As a citizen and artist, John de Bairos is exhibiting his deepest feelings in very different ways in Marlborough and Sudbury.
Several days a week, the 75-year-old lifetime Marlborough resident can be seen at the intersection of routes 20 and 85 holding a sign that says, “Impeach the Lying Idiot” and sometimes even saltier alternatives.
“Somebody’s got to do it,” he said. “You can’t just sit on your hands.”
At the same time, the Navy veteran and candidate for Ward 5 city councilor is showing striking black-and-white photographs at Longfellow’s Wayside Inn.
“What connects them? I try to live a spiritual life,” said de Bairos. “I’ve always been a community spirit. That’s just different parts of me.”
For the last month, he’s been showing 13 photos he took and developed in an exhibit titled “Calliope.” Running through next Wednesday, it includes subtly nuanced portraits, still lifes and landscapes. The 11-by-17-inch photos can be purchased.
A sort of double-entendre, the title “Calliope” suggests both the Greek goddess of poetry who inspired Homer and the ability to make music by driving steam through pipes.
Using a Contax 35-millimeter camera with a Zeiss lens, de Bairos photographs seemingly commonplace subjects and scenes in ways that suggest layers of feeling simmering beneath a still surface.
In one photo an older man sits at a desk heaped with coffee cups and papers, holding in his hands a pen and a cigar. In the unlikely setting of a used car dealership, de Bairos somehow captures the man’s utter serenity amid clutter.
He explained that he drove by the man’s business over the Connecticut line several times over the course of a year, always asking to photograph a nearby abandoned house before he convinced the man to let him take his picture.
In a picture taken at Gates Pond in Hudson, de Bairos photographed an empty path passing between rows of trees casting long shadows that seem to signal a deeper melancholy.
“There’s so much for the eyes in that picture. I really get into it,” he said. “I’ll take a picture of anything that strikes my fancy. When I develop them in my darkroom and see the images coming up through the chemical, it’s like I just took that. It gives me great satisfaction.”
Describing his more public displays, de Bairos said civic-minded citizens “should express their opinions.”
A Korean War-era veteran who was stationed in Morocco, for 2-1/2 years he’s been holding a series of signs in downtown Marlborough denouncing the Bush administration’s war in Iraq, he said.
One sign reads “Impeach the lying ….” Using a movable piece of cardboard if children are nearby, de Bairos can change the last word describing the president to “idiot,” “coward” or “bastard.”
Another sign describes President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney as “guilty of war crimes.”
“It’s so discouraging everyone goes along with what’s being done by Bush. We don’t have to take all this stuff he spews out,” said de Bairos. “I just want people to take charge of their world and have a voice. That’s how democracy works. If everybody expressed their opinion, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
For the last several days, de Bairos has been ill and unable to mount his protest from his usual spot in front of Coral Seafood and Starbucks.
Born and raised in Marlborough, de Bairos considers himself a townie through and through.
He claims to be the town’s “second Caesarian birth” after his sister Nita. Even in high school, he was both outgoing and civic-minded. Graduating in 1951, he was class president and captained the football and baseball teams.
While attending prep school as a prelude to earning a football scholarship to Columbia University, de Bairos was expelled for smoking and joined the Navy.
He remembered his duty as a seabee building roads in Tangiers and Casablanca as “very romantic,” and said Morocco reminded him of California.
After his honorable discharge, de Bairos held a series of jobs, working for New England Power, as a custodian at the high school and running his own cleaning business. For more than a decade, he and his late wife Gloria owned and ran a downtown coffee shop. Ten years after his beloved wife died, de Bairos retired in 1995.
For de Bairos, retirement provided an opportunity to pursue things he had missed. He spent three years studying art and English at UMass-Boston, an experience he described as “enlightening.”
About the same time, de Bairos began assembling and self-publishing books containing photos he’d taken of customers at his coffee shop, which he embellished with personal stories and reflections.
When he’s not protesting or taking pictures, de Bairos indulges his love of reading very different sorts of writers. He named his favorite authors as Annie Dillard, Jack Kerouac and poet Seamus Heaney.
Asked how he reconciled his passion for photography and politics, de Bairos said many people embrace contrary interests. “You can be a softball player and love poetry at the same time.”
Looking back, de Bairos said if he’d gone to college after high school his life might’ve taken a course that would’ve let him devote all his energies to art and politics.
“I never regretted it,” he said. “Never did.”
THE ESSENTIALS:
John de Bairos’ exhibit “Calliope” will be at the Wayside Inn Gallery through April 30.
The inn is located at 72 Wayside Inn Road, Sudbury. The gallery is open for viewing free of charge during the inn’s regular hours of operation from 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., seven days a week.
For information, call 978-443-1776 or visit www.wayside.org.
On Jan. 16, 2008, John Nirenberg shared his views about his walk from Boston, MA to Washington, D.C., in order to promote the cause of the impeachment of President George W. Bush and V. P. Dick Cheney. He insists that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi put impeachment proceedings “back on the table.” Mr. Nirenberg hails from Brattelboro, VT. He was introduced, at the press conference, by David Swanson of afterdowningstreet.org. For background, see: http://www.marchinmyname.org/. The event took place on the Canon House Office Building’s terrace, opposite Capitol Hill, in Washington, D.C.
Ralph Lopez, Dailykos – Congressman Mike Capuano (D-MA) has just signed onto Wexler’s letter supporting immediate impeachment hearings against Dick Cheney, after a long period of stubborn intransigence in the face of constituent pressure. He has been written to and visited repeatedly by constituents associated with the New England Impeachment Coalition, always giving a response similar to the S.O.S. he wrote me in a recent email, “I do not believe that we should pursue articles of impeachment against the President in the absence of a strong record of facts compiled by the Congress.”
Bygones are bygones. Capuano is a smart and articulate voice to have onboard. He’s a hardball politician from the tough ward politics of Somerville, who can be an attack dog when he wants to be. Who knows what flipped him, but I know of one friend personally who faxed him a letter this month with what I think is the creative message that “We did not elect a King. Ask for his resignation letter to be signed unanimously by Congress, and if done, and Bush does not accept, then begin impeachment.” This friend is homeless, and it’s a hardship for her to spend 5 bucks on a two page fax at Kinkos, but spend it she did…
You never know what works. We are each tiny compared to the power of a man who lives in the sky aboard the magnificent Air Force One, complete with F-16 escorts, but we are relentless. We are a free people who have not learned the habit of staying silent as our rights are taken. We squeal like stuck pigs every time. And the would-be tyrants, King George being the latest and most determined, always fall into the trash-heap of history.
Netroots Media Mission on Impeachment: Help Us!
Dennis Kucinich will introduce articles of impeachment against President George Bush this Monday January 28, the same day as Bush’s State of the Union speech. The media is sure to try to ignore it to the best of its ability. So I have made it easy for the netroots to write to many major media outlets at once, so we can swamp them with letters and messages asking them to cover impeachment.
This experiment in the netroots “pushing it down” to the major media will send the message that we are paying close attention to the fact that the media is not doing its job. We were alerted to this when Kucinich gave his historic speech on November 6th, 2007, calling for the impeachment of Dick Cheney, and there was a deafening silence from all but the Internet media. There is excellent reason for The Fourth Estate to actively bury the impeachment story.
With impeachment on the lips of 54% of Americans in the case of Cheney and 45% in the case of Bush, impeachment is a dam ready to burst. Perhaps never in American history has the true sentiment of the country been as removed from the blatherings in Congress as the Earth is from the Moon.
Once it hits one newspaper, it will have to hit others. Woman in Omaha calls sister in Dallas, Did your paper report this? Sister in Dallas says no, calls local editor, WTF is going on? It always unravels very quickly for the bad guys.
There’s no sense in suggesting a form letter, since these are discounted as coming from an interest group. This is the time to write from the heart, on what you feel about impeachment, on what has happened to our country, and on our media’s duty to uphold “the people’s right to know.”
You never know what works. We are each tiny compared to the power of a man who lives in the sky aboard the magnificent Air Force One, complete with F-16 escorts, but we are relentless. We are a free people who have not learned the habit of staying silent as our rights are taken. We squeal like stuck pigs every time. And the would-be tyrants, King George being the latest and most determined, always fall into the trash-heap of history.
Write the best letter you can, then send to all the listed media, something the multiple addresses feature of email makes easy. Will it help? I don’t know. But Dennis is going out on a limb on Monday, as he did last November, as Rep. Wexler did earlier this month, and it’s up to us to do everything we can to support these brave efforts for us, with everything we’ve got. We can’t leave him hanging.
We have three days to make ourselves heard. This list will be updated.
Write early write often. These email addresses are all publically available online at Wikipedia listings of media, so this is not spamming. It’s using the power of the Internet to achieve the breakthrough for democracy that this country so badly needs. Please bookmark this post and spread it around.
Also I have included the hometown newspapers of two key Republican congressmen in the Judiciary Committee, Howard Coble (NC) and Mike Pence (IN). The idea is if we can manage to flip one Judiciary Republican from the heartland, the rest of the Committee will come tumbling down. This is the kind of cover Barry Goldwater gave to his fellow conservatives when he told Nixon he would no longer support him. The Democrats would be left with their pants hanging around their ankles trying to explain why, if impeachment is OK for a Republican, it’s not ok for them.
We’ve got until Monday to swamp them with appeals to their patriotism, how their children will grow up in this country too, and we don’t want our children to grow up in a country governed not by laws, but by the whims of men. Use this resource for talking points with which to help compose your own missive, if you need it: “Impeachment is a Non-Partisan Issue.” Also this site has a full list of Judiciary Committee members, and a local media email tool, in case you get into it and want to google some more papers in these guys’ districts. Their homepage at name.house.gov will have a link called “district” which tells the names of the major cities and towns. Do a little “Podunket newspapers” google search and you’ll almost always come up with a few.
Maybe some of us will get a letter to the editor in. Maybe some of us will stumble across a patriotic American.
As a citizen and artist, John de Bairos is exhibiting his deepest feelings in very different ways in Marlborough and Sudbury.
