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       Once I was hyphenated.  It was all the rage back in the 70’s, along with using only the letter of your first name followed by the other two.  J. Snuffy Smith, for example, sounded much more sophisticated and presumptuous that simply James Smith, and we were convinced that German - American and Irish - American and African - American or Cuban - American or whatever - American added an air of aristocracy to our mundane American lives that belied our untraceably mixed racial identities and multi- geographic heredity.  In other words, we are all here in America now and our past did not follow narrow genealogical paths to result in us.  None of us has ancestors of just one color, type, race or only one geographic area. The people that came before us traveled the seas and the deserts and the mountains and really didn’t have time to worry much about genealogy or hyphenation when they were mostly concerned with basic stuff like food and not getting eaten by a shark or a grizzly bear.  

  Wokeness and The Beaver      I’m pretty sure it all started with Theodore Cleaver. Many of you might not be familiar with the name, but at one time he was the cat’s meow.  In the early 1960’s Leave It To Beaver was a hit TV show that a lot of America, to their unknown detriment, watched almost religiously.   Every week a new episode about a cute little kid named Theodore - his nickname was Beaver - got into trouble and was rescued by his parents, June and Ward Cleaver.  Beaver would do really stupid stuff like order an accordian from a magazine ad and try to hide it from his parents when the bill came in the mail, or give his alcoholic uncle a bottle of bourbon from his Dad’s cabinet without asking his parents or feed a neighbor’s cat and try to hide it in his room. Nothing that really stretched the imagination too much, but usually things that most kids (like me and my brothers) might have thought of but never followed through on because we would be scared to death of our Dad’s reac