I never start writing my weekly column until the ending comes to me first. Then it’s simply just a matter of writing up to the end, one sentence at a time between periods, according to the rules.

After finishing a column’s first draft, it then goes to Westphalia’s language department, headed by Culley Jane, the retired professor and novelist. She knows rules I've never heard of, like the subject has to agree with the verb. She always finds an internal structural flaw or two and I grumble about it ("But that's the way they say it in the U.P..." I say) but she’s the professor and I go back to work.

This week, though, she had a problem with the ending, itself. She said it struck her as a non-sequitur to the body of the text; that it didn’t logically follow, wrap up and give deeper meaning to what had led up to it.

This time I disagreed.

With everything going on in Washington these days, the word "fascism" is being thrown around with many meanings. So, I wanted to write this week's column about the illusive word but couldn't come up with an ending until one day this past week I remembered that I already knew it... the ending.

The story of the ending takes in Michigan’s “Upper Peninsula,” the U.P., in the town where I grew up and my family had lived for generations, Iron Mountain. Our house on D Street was just a bike-ride away from grandparents and great-grandparents. Kids played outside in the cold. After school in winter, me and some buddies might walk to the surrounding hills and pine forests to make a roaring fire and ski jump. After high school I took off to become a writer and didn’t really go back there for a quarter century.

It was the early 90s when I returned. I was in my early 40s and had just “gone back home,” as they say, to start a new life, a new career, a new way to make a living. I had a wife and three kids and had just been exiled from the press.

For over 20 years I had made a living writing for newspapers. I did a good job and had won awards and by the early 90s had made it to the big time — an investigative reporter at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. And then one day, somebody in the bureaucratic works with influence decided that I was a fascist, or a fellow traveler.

At the time, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram was owned by a company in New York that had been started following WWII by former members of America’s wartime OSS. By the late 50s, it had cozied up to Meyer Lansky’s “Resorts International” and kept growing into a media giant. By the time I got to Fort Worth, it had already purchased Disney and ABC News. One of its founders and leading stockholders was William Casey, Reagan’s pick to head the CIA.

And there I was, a working class C-student kid from Iron Mountain, who’d moved up through the ranks to become an ace reporter at one of the company’s flagship news operations. But then somebody in the bureaucratic works with access to my telephone records discovers that I’d been making late-night calls to a known fascist -- Lyndon Larouche -- who was, at the time, locked up in a federal penitentiary for violating an obscure campaign finance law. But people in the know knew why. He was a fascist.

Quoting “sources,” the thought-shaping New York Times, itself, had labeled Larouche a fascist, and therefore dangerous. It was later revealed in declassified documents that their “source” had been Kissinger. So it must be true. People knew what they knew. In the New York Times and then across the wires, the jailing of a known fascist was front-page news.

At the time, I was talking to the imprisoned Larouche by phone about his ideas for a new international economic system based on the principles of the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. After 30 years of religious slaughter, the European princes finally agreed that it was in their best interest to act in the best interest of their sovereign neighbors. The Chinese Communist Party has publicly recognized Larouche as an intellectual founder of the Belt and Road Initiative and BRICS.

But Larouche was a fascist and like birds of a feather I must be one too. So the company got rid of me and told any other newspaper that wanted to know that I was a “loose cannon” with back-channel links to fascists.

Like Capone did when things got too hot in Chicago, I took off for the northwoods.

And just like that, I’m back in the imagined safety of the old home town that I’d left decades before, inspired by the Beatle’s Paperback Writer and dreams of getting on the Johnny Carson Show.

I walked the old neighborhood streets: past the gas station where I had my first real job washing windows and pumping gas; past the house where she had lived, the one who’d taught me how to swim without breathing in the back seat of the old man’s Chevy’, the one I’d left at the altar to become a writer.

In the old neighborhood bars, beneath the heads of trophy bucks mounted on the wall, I’d meet old classmates who’d never taken off. We’d talk about the Packers and the games we’d played and what became of so-and-so. They’d tell me about their jobs at the power company or at one of the paper mills and about their family and their golf scores and they’d want to know what had brought me back to the old home town. I’d tell them I wanted a quieter life, although it wasn’t so. I couldn’t tell them what had  really  happened or pretty soon it would be news all around town that I’d become a fascist. It would embarrass my parents and extended family. Dad was the town’s third-grade teacher. They wouldn’t want the neighbors whispering about a wayward son who’d disappeared and then came back home a fascist.

I decided on my new career. Nursing. I worked as a nurse’s aide and enrolled in the nursing program at a local community college. I wrote poetry and Zen koans in my spare time.

The ending came to me late one night during a clinical rotation on a psych ward. The patients had been medicated and slept or shuffled silently about in the halls in white robes and stocking feet. In a moment of curious clarity, it came to me… the ending, the obvious — that everybody knows what they think, but what makes a person crazy is not so much what they think as not knowing why they think the way they do.

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