Aspidistra

The only significance of my 79th Birthday last week
was that it reminded me that I was two to ten years
old during the deepest part of the Great Depression.
And so, as a remaining witness, I've got a couple of
opinions that may upset you......particularly if you're a
passionate advocate of our president's Stimulus
Package which is supposedly spreading money throughout
the countryside like Johnny Appleseed making fruit trees.
Don't misunderstand.....I'm a huge Obama guy.....and
Stimulus is just what we need. God knows I remember
the New Deal....the great ceramic transformers and dams
that were built just outside my hometown of Charleston,
Illinois....and the hundreds and hundreds of guys who
came from all over to work in the CCC camp to build all
that stuff. Jobs. Jobs. Jobs. That was the drill......Hoover
Dam, TVA, WPA...."back to work" was the song.... And the
whole thing was also a burst of humanism and decency.....
I vividly remember the CCC guys in their blue overalls
piling into their trucks to save the Catholic Church from a
Ku Klux Klan burning.

Why not this time? Is their nothing left to build? Or save?

The Stimlus money seems to evaporate into the
tax-based bureaucracies of our cities and states.
Don't misunderstand,
I did close to thirty years as a civil servant and I have nothing
but respect for that profession which keeps the cities running
and the projects warm in winter. But no matter how much
we pour into the existing "infrastructure"....the jobless
numbers continue upwards, scratching ten percent this weekend.
The stimulus is like the aspidistra plant, the plant that is borne
close to the ground....and doesn't fly.

Here's my plan.

From now on, every dime we spend of Stimulus money must
result in specific, indentifiable new work....real work....real new jobs.
We got to stop balancing budgets and build, build, build.
Highways for a start...(I've got a couple of candidates),
wind farms, new dams, cleaning up poisonous industrial sites,
bridges to fix and bridges to build and on and on. And it should
be a visible program....with signs everywhere....a proud new
moment in American history where we grabbed our bootstraps
and owned up to our problems.

Now...I'm not kidding.....I mean a LAW.....a law that says you
must get the aspidistra flying.....make it wave.....like that flag
that so often flies upside down.

Afghanistan.....enough.

Well, I got up yesterday and read George Packer's
ringing piece on Richard Holbrooke and the terrifying
situation in Afghanistan. It is encylodpedic, thorough
and reminds me of the intellectual jungle that
stupified Washington just before and during the the
Vietnam War.

Poor ol Lyndon Johnson, the president
who did so many wonderful things in this country, all
the way from the anti-poverty program (which was
hugely successful) to Medicare and weaving the
civil rights movement into our mainstream, this same
guy was destroyed by an endless, pointless war
whose best result was a black marble wall a hundred
yards from the Lincoln memorial. Are we going to do
it again? Will another president, this one a "son" of
Johnson's presidency....be destroyed by another paralyzing
war explained by 9/11 and the international horror of
the jihadists.....just as the Vietnam War was explained by
the "domino effect" of nations falling under the winter of
communism.

Holbrooke says, explaining that this war
is different (aren't they all?), that the failure in Vietnam
"was based on a profound misreading, by five presidents
and their advisors, of he strategic importance of Vietnam
to the U.S." Try applying that paradigm to the
Afghanistand of Karzai, Gary Cooper and the Khyber Pass.
In truth I was scared silly by the article.....it was the same
dense, short-term reasoning that David Halberstam
uncovered in "The Best and the Brightest". McGeorge
Bundy, MacNamara et. al. writ large in 2009. All of the
same rationales are in place......guerilla warfare, villages
on the brink of going "Taliban", an endless supply of
American soldiers rolling into the maw. And most of all,
the threat of communism engulfing the world is now replaced
by a new darkness, crazy Islam.

Nobody, and I mean nobody is angrier and than I am about
9/11. I had the incredible bad fortune to be there....standing
with my family watching those poor souls jumping from the
top floors of the World Trade Center. I want to get those
bastards who did that. And I think a strategy organized
around targeting Al Queda...wherever they are....is manda-
tory. I also hate the sexist lunacy of the Taliban...but I'm
not if favor of a consuming war to "get" them. My God, Islam
(and it's lunatic fringe) has been around for 1500 years,
"Al Queda"in those days was called "The Assassins". Pope
Urban II started the Crusades and noone could stop them.
Even the gentle St. Francis couldn't negotiate an end to the
Third Crusade. The poison of theocratic warfare flows
forever......

I love Obama...and I love his pragmitism. I love his
balance and his humanity and I think he will find a way out
of this mess, but I do not think he is well served by the men
and women of the State Department.....and I do not want him
to be wasted by another Vietnam.

ol Val

We're Not Done Yet

All you have to do is say it…… “affirmative action”….
and everyone in the room winds themselves up tight like a
railroad watch.

Well, I think it is a surpassing, humane and and sensible policy,
a proper emergency room which opened after 500 years of color
discrimination and savagery.

And it ain’t a final paradigm. I hope it lasts only as long as its needed.

The reason I’m bringing it up is what I call the “Westchester Decision,”
a stunning agreement filed in Federal Court this past Monday which
desegregates Westchester County. You heard me right, desegregates
the whitest community in America requiring all of the Westchester
communities to provide affordable housing for a total of 750 blacks and
Hispanic households. To qualify you have to have less than 3% blacks or
7% Hispanics.

Glory Hallelujah! We sat-in on Scarsdale! Get the fire hoses! It’s
affirmative action in real estate!

Now, there are all sorts of “affordable” housing laws in place already
driving recalcitrant all-white communities nuts. (Like in Westchester and,
dare I say it, in then Berkshires (where I live)).

But this is different….this’ll really upset the selectmen…..this is old
fashioned civil rights stuff…..a ruling based
(like the ‘64 public accommodations and the ‘65 voting rights act) on race,
on ethnicity…..

I pulled out my old Jim Farmer file and found an OP-ED piece I wrote
14 years ago….It’s the story of how Affirmative Action was invented, by
Farmer and Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office. It went something like
This:

Jim: Did you ever hear the “hobbled runner” story?

Lyndon: Tell me.

Jim: Seems there was this black long distance runner who raced a white
competitor. After he circled the track for the first time, the white
runner found the black man hobbling along with chains on his legs.
The white runner got a hammer and chisel and struck off the chains
and the two men continued the race…..with the white runner a full
circuit ahead.

Lyndon. That’s not fair. We’ve got to do something about it.

Jim: I propose a program of “compensatory preferential treatment” for blacks in the
marketplace.

Lyndon: (smiling) I completely agree…but for God’s sake don’t call it that, it’ll scare
the hell out of everybody. We’ll call it…… “affirmative action” !

##################

All these years, I've floundered and whined about segregated communities and
I haven't done a damn thing about it. Listen to this quote from Craig Gurian of the
Anti-Discrimination Center who brought the lawsuit that ended in the Westchester
decision:

"Residential segregation underlies virtually every racial disparity in America, from
education to jobs to the delivery of health care....."

I've met an awful lot of indignant people on this subject....seems they've
forgotten what it was all about in the first place.

I want to add a Hooray! for Judge Denise L. Cote, who made the Westchester ruling.

We’re not done yet.

ol val

A complaint! Where are the Initials?

Well, I just took a look at my June 17 posting, and it was
a splash of optimism following Obama's Cairo speech....I
had no idea the old "no nothings" and Christers would come
tumbling out of the woodwork and raise hell in the the town meetings
about health reform.
Jeez , (which I'm told is a squeeze of "Jesus") can't they give
the guy some time to straighten out the crooked compass Bush
left us to navigate with?

While I'm thinking about the Obama early months,, let me
register a complaint..... Now, you gotta understand I was born
in 1930 and ALL around me (when I was old enough to eat on
my own) was the New Deal.... Outside town (in Charleston, Illinois)
was the CCC camp with the guys in green overalls who built the
dam on the Embarras River and the big new ceramic transformers
of the Central Illinois Public Service company (CIPS). And
(it's OK to begin a sentence with a conjunction)
I remember the square tin signs signed by
Henry Wallace annoucing "This Field is a Department of Agriculture
Experimental Field" (or something like that...). Everywhere you
looked it was "WPA" or "TVA" or some set of initials that added up
to "NRA." There was the big blue eagle and Roosevelt was on the
radio (seems to me every night) selling the program. So my complaint
is that the Obama stiumlus package is still in lower case....despite the
fact that it is a wonderful program which is spending as much (or more)
money than the NRA.

I spent a lot of my life as a PR guy (it's one of the jobs you can do
drunk) for a bunch of public agencies...and believe me VISIBILITY
is everything. Every time a shovel hits the ground there ought to
be a forty gun salute. I respect the way the stimulus package is being
administered...very carefully I understand so that it can't be ripped
off (that'd give the Christers something to spasm about). But we've
got to SEE it....and celebrate it....not just the numbers reports (oh
look ma, unemployment only went up a little bit this month) but the
name, place and size of every new bus, new bridge, fixed sidewalk,
highway and every new hole in the ground (somebody had to dig it.)

By the way, back in the Thirties, Charleston, Illinois became the
"Broomcorn Capital of the World" --- and I can prove it....there was a\
SIGN on the way into town that said so.

Anyway....I back again, looking for trouble....

MUSIC IN THE STREETS

I'm back. My first blog in six months.

I have lived most of my life out on a
limb, so this won’t come a surprise…. I
think that the Obama win and his presence
on the stage of the world has encouraged
the whole Goddam human race. I think that
all over the place folks are recovering their
self-respect….and that a new kind of un-
selfishness has appeared….something like
the appearance of humanism in the 16th Century and
the sweep of reason in the 18th. I just can’t
quite find the word or the words……I’ve been
searching all week, finally my pal Ann said
“people feel encouraged” and that’ll do fine
for the time being.

Make a list. Lebanon….the sensible lot won
a very important election. There are
folks speaking out in Israel and Palestine who
really want to settle that business no matter how
ancient the divide.

And Iran…..my God….day after day of silent
protest, green wrist bands on the national soccer
team. Look anywhere…Russia…I smell something
better with this guy Medvedev and China
has had some generous days.

And here at home, the horizon is clearer…nobody’s
denouncing their neighbor and I swear there is a real
difference on the streets…..people are talking and
slapping hands all over. I was in New York a couple
days ago and it just felt different…nobody was a
Christian or a Jew or a black or a white or a brown…..
everybody was somebody and the there was
a kind of music on Broadway that wasn’t just in the
theatres it was in those little parks and on the sidewalks.

Now I don’t mean Obama has fixed up all this stuff….
(although that speech in Cairo was magnificent) it’s
just that hope seems to be alive again….something
has changed in what we used to call the “ether”….
the atmosphere.

It's June 17, 2009 and that's what I think.


Val