Film still from Franklin J. Schaffner's “The Best Man”—1964 from United Artists.
“The Walk Through”
As noted downpage, I assisted the gator-ific one and “Tokyo Terri” (one of my favorite commenters here and a damned hard worker for progressive causes on the internets in her own right) a little bit with their impromptu video “get” of Dr. Howard Dean for the “Unofficial Netroots Nation Podcast” down here in Austin.
One minute I was at our table watching Gen. Wesley Clark winding up his speech in rollicking fashion and the very funny Baratunde Thurston who bridged the speakers with some hilarious and pointed political stand-up, and the next minute, there was an advance person/assistant to Dr. Dean appearing magically in a puff of burnt Orange Netroot smoke, quickly informing T and Gator that “The Fifty-State Strategy Man” was now miraculously available for the interview—but...it would have to be quick and and an “on a dime turn-about” would be required as he was scheduled next at the podium to speak.
What followed was the “art-y” part. As the video camera being used was a relatively new-ish one, it was still in the process of being set-up which when under time constraints can only cause problems, thus, I volunteered my help with that, being an inveterate A/V geek and suddenly, we were off—out of the main hall and being led down the corridor where another very important person with a walkie-talkie awaited near a closed door. We were quickly ushered in, and then...an eerie feeling of dejá vu kicked in.
I don't know if you've ever seen the 1964 film “The Best Man”,, starring Henry Fonda (and if you haven't—you should. It'll be on Turner Classic Movies Aug. 24th @ 12 a.m. and on Sept. 3rd @ 12:15 a.m.) as the earnest, honest-to-a-fault “William Russell”, a clearly liberal candidate for president, with of course, the one tragic flaw—he'd been institutionalized for a nervous breakdown some time before, and it had also damaged his marriage. His opponent was Cliff Robertson's “Joe Cantwell”, a feral attack dog of a right-winger who'll stop at nothing to get elected—and he too, has a secret, as he'd apparently engaged in...ahem!, “The love that dares not speak its name” while in the army during WW2. The movie (Based on Gore Vidal's hit Broadway Play) is one of the best filmed treatments of the modern political game, focusing on the unseen glad-handing, horse-trading, hypocrisy, conventioneer-ing, and all manner of back-room dealing innate to the “game”. It was lensed in that stark “Manchurian Candidate” black and white style on location in the guts and bowels of the old Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles (where RFK would be killed a mere four years later), and the film is chock-full of these odd, shadowy back-of-the-building shots—tall unused ballrooms and long, echoing gray corridors, piping and ducts and all of the unglamorous building innards where the main characters skulked and plotted and met from time to time to measure each other like street-bred dogs facing off.
We were led through just such a labyrinth of rooms and corridors on our way to Dr. Dean. It was eerie. The rooms and hallways were a deep, stoney gray, with more echo than a Tommy James & The Shondells record. The occasional bark of a walkie-talkie could be heard as we were led left, right...Then left again and once again right to meet with and interview the former governor.
It looked exactly like that creepy, cavernous maze of rooms they shot “The Best Man” in. I kept waiting for the movie's director, to rise suddenly on the end of a big Chapman crane and yell “Cut!”. But this wasn't a movie. It was quite real.
We got to Dr. Dean, but of course the camera was balky and we missed that opportunity, but were granted a second chance after his speech, which came rather quickly.
He was ebullient, affable and as down-to-earth as could be. You couldn't help but notice his real fondness for the politically activated folks on the internet. He doesn't say “No” when people approach him—which for the thankless jobs of handlers and assistants, understandably makes them a little bit crazy. There are schedules and appearances to be maintained, and when you have a garrulous and open person like him to hold to the “every second counts” level of getting about, it can be difficult. (Bill Clinton is also notorious for this—even moreso in fact.) Nevertheless, good cheer was maintained and the interview went well.
But I couldn't help but notice those surroundings on our way to interview him. There was no magic, donut-stuffed green room or make-up people wielding puffs and powders and the like. It was furtive hustling about, no glamour. You run, you brief one another—it is on the fly. Big gray rooms and chugging forklifts. Echoing halls and harsh fluorescent lights. Barking, squalling walkie-talkies and the crispy sound of handlers necks snapping from repeatedly whipping downward to check watches and back up at their person.
What you see up front on CNN and MSNBC, the talking head perfectly centered before a green screen where a DC backdrop is popped in is the end result.
The guts is all the rushing to and fro through cavernous hallways, past kitchens and loading bays.
Got a chance to experience a little bit of the political game up close...back rooms and all.
Amazing stuff. And real.
Saturday, July 19, 2008
Life Imitates Art
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
That Was The Week That Was—Part Two:
“A Round-Headed Kid Can Dream...”
(Part One One Post Down)
It's Tuesday night. June 3rd, 2008
I sit there at the computer in something of a daze as Senator Barack Obama made his way to the podium, looking quizzically at the scene with my head askance the way cats do when they see something that just doesn't register as familiar in the tidy and ordered feline brain.
What was I watching?
Senator Obama's wife Michelle was waiting for him there and they embraced for a moment, with just a little bit of an extra clinch at the end that kind of said, “Let's savor this for a second, shall we?” And then, she backed up and muttered a quick something, and offered a slender left fist up for “The Dap”, which he never skipped a beat on and returned with a quick, soft “thump”.
Wha-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-t?
Did they just do a quick, little “Dap” for all the world to see? A little personal affirmative that looked like they'd done it a hundred times before? I laughed inside for a moment. I've given my wife “The Dap” for jobs well done a thousand times.
When she handled an ornery relative with perfect touch and tone on a hyper-emotional phone call? “Dap!”
If I find a glorious, pre-made pitcher of iced coffee—which she can't stand—in the fridge on a boiling summer morning she's beaten me to wakefulness? “Dap!”
When she tells me of a particularly tricky work account she's managed to find an angle on to complete, and I know the sucker's been the bane of her existence for weeks on end? ““Dap! Dap!”
An unspoken, small bit of cultural shorthand that's just a little bit “round-the-way”, and I just saw...“The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.” work it like I do in quiet moments with someone I appreciate. It was remarkably humanizing. And then, a quick pat in the small of the back saying, “Okay...I've got this.” And she was off, while he was...on.
I've got this.”
And what exactly was it he had at that moment? Oh, only the position of the Democratic Party's nominee for the Presidency of The United States of America.
?!
Now, once he plunged into his speech—and it was a hum-dinger, replete with fawning praise for his in-party rival Senator Clinton—I sort of had to pinch myself, because what I was seeing required a certain suspension of belief to absorb. Because I honestly did not think in my lifetime that I would see an African American presidential candidate get thisclose to as George Clinton so perfectly put it, “Painting The White House Black”. This isn't negativity, or poor-mouthing, or spin-management/underselling.
This is reality for millions of Black folks of a certain age. Call us “Boomers”, “Generation Jones” or whatever you will, but for those generations back—from those of us Obama's age and upwards, many of us find this new American reality as of June 2008 a rather daunting one. We may make more money, or have more access to higher learning, and so many other neat-o trappings of 21st century America that our forebears didn't have, but we still carry the stigma of denial of equality once the rubber of ambition meets racism's road. Many of us are old enough to in spite of whatever success we may have enjoyed, know the sting of blunt-force racism up close and personal.
I'm a year younger than Barack Obama, and I know what it's like to be chased through an all-White neighborhood in New York City with bottles exploding on my heels as a teenager, just because I showed my Black face there to get something that wasn't available near home. Came down the steps of the elevated J Train in then mostly-White Woodhaven a few years later where I saw a toddler with his mom walking past me.
The little boy pointed at me, smiled, and said “Ni-guh”, in the cutest baby-voice you've ever heard.
Mom never said a word. Didn't blink and kept on her merry way with that little, tousle-haired cherub whose soul she'd sadly already managed to partially wreck. I stood there dumbfounded for about a minute. And then I went back up the stairs and said “the hell with what I came here for”, got on the train back to Jamaica and have never set foot in that neighborhood again. That was twenty-two years ago.
Only last year, the fashion statement du jour wasn't the drapey Paul Lyndian scarves so favored by style-setters like Vogue's dandy-monolith André Leon Talley. No...the neckwear wildfire trend that swept the nation like a Klan cross too near dry brushland was the old standby rope noose. Everything old was new again. From the “Dirty South”, all the way up to the so-called “refined” North. Ironic, genocidal “cool” was all the rage. I'm surprised I didn't see an Abercrombie & Fitch T-shirt with an old lynching pic silk-screened on and the ironic phrase “Hang In There Baby” printed below it, as the noose came roaring back with such a vengeance (pardon the unfortunate pun) in the public consciousness. The Goddamned noose. One of the most powerful symbols of wanton, hate-driven violence in history made a major comeback last year.
In America, people.
And here we are one summer later, standing on the verge of seriously “getting it on”, if you will.
Color me a deep, dusky mahogany, and surprised.
Black folks are so damned used to being the perennial, gullible “Charlie Brown” who gets true equality's football snatched away every fucking time by the great, all-powerful “Lucy” that we've taken on ol' Chuck's nonplussed demeanor about the whole damn thing. This is how the shit is. Yet, we run for it every damned time, thinking the outcome'll be different just this once...
And somehow, this time...things are a bit different. Obama is somewhere I / we never expected him to be, while w-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-y deep-down wondering if he'd ever get close.
He's close. Really close. Scary close. And it requires a reboot of a lifetime of conditioning and thinking. How did we get to the point where instead of the ball being snatched away, there's a better than even chance our foot may actually touch the damned thing, or better yet...
I noted post-Iowa that Obama was more or less “surfing” a change wave as opposed to initiating it, saying:
That's what Barack Obama's doing here. He's just shooting. Tapping into “it”. 'Cause “it” is bigger than he is. And that “it” is a tidal wave begun with the Supreme Court's December 2000 judgement that Bush be installed, fluttering down into the collective water of history. The ripple began there, rolled into larger ones with the Iraq debacle, became waves then and rose higher with the repeated flouting of the Constitution—FISA, glad-handing torture, and then, the open subverting of justice, and now crests eight years later on a sweat, shit and pee-inducing Tsunami that isn't about a grumpy bark of “Throw the bums out!”.
No. This is a level beyond that. It's a “Throw the bums out, then burn down the place we were in, so we don't have to remember it and let's build some place completely new that's got no ties to the old bullshit.”
Obama just happens to be the dude who was out there on the breakers when that wave rolled in, and for what it's worth—he's riding the living hell out of it,
For all of the positives Senator Obama brings to the table, and those positives are indeed mighty ones, when I look at America's long, and unresolved history of racism—right down to last year's “noose-a-palooza”—his present nearness to the levers of power still reads as an anomaly to me and many others you would think would be turning cartwheels of joy. What could move this country to this strange precipice we stand at today?
Say hello to the forty-third President of The United States, George W. Bush.
Should Barack Obama pull this thing off, down the road, the most diamond-hard of hard-core American racists will burn effigies of Dubya's figure, as they will blame him, with some truth behind it—for the country's electing its first Black president. Bush has so trashed the country—its reputation, its infrastructure, its economy, the military, the right to privacy, the Justice Department—just about every element of any piece of government that his “King Midas In Reverse” hand has touched, that he has moved America to the point where for many more than ever before, race will not matter as much in their choice of president, and said people are seriously willing to consider the polar opposite image of the executive branch awfulness they've endured for eight years.
Commander In Chief can't speak? Let's get one who can, huh?
Commander In Chief is an absolute idiot? Can we get one who's got an above-average intelligence, please?
Commander In Chief has the diplomatic skill of an F-5 hurricane? Howsabout someone who will talk to people and exhaust negotiation before more hasty, destructive considerations?
Commander In Chief is everything people have come to utterly despise in the typical, privileged class of leadership for over two hundred years? Okay, fuck it. we will at this point actually consider someone for the job who does not even look remotely like the dude who has fucked this place to Kingdom-Goddamn-Come.
And yes...even if it means said person is a Black dude who can trace his bloodline all the way back to the Motherland in so few steps, Alex Haley's grave is probably trembling from inner centrifugal forces as we speak.
The Bushian legacy may be akin to the fabled volcanic one of the Hawaii of Barack Obama's youth. The destructive power of a earth-shattering volcanic eruption rains down boiling lava and a thick ash—burning away and fossilizing the past in so many ways. And from that hell-spawned lava, mineral-rich ash and debris, the soil becomes hyper-fertilized to the point that what grows from it...can often be spectacular.
I watched Obama speak, and I didn't pick up the phone this time—for there were indeed a few calls—and I must admit, I did more soaking in and straight looking than listening. It was history, in real time, and everything I believed up to that point was being challenged by the unfolding reality before me. But then, this passage hit me like a two-by-four to the forehead...
So it was for that band of patriots who declared in a Philadelphia hall the formation of a more perfect union; and for all those who gave on the fields of Gettysburg and Antietam their last full measure of devotion to save that same union.
So it was for the Greatest Generation that conquered fear itself, and liberated a continent from tyranny, and made this country home to untold opportunity and prosperity.
So it was for the workers who stood out on the picket lines; the women who shattered glass ceilings; the children who braved a Selma bridge for freedom's cause.
So it has been for every generation that faced down the greatest challenges and the most improbable odds to leave their children a world that's better, and kinder, and more just.
And so it must be for us.
My wife had rushed into the room early on, along with my stepson, and this time, unlike the last, she did not flinch. She did not cower. She did not hide.
She watched in full, with her hand at her mouth and wettish eyes and shaking her head. The texting-crazy lad at my feet kept silently dropping his head and thrusting a pointed finger at the screen, as if to say, “Yes!”
And me? I sat there, with my Pavlovian trepidation for his security being subsumed by what could only be called awe, as my very soul seemed to be re-arranging itself, like a computer's hard drive after a necessary, diagnostic de-fragmenting. Not to sell anything short, but I'm frankly astounded at where Barack Obama stands right now. And the hell with the complacent “Hey, I'm just glad to be here” mantra. “Here” is actually one hell of an amazing place when you look at it.
I remember the odd, glassy-eyed look on Chris Matthews' face that night, and Olbermann's self-satisfied near-chuckling at Chris' obvious discombobulation. The lovely, post-primary shade “Buchanan Purple” didn't manifest itself that night, as Pat seemed kind of melancholy—as if it were a hot August day in 1974 and he'd stumbled across a sweating, near-empty pitcher of Manhattans on Nixon's grand piano in the White House. Mostly ice, really—and looked down the hall at the Oval Office, sporting light spots where pictures had recently hung. The sight of history packing its bags. And then...the sound of helicopter blades “whup-whup-whupping” to take-off speed outside. The “Boss”...was gone baby, gone.
Pat looked on Tuesday night like he realized in a bigger way, that “The “Boss” was gone baby, gone.”
I didn't watch much more TV. I made myself a drink. A Pimms and Seven, and sloshed it about the glass and ice to chill it as I padded downstairs to the front steps. I sipped it slow, and looked up every now and then at the stars and frankly wondered to myself, “How?”
And though I knew “how”, as I'm decent with math and strategy, I still had to ask, in the face of where I live and what history has taught me.
I could hear my phone ringing upstairs. My wife called down. “It's your mother!”
I took the call. She was ecstatic. And she was angry, too. Where was the concession?
“Ma,” I said. “The hell with a concession. Do you realize what happened tonight?”
And she seemed to hyperventilate for a moment as a string of vowels and consonants came out of her mouth tumbling like a mess from “Fibber McGee's Closet”, but at the end of it all, she took a breath and I made out the words “Not in my lifetime”.
“Not in my lifetime” applied to me too. Maybe too many of us, sadly.
But here it was. And a hundred hours later or so, that concession and endorsement would come too. Classy and painful all at once. Bittersweet, yet full of vigor.
In my lifetime.
What else will I see? I have no clue. I see Senator John Sidney McCain before me. The dangerously flawed John Sidney McCain, in fact. And I see him and hear him word-salad-ing, lying, and spouting off like some primeval geyser that has only steam and bubbles and no blast. He mauls a speech like a pit bull in a slaughterhouse. He lamely dodges confrontation with his lies as if it's the year 2000 and there's no Google or YouTube to fact-check his ass before millions of pairs of eyes. I see the tepid support he garners and the “We are fucked” faces of his fellow in-party troglodytes. The ball is right there ready to be kicked for all it's worth. And the “Charlie Brown” in me fairly screams To hope is to render yourself vulnerable.
Well God-dammit...call me vulnerable. Because I'm hoping. There's more...
That Was The Week That Was—Part One:
The End Of The Beginning Is The Beginning Of The End...
Oh thank God it's over.
This past week, that is.
It was a bearish one for me, as I was toiling on a project I'm hoping sends a little coin my way, and it's bringing back the heart-rending memory of the loss of The Big Fella one year ago, and yes...in seeing the “It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World”-ish finale of the Democratic primary season.
Just. Brutal.
The personal work was hard enough to get through—changes on a project started long ago, that new eyes and a new time dictated some serious alterations on. But it was the thinking about Steve that really weighed on me. Loss is difficult for me—in huge and overly childish ways, and this blog is a thing that has helped me grow up a little bit in handling it. But I'm human. Disgustingly, unshakably so—and as I found myself grinding through that project, I couldn't help but think of how things would be if The Big Fella, one of the best writers I've had the pleasure to know, were here now.
Would he have gotten “The Big Gig”? Or would something he'd written during this oh-so-fertile newsy period in the last 365 days caught fire in that way things do, and he have at the very least gotten his just due as a journalist and expert chronicler of the America and world we all live in? I don't know if “survivor's guilt” is the exactly apt framing for these feelings, but thoughts of “What if? and “Why Him” so permeated my thinking that it made it somewhat difficult to do the thing he did such a bang-up job of—which is to write. I could sort of feel him over my shoulder a lot this week—peering in, as if to say “So, one year hence...“How do you feel about this. Are you any better than you were at this than you were last first week of July?”
That's one hell of a question. But I realize it was me asking it of myself just as much as any paranormal apparition's doing so.
Haggling over the answer is a non-starter for me—quite literally, as time is such a Damoclean sword that to linger over the answer too long is to in effect answer it. “No. You ain't. 'Cause a real writer doesn't get put off his game wondering if he's any good. 'Said writer's too busy bustin' his ass trying to do good work in the first place.”
Corporate mantras make for awful life lessons, but that damn Nike tag sums it up well. “Just Do It.”
And I have.
The world however did its best to trundle in like a wild, hungry bear into my pastoral campground of creativity. Particularly the 72 hours spanning from Saturday evening to well into the inky pre-dawn of Wednesday.
It was “The Final Comedown.” “The Brawl For It All”. “The Supa-Dupa Thrilla Between Chocolate and Vanilla”. The Clinton / Obama Reality Show's thrill-packed season finalé as it were.
I caught a good chunk of the big DNC Rules and Bylaws Committee meeting that Saturday, and realized again how important tone is in putting across a message. From the impassioned (maybe too impassioned) advocacy of Florida's Bob Wexler on Obama's behalf, to the unfortunate, smarmy lawyer-joke come-to-life of Cinton backer Harold Ickes. Facts matter, yes—but by God, presentation is nothing to sneeze at, and Ickes for all his lawyerly acumen managed to almost single-handedly torpedo public opinion for his cause, thanks to his almost hissing, contemptuous delivery. I was outright flummoxed that someone wasn't put up there who was a bit more sympathetic and able to connect with folks—in the room and in the homes of TV viewers. And when that impromptu uprising took place at the end of Ickes' huffy jeremiad, I had to pay attention. Taking the facts of what happened with Florida and Michigan into account, along with precedent and the byzantine wonkery that is state election rules. I found the meeting's outcome at the very least Solomonic, and at best, fairly well-reasoned.
But it was that group of noisy protesters (who a friend in local politics would later derisively dub “The Boneva Brigade”) who kind of stole the show, and one in particular—New York's own Ms. Harriet Christian, who would steal folks' breath away with one extended, YouTube-a-licious, verbal earth-scorching that peeled away a mask and revealed something ugly but known, and unhealthy but undeniable in 21st century America. Namely, the herpes-like nature of much of modern-day American racism. It never really goes away, but the outbreaks can be ugly to look at. If you haven't seen the clip, here's Harriet—with nary an amiable Ozzie in sight to put a smile on things.
I was out at a Starbucks working on my project when I checked on the internet—specifically FireDogLake—where I stumbled upon Ms. Christian's optimism-stomping rant. She managed to make Harold Ickes look like Captain-Fucking-Kangaroo. I watched her venomous tirade several times, wincing at her spitting of the words, “An inadequate Black man.”—words unprompted by any racial foreshadowing whatsoever by her questioner. She went there all by herself. In fact, it's clear that she was already “there” from jump, but she simply wanted to let the world know “where she was from” opinion-wise. I had my headphones unplugged for a couple of the listens when a woman next to me asked if what I was watching was coverage of the RBC meeting and I said “Yes.”
She asked me if the woman I was watching—the batshit Ms. Christian— was a delegate or something, and whether she had heard her say “what she thought she'd heard” on the YouTube clip. “No. She's not a delegate, she's a supporter.” I answered, and I sadly also said “Yeah. She said what you thought she said.”
The woman asked if she could see it again, so I obliged her.
Before I knew it, there were three other people looking on over us, and when Christian hit that sour, end of “The Muppet Show” talking point note—one woman looking on said, “Oh yeah. Thanks for that one, honey. Way to represent New York. Fucking idiot.” The original woman asked “Is she drunk?”. The guy to my right said, “That's no excuse. Alcohol don't make you do things you wouldn't do. It just removes your inhibitions. That's the real her right there.” The other young woman looking on simply said. “Wow.” and shook her head in disgust. There were the obligatory requests to see it again and I acquiesced, as the group seemed incredulous, and fortunately, the WiFi signal happened to be a free one that bleeds into the Starbucks bubble, so it was no skin off my nose. The clip was just starting to go viral when we were watching it, but the young man near me simply noted, “People in NY are gonna remember her name, and that face and voice. I'd be real careful once I got back home if I was her.”
“If she gets someone at the DMV (Department of Motor Vehicles) who remembers her, that'd be interesting.” I said, noting without having to elaborate the preponderance of African American clerks who handle your business there.
“Hope she can cook, 'cause eating out's gonna be an adventure for awhile.”, he chuckled. “You never know...”
“Then there's the mail, maybe her super, all kinds of people she may depend on who ain't gonna take kindly to that clip either.” I said.
“Ohhhhhh, maaaaannnnnn. Awk-warrrrrrrd!”, he barked in a perfect Fred Armisen voice.
Such is the potential price of stupid when you live and fuck up in the world's biggest little town.
On to Monday, and my work was interrupted several times by my buddy from uptown who works with people in Rep. Charlie Rangel's office.
“Charlie wants this shit over. He's catching hell from his people.”
“We're in limbo here. Nobody in town can endorse Obama yet. It'd make the Clinton people crazy. But the pressure! Brooklyn's ready to say 'Fuck it' and go.”
“You wanna come to the thing? I can get you in. The food's supposed to be off the hook!”
No thanks. Work to do, man.
Tuesday rolls in like a tidal wave on crack as the day is unavoidably full of minute-to-minute reports of early exit polling and then, a report about a concession from Senator Clinton that is quickly rescinded. But too late—it's a media wildfire, and my buddy calls me up with some news, saying that Rangel's really pissed, because “it has to end tonight, and he's getting signals that they're gonna drag this shit out.” I get a follow-up call from homeboy and he hips me that “It's on. The super-delegates are gonna be released today 'steady'.. Five an hour to put Obama over the top and squash this 'fucking Bataan death march' shit”.
Of course, I couldn't get Blogger to do a Goddamned thing to post on my news , so I put this up at Democratic Underground:
(Click to enlarge)
And so it went that afternoon. Every 25 minutes a call from buddy boy counting 'em off—through the twenties and then the teens.. The last count-call he was at nine needed to lock things up.
“This shit is done but for the shoutin'.”
I toiled on, half-listening to the news when my pal calls again saying it's gonna be “radio silence” for a while as the end event for Sen. Clinton was going to be held in the subbity-sub-basement at the new Baruch College complex off Lexington Avenue near Little India—the pocket nabe off Kips Bay in Manhattan where all the Indian restaurants are concentrated, “This is how they want it.” I ask if I can still get in to see—just out of curiousity.
He laughed so hard into the phone he almost hurt my ear.
“Man, I don't know what the fuck I was thinking. My ass can barely get in, and I've got reason to be there. Lock-down mode, br'uh. They ain't playing.”
So, I watched from home while working on my project, and saw instead of Senator Clinton's event...what simply had to be one of the worst political speeches ever delivered—by a person who didn't have an axe imbedded in their skull or wasn't Leon Spinks after nineteen novocaine needles jabbed in his jaw.
Good God. Who told John McCain it would be a good idea to grandstand on the Dem candidates final big day with a speech that reeked of John Candy's batshitteldy amiable Mayor Tommy Shanks from SCTV? His people know he doesn't have the goods—“the skillz, son!”—to pull this off on a no-pressure day, so how many brain-eating, mad-cow burgers were consumed by his handlers to make them think this ode to oratorical oafishness seemed like a good idea? Normally, I can sort of half-listen / half-work when speeches are on, but this one? This disaster required my full attention. I couldn't look away. Calling it a train wreck is an understatement.
It was a twenty-five car derailment of a special shipment of cutlery spilled everywhere—just before the locomotive plowed a gaping hole through the security fence of a Home For the Criminally Insane. A multi-stage tragedy.
They posed him in front of a green background, leaving him looking like a dollop of runny cole slaw on a bed of wilted lettuce. And the speech itself was a hodgepodge of monotonous line-readings that would have gotten him cut from the community ensemble from “Waiting For Guffman”. It doesn't help that Stevie-fucking-Wonder reads a teleprompter better, and McCain seemed as if he were told to not go into “Angry Old Man Yells At Cloud” mode, and then, fearing he wouldn't listen, his handlers dosed his Postum or something. He came off almost drugged, and he exhibited an annoying little chuckle that scanned like he was hallucinogenically seeing everyone in the crowd as characters from a vintage “Funny Face” drink mix ad.
It was that damned bad.
So bad, even FOX News had to smack it down. I'd love to tell you what he said, but that would be like describing what a hairy, 450-pound streaker said while screaming and running across the stage during a performance of Othello. You just ran your sloppy ass across a stage, man. Fuck what you had to say!
Olbermann and crew on MSNBC mercifully cut away mid-turd pinch by McCain to go live to the Baruch College bunker where Senator Clinton was addressing her supporters.
And yes, I said “addressing” her supporters because I had NO reason to believe that she would be capitulating in any way that night. And she most certainly did not disappoint. From the moment Terry McAuliffe (“McAwfuliffe”) hit the stage looking higher than a NASA satellite, crowing “The next President of the United States” as Ms. Clinton's intro, I knew: “If It's Tuesday, And Terry's Talking, It Must Be Bullshit.” There would be no acknowledgment of what a large number of the remaining 299,997,000 Americans not in Baruch College's bowels already knew by that point. The shit was done. The 2118 delegate number was easily eclipsed and would steadily mount even before the reports on the Montana totals came in. But there in that warm, enveloping cocoon of irreality, the Senator could bait, switch, tease and cajole for one last grand time with people who would NOT question her whatsoever. What in the last crazy final weeks of this campaign would lead one to think this was going to end tidily?
Please.
It was a rousing speech. meant to fire up her base and little else, in spite of the final, ugly math she surely knew as she strode onto the dais. The “supers” had in effect called her into the coach's office and said “Oh, and bring your playbook”. The dreaded “Turk” had spoken. But she was going home to the folks after being cut from the team and blithely telling them that she'd not only made the final roster, but thrown for five nifty TDs in the practice scrimmage that day. Ouch.
Now, let's slow it down here for a moment folks. Yes, a lot of that braggadocious roaring last Tuesday was indeed hubris-driven. The old inevitability thang is hard to shake still, some 18 months later, even when you've lost and the porters are sweeping peanuts and mustard packets down the stadium steps. The Clinton effort was deemed from the start as a dominant force “on paper”—a “Fantasy” team that could not lose based on the numbers. And it had been something akin to that for the years before this campaign when it was clear to power brokers, interested parties and folks looking to get a leg up that she was going to run. Am awful lot of those people / organizations did a lot of nice things for the Clintons and were probably assured access at the least, and specific deeds at the most when they re-ascended. A lot was invested in this campaign ending with her at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by people you don't just say, “Eh, we tried.” to. Imagine a casino where a person supposedly has a major “in” at a table. Said person is backed by folks who want to capitalize on that “in”, so they float that person a lot of capital up front, assuming the investment's a solid lock with this “in”. Throw the player a hundred now 'cause you know they're bringin' back a thousand, right?
Except, the “in” doesn't pan out. Some mook from outta nowhere sits down at the table and cleans up like a 30-gallon drum of Tide™, Roll, BOOM! Roll, BOOM! Roll, BOOM! He cleans up for what seems like an eternity, racking up a fat stack of chips. You eventually win again. but he's so depleted your stack from your losses, you can never really catch up. He's got the “in” now, and you're in a position where the people who backed you for what looked like a sure thing won't be pleased if you fold.
So...off comes the pinky ring onto the table. “Clonk!” The watch. The gold money clip and the keys to the car. Fuck how you get home or if you even do get home at this point. You are betting it all on the big, unlikely Goddamned miracle that if it came in a movie, you'd throw your popcorn at the screen.
“Snake-eyes”...all the way down the line.
You're busted. No car, No watch. No ring. And a chorus line of bad checks bouncing like caffeinated Can-Can girls.
There's still those people behind you. The ones who kept you flush and hooked you up in return for capitalizing on that “in”.
What do you tell them? You make like you can still win. And that's what that speech last Tuesday night was about—as well as keeping the rank-and-file support base's spirits up in the face of reality's swift kick to the ol' nads. I understood it. The tone was not what people looking for an ending to all the rancor and getting on with the business of fucking up the GOP standard-bearer, Professor Irwin Corey's act were looking for (Count me in that heckling number), but I had a feeling based on my discussions with my buddy that this was all gonna be settled in short order. Especially when he called me after leaving “The Bunker” and cryptically, but perfectly summed up what his connected pals were calling the oddly haughty display.
“Man, a dude next to me shook his head and said 'Oh God. 'It's 'Top of the world, ma!'”
“Top of the world, ma!” As in Jimmy Cagney's wild-eyed, literal flame-out at the end of the classic film “White Heat”. Trapped, Hopelessly outgunned. Brutally outmanned. Even if you've seen it a thousand times, the visuals still speak volumes.
It wasn't pretty. But again, I understood it.
There was no time to dwell on it though, even with the bug-eyed pans of the speech's tone and content by the talking head-class...
...Cause the surreal shit was coming hard on its heels. Barack Obama was now, now somehow officially The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.
Um...can I keep it real with you? Just reading those words on a page or computer screen—“The Presumptive Democratic Nominee for President.”—and considering who he is...well, the sentence still looks like something written in an indecipherable alien language to me.
I...just wanted to get that out there.
(End of Part One—Continued in Part Two)
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
“How is that not Deception?”
Douglas Feith on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show
Part 1 - The Daily Show - May 12
Douglas Feith on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show
Part 2 - The Daily Show - May 12
Jon Stewart interviews Douglas Feith
Feith, Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, was one of the principle architects of the Iraq War.
No going for the funny, Jon goes for the point: didn't Feith and the Bush administration lie to us, deceive us, intentionally sell us war, by underplaying risk?
Feith says no, that while mistakes were made, and with the benefit of hindsight they would have done things differently, the mistakes were honest mistakes.
Jon (politely) calls bullshit.
No one is fucking around.
The argument between the two is laid out cleanly and fairly. You likely will not agree with Feith, however he presents his position well.
Jon taking Feith's argument apart is a joy to behold. Highly recommended.
Sunday, April 13, 2008
What Condition Our Condition Is In
They call Economics "the dismal science". If you've ever taken a basic econ class, you'll know why. The assumptions upon which economics are built are known to be faulty (people do not act "rationally" as defined by economists), the conclusions are often depressing, many of the important questions are left unasked, and the ability of economists to agree on how the world works (or an economy works) is extremely limited. These problems notwithstanding, we spend an appalling amount of time thinking about the economy, worrying about the economy, trying to effect the economy, trying to predict the economy, and generally obsessed with the economy.
So let's take a look at a few current "conditions"
Pricing the War
Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes suggest that the Iraq War is going to cost $3 trillion or even more. You can see the current direct costs of the war for the US, states, towns, or congressional districts at the National Priorities Project.
The Economist weighs in, largely with quotes from others, so I won't quote it. But check out this blog entry by Robert Reich.
- Amount requested by the Bush Administration for 2008 War Funding: $196,400,000,000 (that's $196.4 billion)
- Number of households in the US: 126,316,181 (that's 126 million)
- Annual Cost per Household: $196,400,000,000 / 126,316,181 = $1554.83
- Monthly Cost per Household: $1554.83 / 12 = $129.57
That $1550 annual cost is the whole War on Terror, not just the Iraq War. What could you do with $1550 in your household? Of course, it's not evenly distributed. People who pay more taxes bear more of the direct cost.
But we all bear the secondary costs, like current and future interest expense for the money we're borrowing to pursue the war. We also all bear the opportunity cost. According to the National Priorities Project site, taxpayers in the state of Washington (my nearest US neighbor) will spend $1.9 billion for Iraq War funding in FY 2008. That money could have bought:
- health care for 300,000 people
- health care for 767,000 children
- Head Start for 214,000 children
- 35,000 public safety officers
- 30,000 music & art teachers
- 31,000 elementary school teachers
- 317,000 scholarships to university
- 179 elementary schools
- 25,000 port inspectors for shipping containers
- 10,000 affordable housing units
In FY 2009, projected spending for the taxpayers of Washington state will be $3.2 billion (168% of the FY 2008 spending.
According to Zachary Coile of the Chronicle:
In historical perspective, the Iraq conflict is already one of the most expensive conflicts in U.S. history.
The price tag in Iraq now is more than double the cost of the Korean War and a third more expensive than the Vietnam War, which lasted 12 years. Stiglitz and Bilmes calculate that it will be at least 10 times as costly as the 1991 Gulf War and twice the cost of World War I.
Only World War II was more expensive. That four-year war - in which 16 million U.S. troops were deployed on two fronts, fighting against Germany and Japan - cost about $5 trillion in inflation-adjusted dollars.
In early 2003, White House Office of Management and Budget Director Mitch Daniels said a war with Iraq could cost $50 billion to $60 billion. Even Congressional Democrats suggested it would cost only $93 billion (although they specifically excluded peacekeeping costs).
The Economist article linked above is quick to note that "suggestions that the war is responsible for current economic malaise are misguided--to the contrary, given under-utilised capacity, the war is probably helping to keep the economy moving". Their contention is that we're not using our full production capacity because of current problems with the dollar and demand and the credit crunch and so keeping the machines operating by having a war is reducing our economic problems. IF that is correct, and I doubt it is, surely we could do at least as well by spending that money here in the US, perhaps fixing some of the crumbling infrastructure in which Republicans don't believe we should invest money.
Home Foreclosures
California, Nevada, Colorado, and Florida are experiencing foreclosure rates of more than 1 in 150. If you click through to the zoomable map, you can examine your region, or downtown Tampa, or wherever. Some neighborhoods are getting very hard hit. Absolutely great map.
During the peak of the Great Depression (1932-33), foreclosure rates reached roughly 10% (pdf). That's 10% of all mortgages, not 10% of all houses. Our current rate is about 1% of all households. About 1.3 million homes entered foreclosure in 2007, with 1 to 2 million households predicted to face foreclosure in the next 18 months or so. The US home-loan market was about $3 trillion in 2006. About 1 million new single family homes were sold in 2006. The average house sold in 2006 cost $305,000. If all houses were fully financed (not likely), $3 trillion / $300,000 = 10,000,000 houses sold in 2006. If 1.3 million homes entered foreclosure in 2007, that's equal to 13% of the houses sold in 2006. If half of all home purchase costs were financed, then $3 trillion / $150,000 = 20,000,000 houses sold in 2006 and 1.3 million foreclosures represents about 6.5% of the houses sold in 2006. Without better data I can't get more precise, but we appear to be below the 10% foreclosure rates of the Great Depression, but within an order of magnitude and possibly in the vicinity of half of those rates. Too close for my comfort, certainly.
Real Wages
Real wages are down for this generation of adult Americans. Taking men in their 30s as a generational proxy, real wages are 12% less than in 1974. According to the EMP American Dream Report, released in May 2007 (WSJ article quoted here, gated version here):
Beginning with a comparison of men ages 30-39 in 1994 with their fathers' generation, men ages 30-39 in 1964, we see a small, but fairly insignificant, amount of intergenerational progress...Adjusting for inflation, median income increased by less than $2000 between 1964 and 1994, from about $31,000 to under $33,000 -- a 5 percent increase (0.2 percent per year) during this thirty-year period.
The story changes for a younger cohort. Those in their thirties in 2004 had a median income of about $35,000 a year. Men in their fathers’ cohort, those who are now in their sixties, had a median income of about $40,000 when they were the same age in 1974. Indeed, there has been no progress at all for the youngest generation. As a group, they have on average 12 percent less income than their fathers’ generation at the same age.
Bottom line, our condition ain't everything it should be. It's pretty clear that the experiment in relatively unbridled capitalism over the last 30 years or so has failed many Americans. It's time for change.
Tuesday, April 8, 2008
Reflections On “4/4 Time”
Image Is NOT Everything.
“Dream”-sick is what a lot of folks get around this time of year.
And maybe a little bit “Promised Land”-paralyzed.
I am effectively “How-Long”-ed out, and my brain fairly aches from desperate, clutchy tales of “I Marched With Him...” and “ I Met Him When...”.
This is the time when lazy news directors scuffle for an angle and invariably blow the dust and spider webbing off that old theme tucked in its usual spot—fourth row, fourth book—and bid their newsreaders and...“personalities” to dimly ask if a “dream has been realized” or what one man would think of today had institutionalized American racism not cut him down like some southern tree on which nooses had hung not terribly long before.
It is “4/4 Time”. Ironically enough, the time signature for “marching” music, but also signifying a certain time of year—4/4 as in April 4th. The date and month when America badly for the most part—notes the passing...oh, passing sounds so damned pass-ive, let's call it exactly what it was...the violent assassination of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Those in a position to inform and educate on grand levels seem to invariably fail at doing so when it comes to handling the message and legacy of what Martin Luther King was about in deed. For years I thought this was done out of an inability to grasp his message and actions. That was equal parts cop-out and myopia on my part. I guess I didn't want to see and when it was visible—couldn't see. I didn't realize until many years of frustration and denial that the cathode ray and transisitor stitched, wall-hung homilies were fully intentional attempts to sand away the skin-catching rough edges of what Dr. Martin Luther King was all about in the time that he lived. Television station I.D.'s, the brief “packages” the network news runs, and the space-filling PSAs packing the unsold ad time in the early morning and late night gaps. The obligatory shot of King, hand outstretched over a teeming sea of people. Cut to the head-on shot of Dr. King speaking into the mic—with a bevy of white-hatted supporters at his side nodding affirmatively.
“I have a dream!” goes the public service ad.
“I have a dream!” blares the tepid news show “package”.
“I have a dream!” The Sunday paper toss-in reads as it wafts out when you open for the sales circular.
“Dream“-sick is what a lot of folks get around this time of year.
The reduction—and a reduction is exactly what it is—of Martin Luther King to mere kum-ba-ya-singing “dreamer” status is one of the more insidious bits of spin by a thought-sedating media.
Dreamers sleep. Do-ers walk the earth impacting it with every stride and deed. Dreamers don't take knives to the gut from progress-fearing xenophobes bent on stopping a man actively re-weaving a country's social fabric. Dreamers don't get the FBI stalking their every move and setting out to destroy them with scurrilous innuendo and family-wrecking blackmail.
Dreamers...don't take fatal sniper bullets in the neck for leading a growing multitude of Americans in a battle for fairness, equality and justice.
The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King was NOT a dreamer. He was a do-er.
But you'd never know that from the obfuscations and gossamer shrouding his decidedly radical doings have been tangled up in that you saw on your television the last few days. You saw the usual tripe, but this year—the 40th anniversary of his being shot down like some beats to be feared, there was an additional angle injected into the mix. The politics of a presidential election—one steeped in all the ironies one could muster in dealing with this day as the would-be next presidents all spoke publicly on the anniversary and its meaning.
In a rainy, dreary Memphis this past April 4th...
You had a White female Democratic candidate—Senator Hillary Clinton, who grew up a “Goldwater Girl” but would find herself in adulthood fighting for many of the things Dr. King espoused—better education for all, equal access to health care, and many elements of his civil rights program. Her husband a former Commander-in-Chief himself, would be lionized by some (in a hopeful bit of over-projection) as “The First Black President”, and these two people—him first during his two terms, and now her during her run for the job desperately fighting for that Black vote. And when that vote did not come in the proportion hoped for, they would lapse into clumsy over-reaching and destructive, and in the minds of too many to ignore, borderline race-based (as opposed to rac-ist) under-cutting to rectify “the problem”. The Friday Memphis photo op was as necessary as it was sincere and maybe moreso based on the dilemma her campaign finds itself tangled up in. You go where the heartstrings when plucked hard, resonate the loudest.
And you had a conservative Republican candidate, a Vietnam veteran whose stated public policies fly in the face of everything Martin Luther King stood for standing in that rain trying to fix a racism-busted past when it came to things “King”. King's life was forcefully ended just as he came out hard against the war that Sen. John McCain still lionizes and slurs the Vietnamese over. “Gooks” he calls them proudly. That poisonous and still inexplicable war is a badge of honor for McCain as it remains a moral blight for a plurality of Americans in general. And McCain still unblinkingly snuggles up to the racists and dividers who giddily hated Dr. King and all he stood for while professing him to be a bucking “Maverick” who doesn't kow-tow to their bigoted ways. The same “Maverick” who tucked close to the bosom of Ronald Reagan, a man who proudly spent time “McCarthyizing” King with communist epithets. The same “Maverick” who unabashedly voted AGAINST a Martin Luther King holiday.
But in Indiana, the American mid-west's hub of Ku Klux Klan operations we saw perhaps the most viscerally pointed image of all.
A Black man, Barack Obama—who most improbably is the leading Democratic candidate for the presidency, and in many polls the leading candidate to ascend to the office of President of the United States. Forty years to the day of Dr. King's assassination this candidate...who is only now being taken 100% seriously as the person who would be, is being likened to the late Dr. King. A disturbingly unfair comparison that diminishes both men on their merits—cheaply filtering the multi-disciplined and many-triumphed King down to a “great speaker” who drew crowds, and senselessly uplifting Obama to King's impossibly stratospheric level in terms of social actual impact based on the most superficial considerations of those doing the media's short-hand boosterism. But nonetheless, this candidate again—some forty years after Dr. King's assassination for daring to push for equality now finds himself on the verge of a loud, but incremental move towards the America King pushed so hard to get to, and so many of us still hesitate thinking to be possible.
That's right. Still hesitate thinking to be possible. In the two score years since that bloody day, in spite of what progress has come, a deep well of trepidation remains. It's a pavlovian response. Not a proper response. But one burned into the circuit board of our psyches still in a new century thanks to the cause-and-effect training from the previous one. Where final vote be damned, the possibility of something potentially unheard of occurring, the emotion of pride is mixed with equal parts of palpitations.
Obama didn't go to Memphis to speak. Quite honestly, Im glad he didn't. There are those for whom the pilgrimage on that day can be a photo-op and whether it works for them or not, read “4/4 Time” Memphis differently at a gut level than those who live that day while toting a different set of baggage about. Baggage experienced. Baggage handed down like some heirloom you don't want but cannot not accept and you tote it along till you forget it's there dangling off your shoulder. Until you do think of it, that is. You feel its leaden weight and its hard dig into your body and soul. I've unpacked abit of it publicly several times before...
When I was around five years old, Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated. I remember the day. I was home on a half-day from school and I can recall the TV bulletin, then a frantic rush around the house by my mom to a radio, and then a breakneck flipping between different radio and TV stations and the phone then ringing off the hook seemingly every 20 seconds. I remember my mama ashen faced, sometimes sobbing into the phone, other times consoling someone on the end of the line and then sometimes silent, shaking her head with her hand over her mouth, just going “Mmmmmmmmhhhh-Mmmmmmh” into the receiver.
Just then, I heard what sounded like a lunatic shouting in the courtyard.
“F*ck this sh*t!”
“F*ck this sh*t!”
“F*CK THIS SH*T!”
It wasn’t the usual screaming freak from the area—Mr. Douglass, who’d caterwaul over a stray CreamSicle wrapper on his stoop. This was fresh crazy, a new voice just out of the incubator of wild sh*t a’ goin’ down in the world outside.
Mere minutes later, my mom had my siblings and I prepped for an odd, unexpected early evening nap. As she hustled my brothers and sister off to bed, I paused by the hall window of our fifth floor walkup on W. 115th St. in Harlem. I always looked out that window, daydreaming, watching the sun play off the terra-cotta building tops and occasionally pushing a stray baby shoe or box of tissues off the ledge, just to hear the distant “poonch!” as it landed five floors down. Next thing I knew, I was swept up into my mom’s arms, given half a cup of warm milk and then off to the land of nod.
I awoke a couple of hours later, supremely groggy and stumbled to the kitchen where the door was closed and all I could hear was my mom’s slippers “pap, pap, pap” across the linoleum as my father exasperatedly sighed “Baby…please stop pacing.” I walked back to my window perch, to look out on my little stretch of the world and the view was a horror. Plumes of smoke as far as the eye could see from buildings galore, flames licking here and there, Five-O's sirens swirling from every direction, People throwing sh*t off rooftops and howling in pain. The comfortable little spot I liked to look out on the world from was now a twisted crazy thing unrecognizable from mere hours before. What the f*ck had happened?
It's a bottomless satchel for me though. Full of memories and images.
I remember killing time in Memphis one weekend about 10 years ago, goofing 'round at Graceland, making my pilgrimage to the abandoned lot that was wherer Stax Records stood on West McLemore—and then...I went to the National Civil Rights Museum which incorporates the Lorraine Motel where Dr. King was killed. I wandered through the displays, feeling the hair go up on my neck. There was an actual lunch counter from a diner where you saw sit-in folks viciously beaten down the old newsreels.
There was a “Freedom Riders” bus—with it's back end—charred and blown out like an exploding cigar from being bombed by racists in the mid-60's.
And most disturbingly, was a yellowed Ku Klux Klan robe and hat displayed under glass on a wall. I remember getting a tension headache that spread from the base of my neck, and into the base of my skull from my muscles binding up while looking at it. My forearms hurt from clenching my fists. And then, at my left was a little White girl—about 8 or 9 years old, looking up at the evil, patina-ed hate-frock. I wondered who she was with, and then her dad appeared, a sandy-haired fella in a plaid shirt.
And she plaintively asked him, looking up at the robe as he neared her left shoulder “What is that daddy?”
I didn't hear him go “Uh..uh...”,
I could feel it. Almost with him. That question from his daughter linked us invisibly, five feet apart. The air caught in his throat, and I could feel it catch as the answers swirled in his head, formed en masse, rushed to his throat and log-jammed there. From the corner of my eye, I could see him blinking—trying to sift through the pile of answers—none of 'em that wouldn't lead down a path of a day's worth of questions about race that in spite of his good intentions in being there at that museum, he was not ready to answer. I walked away—figuring if I gave him some space and wasn't there as a living check and balance to his answer, he'd find enough gumption to say what had to be said. I ran into him later in the gift shop, His wife had his daughter off to the side, and he actually said to me “That was uncomfortable.”
“I'm sure it was.”, I replied.
“I mean...what do you say to a kid about that?”, he wondered aloud.
“S'gotta be the truth. There's a way to say it to a kid.”
“How?” he almost pleaded.
“That's for you to figure out. It's not just about her. it's about you, too.
He turned and walked away muttering under his breath, “Ah...mygodmygodmygodmygodmygod...” as he trailed off.
There was more to that day. Unexpected and jarring things. Wandering upstairs from the exhibit I came cross a tableau that leadened my feet and sank my heart. Behind a plexiglass barrier was the opened hotel room—#306—that Dr. Martin Luther King stayed in on 4/4/68. The very room behind that infamous balcony everybody pointed from as a mortally wounded King lay sprawled at their feet. There was a neat bed, and an old TV Guide nearby with some strewn papers here and there. I remember seeing a set of cufflinks and a pack of cigarettes. A plate some food had been eaten from and a small container of milk or juice. And of course, that window looking outward, onto the balcony towards for him, that day...infinity.
I found myself later in the motel's parking lot downstairs where vintage cars from '68 sat parked in a time-locked open-air diorama of sorts. A local woman pointed for me—pointing is something one seems to do on impulse when at the Lorraine—to a short brick wall in the distance, a scattering of small trees and a boarded up building where Ray supposedly shot King from. Eyes darting from sniper's nest to target area. Imagining the crack of the Remington 30.06 caliber rifle. The distance a short one, a couple of hundred feet perhaps. And blinking back the image of the fallen King and the pointing co-horts. That room, in those odd 60's pastels—seafoam and beiges. The last place he willingly lay.
It would be days before my mood would brighten after being there.
And it pained me on this past Friday seeing how people took advantage of that day to paint it s something entirely other than what it was. You would think from the gauzy language and safe visuals and sanitized memories conjured that King had simply laid down that day and fell asleep, expiring quietly as he rested.
This was violence. Terrorism in fact. And no matter how many of those gauzy words, safe visuals and sanitized memories foisted upon us, the truth of the matter is that King's assassination was not the collective weepfest the historical re-imaginers would have you conveniently believe. This nation was so racially polarized that this man who never raised a hand to anyone during his protests saw not a few million twisted Americans accept his murder with a smile on their faces and if not a song in their hearts, barely a care in the world—as described via Keith Olbermann on Countdown on March 18th:
“My grandfather, a fire fighter. Put himself in danger to save people, didn't care who they were. His parents were immigrants to this country and they came to New York in the late 1800's theyre so naive they told him 'Don't touch a Black person, the color will come off on your hands'. And one night I was nine years old my parents were out to dinner he was babysitting me, television's on and you know the middle of Hawaii 50 or Ironside or whatever the show was, on comes the news bulletion from Memphis: Martin Luther King Assassinated. And my grandfather who was a good man says 'Why did they interrupt my show to tell me about some n-word getting shot'.”
It was a time when King was still referred to publicly as “Martin Luther Coon” by elected officials.
When Ronald Reagan when asked about the factors leading up to King's death said: (It's a) “great tragedy that began when we began compromising with law and order, and people started choosing which laws they’d break.”
He was no mere dewy-eyed “dreamer” of a better day. He was an increasingly hard-nosed opponent of injustice in America—a trench-fighter for equality who faced some of the most vicious opposition to his quest for equality for all not in the deep south that is so easy to pillory, but in the northern, supposedly civilized environs of Illinois—Cicero, Illinois to be specific, where he found himself having to step back southward to regroup in the face of caustic, blatant bigotry. Bullets fired overhead as he marched through catcall and epithet-filled streets. But again...it was more than his stance against racism that began to set the die against his living for long. It was his holistic position against injustice—nationally and internationally that helped hasten his end.
It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about “the slain civil rights leader.”
The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years —his last years—are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.
What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).
An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.
Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.
Why?
It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.
In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.
But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without “human rights”—including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.
Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for “radical changes in the structure of our society” to redistribute wealth and power.
“True compassion,” King declared, “is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his “Beyond Vietnam” speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 –– a year to the day before he was murdered —King called the United States “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”
From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” King questioned “our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America,” and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions “of the shirtless and barefoot people” in the Third World, instead of supporting them.
In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about “capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries.”
You haven't heard the “Beyond Vietnam” speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 - and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it “demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi.” The Washington Post patronized that “King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.”
That is the “4/4 Time” Dr. King lived in. On April 4th of 1967 he delivered that infamous “Beyond Vietnam” speech. One year later to the day—April 4th 1968 is when he fell before a sniper's bullet.
And on the day that The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. died, he spent some of it working on a sermon to be delivered the following Sunday. I didn't see it amongst the effects in Room 306, but that sermon was not the treacly stuff we are led to believe King spoke of exclusively.
That sermon—little discussed by those who would spin a wan hagiography of what this country was about at that time—was brusquely titled, “Why America May Go to Hell.”
“Why America May Go to Hell.” Take that for what it's worth, folks.
That rough sentiment was on the man's mind the day a boiling over of racism wrested him from this mortal coil. Yes, people loved him.
And perhaps, just as many people hated him.
Not just then, but for the many years afterward.
Reagan bought North Carolina Sen. Jesse Helms' loud and oft-shouted view that King was not just a noisy racial agitator, but had strong Communist leanings. Reagan barely finished signing the bill when he was asked whether he thought there was any merit to Helms' Communist charge against King. The Gipper couldn't resist the sly aside, “We'll know in about thirty-five years.” Reagan referred to the voluminous FBI surveillance tapes on King that a court had ordered sealed until 2027.
And then there's the dangerously flawed Senator John Sidney McCain, who stood there stiffly last Friday amidst a sea of umbrellas and tried to simultaneously pander to those with a conscience about America's racial insensitivity and lie away his refusal to support a national holiday for Dr. King. as he said, “long ago”.
“We can be slow as well to give greatness its due, a mistake I made myself long ago when I voted against a federal holiday in memory of Dr. King,” McCain said. “I was wrong and eventually realized that, in time to give full support for a state holiday in Arizona. We can all be a little late sometimes in doing the right thing, and Dr. King understood this about his fellow Americans. But he knew as well that in the long term, confidence in the reasonability and good heart of America is always well placed.“
McCain has said that he knew little of King and the civil rights struggle because he was a prisoner of war in Hanoi and received only sporadic news during his five and a half years’ confinement. But his captors told him and his fellow POW’s when King was assassinated.
----------------------------------
McCain voted against the creation of a holiday honoring King in 1983, a vote which was supported by a large number of Republicans. McCain claimed this week that he was largely unaware on the importance of King's work at the time, due to his Vietnam-era service overseas. Speaking on Thursday to reporters, he explained that his conversion occurred around 1990:
“I voted in my...first year in Congress against it and then I began to learn and I studied and people talked to me. And I not only supported it but I fought very hard in my home state of Arizona for recognition against a governor who was of my own party."
But McCain's voting record since 1990 doesn't support this explanation. In addition to voting to oppose a state holiday in 1987 (which he later supported) and a federal holiday in 1989, McCain voted in 1994 to cut funding for the commission that promoted King's holiday.
The “I wasn't aware / I was young and uninformed” excuse not only does not wash, but doesn't even wet.
I was five years old in 1968. John McCain...was a 32-year-old man. I would imagine he'd heard quite a bit about Dr. King before his imprisonment while still if not stateside, at least free as a great many American soldiers did. And in the years post his release—a decade in fact—one would think he'd maybe, possibly heard a positive thing or two about the Nobel-Prized man. Especially as McCain was then a federal legislator in Congress. That “neophyte” first year in Congress for McCain was when he was all of forty-six years old.
That vote was as much a youthful indiscretion as was Rep. Henry Hyde's “teen” wanderlust at age 41.
I remember John McCain's opposition to the King holiday quite well, it was mocked by Public Enemy in their song “By The Time I Get To Arizona”. I protested and did my small part in participating in the tourism boycott of the state of Arizona (my then-job required me to travel there—I chose not to).
All of that made the crypto-segregationist Senator's lame posturing this past “4/4 Time” that much tougher to digest...while pretty much being par for the superficial course.
“4/4 Time” is a time for those in trouble to pander. Those who have not, or can not to pretend that they will or can. It is a time for those in the media who have in their historical archives their own dismissals and vicious words against Martin Luther King Jr. to pretend to have been bastions of fairness while bleaching away the vividness of the reverend's opposition to injustice.
It becomes a time for spin and re-casting.
Turn a do-er to a dreamer. Warrior to wimp. Table-upsetter to mere talker.
How should Dr. King have been remembered that day?
Why not for what he actually was? A person who physically put himself in harm's way so that justice would eventually prevail.
As a leader who dared to grow before our very eyes. Learning, changing, and maturing as the world opened itself up to him and showed its ways to him—unprettily in many instances.
As a true multi-issue warrior against the evils of the power structure, in spite of the gross contorting of his struggle into a single-issue one.
As someone who DID things and not just some “Zelig”-esque human backdrop that the disingenuous politically “CGI” themselves into for effect.
Not as a flawless “god” to be seen in the shimmering view of a cheap 3-D roadside souvenir you'd hang on a wall in simple-minded reverence.
But as a human being—with flaws and gifts—who without argument, gave far, far more than he got and in so doing along with others, qualitatively bettered America.
So spare me this vapor-tangible talk of “Dreams” and “Mountain-tops“ and “Promised Lands” as his legacy.
I see a person who went to jail for equality. Who took a knife in the gut for freedom. Who was spied on and plotted against for forcing justice. Who was turned on by the government and media for leading on peace. And eventually killed for moving a country of 250 million people towards all of that change.
Killed, okay? Murdered.
Not for dreaming. But doing. An awful lot more than just marching...in “4/4 Time”. There's more...
Sunday, April 6, 2008
George W. Bush Sewage Plant
You don't even want to know what this is, er, was.
But people in SF want to name the treatment plant after GWB.
We've Been Cleaning Up Bush's Mess for a Long Time.
People in San Francisco Want to Make it Official.
You've heard of Reagan Airport (used to be called National Airport.)
San Francisco wants to honor our 43rd President.
SFistCheck out the diagram.
Looking to honor the forty-third President of the United States of America, George W. Bush, the recently formed Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is looking to change the name of the Oceanside Wastewater Treatment Facility. It seems the group would like to rename the SF Zoo adjacent facility to the "George W Bush Sewage Plant."
Genius.
The local grassroots movement, helmed by "Wayne Pickering," is proposing an ordinance initiative for the November 2008 San Francisco ballot in order to get the poop/pee/vomit plant's title changed. Why? To honor our current leader of the free world with an "appropriate and enduring legacy, for no other president in modern American history has accomplished so much in such a short time.
As you can tell from the diagram (or this more detailed explanation), this plant calls for technical competence.
Ironic, actually, considering it's to honor George W. Bush.
But well, competence is what's needed to clean up messes, piles of steaming crap spread all over the world, not to mention the image of the United States.
Wouldn't it be great if sewage plants, land fills, and failed strip mines everywhere were named in GWB's honor? Or perhaps the GWB oil spill, for a particularly ugly ecological disaster?
Thank you San Francisco. Good work. Good luck in November.
h/t Huffington Post. There's more...