late.

Mushers – those who drove teams of dogs, pulling sleds, as a form of transport, thought to have been named after the French word marche, meaning onward or walk – had been a vital part of Alaskan culture for centuries by the time of the Nome diphtheria outbreak. Indigenous Alaskan people had been using dogs, often huskies, to pull sleds as far back as the early 1700s, due to their hardiness and ability to navigate the snow more effectively than other transport animals such as horses. By the time of the gold rush in the early 1900s, the Iditarod trail, which ran from Seward to Nome, served as a route for these dog sleds and their mushers to move people and property effectively through the harsh landscape. Such was the synonymity of dogs with the trail that dog shelters were found alongside rest stops for people, every twenty miles or so along the road. By 1925, this route and the mushers who ran it served as one of the few connections small, isolated towns like Nome maintained to the outside world, delivering mail and supplies several times throughout the winter months. It seemed the most reliable form of transport and the best way to deliver the serum to Nome – but still posed serious issues.

The trip from Nome to Nunana, for a single musher, would take around thirty days – too long for the stricken citizens of Nome and the surrounding area. Welch was also concerned about the serum surviving the frigid conditions of the Alaskan winter for so long – he estimated that the antitoxin would not last more than six days, with temperatures threatening to drop below -60°C. Time was of the essence, in more ways than one. While Nome local and highly-decorated musher Leonard Seppala – whose young daughter was especially at risk to a diphtheria infection – was initially tipped to do the run alone, the dangerous conditions and urgency led to the development of a different approach.

It was Governor Scott Boone who eventually proposed a potential solution: a relay team of mail-carrier mushers, spaced out between Nenana and Nome, who would carry the serum along the Iditarod trail and deliver it to Nome in a matter of days. With the help of US Post Office Inspector Edward Wetzler, Boone arranged for the finest mushers and their dog sled teams to prepare for a gruelling and potentially life-saving journey along the Iditarod trail. Soon, a team of twenty mushers, including Seppala, had been alerted of the emergency, and the Nome serum run was poised to begin.

“Wild” Bill Shannon met the train at Nenana late on the 27th of January – the serum had been insulated and secured in a package weighing around 20lbs, to try and preserve it against the frigid temperatures it would face on the journey. Despite encouragement to wait for the following morning, in order to ensure slightly less brutal temperatures, Shannon, a miner who had well-earned his “wild” nickname, was said to have remarked “if people are dying, let’s get started”. Shannon, leading his team of nine dogs, set off on the journey to save the remaining population of Nome.

Problems arose almost immediately; horse-drawn carriages had left imperfections on the trail, which risked tearing up the paws of the dogs leading the sled. Shannon was forced to divert to the colder but smoother terrain of the ice-covered Tanana River, opting to run alongside the sled to try and keep himself warm. After several hours, he reached a roadhouse where he took a brief break to ensure the serum was warm and rest himself and the dogs – his own face blackened with the onset of frostbite, and several of his dogs bleeding from the mouth due to frozen lungs, he left three dogs behind and set off at around 7am on the 28th with a smaller team to the next handover in Tolovana.

Edgar Kallands, the next musher in the relay, had arrived in the nearby Minko just hours before he met Shannon at a roadhouse in Tolvana around 11am the next day. Kallands drove his dogs the thirty-one miles to the next drop-off point in Manley; by the time he arrived, his fingers had frozen stiff around the handles of his sled, and boiling water had to be poured on to free him. Dan Green and Johnny Folger, the following mushers on the relay, carried the serum to Fish Lake – with a hundred or so kilometres down, there was still a considerable distance to be covered, and news out of Nome was not looking good.

Despite the quarantine, additional diphtheria cases had been recorded in the small town, with the hospital swiftly filling to capacity. Another fatality would spur George Maynard into further action, and he added several more drivers to the final leg of the relay, and ordered Leonard Seppala to meet with the relay near the Yukon river, to expediate the delivery of the antitoxin before more lives were lost.

As Welch tried to manage the epidemic in Nome, on 29th January, the serum was being passed between mushers as they made their way parallel to the Yukon River. Dan Green, Johnny Folger, and Sam Joseph carried the serum to Kallands, where it was picked up by Titus Nikolai, then Dave Corning, a musher for the mail service, then Harry Pitka. By the time that Pitka arrived at Ruby, a small town on the tip of the Yukon River, conditions had taken a turn for the worse – the next musher in the relay, Bill McCarty, would start his leg in the midst of a blizzard that he fought through for twenty-eight miles before he reached Edgar Nollner in Whiskey Creek, who would begin the serum’s relay into January 30th.

Nollner handed off the serum to his brother, George, who sped to Bishop Mountain. By now, conditions were beginning to improve, but were nonetheless dangerous – temperatures of -50°C were reported by the next member of the relay, Charlie Evans. Evans led his dogs on the next brutal part of the relay, beginning at 5.00am, with fog so thick that he could barely make out the dogs pulling his sled – thin ice made passage difficult, and he had to travel miles out of his way to find a safe crossing to Nulato. By the time he arrived at the next handover, two of his dogs collapsed in the harness, dead from exhaustion. Tommy Patsy, the fastest musher in the relay, travelling at more than ten miles an hour, carried the serum to the next relay point, where the mushers would diverge from the well-trodden Iditarod trail.

Jack “Jackscrew” Madros picked up the serum from there, and took off for the next meeting point – on Friday evening, he met with Victor Anagick, who drove his dogs into the early hours of the following day, January 31st, to pass the serum over to the next musher. Myles Gonangnan faced another blizzard as he carried the package over forty miles, driving his dogs through six inches of snow to reach Henry Ivanoff – when Ivanoff was forced to stop to untangle the harnesses of his dogs, he was intercepted by Leonard Seppala, who took the serum and began the relay’s longest leg yet.

Seppala, an experienced musher who had won the All-Alaska Sweepstakes for his mushing for several years in a row, had a particularly compelling reason to get the serum to Nome: with his own daughter at risk of fatal diphtheria, he was painfully aware of the importance of his journey. Twelve-year-old Togo, his trusted sled dog, led his team along the coast towards Novolin, as a storm began to close in.

But, soon, they encountered a problem: the fastest route, leading across a beachhead on Norton Sound, was covered with pack ice. Going around it could cost hours, maybe even days – going across it could cost his life, and that of his dogs. The pack ice was being thrown this way and that by the storm, the ground unsteady and unsafe – in a matter of hours, it would all be swept out to sea. High-speed winds had polished the ice to a dangerous glaze in some places, and would make it virtually impossible to hear the warning groans and pops of ice cracking that might give Seppala and his dogs time to flee to safety.

Seppala and his dogs took to the ice. A blizzard soon descended, completely obscuring Seppala’s vision – Togo led the team through the whiteout as the storm intensified, cracks appearing in the ice as they crossed the twenty-mile stretch. Despite the conditions, he made it to a roadhouse on the other side of the Sound, where he and his dogs rested for several hours before they continued their journey. By the time they left, the pack ice that they had crossed the day before had been washed into the ocean.

But the challenges for Seppala and his team were not yet over – the final leg of his journey was a gruelling 13km ridge to the peak of Little McKinkley. The dogs, exhausted after days of travel, managed to complete the journey, and Seppala handed the serum to Charlie Olsen, the next member of the relay, in the early hours of February 1st.

Olsen would face similarly disastrous conditions as he carried the serum to Bluff, a mining town on the North shore of the Norton Sound. Winds were so severe that several of his dogs were blown into a snowdrift; he was forced to retrieve them with his bare hands and, in his attempts to warm them, suffered severe frostbite. Even more worry was his concern that the serum had frozen – when the package was shaken, the sloshing of the antitoxin was no longer audible. By the time Olsen reached Gunnar Kaasen, the final musher in the relay, it seemed as though their efforts might have been fruitless.

Kaasen, a Norwegian who had adopted the town of Nome as his home, and his team of thirteen dogs, led by husky Balto, started the gruelling expedition to the nearby town of Safety. Conditions were worsening, with a blizzard rendering visibility very poor, and high winds blowing the team off-track. After one particular intense gust, several dogs were thrown into a snowdrift, and, when Kaasen left his sled to rescue them, he realized that the serum package was missing. He was forced to search in near-whiteout on all fours through the snow with his bare hands until he recovered the package, and continued his journey.

When Kaasen arrived in Safety, some 33km from Nome, he found that the next musher, Ed Rohn, was asleep – Rohn had expected Kaasen to be held up by the blizzard, and was not expecting him so soon. Kaasen, calculating the time it would take to prepare Rohn’s dogs, opted to let Rohn rest, and to carry the serum the final leg of the journey to Nome.

At 5.30am, February 1st, Kaasena arrived in Nome – banging on the door of the hospital, he handed over the serum to Curtis Welch, who carefully thawed the antitoxin and found, much to his relief, that it had survived the journey – not a single ampoule had been broken.

With the arrival of the antitoxin, the would-be epidemic in Nome was limited to under 10 deaths and around 100 infections. The journey, which took on average thirty days, had been completed in just five and a half. The relay drew national attention, earning the title of “the great race of mercy”, and was covered in headlines across the USA; the mushers received letters of commendation from then-president Calvin Coolidge. Several of the dogs involved in the relay, particularly Togo and Balto, earned minor celebrity status, with Balto even commemorated by a statue in Central Park in New York, despite some debate over the importance of his involvement in the relay – the mushers, the majority of whom were indigenous Alaskans, received markedly less attention.

The Nome serum run would go on to become an iconic part of the history of the state, earning adaptations in film and literature, both fiction and non-fiction. The Iditarod Trail Dog Sled Race, which began in 1973 and runs every March to this day, covers some of the same route that the relay mushers took to deliver the serum, and often honours those involved in the relay and the diphtheria outbreak in Nome, with the  Leonhard Seppala Humanitarian Award awarded to the musher who takes best care of their dogs during the race. Nearly a hundred years after Bill Shannon set out from Nenana, the relay remains one of the most enduring symbols of tenacity, bravery, and teamwork in Alaskan history.

Sources and Further Reading

 Leonhard Seppala: the Siberian dog and the golden age of sleddog racing 1908–1941 by Pat Thomas

The Serum Run of 1925 by Jennifer Houdek

The Cruelest Miles by Gay Salisbury

The Race to Save Nome by Mike Coppock

If you enjoyed this article, please consider supporting me on Patreon or dropping me a tip via my Support page.

(header image via Sports Illustrated Vault)

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

It’s “where are you now?” month at Ask a Manager, and all December I’m running updates from people who had their letters here answered in the past.

There will be more posts than usual this week, so keep checking back throughout the day.

Remember the letter-writer who organized orgies and wanted to know if they could talk about it in their job hunt? Here’s the update.

When I wrote in to you about work for retired orgynizers, I was mostly writing out of shame. There had been a ton of fun, friendship, and adventure in orgynizing. But I also thought that it made me sort of marked forever as some class of “candidate too gross, too weird” to employers.

Reading the comments was whiplash. One type was certain that I would engage in further nefarious deeds in the workplace, like not writing my experience from that business as ORGY MAKERS R US, LEAD ORGYNIZER on my resume. Or some other line of thinking about how my character was irreparably damaged from my time buying lube in bulk.

There were also a ton of people who said things along the lines of “oh, yep, I’ve needed to be cautious about things in a resume before.” People were pointing out my obvious admin and people skills. [And you know what? You were right! I DO have great administrative and people skills! Some thought it was funny, people conducted sex ed for adults in the comments (“what do they do at orgies? why does it take a weekend?”] I read all the comments, and you guys were great.

Thank you, too, to the commenter who came up with “orgynizer.” That is a genius portmanteau. May there always be room in the office fridge for your lunch, may the good parking spot open up before you.

What did I do with your advice? I decided fuck ’em. The global point of no return from climate change is 2-26 years away. What is the point of worrying about if every interviewer will like my resume? Universal appeal isn’t something we get. I took my skills in finding very discreet AirBnBs and herding people with cat ears, and now I do an analog letterpress business’s marketing and administration. Fun! Weird! Lots of old white men in Meaningful hats! Not fracking! Pays the bills! Great. I also teach people how to grow legal psychedelic plants, and am working on a slime mold that I can use for data visualization projects.

Which is all to say, don’t let the bastards grind you down. There are so many good paths through life. As long as you’re not hurting anyone, picking a strange but reliable career path is a totally neutral, or even good, thing to do.

Warmly,

Former Orgynizer, Retired with Honors

P.S. A common question that came up in the comments was if the adult weekends were something I was doing as a volunteer/my hobby. Nope! Formal business. I set up an LLC for that business and paid taxes under that designation.

This is the grave of Fats Domino.

Born in 1928 in New Orleans, Antoine Domino, Jr. grew up in the French-speaking Catholic Creole world of Louisiana. In fact, his first language was French. His family had only just moved to New Orleans from rural Louisiana, settling in the Ninth Ward. Like most residents of that ward, his parents were working class, getting whatever jobs they could find in that segregated world. His father worked at the racetrack, while also playing violin in various bands. So that’s the world of Domino. Music was in the family. His older sister had married Harrison Verrett, the early R&B banjo and guitar player but who also played piano, who started teaching the latter to Domino when the latter was 10.

Domino was already playing in bars by 1942 and in 1947, was asked to join Billy Diamond and the Solid Senders. It was Diamond who nicknamed him Fats and it fit as he was not a slender man. It didn’t take long though for Domino to rise out of being someone’s pianist. In 1949, Lew Chudd signed him to Imperial Records. Rather than the normal contract of being paid by the song, it paid by the sales. Domino was already creating something that could be defined as rock and roll, taking those R&B beats and ramping them up considerably. In 1949, he and the producer and bandleader Dave Bartholomew took an old heroin song called “Junkie Blues” and rewrote it as a more lyrically tamed song called “The Fat Man” that used some of these new piano techniques that Domino had created. The song sold like gangbusters and by 1951 and sold over one million copies. This is widely considered the first rock and roll hit, though there are other songs that could have a claim, depending on how you define the genre.

For the next few years, Domino kept churning out songs, usually his own but sometimes playing piano on his friends songs, and many of them were regional hits. But when he recorded “Ain’t That a Shame” in 1955, it reached a whole other level, hitting the top 10 of the pop charts, as well as #1 on the R&B charts. Pat Boone immediately stole it for his own career; the fact that Boone is the last living person in that early rock scene is outrageous. But Domino’s copy itself sold over a million copies. Music was changing fast now and Domino was leading the charge. That led to an album, compiling a bunch of his previous less known hits, Rock and Rollin with Fats Domino, released in 1956.

That same year, Domino recorded “Blueberry Hill,” one of the great all-time songs. It was written in 1940 and tons of people had already recorded it, including Glenn Miller, Gene Autry, and Louis Armstrong, but it was definitely Fats’ song after that. And really everything Domino did through 1959 was just magic. “Blueberry Hill” topped the R&B charts for 11 weeks. It sold 5 million copies by the end of 1957. Shortly after came “I’m Walkin’,” “Valley of Tears,” “Whole Lotta Lovin’,” “I Want to Walk You Home,” “Be My Guest,” and just so many more.

Of course Fats Domino being a Black guy selling record to white girls freaked the authorities out. In 1956, Domino played a show in Fayetteville, North Carolina. There was a riot that forced Domino to jump out a window while the cops lobbed tear gas. For the authorities, this was Satan incarnate. First, people voluntarily engaged in racial mixing to see Domino. Then there was alcohol. And dancing. DANCING! This rock and roll had to be destroyed! The reaction to early rock and roll is insane, but honestly, you see the exact same reaction through the 20th century to new forms of Black music reaching white ears, from ragtime to hip hop. Every generation has its Tipper Gore.

It’s almost impossible to overstate Domino’s influence on the history of rock and roll. He was a terrible self-promoter really. Personally, he was a very shy man. But his music spoke so loud. Among those more than happy to tell you about how much they owed him was Elvis Presley, who was in absolute awe of a real hero when they met in 1959. Of course, everyone else was influenced by him as well. Time for a bit of an aside. In part because the 60s generation still controls so much of American culture, everything still refers back to that very long time ago. But in the 60s, things were changing so fast that the music one heard from just a few years ago could be transformed into something entirely new, which is what bands such as the Beatles and the Who and the Rolling Stones did when they heard Fats Domino as well. Of course the British bands were pretty open about their heroes from the Black South (though in the case of Led Zeppelin, just openly ripping them off). So they were happy to talk to their fans about Fats or James Brown or the blues legends or anyone else.

Alas, the good times did not last forever for Domino. The music changed so fast. He stayed with Imperial Records until it folded in 1963. He still had some hits through that time, most notably “Walking to New Orleans,” in 1962. He signed with ABC-Paramount after that. Although he recorded consistently until 1970, nothing was a hit anymore. He became a nostalgia act early, including appearing on a Monkees TV special. Still Ike & Tina had him open for them at Carnegie Hall in 1971. They knew what was up.

Overall, Domino sold about 110 million records in his career, so let’s not feel too bad that he didn’t have big hits after the early 60s. He refused to tour after 1995, deciding that he didn’t like food outside of New Orleans. And the thing was that since he had his per-song royalties, he was ripped off a lot less than most musicians of that period and he simply didn’t have to tour. He had big time royalty payments. In fact, when Bill Clinton asked him to perform at the White House in 1998, when the Big Dog was going to present the great musician with a National Medal of the Arts, Domino refused to go. That’s cool, why leave paradise if that’s your paradise?

Not surprisingly, Domino was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its very first class, in 1986.

Late in life, Domino had it rough. He was a man of the Lower Ninth Ward and he lost his house to Hurricane Katrina. He did not evacuate because of his sickly aging wife and nearly died. He lost everything. All his memorabilia was gone. Some stuff could be replaced–another gold record could be pressed. George W. Bush had his National Medal of Arts granted by Bill Clinton replaced. But still. Now my favorite bit of trivia in this entire grave series–who rescued Domino from his house? JaMarcus Russell, soon to be the greatest bust in NFL history! Russell, then the QB at LSU, was dating Domino’s granddaughter at the time.

Domino showed up occasionally late in life, including in an episode of Treme in 2012. He died in 2017, at the age of 89.

Let’s listen to some Fats Domino:

Fats Domino is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit other members of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Elvis Presley is in Memphis and Chuck Berry is in St. Louis. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.

The post Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,769 appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

I chose to return to Aleppo from Beirut for the things that couldn’t fit into a suitcase: my mother’s smiling face in the morning and her warm embrace at all times. I chose to leave my exile in Lebanon after eight years, to reclaim the life I had let slip through my fingers, searching for safety where it had long vanished.

Israel’s recent aggression against Lebanon only strengthened my resolve to return to Aleppo, as life grew unbearable amid constant air raids. So I packed my bags, tidied my house, said my farewells and left on Sunday, Nov. 24.

When I woke up three days later, on Wednesday, I could hardly believe my ears. I thought I was dreaming. Aleppo, after all, was a “safe” city; surely the sounds of bombs in the distance couldn’t be real. But as the hours passed, and I saw the unease in people’s faces, I realized it wasn’t a dream. There were clashes between opposition factions and the joint Russian-Syrian forces in the countryside west of Aleppo, triggered by a large-scale attack by the opposition, which was pushing toward the city.

The state media, of course, insisted it was all under control, that it would all be over in a few hours, and that Aleppo was “bkhair” (fine and unharmed).

But Aleppo was not “bkhair.” Two days later, the opposition factions entered the city with hardly any resistance, while reports confirmed a clear retreat by the government’s army in the face of their advance.

Panic and confusion gripped the people. Phones rang nonstop, voices trembling with fear and uncertainty. No official body offered a clear statement on what was happening or what might come next. We were left to face our sorry fates. I will never forget, as long as I live, the image of my mother’s smiling face when I returned slowly turning into one filled with concern, tears and quiet desperation.

We did our best to absorb the shock and decided to stay in Aleppo, clinging to our long-held belief that nothing lasts forever.

Since that day, our minds have struggled to make sense of how our daily lives have been turned upside down overnight. The city, once full of life, has become a state-free zone. There is no army, no police, no political figures. The city’s institutions and departments have ceased functioning, taken over by the opposition. They set up military checkpoints in the city’s main squares, like Saadallah al-Jabri Square, and faction members began driving around in their private cars, buying goods with Turkish lira or U.S. dollars — currencies we weren’t allowed to use.

The hours during which we had electricity increased slightly, rising from just four hours a day. The factions began distributing free bread, a scarce commodity previously offered to those with a smart card. The bakeries resumed work.

Amid these changes, I found myself questioning everything. I listened to neighbors and friends, both near and far, on social media. My anxiety grew, especially as a young Christian woman in the prime of her life, unsure of what would become of me and other Christians from different denominations.

What surprised me, though, was that most of those around me didn’t share my worries. They were concerned with whether they would be able to celebrate Christmas, whether they could cook salika (traditional wheat pudding) on St. Barbara’s Day, whether they could wear whatever clothes they wanted or drink alcohol in public. They were terrified of the thought of wearing the hijab or niqab, even though no one had yet forced them to change their habits. I clashed with them when I raised my voice, trying to shift their focus to matters of real importance.

Can’t we, for once, stop being cowards? Why do we flee our land at the first sign of trouble? Shouldn’t we prove our existence as Christians in our country when it’s struggling, not just when everything is fine? We left when the Syrian conflict began, and soon we were complaining about the Muslim majority in our areas. Aren’t we the ones who abandoned our land, our honor? Today, we repeat the same pattern, worrying about potential hijab laws, makeup bans and Christmas trees. Is this really what Christianity means to us? Is this the mystery of the cross on which our faith is built? Is this the image we want to show the world? Are we so fragile that we must play the victim every time?

Have we still not understood that our displacement isn’t the heart of everything that’s happening? Aren’t we tired of the betrayal and injustice that the whole world has heaped upon us in this weary land? Did we not feel sorrow when we took to the streets in search of a loaf of bread, because we barely had enough in our homes?

I’m not sure if it’s our current situation that wears me down, or the ignorance that blinds our hearts and makes me lose hope. I don’t know on what foundation I will build my life after today, but I’m certain that I cannot accept this as the limit of our ambitions as a society. The questions we need to ask today must reach beyond concerns about holidays, decorations and lipstick. We need to demand answers about our future, about what will happen to our civil and military administration.

We want to know our rights and duties. What will happen to state employees, and who will be responsible for them? What will become of our banking sector and the central bank? What currency will we use?

We want to feel secure after years of instability in a country that the whole world has fought over. Who will be our authority? Who will protect us? Who will we turn to in the event of theft or any other crime?

Where will we send our students to school or university? What curriculum will shape their characters? What education will occupy their thoughts?

We want to build, prosper and move forward, as all nations do. What will our investments be? What will our exports or imports be based on? Will we ever be free from sanctions?

If these aren’t the things we’re thinking about, and if our future isn’t what’s on our minds, then I don’t believe we will ever be at peace. If we don’t unite and demand a clear explanation and an ultimate, sustainable solution — one that doesn’t rely on violence, bombing and destruction — I see no bright future for us or for this overburdened country.

The post Amid Chaos in Aleppo, There Is a Chance To Discuss the Future appeared first on New Lines Magazine.