Dr. Frances Piven, who I bother from time to time about old
movement tumult, has written a piece in The Nation entitled
“Obama Needs a Protest Movement”. I couldn’t get the
damn thing out of my mind…. In some ways, it reflected
my own view of things…..but more importantly it organized
my feelings….gave shape to my unexpected sense of loneliness,
even despair…that followed the election. I couldn’t figure out
on that Tuesday evening, with everyone around me rattling and
raving about this incredible turn of events, why I was silent,
confused and even a little depressed.
The only thing I remember saying that night, when it became
clear that Barack Obama was going to be elected, was
“I’m 78 years old!”
I don’t know what the hell I meant, except that I probably wanted
a piece of the applause and wanted to explain that it had been a long,
unbelievable struggle that had consumed most of my life.
If I had really celebrated (maybe even taken a jar) I probably
would have started shouting a bunch of slogans and all sorts
of nonsense….and my friends would have locked me up.
With her faultless prose, Dr. Piven explains her title by making
the parallel with the election of 1932….that both FDR and
Obama came to office at time of “economic catastrophe” and
that both were great orators. I might add some further similarities
of both their predecessors. And she goes on describe the movements
of the 30s; bread riots, rent riots and the crowds of unemployed
that marched through the streets in New York and Chicago
….suggesting that Obama, despite his argument for change “from
the bottom up” will need the boost of widespread dissent to unify
and mobilize the country.
It occurred to me that she may have missed a piece of the puzzle.
Both Dr. Piven and I agree that the background music for this
marvelous turn of American events is very different than it was
76 years ago. I should explain that both of us were hip deep in
the modern civil rights movement….and she and her partner Richard
Cloward went far beyond me…sustaining the struggle and , as Jim
Farmer once said to me, “clearing up the battlefield” with initiatives
on welfare and voting reform.
But I have to go back to that feeling of despair that I felt the night
of Obama’s election. I miss the action something awful….and
it’s possible Frances Piven does as well.
There is no question that America is still, as she says,
“divided by race, by party, by class” But it is just possible
that a new game is afoot. That the arc of our lives, the
continuing protests, have brought us to a place where serious
social and political change can come with the diplomacy
of an elegantly-led democracy. That the new generation
(who I don’t envy) can pour their lives into the work of the
civilians of this world; tolerance, the dying ice, fossilized poverty
and violence.
Have we won? Certainly not.
But it’s been one hell of a trip.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
SUNRISE
I waited exactly a week to talk about it. The truth is at ll PM
on the night of November 4th ….I went limp….like overcooked
linguine… my bones were not connected any more. Too much
had happened in a single minute and I was done, speechless. I
thought I’d cry…Jesse Jackson cried ….but I didn’t. I couldn’t
think of anything to say or do. Actually I had million things to
say but it would have been a great babble, shouting names and
old slogansand somebody would have locked me up as a crazy
person.
That was a week ago…
I called this “sunrise” and it was a sunrise…..like the ones I’d seen
in Maine when I was a little kid and the sun came up over Mount
Washington. When I was little I had this idea that each day was
fresh and beautiful and promising and that nothing that had
happened before the sunrise.
This time a lot had happened.
Charlie was in Brooklyn and said that people were walking in the
middle of the streets….something that happens in New York only
with surprises…catastrophes or celebrations…events terrible and
beautiful.
Come to think of it sunrises aren’t surprises at all….so you’ll have to
make an exception because I’ll be damned if I’ll change the title. George
Orwell could write titles; “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” for example….I
don't remember what it means, but I love to say it. And I love to say
“sunrise” when I think about young Obama as our President.
People were walking in the middle of the street in Brooklyn. Honest
to God.
I’ve got to say the obvious…and you can skip this self-serving
paragraph if you like. It was a long, relentless journey. For me
it was 48 years, a couple of barrels of gin, a lot of slogging against
the wind. All the years at CORE, on the Lower East Side, in public
housing and finally the weeks in Ohio in the projects, registering
people for Obama. And there were tens of thousands of others
….much stronger and braver than me.
I’ve run out of words already……
It’s 1860 and it’s 2008 and a skinny young man from Illinois will
save the republic.
ol val
on the night of November 4th ….I went limp….like overcooked
linguine… my bones were not connected any more. Too much
had happened in a single minute and I was done, speechless. I
thought I’d cry…Jesse Jackson cried ….but I didn’t. I couldn’t
think of anything to say or do. Actually I had million things to
say but it would have been a great babble, shouting names and
old slogansand somebody would have locked me up as a crazy
person.
That was a week ago…
I called this “sunrise” and it was a sunrise…..like the ones I’d seen
in Maine when I was a little kid and the sun came up over Mount
Washington. When I was little I had this idea that each day was
fresh and beautiful and promising and that nothing that had
happened before the sunrise.
This time a lot had happened.
Charlie was in Brooklyn and said that people were walking in the
middle of the streets….something that happens in New York only
with surprises…catastrophes or celebrations…events terrible and
beautiful.
Come to think of it sunrises aren’t surprises at all….so you’ll have to
make an exception because I’ll be damned if I’ll change the title. George
Orwell could write titles; “Keep the Aspidistra Flying” for example….I
don't remember what it means, but I love to say it. And I love to say
“sunrise” when I think about young Obama as our President.
People were walking in the middle of the street in Brooklyn. Honest
to God.
I’ve got to say the obvious…and you can skip this self-serving
paragraph if you like. It was a long, relentless journey. For me
it was 48 years, a couple of barrels of gin, a lot of slogging against
the wind. All the years at CORE, on the Lower East Side, in public
housing and finally the weeks in Ohio in the projects, registering
people for Obama. And there were tens of thousands of others
….much stronger and braver than me.
I’ve run out of words already……
It’s 1860 and it’s 2008 and a skinny young man from Illinois will
save the republic.
ol val
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
BLACK SUFFRAGE
In case you haven’t noticed, and I’m sure you haven’t,
I’ve been parading around the lower left hand corner of
Massachusetts giving talks to anyone who’ll listen about
the history of the black vote. Black Suffrage if you like.
The ancient word “suffrage” suits the topic just fine. It’s
original Middle English meaning was “intercessory prayers”
which links its later definition as the right to vote to my own
view of voting as an earnest asking of the electorate to behave
itself.
So obviously this all has to do with the junior senator from
Illinois who, incredibly, is black and actually has a shot at
becoming the President of the United States. What happened
was that I took a step backwards a few months ago and damn
near died of the wonder of it all….in this looney, erratic and
beautiful country we have found the spine to nominate a man
of color to receive our highest gift.
I’m an old guy, who has fought the good fight (not always
properly) and my head is full of angry faces and voices from
the Sixties when four hundred years of hatred got turned up like
a fresh furrow…when we despaired of winning when riots
and nationalism smeared the windshield….when it seemed that
the nation would never give African Americans a fair share of
the vote……permit them to have a persuading role in this
democracy.
What an amazing and surviving thing this Obama candidacy
is, if you put it in the same river with agonizing slavery, lynch
law, the rise of abolition and the bravery of the civil
rights movement. And add suffrage….the vote just out of the reach
of 30 million Americans whose forbears were brought here
in the holds of the slave ships.
It was time to meet the villains and honor the heroes.
So I took a look and found old Dred Scott stumbling across the border
to be denounced by Justice Taney the Supreme Court in 1857 as a
“being of an inferior order…unfit to associate with the white race.”
I found the relentless WEB DuBois, the Quakers, John Brown,
Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. I found the
Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia --- and the drunken
mob that murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner.
And I remembered Jim Farmer and Martin King and Malcolm X…
CORE, SCLC, SNCC and the Panthers.
So I’m going on the road. If you read this and want me to show
up at your local gymnasium and talk this talk…..I’ll be glad to
come…..my telephone number is 413 258 4010 and my Email
is trochee@aol.com I’m 77 years
old so don’t wait too long.
Val Coleman.
I’ve been parading around the lower left hand corner of
Massachusetts giving talks to anyone who’ll listen about
the history of the black vote. Black Suffrage if you like.
The ancient word “suffrage” suits the topic just fine. It’s
original Middle English meaning was “intercessory prayers”
which links its later definition as the right to vote to my own
view of voting as an earnest asking of the electorate to behave
itself.
So obviously this all has to do with the junior senator from
Illinois who, incredibly, is black and actually has a shot at
becoming the President of the United States. What happened
was that I took a step backwards a few months ago and damn
near died of the wonder of it all….in this looney, erratic and
beautiful country we have found the spine to nominate a man
of color to receive our highest gift.
I’m an old guy, who has fought the good fight (not always
properly) and my head is full of angry faces and voices from
the Sixties when four hundred years of hatred got turned up like
a fresh furrow…when we despaired of winning when riots
and nationalism smeared the windshield….when it seemed that
the nation would never give African Americans a fair share of
the vote……permit them to have a persuading role in this
democracy.
What an amazing and surviving thing this Obama candidacy
is, if you put it in the same river with agonizing slavery, lynch
law, the rise of abolition and the bravery of the civil
rights movement. And add suffrage….the vote just out of the reach
of 30 million Americans whose forbears were brought here
in the holds of the slave ships.
It was time to meet the villains and honor the heroes.
So I took a look and found old Dred Scott stumbling across the border
to be denounced by Justice Taney the Supreme Court in 1857 as a
“being of an inferior order…unfit to associate with the white race.”
I found the relentless WEB DuBois, the Quakers, John Brown,
Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison. I found the
Ku Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelia --- and the drunken
mob that murdered my friend Mickey Schwerner.
And I remembered Jim Farmer and Martin King and Malcolm X…
CORE, SCLC, SNCC and the Panthers.
So I’m going on the road. If you read this and want me to show
up at your local gymnasium and talk this talk…..I’ll be glad to
come…..my telephone number is 413 258 4010 and my Email
is trochee@aol.com I’m 77 years
old so don’t wait too long.
Val Coleman.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
BLOODY VICTORY
A couple of months ago, up here in Sandisfield, Mass.
Bill Cohn, the local historian, asked me to prepare a talk
about black suffrage…..and while I was researching, the
world came to me…..blacks all over America were voting
their hearts out in great clumps…..for a skinny brown dude
from everywhere…Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Kansas
and the south side of Chicago.
Have you ever been on the south side of Chicago?
I was struck dumb.
When it actually happened,; when Wolf Blitzer pointed
at a cinemascope screen that read “OBAMA CLINCHES
DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION” I was struck dumb.
All I could do was cry.
My God it had been (for me) 48 years…and we never
figured to win this big.
The first person I called was Marvin Rich……Marvin
had taken the tough shift…..those years before the
Sixties when he tended the CORE office, challenging
Jim Crow north and south long before the celebrity
of the “civil rights movement”.
Did anybody remember that almost no black Americans
at all voted in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama,
Louisiana, Georgia and all those other Confederate states
as recently as 1960? Did anybody remember the
unfinished dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi
where in June of 1964 the bodies of Mickey
Schwerner, Jim Chaney andAndrew Goodman were found?
They had been ambushed after visiting a Philadelphia
church which had been burned to the ground because
it had conducted a voter registration service.
Chaney, a CORE field secretary, was beaten so badly that
the FBI told me the body looked like it had been found at
the site of an airline crash.
In 1964 there were six murders, thirty-five shootings, thirty
home and business bombings and the bombings of
thirty-five churches…
Most of this has become boiler plate…….printed but unread.
But it all came parading through my head when
Senator Obama got nominated….and my head
was so full of faces and names……
Bob Gore, one of our bravest black brothers, hero
of a half-dozen modern civil wars, died alone of
malaria in The Gambia, Africa last month.
He’d had enough, he wanted to go home.
And Rudy Lombard…..who walked alone at night
in the Louisiana country parishes trying to register
black voters with the Klan on his heels?
And Jim Farmer, my best friend, who has literally
vanished from the history he created …..the first
applicaton of Gandhi’s non-violent technique in
America…..when he and Jimmy Robinson sat down
and got thrown out of a segregated Chicago restaurant
in 1942…..when Martin Luther King was 13 years old.
Entirely forgotten are the hundreds of CORE chapters
in the north flailing away at the deep undramatic stuff
……segregated education, unspeakable housing,
segregated unions.
Herb Callendar brought a cage of Harlem rats to the steps
of city hall in New York.
In Cleveland, a young man lay down in front of an urban
renewal bulldozer and was killed.
I don’t want to disturb the Senator’s precious moment.
I just want to remind us that it has been 389 bloody
terrible years since Ameica’s first slave ship (a Dutch ship called
“The White Lion”) parked at Jamestown……
Bravo Barack! Now we can rest….just for awhile.
Bill Cohn, the local historian, asked me to prepare a talk
about black suffrage…..and while I was researching, the
world came to me…..blacks all over America were voting
their hearts out in great clumps…..for a skinny brown dude
from everywhere…Hawaii, Indonesia, Kenya, Kansas
and the south side of Chicago.
Have you ever been on the south side of Chicago?
I was struck dumb.
When it actually happened,; when Wolf Blitzer pointed
at a cinemascope screen that read “OBAMA CLINCHES
DEMOCRATIC NOMINATION” I was struck dumb.
All I could do was cry.
My God it had been (for me) 48 years…and we never
figured to win this big.
The first person I called was Marvin Rich……Marvin
had taken the tough shift…..those years before the
Sixties when he tended the CORE office, challenging
Jim Crow north and south long before the celebrity
of the “civil rights movement”.
Did anybody remember that almost no black Americans
at all voted in South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama,
Louisiana, Georgia and all those other Confederate states
as recently as 1960? Did anybody remember the
unfinished dam outside of Philadelphia, Mississippi
where in June of 1964 the bodies of Mickey
Schwerner, Jim Chaney andAndrew Goodman were found?
They had been ambushed after visiting a Philadelphia
church which had been burned to the ground because
it had conducted a voter registration service.
Chaney, a CORE field secretary, was beaten so badly that
the FBI told me the body looked like it had been found at
the site of an airline crash.
In 1964 there were six murders, thirty-five shootings, thirty
home and business bombings and the bombings of
thirty-five churches…
Most of this has become boiler plate…….printed but unread.
But it all came parading through my head when
Senator Obama got nominated….and my head
was so full of faces and names……
Bob Gore, one of our bravest black brothers, hero
of a half-dozen modern civil wars, died alone of
malaria in The Gambia, Africa last month.
He’d had enough, he wanted to go home.
And Rudy Lombard…..who walked alone at night
in the Louisiana country parishes trying to register
black voters with the Klan on his heels?
And Jim Farmer, my best friend, who has literally
vanished from the history he created …..the first
applicaton of Gandhi’s non-violent technique in
America…..when he and Jimmy Robinson sat down
and got thrown out of a segregated Chicago restaurant
in 1942…..when Martin Luther King was 13 years old.
Entirely forgotten are the hundreds of CORE chapters
in the north flailing away at the deep undramatic stuff
……segregated education, unspeakable housing,
segregated unions.
Herb Callendar brought a cage of Harlem rats to the steps
of city hall in New York.
In Cleveland, a young man lay down in front of an urban
renewal bulldozer and was killed.
I don’t want to disturb the Senator’s precious moment.
I just want to remind us that it has been 389 bloody
terrible years since Ameica’s first slave ship (a Dutch ship called
“The White Lion”) parked at Jamestown……
Bravo Barack! Now we can rest….just for awhile.
Wednesday, May 7, 2008
TERRE HAUTE REVISITED
Well, now that we almost won Indiana….and clobbered the
the Clintons in North Carolina….I can tell you the story of my
trip to Terre Haute Indiana last week to work for
Barack Obama. Terre Haute is about sixty miles from my
home town Charleston, Illinois which I haven’t visited in
forty years…and the sounds and the smells of highways (we
called them “the slab”), the flat cornfields, all the churches
(the horizon, as you approach town looks like a cardiogram)
and the nosey middlewestern accent (just a touch of ‘y’all’)
came back in a hurry. It was exciting…..the little “Obama for
America” storefront bursting with volunteers of all sizes and
shapes and colors, buoyed up by the idea of a wonderful
candidate who showed up from the streets of Chicago, the
Serengeti of Africa and the plains of Kansas. Wow.
What happened was this. When I got there on the Friday
night before the primary, they put me to work canvassing in
a fairly fancy suburb…one of those “developments” with a
wandering street strung with ugly houses neatly placed every
twenty yards or so. I was instantly in an argument with a
guy who wanted to discuss Jeremiah Wright’s “world view”
and a sweetheart of an elderly lady who rubbed her hands
with delight and said “That Obama…. he’s one hell of a guy!”
The campaign is very well organized, I was given a sheaf of
papers with a list of names and addresses and a check-off
list; “Supporter”, “Non supporter”, “Undecided”
and “Not Home”. It started to rain and my papers got wet so
I jumped back in my rented car and I’ve got to admit I was
pretty proud of myself…suddenly out there in Indiana, 77
years old working the streets…and I wasn’t selling
vacuum cleaners.
When I got back to the office to turn in my papers,
everybody was so busy…making phone calls, assembling
canvassing kits, making buttons… that my little bout of
self-congratulation seemed silly…the whole Goddam
world had joined our army.
Saturday was even better. I was paired with a guy from
Albany, New York named Steve Quist (like me, he had
grown up in the neighborhood) and we worked what folks
called the “inner city” with its shabby houses and broken
doorframes. I met the occasional bad guy ---- one old
white dude said Barack “looked like a monkey”, and
another softly said “nigger lover” under his breath.
But most everybody else was thoughtful and forthcoming…
I worked out this corny opening…. “Hi, I’m Val Coleman with
the Obama campaign….I’ve come from Massachusetts
this morning to ask you if you plan to vote for him on
Tuesday.” Then sometimes I would stagger a little and ask
for a glass a of water. Well, what the hell…..
The stairs! Even though Terre Haute is mostly flat, most
of the front entrances are up a small flight of stairs and I was
grateful for the old broken wicker chair on the porch. I was
reminded of the opening line of Elaine Stritch’s one woman show,
“Like the prostitute says, ‘it’s not the work…it’s the stairs!’”
There were a lot of low-rise apartment houses with no elevators
that nearly did me in. One time, I climbed four flights, knocked
on the door and sank into a wicker couch. A nice looking woman
came out and looked at me and said, “I’m on my way to work…I’m
a nurse, and you don’t look too good.” Five minutes later she
assured me on her honor that she would vote for Obama.
Now Sunday was even wilder. We weren’t allowed to canvass on
Sunday morning because most folks are in church. So I asked
Mike, one of our leaders, what I should do. He said, “put on your
Obama button and go to church!” Me? Church? The old apostate?
I went.
Now this was a bigger deal than I figured. I walked into this
Catholic Church (almost a cathedral with 4 or 500 folks in the
pews) and I felt very peculiar. It had been 60 years. The
whole thing came back and landed somewhere in my neck, just
below the jaw. The altar….the stations of the cross….the stained
glass…the vestments. But it was also different…John XXIII had
changed a lot of things in my interim. People were singing!
Singing like Protestants! And everyone prayed in chorus. There
was no Latin. But the strangest moment came when everybody
took communion….including me! The priest looked at my Obama
button and grimaced….but gave me the wafer and I didn’t let it
touch my teeth when it melted in my mouth….like I’d been taught
a thousand years ago.
I went back to the office and made buttons on a button machine.
Then back to the streets, this time with a an old guy from Tennessee
named Jesse McClain. I spent the rest of the day and night knocking
on doors meeting strange and wonderful people. There was this
retired dancer from Indiana State University….82 years old and in
terrific shape. She was crazy for Obama and wanted to talk all night….
Then there was the landlord who kept yelling "Yea! McCain!" He told
me to get lost….I had a fit, lost it, and yelled at him, “Who the hell do
you think you are?"
A couple of fraternities were on my list…nice guys who I’m sure voted
for Barack….I even ran into a couple of Hillary folks…..clenched-teeth
middle-aged women who were just generally furious.
I went home on Monday…Maggie met me at the Hartford
airport. I was tired and happy.
Maggie asked me to summarize it. It was minestrone…..it
was everything at once. Bad guys, good guys, old and young….
it was the determined Obama workers, it was bad food and a
motel room that smelled like disinfectant. But it was where
I come from…with a touch of joy added because this guy just
might fix up the world.
.
the Clintons in North Carolina….I can tell you the story of my
trip to Terre Haute Indiana last week to work for
Barack Obama. Terre Haute is about sixty miles from my
home town Charleston, Illinois which I haven’t visited in
forty years…and the sounds and the smells of highways (we
called them “the slab”), the flat cornfields, all the churches
(the horizon, as you approach town looks like a cardiogram)
and the nosey middlewestern accent (just a touch of ‘y’all’)
came back in a hurry. It was exciting…..the little “Obama for
America” storefront bursting with volunteers of all sizes and
shapes and colors, buoyed up by the idea of a wonderful
candidate who showed up from the streets of Chicago, the
Serengeti of Africa and the plains of Kansas. Wow.
What happened was this. When I got there on the Friday
night before the primary, they put me to work canvassing in
a fairly fancy suburb…one of those “developments” with a
wandering street strung with ugly houses neatly placed every
twenty yards or so. I was instantly in an argument with a
guy who wanted to discuss Jeremiah Wright’s “world view”
and a sweetheart of an elderly lady who rubbed her hands
with delight and said “That Obama…. he’s one hell of a guy!”
The campaign is very well organized, I was given a sheaf of
papers with a list of names and addresses and a check-off
list; “Supporter”, “Non supporter”, “Undecided”
and “Not Home”. It started to rain and my papers got wet so
I jumped back in my rented car and I’ve got to admit I was
pretty proud of myself…suddenly out there in Indiana, 77
years old working the streets…and I wasn’t selling
vacuum cleaners.
When I got back to the office to turn in my papers,
everybody was so busy…making phone calls, assembling
canvassing kits, making buttons… that my little bout of
self-congratulation seemed silly…the whole Goddam
world had joined our army.
Saturday was even better. I was paired with a guy from
Albany, New York named Steve Quist (like me, he had
grown up in the neighborhood) and we worked what folks
called the “inner city” with its shabby houses and broken
doorframes. I met the occasional bad guy ---- one old
white dude said Barack “looked like a monkey”, and
another softly said “nigger lover” under his breath.
But most everybody else was thoughtful and forthcoming…
I worked out this corny opening…. “Hi, I’m Val Coleman with
the Obama campaign….I’ve come from Massachusetts
this morning to ask you if you plan to vote for him on
Tuesday.” Then sometimes I would stagger a little and ask
for a glass a of water. Well, what the hell…..
The stairs! Even though Terre Haute is mostly flat, most
of the front entrances are up a small flight of stairs and I was
grateful for the old broken wicker chair on the porch. I was
reminded of the opening line of Elaine Stritch’s one woman show,
“Like the prostitute says, ‘it’s not the work…it’s the stairs!’”
There were a lot of low-rise apartment houses with no elevators
that nearly did me in. One time, I climbed four flights, knocked
on the door and sank into a wicker couch. A nice looking woman
came out and looked at me and said, “I’m on my way to work…I’m
a nurse, and you don’t look too good.” Five minutes later she
assured me on her honor that she would vote for Obama.
Now Sunday was even wilder. We weren’t allowed to canvass on
Sunday morning because most folks are in church. So I asked
Mike, one of our leaders, what I should do. He said, “put on your
Obama button and go to church!” Me? Church? The old apostate?
I went.
Now this was a bigger deal than I figured. I walked into this
Catholic Church (almost a cathedral with 4 or 500 folks in the
pews) and I felt very peculiar. It had been 60 years. The
whole thing came back and landed somewhere in my neck, just
below the jaw. The altar….the stations of the cross….the stained
glass…the vestments. But it was also different…John XXIII had
changed a lot of things in my interim. People were singing!
Singing like Protestants! And everyone prayed in chorus. There
was no Latin. But the strangest moment came when everybody
took communion….including me! The priest looked at my Obama
button and grimaced….but gave me the wafer and I didn’t let it
touch my teeth when it melted in my mouth….like I’d been taught
a thousand years ago.
I went back to the office and made buttons on a button machine.
Then back to the streets, this time with a an old guy from Tennessee
named Jesse McClain. I spent the rest of the day and night knocking
on doors meeting strange and wonderful people. There was this
retired dancer from Indiana State University….82 years old and in
terrific shape. She was crazy for Obama and wanted to talk all night….
Then there was the landlord who kept yelling "Yea! McCain!" He told
me to get lost….I had a fit, lost it, and yelled at him, “Who the hell do
you think you are?"
A couple of fraternities were on my list…nice guys who I’m sure voted
for Barack….I even ran into a couple of Hillary folks…..clenched-teeth
middle-aged women who were just generally furious.
I went home on Monday…Maggie met me at the Hartford
airport. I was tired and happy.
Maggie asked me to summarize it. It was minestrone…..it
was everything at once. Bad guys, good guys, old and young….
it was the determined Obama workers, it was bad food and a
motel room that smelled like disinfectant. But it was where
I come from…with a touch of joy added because this guy just
might fix up the world.
.
Monday, April 21, 2008
WE TWO KINGS
Well…..Maggie and I went to Bethlehem after all.
We dithered and flubbered, probably trying to figure out
a way not to go. Was there going to be room at the inn?
Would we make a difference? It was tough country…there
were dogs and hostile ex steel workers. Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania wasn’t going to be a piece of cake for two
old canvassers for Obama.
Were we wrong!
It’s a wonderful town….ol Joseph knew what he was doing.
It’s full of generous, gracious people (with a couple of
exceptions, see below). We walked into the Obama Hq.
a day early….young folks were moving swiftly
back and forth; packing kits, answering two phones at once,
sorting out buttons and lawn signs….. Even though we were
early…they sent us out to two senior complexes on the
edge of town to check out the cliché that the old people
are all voting for Hillary. We found a lot of folks sitting
around in the spring’s new sun, and we got to talking with
them. Lo and behold, most of them promised to vote
for Senator Obama and were grateful for an opportunity
to talk about it. One old gal (she announced to the world
that she was born in 1919) said, “well…it’s about time” and I
(born in 1930) agreed.
That night we worked the sidewalk in front of the Wired Café
where a circle of drummers were pounding away on anything
that resonates from tin garbage cans to regular drums.
We passed out all of the slick pamphlets that the headquarters
had, to a motley crew of Bethlehem’s night people….pasting little
adhesive stickers saying “OBAMA!” on the kids and telling
everybody who passed that “When America gets in trouble,
guys show up! Lincoln in 1860, FDR in 1932 and Obama
today!”
But the big deal for us was Saturday. We actually canvassed!
The headquarters handed us a well-organized package of names
and addresses and maps and pamphlets and we drove (Maggie
drove…I navigated) into the heart of working class Bethlehem,
badly paved streets, badly-painted houses and all. We knocked on
a couple hundred doors…and met some remarkable people….
most of whom were Obama supporters! A lot of the houses
have rocky steps leading up to the front door, so halfway through
I was pretty wasted. Maggie kept me going and we searched
for addresses on the plain streets. The few Hillary supporters we
met were…interestingly….all cheeky middle-aged women with
enormous chips on their shoulders. I can’t tell you how great the
whole thing was….the “blue collar” vote (at least where we were)
wasn’t so unanimous and hostile to Obama as we had been told.
Finally, we completed our assignment….finding the odd household
left on the map….and after reporting in…so our information could be
pumped into the Pennsylvania-wide computer…..
we went home toMassachusetts.
This is being written on April 21…primary eve….I don’t know how
Obama’s going to do….those damn polls keep changing,
but whatever happens…it was worth it!
We dithered and flubbered, probably trying to figure out
a way not to go. Was there going to be room at the inn?
Would we make a difference? It was tough country…there
were dogs and hostile ex steel workers. Bethlehem,
Pennsylvania wasn’t going to be a piece of cake for two
old canvassers for Obama.
Were we wrong!
It’s a wonderful town….ol Joseph knew what he was doing.
It’s full of generous, gracious people (with a couple of
exceptions, see below). We walked into the Obama Hq.
a day early….young folks were moving swiftly
back and forth; packing kits, answering two phones at once,
sorting out buttons and lawn signs….. Even though we were
early…they sent us out to two senior complexes on the
edge of town to check out the cliché that the old people
are all voting for Hillary. We found a lot of folks sitting
around in the spring’s new sun, and we got to talking with
them. Lo and behold, most of them promised to vote
for Senator Obama and were grateful for an opportunity
to talk about it. One old gal (she announced to the world
that she was born in 1919) said, “well…it’s about time” and I
(born in 1930) agreed.
That night we worked the sidewalk in front of the Wired Café
where a circle of drummers were pounding away on anything
that resonates from tin garbage cans to regular drums.
We passed out all of the slick pamphlets that the headquarters
had, to a motley crew of Bethlehem’s night people….pasting little
adhesive stickers saying “OBAMA!” on the kids and telling
everybody who passed that “When America gets in trouble,
guys show up! Lincoln in 1860, FDR in 1932 and Obama
today!”
But the big deal for us was Saturday. We actually canvassed!
The headquarters handed us a well-organized package of names
and addresses and maps and pamphlets and we drove (Maggie
drove…I navigated) into the heart of working class Bethlehem,
badly paved streets, badly-painted houses and all. We knocked on
a couple hundred doors…and met some remarkable people….
most of whom were Obama supporters! A lot of the houses
have rocky steps leading up to the front door, so halfway through
I was pretty wasted. Maggie kept me going and we searched
for addresses on the plain streets. The few Hillary supporters we
met were…interestingly….all cheeky middle-aged women with
enormous chips on their shoulders. I can’t tell you how great the
whole thing was….the “blue collar” vote (at least where we were)
wasn’t so unanimous and hostile to Obama as we had been told.
Finally, we completed our assignment….finding the odd household
left on the map….and after reporting in…so our information could be
pumped into the Pennsylvania-wide computer…..
we went home toMassachusetts.
This is being written on April 21…primary eve….I don’t know how
Obama’s going to do….those damn polls keep changing,
but whatever happens…it was worth it!
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
The speech
The Speech
I got into a dust-up with an Episcopalian minister at an Easter lunch over at the Myer’s house. She was still leaking steam from her morning sermon about how Jesus’ resurrection should be the paradigm for fixing up America. I brought the conversation around to Barack Obama and she said she admired him as a faith-based candidate but felt he was flawed by his unwillingness to demolish that Chicago pastor. To paraphrase her, “They’ll tear him up in the White House,” she said…… “he can’t fire people, do what’s necessary..." I asked her if she had read the speech on race he gave in Philadelphia last week and she said she hadn’t, and then she added, ominously…..(again, a paraphrase)…. “have you noticed that many of the people surrounding him are atheists?”
Whizz! Bang!
The devil made him do it.
The devil made him speak out with elegance and honesty on the subject of race in response to his own minister’s screed.
What Obama did in that single speech was organize the truth about race in our country, pretty much all of the truth…. It wasn’t an expose’, not a log got turned over….the surprises weren’t surprises at all…he just said things that we all know and never say outside of our private world. He said his white grandmother loved him and was a bigot and that he knows guys who are really pissed off that they have to bus their kids 11 miles when there is a kindergarten next door. He said the back wounds of slavery still sting and that they’re not going to be healed in a single election round.
He said all that standing there in front of a small live audience, his tone was measured, his language free of the usual stump stuff. There was a particularly stunning moment when talking about racial chaos he said, “Not this time……”
He said that there is some bad stuff underneath our racial civility….he said he wanted to find justice and healing in the middle of angry history. He didn’t use Dr. King’s poetry, or his rhythmic phrasing…..he spoke quietly with a kind of intellectual candor that I haven’t heard since I listened to Jim Farmer talk in 5th Grade public schoolroom in New Orleans twenty years ago.
I have never been so touched as I was by Obama’s speech and yes, I was there in August of 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.
That reminds me; I grew up in central Illinois, not far from Salem. My father was a Lincoln scholar…and I know he would be fascinated by the obvious parallels of this young man and our 16th President; a lawyer who worked the streets, an Illinois state senator, a member of congress, a man who can’t write a bad sentence, and most of all, a guy who showed up and ran for president when the country was in deep deep trouble.
olval
I got into a dust-up with an Episcopalian minister at an Easter lunch over at the Myer’s house. She was still leaking steam from her morning sermon about how Jesus’ resurrection should be the paradigm for fixing up America. I brought the conversation around to Barack Obama and she said she admired him as a faith-based candidate but felt he was flawed by his unwillingness to demolish that Chicago pastor. To paraphrase her, “They’ll tear him up in the White House,” she said…… “he can’t fire people, do what’s necessary..." I asked her if she had read the speech on race he gave in Philadelphia last week and she said she hadn’t, and then she added, ominously…..(again, a paraphrase)…. “have you noticed that many of the people surrounding him are atheists?”
Whizz! Bang!
The devil made him do it.
The devil made him speak out with elegance and honesty on the subject of race in response to his own minister’s screed.
What Obama did in that single speech was organize the truth about race in our country, pretty much all of the truth…. It wasn’t an expose’, not a log got turned over….the surprises weren’t surprises at all…he just said things that we all know and never say outside of our private world. He said his white grandmother loved him and was a bigot and that he knows guys who are really pissed off that they have to bus their kids 11 miles when there is a kindergarten next door. He said the back wounds of slavery still sting and that they’re not going to be healed in a single election round.
He said all that standing there in front of a small live audience, his tone was measured, his language free of the usual stump stuff. There was a particularly stunning moment when talking about racial chaos he said, “Not this time……”
He said that there is some bad stuff underneath our racial civility….he said he wanted to find justice and healing in the middle of angry history. He didn’t use Dr. King’s poetry, or his rhythmic phrasing…..he spoke quietly with a kind of intellectual candor that I haven’t heard since I listened to Jim Farmer talk in 5th Grade public schoolroom in New Orleans twenty years ago.
I have never been so touched as I was by Obama’s speech and yes, I was there in August of 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial.
That reminds me; I grew up in central Illinois, not far from Salem. My father was a Lincoln scholar…and I know he would be fascinated by the obvious parallels of this young man and our 16th President; a lawyer who worked the streets, an Illinois state senator, a member of congress, a man who can’t write a bad sentence, and most of all, a guy who showed up and ran for president when the country was in deep deep trouble.
olval
Friday, March 7, 2008
Gentle Men
Well, to bring things up to date, I’ve become an impassioned Barack Obama supporter and was devastated Tuesday, March 4 when Ms. Clinton won both Ohio and Texas. As and old (77) civil rights guy, I allowed myself to think about the incredible fact that less than fifty years ago….virtually NO black people voted in the American south. And here we are, in 2008, with a viable black candidate for president. I remembered that CORE’s first big voter registration drive was led by Jim McKeon in South Carolina in 1960. I remember…I remember a lot of things….but the truth is that most people take the franchised “African-American” community as a given…as if it has always been there.
I like Barack Obama…..I find him a strong and gracious leader, a gentle man, not unlike my best friend Jim Farmer who was the actual founder of the non violent civil rights movement in Chicago in 1942. Jim, like Obama, had both a moving and common touch….and could, with a few words….reach across old divides with a call for self-respect and yes….love of one another. I was moved by the number of white votes for Obama in South Carolina….a state where it was worth your life to try to register black voters all those years ago.
There came a time when Jim Farmer was attacked and pilloried just as Senator Obama was beaten up on the weekend before the Texas and Ohio primaries. One story links the two men in my mind in a remarkable way. In 1968 Jim ran for Congress in the Bed-Stuy
District of Brooklyn, NY. He didn’t have much of a chance because he didn’t have the Democratic line on the ballot…..he appeared only on the Liberal line….way down on the lower left hand corner of the ballot. About a week before the election, a friend of mine….a distinguished writer, pulled me aside in a Harlem restaurant and told me he had what he called “a terrific piece of dirt” on Jim’s opponent. The writer told me a harrowing story about a close relative of the opponent which, if revealed, might well have killed the opponent’s chances in the election.
I took the story to Jim and asked him if we could use it. Jim looked at me as if I was crazy…… “No! No! A thousand times No!,” he said, “I’ve been preaching brotherhood all my life…I’ll be damned if I’m going to get down in that sewer.”
We lost.
I like Barack Obama…..I find him a strong and gracious leader, a gentle man, not unlike my best friend Jim Farmer who was the actual founder of the non violent civil rights movement in Chicago in 1942. Jim, like Obama, had both a moving and common touch….and could, with a few words….reach across old divides with a call for self-respect and yes….love of one another. I was moved by the number of white votes for Obama in South Carolina….a state where it was worth your life to try to register black voters all those years ago.
There came a time when Jim Farmer was attacked and pilloried just as Senator Obama was beaten up on the weekend before the Texas and Ohio primaries. One story links the two men in my mind in a remarkable way. In 1968 Jim ran for Congress in the Bed-Stuy
District of Brooklyn, NY. He didn’t have much of a chance because he didn’t have the Democratic line on the ballot…..he appeared only on the Liberal line….way down on the lower left hand corner of the ballot. About a week before the election, a friend of mine….a distinguished writer, pulled me aside in a Harlem restaurant and told me he had what he called “a terrific piece of dirt” on Jim’s opponent. The writer told me a harrowing story about a close relative of the opponent which, if revealed, might well have killed the opponent’s chances in the election.
I took the story to Jim and asked him if we could use it. Jim looked at me as if I was crazy…… “No! No! A thousand times No!,” he said, “I’ve been preaching brotherhood all my life…I’ll be damned if I’m going to get down in that sewer.”
We lost.
Saturday, January 12, 2008
The Coldest Winter
I've been reading David Halberstam’s history of the Korean War, “The Coldest Winter” and at the same time I’ve been watching the lovely chaos of the 2007-08 primary elections. This curious mix of a book about a violent forgotten war and the nightly TV burst of political non-violence has set me to wondering.
“The Coldest Winter” is a big book in every sense of the word……666 pages, evenly written and powerful researched…about an earthquaking period in the world’s history when Communist China and the Soviet Union owned more than half of the Eurasian continent and we were left to dispute the edges of their empires.
It is Halberstam’s twenty first and last book….he died in a car accident this past Spring on his way to interview an old hero of mine, the New York Giants quarterback YA Tittle, for a football book he was planning.
My first impression of “The Coldest Winter” was that it was much like a Russian novel….most all of the principal characters, high and low in rank and in Halberstam’s esteem, get substantial biographies as they appear on the scene. The book is rich in context; every player and each nation’s political history surrounds the battles and the whole political panolply from from the rise of Mao to the fall of MacArthur is unfailingly described.
As you might expect, there are brave men and cowards, commanders in the very front of the line and commanders hiding in tanks or back in Tokyo. There stands the plainspoken ex-haberdasher Harry Truman and the aristocratic Dean Acheson coupled in a world crisis that no one really understands.
The book was very personal for me….I was drafted into the army on the very day the war ended…..and thus wasn’t sent into the shooting war. In a spooky way, I examined myself as each battle, each death, each mad bloody event was described…..trying to figure out how I would have behaved if I had been there. I suspect many readers my age will do the same. Halberstam evokes combat so graphically that you are drawn onto the hillside or into the valley where men are dying all around you in a sleet of steel.
Throughout the book, you are always reminded that this war was being produced and directed by men most of whom had just survived the Second World War and are infected by the hubris of victory. In particular there is MacArthur. I was raised on MacArthur’s majestic performance in World War II….the “I Shall Return” following his retreat to Australia, the brilliant island hopping in the southern Pacific….his eloquence as he stood on the deck of the USS Missouri accepting the surrender of Japan. But Halberstam’s MacArthur is a lousy soldier, an arrogant would-be royal surrounded by sycophants. And his sycophants (principally one Major General Ned Almond), trying to please MacArthur, blunder and bluster their way through the conflict, dividing forces, spewing anti-Asian racism and damn near losing the war.
Halberstam’s heroes are usually the common American soldiers. (The book is subtitled “America and the Korean War” which directs its focus onto the GIs.) General Matthew Ridgway and Colonel Paul Freeman are singled out as officers who recovered the integrity of the battlefield and eventually turned around the huge defeats of the first months. Lieutenant Paul McGee of Belmont, North Carolina, a brave and sensible platoon commander…is the book’s most singular character.
However, what gives “The Coldest Winter” its true nobility as Halberstam’s finest (in my opinion) work….is the way he weaves the history of the post-war world around this forgotten little war that after killing 58,000 American soldiers and many hundreds of thousands of Asians, ended up right back where it began.
It seems to me that the book, with it’s complete, almost encylopedic recording of this particular struggle, teaches us the futility of all the wars we have stumbled into since World War II…..from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq.
“The Coldest Winter” is a big book in every sense of the word……666 pages, evenly written and powerful researched…about an earthquaking period in the world’s history when Communist China and the Soviet Union owned more than half of the Eurasian continent and we were left to dispute the edges of their empires.
It is Halberstam’s twenty first and last book….he died in a car accident this past Spring on his way to interview an old hero of mine, the New York Giants quarterback YA Tittle, for a football book he was planning.
My first impression of “The Coldest Winter” was that it was much like a Russian novel….most all of the principal characters, high and low in rank and in Halberstam’s esteem, get substantial biographies as they appear on the scene. The book is rich in context; every player and each nation’s political history surrounds the battles and the whole political panolply from from the rise of Mao to the fall of MacArthur is unfailingly described.
As you might expect, there are brave men and cowards, commanders in the very front of the line and commanders hiding in tanks or back in Tokyo. There stands the plainspoken ex-haberdasher Harry Truman and the aristocratic Dean Acheson coupled in a world crisis that no one really understands.
The book was very personal for me….I was drafted into the army on the very day the war ended…..and thus wasn’t sent into the shooting war. In a spooky way, I examined myself as each battle, each death, each mad bloody event was described…..trying to figure out how I would have behaved if I had been there. I suspect many readers my age will do the same. Halberstam evokes combat so graphically that you are drawn onto the hillside or into the valley where men are dying all around you in a sleet of steel.
Throughout the book, you are always reminded that this war was being produced and directed by men most of whom had just survived the Second World War and are infected by the hubris of victory. In particular there is MacArthur. I was raised on MacArthur’s majestic performance in World War II….the “I Shall Return” following his retreat to Australia, the brilliant island hopping in the southern Pacific….his eloquence as he stood on the deck of the USS Missouri accepting the surrender of Japan. But Halberstam’s MacArthur is a lousy soldier, an arrogant would-be royal surrounded by sycophants. And his sycophants (principally one Major General Ned Almond), trying to please MacArthur, blunder and bluster their way through the conflict, dividing forces, spewing anti-Asian racism and damn near losing the war.
Halberstam’s heroes are usually the common American soldiers. (The book is subtitled “America and the Korean War” which directs its focus onto the GIs.) General Matthew Ridgway and Colonel Paul Freeman are singled out as officers who recovered the integrity of the battlefield and eventually turned around the huge defeats of the first months. Lieutenant Paul McGee of Belmont, North Carolina, a brave and sensible platoon commander…is the book’s most singular character.
However, what gives “The Coldest Winter” its true nobility as Halberstam’s finest (in my opinion) work….is the way he weaves the history of the post-war world around this forgotten little war that after killing 58,000 American soldiers and many hundreds of thousands of Asians, ended up right back where it began.
It seems to me that the book, with it’s complete, almost encylopedic recording of this particular struggle, teaches us the futility of all the wars we have stumbled into since World War II…..from Korea to Vietnam to Iraq.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
New Hampshire Blues
Well. I just don’t know what’s next. Down the garden path I went and got clobbered in New Hampshire. I believed! It just shows how vulnerable I am….an old man who made his bones in the civil rights years….looked up one day and a guy with a black father and a white mother won the Iowa caucuses, so I write a Glory Hallelujah! blog.
It was all too easy….I even had it figured out that he will win South Carolina (where, by the way, the very first voter registration drives began back in the late 50s)…The black votes that we collected years ago win it. Right?
So I’m sitting watching MSNBC on New Hampshire night and I’m watching the crawl that shows the percentage of votes for each candidate and my man is 3 points behind right away. ALL of the polls, all of the pundits, EVERYONE is sure he’s going to win going away…..but I begin to get this awful feeling, the same feeling in the nape that I felt on election night in 2004 when we lost the big one.
And we lose. It’s close, but we lose. Again. And again.
Oh Lord….why are you so cruel to old soldiers?
OK, enough self pity…..let’s go to Nevada and South Carolina and try some more.
It was all too easy….I even had it figured out that he will win South Carolina (where, by the way, the very first voter registration drives began back in the late 50s)…The black votes that we collected years ago win it. Right?
So I’m sitting watching MSNBC on New Hampshire night and I’m watching the crawl that shows the percentage of votes for each candidate and my man is 3 points behind right away. ALL of the polls, all of the pundits, EVERYONE is sure he’s going to win going away…..but I begin to get this awful feeling, the same feeling in the nape that I felt on election night in 2004 when we lost the big one.
And we lose. It’s close, but we lose. Again. And again.
Oh Lord….why are you so cruel to old soldiers?
OK, enough self pity…..let’s go to Nevada and South Carolina and try some more.
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Glory Hallelujah!
Barak Obama’s win in Iowa is a victory born in the early years of the civil rights movement, the movement that laid down its life to end segregation; a movement grounded in pacifism and non-violence. The fierce black nationalism that followed the movement, however important, is finally under siege……and emerging out of the brutal polarity of those years is a sort of miracle….in which to be black in America is an honor, but only one piece of a decent life. Racism will probably never disappear….but on the night of Thursday, January 3, 2008, in a state that is 97% white, a black man made his case based on intellect, humanity and political savvy. Glory Hallelujah!
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