The Enigma of Socialism

Socialism.  All of my life I have been surrounded,
cajoled, nearly  drowned by the very idea.  It was
and is everywhere.  My three-novenas-a-year Catholic
mother proudly voted for Norman Thomas,
the gentle Ohio theologian and American socialist
in 1928. Somehowthis aggravating idea that societies
should take care of folks appealed to her gentle soul.
I wanted to be a playwright, just like George
Bernard Shaw no less....and he was a very active
socialist.  Shaw and his fellow "Fabians" believed
in a "gradual" not "revolutionary" change.   I went
 to Antioch College which was swimming in at
least 75 different brands of socialism all the way
from something gentle and agrarian to a couple of
bitter Stalinists and, believe it or not, one of the
actual honest-to-God founders of the American
Communist Workers Party...an economics professor
named Louis Corey, nee Louis "Fraina". By the way
by the time I got to him Corey-Fraina had evolved
like many...into a Social Democrat, a person who
wants to put the humanistic values of Socialism into
a Democratic society.  Something I still aspire to.

Like it or not, socialism was born in the great
secular struggles to humanize our lives...so it is
often a chameleon, hiding in capital economies
or disappearing into dictatorships of allsorts.
It has both a gentle and violent episodic life and
has been claimed in one form or another by saints,
oligarchs, fascists, American presidents, Kings
and Queens.

I just plain don't know where to begin or where
it began. What a minestrone!  Did it start with
a Russian anarchist like Bakunin, should I begin
with the mess of the Spanish Civil War?  What
about the Greeks who invented "demos" a voting
if class-limited democracy?  Then there was
Plato's paternal philospher kings, Erasmus'
aundiced eye...or do I reach all the way forward to
Norman Thomas or Eugene V. Debs...both
brave and passionate advocates for the working
 man.  They were all socialist in whole or in part.

:Perhaps its jsut too damn much, perhaps the
 enigma of socialismis that it nevery stood
 still...that it swept back and forth across the
brutality of society trying to find a way for folks
to live decent lives, be fair to one another.  Am
I a socialist?  Or a social-democrat?  Do I want
the government to run everything, or some things
or just a few things or nothing at all?  Is it proper
to denounce folks as "socialist" if they advocate
generous and humane solutions?  Was Jane
Addams, the saint of the settlement house
movement somehow poisoned by the word
"socilist" which she used so generously. What
about Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker's
advocate...do we dump her in the socialist
landfill?

This is the first few paragraphs of a much longer
study of socialism  that I wrote in response to the
asses who have been shouting "socialist" at my
president and my friends. More is coming.

Messing with socialism

I'm committed to talking this year about the history of
socialism and I've been reading everything I can lay my
hands on to try to add something new to a subject older
than most.   For instance, I just finished a New Yorker
article on Hugo Chavez and Venezuela that blew much of the
optimism I might have about socialism in the 21st Century
right out of the water....oh my God..According to this
writer, it's a disaster down there,
folks camping in Caracas in unfinished high rises like the homeless
poor, violence everywhere, a medieval prison system and
a crop of guys (no women) spouting unutterable nonsense that
bears no relation to the dreams of Michelet, Proudhom, Owen,
Marx, Luxemburg....or even the Brits  Morrison or
Bevan.

Ideas don't necessarily have their own momentum or sets of
rules.  Christianity sure ain't Christ-like, and Judaism bergan to
lose sight of Moses  a dozen or so centuries ago.   And,"oh my
God" again, modern Islam has unfetched the Qran.   So why
should I be surprised that Socialism is hard to find in anything
like its ideological model.

Having said that, let me hurry to say that the  squirmy conser-
vatives that ran around in the 2012 presidential campaign here
accusing Obama and his squad of being "socialists" had any
idea what socialism is, was and might be.   There are, in the endless
history of socialism, moments of success.....like the early days
in New Harmony, Indiana  or the Swedish cooperatives....and, on
the other hand of course, is the terrible deterioration of the idea
into the mindless tyranny in the Soviet Union....But, and this is a big
"but," socialism can be traced to the noblest, most altruistic
instincts of the human being...it is, in the raw, of course, an
effort to give us a decent life, a decent shot at a future.....coming
in its modern form out of the savagery to the workers in the industrial
revolution.

So its a big subject.....it daunts this old man, but I'll be damned if
I'll let it go even if Hugo Chavez' broke my heart.

Much more later.

I'M BACK!

Hello.   OlValsopinion is back in business.   Now I'm 82, so don't
expect the eloquence of an 80-year-old.   We won!   A lifetime
of walking in circles, shouting slogans and living on the edge is
over.  This fine, young, pragmatic black man is our President twice
over.  And for someone who was two when FDR was first elected
it has been a long search for his character and his sanity.   I'm gonna
use this blog a lot to parse this new guy....and explain why I am
pleased with him.  I said "parse" not "praise"---- see you soon.  OV

The Threat

Well, its time I took a look around and posted again on
this old blog. It's been a crazy year...a year of Facebook and Twitter
and the Republican circus on TV, a year of kidney stones, false
medical alarms, pirates and wasted afternoons. I finally have got
something to say, something you'll like...

Here it is.....Democracy costs something. A system of government
where everybody votes is expensive....you've got to live with Franklin
Pierce, George W. Bush, your worst neighbors, five dollar gas, rock 'n
roll, Fox, no sugar-free cake, and like I said, Facebook,Twitter and the
Republicans.

It's worth it, believe me...I've been places where their aint no democracy
and you don't want any part of those places....crowded with pain and hunger
and arbitrary bosses. So the point here is that you're better off here than
most anyplace else.

SO WHATAM I COMPLAINING ABOUT?

The one thing I CAN"T live with is somebody screwing around with the
franchise, the
free and open right to vote. The whole thing tumbles (and I'll give you
some terrifying examples) if we even chip away at the integrity of the vote.
As some of you know, I spent a whole lot of my life trying to restore the
franchise for black voters in the south and we won a miraculous victory
that was set in stone with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. After we won
that, I went home to my martini (eventually I even got rid of that),
put my feet up and waved. Nothing, I thought, could get me out of my
leather lounger. Then it happened. These sonsabitches on the right
started enacting "voter ID" laws that are obviously designed to cull out
poor folks, minority folks....people who might not have proper identification
with pictures etc. Obviously this whole thing is designed to wipeout
significant portions of the vote. Look....like I said.....you want Rick
Santorum, (God help us) vote for him....you might even win. But you can't
disenfranchise regular folks...not in this country, not in MY country.

I said earlier, that I'd give you a scary example of places that got
zapped because somebody messed with the franchise. The Weimar
Republic (in Germany in the 20s) was a pretty wonderful democracy with
a solid consitution and a future. But they made a mistake....there was
a provision in their constitution
that allowed the Chancellor to take over and rule by decree in the
case of emergecies.....which is what Adolph Hitler did in 1933! Just a
single sentence....and the world fell apart.

So no matter what else we're doing this election season..... lets get to work,
state by state, to end these obvious vote killing state laws.

Ol Val

Alarm! Alarm!

It's Sunday morning, Feb 6....and I'm alarmed. The New York Times
reports that a deal is being cut between the US, Europe and the
Mubarak regime that will include some positive changes in the
emergency decrees, the nature of the forthcoming election and
some other timid concessions to the democracy movement. Sorry folks,
what I see is Montgomery Alabama February 1961 when Bobby
Kennedy asked Jim Farmer and the Freedom Riders to "cooldown"
and end the Freedom Ride. Farmer said, "we've been cooling off
for 300 years....we're in the deep freeze....the answer is 'no!'" It's
like 1961 in Cairo.....a popular uprising calling for elementary fairness
and democracy and most of all... the removal of Mubarak...is being
asked to quit. Think about it......the civil rights uprising of the 60s
took another 4 years (after the Montgomery confrontation) and
several deaths before we changed the world with the Civil Rights
and Voting Rights Acts. What Obama and the others must realize
is that this rising.....across the rim of Africa and up into the Outremer
is historic and profound and as natural as a volcano trying to find
it's way up through the mantle of the earth. Nothing short of regime
changes can suffice. Otherwise, the dictatorships remain and are
fair game for the jihadists and other assorted terrorists. There is
a fundamental force underpinning human history in which people
finally say "enough!" It must be heard and embraced.

olval.

Let Civility Prevail

I'm Back! A Couple of Thoughts.

Well....I'm both scared and thrilled by the Egyptian uprising.
I've been spending much too much of my remaining time worrying
about the rise of fascism implicit in the Michelle Bachman, Glenn Beck,
Tea Party stew. Suddenly there are resonable people on the
streets of Cairo (and elsewhere on the upper rim of Africa) demanding
an old-fashioned demand....a democratically elected government to
replace a petrified dictator. How thrilling it is.....mostly peaceful
and non-violent bravery in the long tradition of popular democracy.
Of course, there's the threat of Jihadism and other religious uglies
but it appears today (Jan 30, 2011) that an entire new generation
which by the way includes my Charlie, has some real humane gravaman
that it wants to spend in a secular rebellion. Hooray!

I am inspired to go back to some basics of my own....and try again to
deal with some of the more brutal problems in our own society. I'm
told that the food banks up here in the Berkshires are being mobbed
by hungry people who are victims of the floundering economy... I'm
gonna start collecting non-perishable food on a serious basis.....this
recession is far from over.

Finally (sorry I've been away for so long) I've been trying to help my
friend Frances Piven....the visionary sociologist who was (and is)
the intellectual underpinning of the civil rights movement....who has
been savaged (the word aint strong enough) by Glenn Beck who, in
turn has ignited an internet spasm against her.....the most horrible
series of obscene, even murderous posts and blogs anyone has ever
seen. I will not repeat them. Beck's problem is that 45 years ago
Frances and her co-author Richard Cloward argued for tactics that might
bring about a Guaranteed Anuual Income. (A policy, by the way, that
Richard Nixon via Senator Moynihan supported.) I'll be goddamed if
I'll let these awful people like Beck and Limbaugh prevail....especially
today when the decent folks of Egypt stand tall.

olval

What Have We Done?

I saw "The Social Network" a couple of days ago and I
was flabbergasted, appalled, so Goddam upset that poor
Maggie, my friend and companion, raised her hand at the
post-movie dinner to fend off my terrible tantrum. What
have we done? What has happened to our struggles against
heartlessness, against sexism, racism and careless
invective......where is the poetry of life in that mean-spirited
amoral generation of jerks. And that aint just a facncy turn of phrase,
poetry requires stopping and thinking......requires, as Wordsworth
tells us, "emotion stuided in tranquility"---- not a collection of
greedy, blowhard smart kids using their considerable intellect
to savage one another. Nothing wrong with the writing, nothing
wrong with the direction, the acting (it might gather in a bunch
of Oscars).....but it has been put to the service of
dehumanized brats who would use the remarkable new digital
treasures to blow apart every value we've so carefully looked
after since the Sixties. Nothing wrong with Facebook, by the
way. Nothing except it's ugly authors. Just take the treatment
of women----these guys are the American Taliban. Diminished,
used, even prostituted.....the women in the film all (except for a
brief Erica moment) are abused, chattelled and dismissed.
The rapid-fire dialogue skims the surface without wit or insight.
All right, I'm 80, and I don't "get it". But I can't leave it
alone.......Harvard, for God's sake....have we lost our best
University? My mother smelled this coming....she sent me
to Antioch. Does anyone care?


Ol Val

Tough Day

It's the night the Massachusetts election and it's time
to look things over. I don't think the burden of this
belongs on Ms. Oakley....who is indeed a hapless politician
and was almost reduced to one of those little wooden solidiers
with the red and blue uniforms and the awkward step as she
walked up to shake hands over a police barrier. It ain't her. It's us.
We've lost some of our bearings. We've forgotten our history
again. The tea partiers, the know
nothings...the fringes are always there. Hell, even the founding
fathers had their Aaron Burr. They lurk in the sun of their
nuttiness, paint graffiti on Obama's face and on the country's
monuments. It's part of the American game.

But this time the game (because of the cloture rule) had a deadly
risk. And something deeper than the usual mid-term bounce is
involved. We lost in Massachusetts!

We've got a black president and that means we have a
very small amount of slack. The American racial estrangement
gets suppressed just so long....and comes bouncing back at the least
crack.....we are, as my mother used to say, walking on thin ice.
Everything is twice as hard.....diplomacy, the economy, serious
legislation...everything is reflected through the racial prism. The least
mistake, a wrong sentence, a distracted candidate like Martha
Coakley...can do us in. Obama's decency, pragmatism and measured
policy isn't enough. He's got to lead....lead....lead....he got to be twice
the president that a comparable white man or woman would be. He
and his programs have to be so visible and aggressive and (this is
important) brave they blot out everything else. He needs a horse.

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

WHAT NOW?

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.

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

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.

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.

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.
.

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

In Defense of Vandalism

Father Robert Drinan, SJ, the contentious priest and congressman, once wrote an article explaining to astonished mothers and fathers around the country that it was perfectly OK…indeed even important….to bring your children (including infants) onto the picket lines of the civil rights and peace movements. I remember reading a mimeographed copy of the article in the National CORE office and thinking how the tactics of non-violent protest sometimes require us to do things that cut directly against the grain of our deepest feelings and beliefs.

Forty four years later I was at a dinner party when I got into a argument with my hostess …..a fierce and distinguished woman…..along a similar line. This time the subject was vandalism and its uses, both civil and criminal.

What had happened was this. A mutual friend of ours, a young black entrepreneur, had been driving along a street in nearby town when he spotted a lawn jockey, a black-faced lawn jockey on the lawn of a very handsome house with a pillared porch. He screeched to a stop, jumped out of his car, lifted the little statue into his car trunk and took it to the nearest river where he dumped it in four feet of water. I was telling my hostess this story and applauding the jockey-dunking when she sang out,

“Vandalism!”

I must quickly explain that my hostess got the best of me in the ensuing argument….she always does…I have long since lost my debating skills and when I began to explain the virtues of what we called “non violent direct action” and how I had myself committed a variety of deliberate misdemeanors back in the CORE days, she countered with a withering case for domestic law and order pointing out that lawn jockeys guard the entrance of the “21” Club in New York City.

“Why,” she said, “Vernon Jordan walks right past them all the time!”

Well I hope you can sympathize with my behavior at the time….I didn’t laugh….I was dumbfounded….I went blank. The subject changed. Of course, ten minutes later I was on my way home marshalling the arguments that she would never hear (unless she reads this) including a defense of brother Jordan who, when he lunches at “21,” passes thirty three white-faced lawn jockeys. I know Vernon Jordan slightly…he is a remarkable and honorable man, he was instrumental in getting my friend James Farmer the Medal of Freedom….a once-singular honor that the current administration seems to pass out like political popcorn.

But I stray.

Lawn jockeys, as you probably know, are particularly onerous leftovers of the ante-bellum south, usually short plaster statuettes of a black jockey dressed in the plantation colors and holding his hand with a hitching ring humbly in front of his chest. They were stationed on the lawn in front of the main house to accommodate Missee Ann’s guests as they arrived at the party.

The black lawn jockeys have pretty much disappeared (I did see one at a suburban antique store the other day) but they hold forth in memory as despicable symbols of our slave-stunted past.

So…here’s my unsung argument:

I wish I’d told my hostess that many similar acts of protest-by-vandalism have brightened our American past….it is even possible that some of her direct ancestors were among the Sons of Liberty that tossed 342 chests of tea off three ships in Boston harbor on the night of December 16, 1773.

And then, of course, there were all the “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs that we dismantled in the Sixties.

I would have admitted that tea-dumping, jockey-dunking and sign-breaking push the envelope of “non violence” but I also would have argued that we didn’t hurt anybody and that the folks I knew in the civil rights movement were prepared to take the legal consequences of breaking the peace. Many did.

Some even took the ultimate consequence.

I think, and I think Father Drinan would have agreed, that we should strike our own little local Medal of Freedom for my friend the lawn jockey dunker.

ol val







-----------------------------

Christmas Grammar

I decided yesterday (Christmas) that Christmas is a punctuation point. You go along, live a regular life, pay bills, deal with urges, go to sleep with an Ambien pill, wake up with Foggy the cat next to your ear…..you do all that stuff and then suddenly, everything changes…..like Noah’s flood…..your house, your life, your phone, your email machine is under water, under Christmas water.

No, this is not the usual disquisition about the commercialization of a holy holiday. As long as we’re a capitalist country I figure commercialization is what we do. And I’m not as upset at people who say “Xmas” as my mother was, because I’m not my mother but I agree that “Xmas” sounds wrong and short. My mother said “sacrilegious!” with an exclamation point.

When Christmas shows up all bets are on. We all summon up our best and worst instincts. Greed, promiscuity, generosity, love, fond memories, despair, depression, good taste, bad taste, jealousy…..all come romping in with the reindeer. But the most important thing we do is look across the room at someone other than ourselves. You have to, it’s the rule. You’ve got to make a list. Rich or poor, you’ve got to make a list. Just making a list reminds you that you’ve got a kid, an aunt, an ex-wife, a mother, a lawyer, a guy who mows your lawn, a guy who plows your driveway, an old pal who’s fading….a whole universe of folks that buzz around, making you possible.

And evil guys usually sit down all day.

So, everything considered and put together on Christmas afternoon with a bunch of little people running around with hopeful eyes…it’s OK.

Potemkin

Just finished “Red Mutiny” a well-written (if sometimes creaky) history of the battleship Potemkin’s eleven day rebellion in the Black Sea in 1905. What marks it for me is the purity of its motives, a rebellion of men who took the ancient despair of the naval ratings throughout the world and attached it to the unspeakable class contempt that was igniting Russia (and soon all of Europe). There was no intellectual, theoretical oversight (Lenin sent a man, but he got lost)…..there was little or no factionalism….just a very few, very passionate, unschooled leaders who saw a direct line from rotten food through tyrannical officers and a heartless Tsar to a new and decent society. It damn near worked….at one point they had two battleships and a couple of gunboats under the control of their "sailor committee” which, believe it or not, made sane, sanitary, tactical decisions. Their leader, one Matyushenko, was incredibly brave, a sound tactician and, most important (despite his soaring rage at his oppressors) a humane man who spared lives and in the end, facing defeat (running out of coal and water) surrendered to the Romanians so that his men would not be executed. They buried their dead, tried not to murder all their enemies.

Interestingly, Matyushenko escaped for awhile to England, France, Switzerland, and even
the United States where he was lionized by but unimpressed by the Trotskys, Lenins, Mensheviks, Bolsheviks and SRs who, to him, complicated the mission. He ended up going back to Russia , was almost immediately captured and hung. He was 28. At the end he called himself an anarchist. He brushed aside the priest at the gallows and said, “I am proud to die for the truth.”

There’s something raw and clean about this story,

Robert Brookins Gore

Day before yesterday I got a call that my friend Bob Gore had died. According to his friend Vernell Lillie of Pittsburgh, Bob probably died of malaria in The Gambia, a little republic inside the elbow of Africa. He told me once that he wanted to go home.

Bob Gore lit up the horizon of the civil rights movement, he was part preacher, part pistol, part organizer….. all brave and all eloquent. When it was over I lost track of him….it was the middle 70s…we were both broken refugees from the action….floundering, drinking too much. He married, unmarried and finally settled in Pittsburgh where he told stories to buses full of black children on their way to school.

I don’t believe there is enough English to properly compose a toast to this wonderful man.

On his way to Africa in 2002 he came through western Massachusetts and we had dinner.
During dinner, I gave him an old button I’d saved…the one that is half black and half white and said “Freedom Now, CORE.” He cried.

immigration

I was reading Trevor Royle’s tome about the Crimean War (I have a character weakness for military history) when I stumbled on the American “Know Nothing” movement of l854-1856. My Lou Dobbs bell rang. The Know Nothings were a bunch of American “nativists” ….. people who thought the country was being overrun by immigrants, in this case Roman Catholic immigrants who, on orders from the Pope, were stealing our breath.
It was all very confusing……the Know Nothings were for a while, formidable……taking over the state of Massachusetts in 1854, electing Mayors in several cities including San Fancisco and Washington D. C. The two-party system was collapsing in a poisonous brew of jingoism, religious hatred and slavery….. The country was barely 78 years old and already we were in the business of excluding disagreeable newcomers. But the republic survived…..and the Know Nothings disappeared into the larger soup of this democracy.

This immigration stuff isn’t easy and not given to easy solutions. Lou Dobbs whines each evening…..avenging embattled border guards and dusting off the old Know Nothing rhetoric. One does worry about the illegals swarming across the southern border today, often taking entry level jobs. Is there room? But wait a minute….who’s really out of a job? They say unemployment is at a all-time low. My question is…..how do these desperate folks really differ from those Irish and German immigrants in the middle of the 19th Century who cleaned our homes and built our railroads?

Just a thought.

Christmas, 1917

My name is Charles Fogarty Jr. and I am 77 years old . I live happily alone in a log house in the town of Sandisfield in western Massachsetts and I am pretty sure this is going to be my last Christmas. Under the circumstances, I have taken a look at my long life, played back a string of Christmases and I've decided to make this one a sentimental holiday that would sound and look like the Christmas Eve sixty years ago when I played the bugle in an American Legion Drum and Bugle Corps Memorial Jamboree on a wintry confield in middle Illinois. I remember most everything about that night....our '46 Mercury automobile with a Christmas tree tied on top, the blue uniforms of the band, the grand out-of-tune music, my father's blue overseas cap with the little curved prism of the Rainbow Division of World War I, the frost on his mustache, my mother's arms around my sister with her pigtail down the middle, the foot-high broken stalks of corn and most of all the Mayor, resplendent in a blue and yellow conductor suit flailing away with a gold baton in the midst of an awful noise. We were all so enthusiastic about wars and flags and courage.

But now I know that memory is a souffle, whipped and sweet above the truth.

You see, recently, I found some very old special papers in my father's files. Some were typed and others were written in pencil...the batch of them had burnt edges as if he had tried to get rid of them beforfe he died.....but.....humbled by his Parkinsons, he couldn't destroy them. I found them in a ratty folder, jammed flat above other files that were neatly organized. In the bottom of the file was small flat box with an official paper wrapped around it. The paper was an order for Charles Fogarty appear at a courts martial and inside the box was the Medale Militaire, a
French medal for valor.

Written on the outside of the folder in his shaky hand was "CHF in World War I".

Of all the wars we have fought, indeed of all the wars anyone anywhere has fought, th "Great War", the one that sucked up the world between 1914 and 1918 was the dumbest, most idiotic human folly of them all. Wars, over time, become myths....even the "good " war sixty years ago,
although it had to be fought, has picked up a certain empty celebrity. But the so-called "great"
war, World War I....was nothing more than a bloody human carnivore that ate up generations of young men to no purpose at all.

My father, Charles Hubert Fogarty Sr. was born in New York City in February of 1900 and almost missed the whole war. He was a patriot at birth and when he was 15 tried to join the Candadian army.....but he got sent back.

He succeeeded in becoming a soldier on his 17th birthday, when America had declared war on Germany. The army would talke him as an infantryman because he was too nearsighted but he talked them into letting him become a medic. And it was as a medic that he served in England and France.

On the night of December 24, 1917. Corporal Fogarty, the medic, lay in a little hole he had dug in the back of a trench near the French town of Passchendaele....it was, for awhile, unimaginably silent. There had been three Christmas Eves already in this endless war....men sat in their trenches, sometimes less than a hundred yards from their enemies and thought about their childhood Christmases with plum pudding and sticky fruit cakes, laughter and...most of all.... carols, achingly familiar carols. They silently mouthed the simple, traditional lyrics.

Now my father had had one hell of a time leading up to that Christmas Eve. After an Atlantic crossing that required his standing up most of the way because of the crowded troop ship, he walked into the teeth of the influenza pandemic that swept through Europe in 1917 like the 14th Century plague. It wasn't what we call "the flu" at all, it was the "flu" gone mad...a viral upper
respiratory infection that became a mortal form of encephalitis, killing almost everyone who got it. My father caught it right aawy but survived, depveloping an immunity that made it possible for him to minister to the flu patients that arrived in England to die. A lot of soldiers ended up in
Charlie Fogarty's wheelbarrow as he lugged their bodies to an incredible "morgue" on a fancy
estate near Dover...a warehouse that became an abbatoir...were doctors cut up the corpses in a desperate effort to find the cause of the disease.

In August of 1917 Charlie Fogarty was shipped across the channel, assigned as a medic to a British battalion to fight the Germans at the Third Battle of Ypres...a brutal four month bloodbath known to history as the Battle of Passchendaele.

The war had come down to a hopeless standoff. The genocides of the Somme and Verdun were behind them, but the soldiers huddled in a line of trenches that stretched from Belgium to Switzerland, knew that it all was going to happen again. A whistle would sound and they would climb the side of the trench and walk across the grim playground of the dead once again.

Within hours of his arrival outside Passchendaele, that whistle blew and Charlie was staggering forward through the harvest of bodies that had been scythed by German machine guns. Charlie, the medic,was trying to separate the wounded from the dead, wrapping the ripped flesh with his packet of four inch bandages and passing on to the next soldier lying in the summer mud.

In the end, nothing had been accomplished, the lines remained exactly the same and Charlie went back to the same trench and sat in his little hole where he had left his pouch of tobacco.

He sat there for four months.

In the fall and winter of 1917, the rules, the proprieties of warfare were being challenged. Millions of men had reached the limits of human endurance...and actual mutinies and anti-war strikes had broken out... especially among the French regiments. "Shell shock" entered the language and the insanity of it all...the endless inhumanity was everywhere.

On that Christmas Eve, 1917, Charlie was especially sad as he sat with his English comrades in his hole in his trench because he was 17 years old and Christmas for him was supposed to be a time of gifts and surprises. The temperature had dropped below freezing all along the front and it was gently snowing on the shell holes and unrecovered bodies in no-mans land.

Quite suddenly....as if it were some sort of divine intervention....Charlie heard a beautiful tenor voice singing "Stille Nacht, Heilige Nacht". Around the music it was completely quiet....the men were swept into a great pause....Charlie realized that the singing was coming from 100 yards away, from the German trenches.

As the song ended, lights began to appear on the horizon, Charlie and his comrades reached for their rifles until someone whispered loudly,

"My God in heaven! Look at that, they're lifting Christmas trees!"

Small balsam trees adorned with candles were being placed on the upper edges of the enemy trench...and a voice called out in German-tinted English,

"Where are your Christmas trees?"

The men began to move out of their holes, Charlie Fogarty climbed up the side of his trench, this time without his rifle. A dozen soldiers joined him walking across the battlefield towards the Christmas candles. Someone started singing "Adeste Fideles" and pretty soon everyone was lustily singing in the common Latin tongue.

They came from all sides and gathered inthe center of the cratered field. At first they were awkward, barely able to speak...but soon the voices were sprinkled with laughter and handshakes turned into embraces. Corporal Fogarty spotted a German medic wearing a red cross and they stood together for a few minutes without a word.

But is was the lifting of the Christmas trees that Charlie remembered most vividly. And it was the bobbing trees just above the trench line that alerted the officers.....who were appalled by the spectacle of fraternizing soldiers. Sharp orders to stand down were barked from both sides and the men retreated to their respectived ditches.

It was a great scandal. Forty men, including Charlie Fogarty, were called to courts martial to answer for their behavior. But the touching story appeared in the London Illustrated News and the charges were dropped.

Thirty years later, in 1947, I was playing my bugle at the American Legion Memorial Christmas Jamboree.

At the end of the concert...my father....my wonderful, sane father, Corporal Charlie Fogarty, walked over to our car, unstrapped the Christmas tree on the top and mysteriously lifted it high in the air.

December 7, 2007

giuliani's howlers

There are several aspects of the Giuliani "crime and statistics" dustup that haven't been mentioned yet. Crime did in fact decrease during his term as New York City Mayor but the reasons for the decrease are complex and generally not the result of Giuliani's actions. The number of NYPD cops was dramatically increased by Giuliani by 12,000....but, as reported in the Nov. 11, 2007 Times, 7000 of those "new" police officers were actually fully trained and operational cops from the Housing Authority and Transit Police who were merged into the NYPD. The wisdom of this move has been challenged by those who inisist that NYPD lost it's "neighborhood cops" strategy both in the projects and the subways. Further (and as far as I know this isn't out there yet)....the remaining 5000 increase is largely the result of Mayor David Dinkin's "Safte Streets, Safe City" program....the new classes of these cops (put in place by Dinkin's initiative) graduated and were deployed after Dinkins lost the election to Giuliani. Also, and this noone talks about, the number of crime-age juveniles in America decreased dramatically in the Giulinani Mayoral years. The baby boomer's kids grew past their 20's with the concomitant decrease in crime. Finally (and here Giuliani can be applauded and then booed) William J. Bratton took over the police force early on Giuliani's watch and according to veterans of the department,"got the old stuck battleship moving." Bratton was too successful (Time cover etc.) and the upstaged Giuliani eased him out of his job.