This image includes only one segment of a vast checkered display set up in the Union Square Greenmarket last Friday by Samascott Orchards, of Martin van Buren's Kinderhook, New York. The cherries were going fast.

Speaking of van Buren, I just learned that the bewhiskered knickerbocker, incidentally the first president from New York (and the first born in the U.S.), was the first one for whom English was not a first language. We're still waiting for the second, and, if we all survive, there should be many more.

The boy went far. If he were alive today, what do we think he'd say about our modern Know Nothings? But maybe there's no real parallel, since his family, and many other Dutch settlers, had been busy, and dominant, in the upper Hudson valley since the early 1600's, before English, or the English had subsumed all. Also, the Dutch were pretty white, and definitely not Catholic. Today's Know Nothings have to find a way to get around the fact that if there are any "illegals", it's the people who stole the West, indeed the entire Western Hemisphere, from those who were there first.