Category Archives: Political

VOTING? VOTING, YOU’RE TALKIN’ ABOUT VOTING?

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About four years ago, Sue, some friends and I spent two to three nights a week at a local telephone bank making calls for Barack Obama.  I’ll never forget election night when, after the last call had been made and the telephone center cleaned, a group of us walked to a nearby watering hole.  And damn near couldn’t get in the door as wall-to-wall people boisterously cheered the countdown to his victory.  Strangers hugged and kissed and there were more than a few wet eyes as hope became reality.  We had our first Black president, and one who promised the next four years were going to be different than the previous eight.  We believed we’d finally reached the end of the Reagan Revolution.

Not so.  The war in Afghanistan continues; Iraq is still a mess; innocent until proven guilty doesn’t count for people who the government defines as potential terrorists; indeterminate detention has become part of our daily life.  And all this and more with the president’s tacit (sometimes not so tacit) approval.

Not exactly the change I was hoping for.  Not even close.

I understand the obstacles the president faced.  Blue Dog Democrats who were stalwart against any significant reform.  An opposition party that made it clear from the jump they had only one agenda item—anybody but Obama in 2012.  And stuck to it no matter how many times the president played nicey-nicey.

I’m even aware of the positive changes Obama managed to press through despite opposition from both parties.  He…

Overhauled the food safety system;

Approved the Lily Ledbetter “Equal Pay” for women rule;

Ended “Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell” discrimination in the military;

Passed the Hate Crimes bill in Congress;

Pushed through the Affordable Health Care Act, outlawing denial of coverage for pre-existing conditions, extending until age 26 health care coverage of children under their parents’ plans while adding coverage for around three million more people.(Though a really long spit from Medicare for All, it actually is better than what we had before.)

Expanded the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) health care for children;

Pushed through a $789 economic stimulus bill that saved or created 3 million jobs and began task of repairing the nation’s infrastructure; (Again, way, way too little money to really jump start the economy.)

Established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and used a recess appointment to keep it on track in the face of GOP attempts to derail it;

Outmaneuvered GOP in naming two members of the National Labor Relations Board blocked by the Republicans in their attempt to shut down the NLRB;

Won two extensions of the debt ceiling and extensions of unemployment compensation in the face of Republican threats to shut down the U.S. government.  (Ask the unemployed how they felt about that one.)

And, in my mind, most importantly, appointed two progressive women to the U.S. Supreme Court including the first Latina.

Sadly, despite the above and more, he hasn’t stopped, or even slowed, the Reagan vision of America.  Nor has he sustained the enthusiasm and hope of his most ardent supporters–young people.  Which leads to the one overriding emotion he has engendered in me.

Fear.

Gore Vidal once said, “We live in a nation that has one political party with two right wings.”  That rings incredibly true.  But given our choices, it’s the Republican wing that scares the hell out of me.

I’ve watched the Supreme Court turn corporations into people, tear the Miranda decision to shreds, permit search and seizures without probable cause and, in general, turn back the clock as if the present and future just don’t matter.  This is what we have now and, with two judges deep into their eighties, I don’t want Mitt Romney picking potential nominees.  Not ever.

Still, I find myself unwilling to put the time and effort into Obama’s re-election and my friends feel the same.  While I’m guessing most progressives will probably drag themselves to the polls and vote, it might not be enough to keep Republican hands off the driving wheels of all three branches.

More fear.  It may all come down to our younger adults.  Will they vote for Obama given their disappointments?   Right now, I ain’t betting rent.

So what’s a progressive to do?  Sit still, vote, and pray that we’re not looking at a Republican horror show at the end of the day?  Drag our asses to the phone banks?  Somehow I don’t think that idea is really gonna be enough this time.  Which leaves progressives with the imperative to talk to those young adults.  Without their willingness to vote for Obama (holding their noses, if need be) we’re gonna be catapulted back in time in ways that will annihilate what little progress we’ve made.

I don’t want corporations to be ”people.” I don’t want a larger net fishing for those who DWB (Drive While Black—and, now Brown as well) I don’t want Arizona to lead the nation into greater and more pervasive racism.  I don’t want the rich to grow richer while the poor grow poorer and the middle class slides down the greased economic pole.  I want to retain all that remains of our civil liberties and the First Amendment.  I don’t want back-alley abortions.

So yeah, I’m gonna vote.  And I’m gonna talk to every young adult I can about voting too.

As far as canvassing and calls, I’m not sure.  Probably depends upon how much more frightened I am as we approach November.

And I’m plenty scared now.

“The most common way people give up their power is by thinking they don’t have any.” Alice Walker

 

POETRY SPEAKS

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I’m the last person to write about the quality of anyone’s poetry, though I did go through my e.e. cummings, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Hughes, Bukowski, and Emily Dickinson phase many, many years ago. Still, every once in a while a poem, or even a snippet of one whacks me upside the head.

That’s what happened the other night.  Went to see Superior Donuts at the Lyric Stage Company in Boston. (http://www.lyricstage.com/)  In the front of the playbill, the poet Countee Cullen was quoted:

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

At first I naturally applied the words to the play’s action and meaning.  The bottled-up pain each of the characters carried–the bottled-up hurt, desperation and hidden hopes each of us carry.

Then I flashed on a recent post (three before this one called WHERE EVERYBODY KNOWS YOUR NAME–01/23/2012) where I wrote about my concern for the Third World and the tragedies people living there face every day of their lives.  Do they harbor “seeds?”  Do they dream of a time with a better life?  A time with more?  Then I looked up Countee Cullen’s life and decided that Third Worlders must.  Cullen obviously had a different kind of struggle, a Black man born in 1903, abandoned by his mother, orphaned at nine when his grandmother died, became a recognized poet whose work lives on to this day.  That could not have occurred without the man clinging to his ‘agonizing seeds.’

Many of us Progressives who have more than either Cullen or people in the Third World, still live with hearts that bleed plenty–for ourselves and our times.

Many of my friends believe that we as a nation have no place to slide except down.  They see our economy as buttressed by smoke and mirrors, the hopes we held in the 60s shattered, the dystopian violence depicted in movies and television either a reflection of what is or a harbinger of what’s to come.  That sooner rather than later the ‘haves’ will have completely, swallowing those that don’t–even the middle class.

I understand their thinking.  It’s the part of my heart that “bleeds.”  But I prefer tending to my “agonizing seeds.”

I believe our world can and will become a better place for those with less.  It’s happened before.  The Great Depression were cataclysmic years where most people had little in which to hope.  Yet here we are, economically and even culturally better off.  True, the basic power paradigm of the country remained the same, still I doubt you’d find too many people who preferred living in the 1930s than the late 40s, early 50s.

It might be more difficult now to tend our “agonizing seeds.”  We are no longer isolated from the rest of the world, in fact, so closely intertwined with other nations that a troubled European economy has the potential to tsunami us.  And even with these interlocks we continue to consistently ignore or abuse countries that have the greatest needs.

Only, what if we turned the preceding paragraph on its head?  What if we take the word ‘difficult’ and replace it with ‘possible?’

Yes, it’s a gargantuan task.  Progressives live in a society that still rejects evolution, censors textbooks, continues its institutional racism (despite a Black president), and shovels money to the rich and powerful at a ferocious rate of speed.

But has there been a better time to realign the paradigm?   Certainly the Internet brings the people of the world together–not simply governments.  Just look at its effect upon the course of the Arab Spring or The Occupy Movement.  Change is in the air.  The only question is what kind of change will it be–floating with Greenpeace boats or…

And when Progressives put our voices together and no longer allow minor ideological differences to keep us apart, to speak to those who, up until now, we have ignored, this country will change for the better.  And progressive change here means change throughout the world.

So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

We need not simply “tend to our agonizing seeds.”  It’s time to plant.  We need not “hide the heart that bleeds,” but show it to everyone we can.  Each of us to do and say who we are, what we believe in.

It’s too late in the day to suffer in silence.

Cory Booker: Enthusiasm doesn’t come by chance, it is generated by choice.

 

Acid In The Water Supply

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I’m not talking battery acid, toxins, or grapefruit juice.  I’m talking psychedelics here.  And I’ve long believed that every now and then, it’s been slipped into D.C.’s water supply.

The notion first hit while I watched the Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nomination hearings.  Wasn’t surprised he was ultimately nominated (despite my respect and belief in Anita Hill), but when senator after senator took to network television to use their senatorial, stentorian tones to speechify about “pubic hairs on coke cans” and Long Dong Silver over and over again there was simply no rational explanation why they would do that to themselves.  Even Democrats–especially in prime time.  Blew my mind.  The only thing I never understood was why there’s no Best of the Hearings video.  It would sell more than all the Spring Break movies combined.

There was only one explanation; acid in the water supply.

It happened again when the House of Representatives decided to hold impeachment hearings against Bill Clinton.  I’ve never been a real fan of Big Bill, but watching Congress go through months focused on blowjobs, dicks that lean to the left and despoiled dresses while ignoring issues that actually had something to do with governing, locked and loaded my belief that D.C. had a monopoly on LSD.

Well, I was wrong.  Some subversive brought the acid to Florida.

On October 8, 2011, The Boston Globe reported that a Florida legislator, Representative Ritch Workman, has introduced a bill to repeal a ban on “Dwarf-tossing.”

For those unfamiliar with the term or game, it apparently consists of dressing Little People into light weight protective gear so men in bars can take turns seeing who can throw them the farthest.  Although Representative Workman (who has the right name) won’t call his legislation a “jobs bill,” he does make the point that lifting the ban may put a few people to work.  According to the Globe, although Workman agrees that the practice is “offensive” and “stupid,” he thinks the ban keeps willing projectiles from gainful employment.  “If this is a job they want and people would pay to see it or participate in it, why in the world would we prohibit it?”

Now before my Ron and Rand Paul friends jump to Workman’s defense, let me explain why this is an acid-in-the-water-supply proposal.  I mean, The Right likes to talk about slippery slopes with regard to gun laws, let’s look at the grade of slope here.

Why not “whack a head?”  Folks of any height can wear a protective helmet and be gainfully employed, popping up from one side of the bar while those on the other side try to beam them with hammers.

Why not “water sports?”  I guarantee there’s a larger audience for that than Dwarf-tossing.  I mean if two consenting adults want to tinkle on each other in a public setting for pay, why deny them the right to earn a living?

Why not “bestiality?”  It’s certainly not unheard of in the U.S., so why shouldn’t someone get paid if there are people who want to watch?  Not exactly a “jobs bill,” but it could put a few good men and women to work.  Actually none of these proposals, including Dwarf-tossing are gender specific.

Worse, from where I sit, damn near every Republican has been sipping the acid.  Isn’t the issue to find jobs for Little People and “the little people” of our country rather than giving more money to the rich who already have jobs or don’t need them?  Then they call those folks, “job creators,” rather than “lay-offers,” which they’ve actually been doing to protect their own wealth and profits.

But hey, I’ve used acid and I understand how easy it is to come up with great ideas while you’re tripping.  Hell, a group of us once spent an entire evening trying to enlist Hubert Humphrey’s wife to talk him into moving in with us for a month so he could better understand what young people were thinking.

Problem here, these aren’t young people tripping.  These are people in power, who create laws, regulate industries, eviscerate environmental laws, and generally make it more, not less, difficult for people to get by.  And damn near impossible for poor people to have anything but a shadow life.

So I say to those reps in Florida who will eventually vote on Dwarf-tossing–STOP DRINKING THE FUCKING WATER!

I understand that Amerika has a fascination for circuses, but let’s try to keep the freak shows under the Big Top.

This land is your land and this land is my land, sure, but the world is run by those that never listen to music anyway. Bob Dylan

Tea-Bagging Does Not A Party Make (Again)

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Since I’m drowning in work this week I’ve decided it’s okay to republish one of my earlier posts. (Y’all were warned this might happen.  From this page to god’s ear I’ll be home in time to write a fresh post for next week.)  After reviewing what I’ve written since I began my website, I chose this piece.  Partially because Rick Perry’s rocket to the top of the Republican’s list of presidential candidates and partially the numbers that show President Obama’s favorability ratings in the dumpster.  But more importantly, it touches on themes I want to write about in the future.  That is, the necessity of Progressives to stop talking to each other and start thinking about ways to reach across the divide.  So, for your reading pleasure-or displeasure–the following:

There are plenty of labels people hang on the Tea Party:  patriots, idiots, people who want to stop the insanity, people who are insane, rednecks, and racists, just for starters.  Then there was an anonymous comment I read online: “Tea Party is just a nice way of saying KKK.”

Would that it were so simple. The KKK made no bones about their public hatred of Blacks.  They were founded and acted on tenets of white supremacy, and weren’t the least bit shy about using terrorism to make their beliefs crystal clear.

Obviously the Tea Party hasn’t jumped into lynchings.  But from where I sit, its brand of racism is, in some ways, far more insidious because Tea Party followers are unable (or unwilling) to perceive that much of the underpinnings of their philosophy is indeed racist. That is, their demands to obliterate safety nets that have been in place since Roosevelt and Johnson in the name of small government–non progressive tax programs (flat tax), limitations on growth in federal spending, etc–would result in worsening the already lousy living conditions for countless people of color and the poor of every hue.  The TPers’ obliviousness, their refusal to even acknowledge the logical consequences of their programs and philosophy, trades racist rhetoric for racist policy results, real lynchings for slowly twisting in the wind.

Worse, The Tea Party movement is a natural outgrowth of our domestic policies and ideologies.  And Progressives miss the point when they froth at the mouth about the Palins, Rands, and Bachmans–as foolish and detestable as their thinking might be.  The Tea Party is simply a naked distillation of historical and modern political thinking about race, poverty, taxes, and government.

LET’S START WITH RACE:

It’s not surprising the TPers have landed where they are.  How many decades have Republicans and “New Democrats” objected to Affirmative Action, citing time after time that we now live in a country that has a “level playing field.”  Or, both parties raising the specter of Welfare Queens, which conjures up big Black women living high on the hog without a care in the world.

This wasn’t begun by TPers but from the Reagan Revolution that Bill Clinton did nothing to stop or undo.  In fact, he encouraged the myths through his program “to end welfare as we know it.” (Which in reality meant a huge jump in the prison population of women between the ages of 18-25 for non-violent crimes.  With or without welfare, people need to survive).  And if Democrats are honest about it, Clinton was more than willing to suspend civil liberties to invade Cabrini Green, a non-white housing project in Chicago.

So please let’s drop the pretense that somehow the TPers are more racist than traditional politicians who, in the face of institutional and individual racism, call our society’s opportunities equal for all.  If anything, the TPers are more sincere in their mistaken beliefs than the regular pols, who actually know the truth but pander to the make-believe for political gain.

TAXES:

Ahh, taxes.  Another Tea Party inheritance.  Prop This, Prop That, and trickle-down economics have been a mainstay of the Republican Party and, in their own way, post Reagan Democrats who act as if taxes have no relationship whatsoever to the betterment of people’s lives.  I’m not suggesting there isn’t government waste.  And I certainly have no truck with where a significant portion of our taxes go.  But to eviscerate the idea of taxes, to turn the word into an obscenity has its roots much farther back than the TPers, who have come by this “no taxes” mantra via decades of politically professed hatred of government.

But leaving aside the TPers most reactionary agendas, there are aspects of their movement that parallel Progressive thought.  The social libertarianism to drive government out of our bedrooms is something Progressives have always desired.  And let’s not discount the TP’s beliefs about our foreign interventions–something with which Progressives often agree.

I believe Progressives need to champion the belief that government has the potential to enhance people’s lives.  That government is a social compact between all that live here and the definition of that compact needs relentless work.  Something Progressives haven’t done effectively for decades.  We seemed to take too many of our truths for granted, above discussion with those with whom we disagree.  But we were the only ones who stopped talking, stopped acting and look what’s happened with issues like a woman’s right to choose, institutional racism, social responsibility–hell, even evolution.  We need to recapture lost ground–ground that has allowed the TPers to plant their flag.

We need to trumpet that race is not irrelevant, that poverty exists beyond most American’s wildest dreams, and that it exists because of our social structure, not because of an individual’s own doing.  We need to fight about how taxes are spent, notwhether they should exist.

Our lack of organization, our inability to reach out and connect with people who don’t share our beliefs, our preference to react rather than act, our waste of time, ad homonym name calling, and especially our blindness to the real effects of the Reagan Revolution helped create space for the Tea Party.

As much as I hate to say it, most of them are pretty sincere in what they believe.  And getting rid of their political ideology is gonna be much more difficult than comparing them to the KKK or deriding their “stupidity” and “ignorance.”

We live in a political and cultural crossfire.  Some call it Red versus Blue.  Some call it North versus South.  Some call it Conservative versus Liberal.

I call it Truth versus Myth.  Our war isn’t against the Tea Party, but against the propagation of the myths that have infected our entire society–for it is these myths which aided and abetted the Tea Party’s creation.

Mind Bumps

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I recently met (live) Sherri Frank Mazzotta, with whom I’ve been chatting about writing via the Internet.  As yet unpublished, she is incredibly accomplished and passionate about of all kinds of books and different styles of writing.  As much as I enjoy the Internet, email, and all the people I meet in cyberspace, I guess I’m the age where “there’s nothing like the real thing.”  We spent hours comfortably talking, not only about books, but our lives and how we got to where we are.  A cool do.

One question Sherri asked me is what it’s like to come up with an idea for every week’s post.  My response: nerve-wracking.  From the moment Monday passes, there’s a part of me anxious about whether a new subject will pop.  And the game has to come to me.  If I sit down to conjure up an idea it’s like telling someone to “be funny.”  Just doesn’t work.

This week it’s multiple “nexts” since no single thing jumped out front.  But over this week, like all others, I do stuff, ideas flit in (and most often out), some news report or column or cartoon catches my eye.

Let’s forget the straw poll in Iowa.  Crazies only interested me when I worked as a therapist.  So one of the most important things that occurred this week was my softball team (Jah Energy) won its one-or-done playoff game against the Loan Sharks.  It was a wet one; took place in a steady shower.  The game had been rained out twice before and there were no more permit dates for a makeup.  Maybe not on dry land, but ironically we were better than the Sharks in the water.

Now we play the first place team for two out of three beginning tomorrow evening—weather permitting.  Not gonna be easy.  Ron’s Auto consists of farbissina players, both men and women.  People who Lenny Bruce would describe as the type who wear wool suits with no underwear.  Needless to say, we are major underdogs.  I guess it will make winning that much sweeter–if we win.  I’ll let you know.

Also, something that caught my eye this week was a letter to the New York Times by Stephen Sondheim (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/10/stephen-sondheim-takes-issue-with-plan-for-revamped-porgy-and-bess/) that tore Diane Paulus and Pulitzer Prize winner and McArthur Genius award recipient, playwright Suzan-Lori Parks new assholes for their re-interpretation of Porgy and Bess.  Paulus is the Artistic Director for American Repertory Theater, a prestigious theater company connected to Harvard University.  My ticket isn’t until the end of September, but what I find interesting is:

Diane Paulus.  Who receives an enormous amount of shit for her productions while, at the same time, filling seats with a large number of people who rarely, if ever, attend theater of any kind.  I understand why critics often have trouble with her work.  When you take Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, turn it into a disco, replete with roller blades and semi-nude actors dancing up a storm with the audience and call it The Donkey Show, it’s easy to understand why traditionalists have a difficult time seeing it as theater despite having its run extended for months.

Or when she invited the British Theater Company Punchdrunk to use an abandoned local school and turn Macbeth into Sleep No More, a production where all ticket holders wore masks to become anonymous as they wandered through the building from room to room where different scenes were played out.  Paulus caught it for that one too—Which also sold out and went on to be a must-have ticket in New York.

It’s odd that I find myself defending over-the-top theater since my favorite playwrights are Eugene O’Neill, Tom Stoppard, Arthur Miller and similar writers—as well as traditionally performed Shakespeare.  But there’s something to be said for introducing theater to a brand new audience and introducing it in a way we can all relax and have fun with.  Hats off to Diane Paulus for fucking with A.R.T.’s traditions and succeeding—despite the avalanche of criticism.  Me, I’m looking forward to Porgy And Bess.

This week I also found out we are definitely going to trial on September 8th in that same unnamed Midwestern state for the second of our two malpractice cases.  The defendant refuses to negotiate or mediate and I expect them to stay their course.  It’s a complicated case in a very conservative county where the defendant’s employer has their hands in damn near everything.

So it’s yet another David versus Goliath; this time Goliath has all the weapons except truth.  It will be interesting to see whether truth can win.  It often doesn’t in our civil court system where clout has a way of determining judicial decisions throughout a trial.  We can only hope a jury is able to separate the wheat from the chaff.  They’ve had practice since a good many of them will probably be farmers.  Again I’ll try to do frequent posts on the day-to-day once the trial begins.

And finally, my friend and artist, Michael Smith (check him out by clicking his links on my website’s ‘links’ page) came by Sunday morning to do a photo shoot of the cover for my digitalized version of Still Among The Living.  Spent a fair amount of time Saturday hunting for my old Bakelite radios and deco objects and art.  And finding someone with a gun permit and gun to bring to the “shoot.”

Well, that was my week.  How was yours?

“Life is 10% of what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.” – John Maxwell