My 'Song of the Year' Plus New Year's Eve Cartoons and Photo

And 80th anniversary of a shocking football bowl game: Radiation for the Hell of It.

Greg Mitchell has authored more than a dozen books (see most of them here) and directed four recent PBS films, including the current “The Atomic Bowl.” Subscribing to this newsletter is still FREE—so if you want to help fund, maybe purchase one of those books, thanks. Or recommend this Substack to a friend!

Steve Brodner, above, imagines Trump trying to stop the clock as it moves forward to his 2026 downfall? Below, the perennial question from Queen Ella: “What Are You Doing New Year’s Eve?” Feel free to respond to either in Comments today.

Meanwhile, we face this in 2026, thanks to Booby Jr. and Trump:

Susan B. Glasser at The New Yorker:

Donald Trump’s Golden Age of Awful

A damage assessment of the President’s first year back in the White House.

Yet the biggest disappointment of 2025 may well have been not what Trump did but how so many let it happen. Trump has always been a mirror for other people’s souls, an X-ray revealing America’s dysfunction. If this was a test, there were more failing grades than we could have imagined.

On the first day of his second term, the President pardoned more than fifteen hundred violent rioters who sacked their own U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in a vain effort to overturn Trump’s 2020 election defeat. Even his Vice-President, J. D. Vance, had said that this was something that “obviously” shouldn’t happen; Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, later admitted that she had lobbied him not to go that far. But Trump didn’t listen. He was putting America on notice. The first outrage was a sneak preview of those to come: if there was a choice to be made, he would invariably opt for the most shocking, destructive, or corrupt option. And who was going to stop him?

This is why any obituary for 2025 requires a special shout-out to those whose craven folding to Trump might well have proved to be among the biggest bad surprises of the year—the law-firm managing partners and corporate executives and technology tycoons who decided to pay protection money to the President rather than stand up for the rule of law that enabled their great success in the first place.

New post at my “other” Substack: Tomorrow marks the 80th anniversary of the most bizarre, yet revealing, football game ever: played on a killing field near ground zero in Nagasaki by U.S. all-star teams just months after an atomic bomb destroyed half the city, killing 80,000 or more, nearly all of them civilians. I’ve posted several times about my current PBS film which will be re-aired widely next month (you can watch free streaming right now) but I have not until now published a blow-by-blow on the actual game. So check it out if you wish.

Song of the Year

I’ll be rolling out my favorite music of 2025 in coming days, but I thought I’d start with a single song. Sure, it’s not the greatest performance you’ll hear, it’s not even a full song but almost a poetic recitation, but the lyrics have more meaning and significance than almost any other in my lifetime—even more so given today’s horrors—and while long considered “classic” and covered by dozens of artists, a version by the author himself has never been released until this year. Here’s the release, and an excerpt from my tribute a few months back. Since then, because of its topicality, it’s been performed in concert by many artists, both the famous (such as Margo Price and Rosanne Cash) and obscure. Send along your personal Song of the Year in Comments.

From earlier this year: Since Woody Guthrie is kind of the patron saint of this newsletter, a special posting tonight after word emerged—on his birthday—about home recordings from the early 1950s, twenty of which will soon be released, with thirteen not heard before. In fact, one was posted today, and it’s a bombshell: “Deportee.”

Just last month I posted here about that song, one of my favorites, and its back story about the actual plane crash of “unnamed” migrant farmworkers who were being returned to Mexico. It’s an important story, so follow this link.

In any event, the version released today is so important because it’s a song Woody never recorded himself. The Huntington’s disease that would cripple him until his death really set in before he could do that. But we learned today that, living on Long Island, he had bought an early reel to reel recorder and got a few dozen songs down, mainly for other artists to cover.

It was always assumed he only wrote lyrics for “Deportee,” since another songwriter added a tune later and received co-credit. But the Woody recording released today, though rough, does have a cadence that sounds like it inspired the later version. And a key change: told partly first-person as one of the migrants.

Here are the hallowed closing stanzas:

Some of us are illegal, some are not wanted,
Our work contract’s out and we have to move on;
Six hundred miles to the Mexican border,
They chase us like outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves.

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

The sky plane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon,
A fireball of lightning, and shook all our hills.
Who are all these friends now scattered like dry leaves?
The radio says, “They are just deportees”

Is this the best way we can grow your big orchards?
Is this the best way we can grow our good fruit?
To fall like dry leaves to rot on my topsoil—
And be called by no name except “deportees”

Here’s a favorite live recording, with some graphics, by Ani DiFranco and Ry Cooder.

From Tunes to Toons

Ann Telnaes:

Clay Bennett:

Bramhall:

Joel Pett:

Ben Jennings:

Photo Finish

“Farewell to 2025, Stone Barns, Sleepy Hollow, N.Y.”