Speaks for itself

May he be one of millions

So my brother is a Forward-er. Not one of those, the mostly related-by-marriage who send me straight to Snopes with skyrocketing blood pressure, or at least who did until they tired of chastising Reply Alls. Even when he was a Republican, he was smarter than that. Instead, along with the the links and the occasional photos of food--can't explain that one, not gonna try--he sends more direct glimpses into his life. Today I got a letter from his company's president, explaining cutbacks and announcing layoffs. My brother's note at the top? "Election can't come soon enough."

45 minutes of porn

That's what I just saw on the telly. Pretty disappointed in the twangy after song, but you have to appeal to the south.

Tonight

I tell the stories all the time. I tell them matter-of-factly, as the only white person in the room. I tell them because history matters, and context, and if these brown and black kids think things are bad now, well. They have no idea. I liked to think I told the stories for an appreciation of how far we'd come and how far we have to go-- such a good liberal, don'tcha know. But considering how hard this retelling of the facts and the figures and bits of history that of course I already know hit me, well. I didn't really have any idea.

This is a little long, but you should read it and be better for it. Tonight.

Johnson’s Dream, Obama’s Speech
By ROBERT A. CARO

AS I watch Barack Obama’s speech to the Democratic convention tonight, I will be remembering another speech: the one that made Martin Luther King cry. And I will be thinking: Mr. Obama’s speech — and in a way his whole candidacy — might not have been possible had that other speech not been given.

That speech was President Lyndon Johnson’s address to Congress in 1965 announcing that he was about to introduce a voting rights act, and in some respects Mr. Obama’s candidacy is the climax — at least thus far — of a movement based not only on the sacrifices and heroism of the Rev. Dr. King and generations of black fighters for civil rights but also on the political genius of Lyndon Baines Johnson, who as it happens was born 100 years ago yesterday.

When, on the night of March 15, 1965, the long motorcade drove away from the White House, heading for Capitol Hill, where President Johnson would give his speech to a joint session of Congress, pickets were standing outside the gates, as they had been for weeks, and as the presidential limousine passed, they were singing the same song that was being sung that week in Selma, Ala.: “We Shall Overcome.” They were singing it in defiance of Johnson, because they didn’t trust him.

They had reasons not to trust him.


In March 1965, black Americans in the 11 Southern states were still largely unable to vote. When they tried to register, they faced not only questions impossible to answer — like the infamous “how many bubbles in a bar of soap?” — but also the humiliation of trying to answer them in front of registrars who didn’t bother to conceal their scorn. Out of six million blacks old enough to vote in those 11 states in 1965, only a small percentage — 27 percent in Georgia, 19 percent in Alabama, 6 percent in Mississippi — were registered.

What’s more, those who were registered faced not only beatings and worse but economic retaliation as well if they tried to actually cast a ballot. Black men who registered might be told by their employer that they no longer had a job; black farmers who went to the bank to renew their annual “crop loan” were turned down, and lost their farms. Some, as I have written, “had to load their wives and children into their rundown cars and drive away, sometimes with no place to go.” So the number of black men and women in the South who actually cast a vote was far smaller than the number registered; in no way were black Americans realizing their political potential.

More important, many civil rights leaders felt that President Johnson wasn’t helping them nearly as much as he could have — and that in fact he never had. He had passed a civil rights bill in 1964, but it hadn’t been a voting rights bill.
And they remembered his record, a long record. It was not merely that during his first 20 years, 1937 through 1956, in the House and Senate, he had voted against every civil rights bill — even bills aimed at ending lynching.

Leaders of the civil rights movement who had watched their bills die, year after year, in Congress — not a single civil rights bill had been enacted since 1870 — knew that Johnson had been not merely a voter but a strategist against civil rights, a tactician so successful that Richard Russell of Georgia, the leader of the Senate’s mighty “Southern caucus,” had raised him to power in the Senate, had, in fact, made him his anointed successor as the South’s legislative leader, the young hope of the elderly Southern senators in their desperate battle to maintain racial segregation.

In 1956, by which time Lyndon Johnson was majority leader, he devised and carried out the strategy that had not only crushed a civil rights bill in the Senate by a majority greater than ever before, but had done so in a way that humiliated, in a particularly vicious manner, the liberal senator who refused to bow to his wishes, Paul Douglas of Illinois.

In 1957 he had engineered the passage of a civil rights bill. The mere fact of its passage in the face of Southern senatorial power — it was the first civil rights bill to be enacted in 87 years — made it a significant benchmark in the history of American government, and the guile and determination with which Johnson drove it to passage made it a landmark of legislative mastery as well. But he was forced to weaken it to get it through, and liberals, not understanding the obstacles he had surmounted, blamed him for not making it stronger.

Some civil rights leaders who had been talking to Lyndon Johnson since he became president were now, by the spring of 1965, convinced of his good faith, but most were not, and the mass of the movement, symbolized by those protesters outside the White House gates, still distrusted him.
•
Men and women who knew Lyndon Johnson, however, felt there was another element to the story. They included the Mexican-American children of impoverished migrant workers he had taught as a 21-year-old schoolteacher in the little town of Cotulla, Tex.; to the ends of their lives they would talk about how hard he had worked to teach and inspire them. “He used to tell us this country was so free that anyone could become president who was willing to work hard enough,” one student said.
Others remember what one calls the story about the “little baby in the cradle.” As one student recalled, “He would tell us that one day we might say the baby would be a teacher. Maybe the next day we’d say the baby would be a doctor. And one day we might say the baby — any baby — might grow up to be president of the United States.”
His former students weren’t alone. Men and women at Georgetown dinner tables were also convinced of the sincerity of Johnson’s intentions. “I remember at this dinner party, Johnson talking about teaching the Mexican-American kids in Cotulla, and his frustration that they had no books,” recalls Bethine Church, the wife of Senator Frank Church of Idaho. “I remember it as one of the most passionate evenings I’ve ever spent.”

These men and women felt Johnson truly wanted to help poor people and particularly people of color, and that he was held back only by his ambition: his desire to be president, and because he was a senator from a Southern state. But when, in 1957, ambition and compassion were finally pointing in the same direction — when he realized that he would never become president unless he removed the “magnolia scent” of the South — he set out to pass a civil rights bill, he did it with a passion that showed how deeply he believed in what he was doing.

The bill he got was the weak one, and civil rights leaders blamed him because the advances it made were meager. Only a week before the March 1965 speech, Dr. King had said that at the rate voter registration was going, it would take 135 years before even half the blacks in Mississippi were registered. And as the limousines were pulling through the gates that night in March, the protesters were singing “We Shall Overcome,” as if to tell Lyndon Johnson, we’ll do it without you.
But they didn’t have to.

When Johnson stepped to the lectern on Capitol Hill that night, he adopted the great anthem of the civil rights movement as his own.
“Even if we pass this bill,” he said, “the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life.”
And, Lyndon Johnson said, “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it is all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.”
He paused, and then he said, “And we shall overcome.”
Martin Luther King was watching the speech at the home of a family in Selma with some of his aides, none of whom had ever, during all the hard years, seen Dr. King cry. But Lyndon Johnson said, “We shall overcome” — and they saw him cry then.
And there was another indication of the power of that speech. When the motorcade returned to the White House, the protesters were gone.
•
Another significant moment had occurred in the Capitol after the speech, as Johnson was coming down the aisle accepting congratulations.

It wasn’t just congratulations he wanted. One of the congressmen on the aisle was Emanuel Celler, the 76-year-old chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, which handled civil rights legislation. Long a rights champion but now an elderly man, Celler said he would start hearings on the bill the following week, but “I can’t push that committee or it might get out of hand.”

Suddenly, Johnson wasn’t smiling. His eyes narrowed and his face turned cold. He was still shaking Celler’s hand, but with his other hand he was jabbing at the old man. “Start them this week, Manny,” he said. “And hold night sessions, too.”
Celler did. The heroism of the march at Selma, the heroism all across the South, the almost unbelievable bravery of black men and women — and children, so many children — who marched, and were beaten, and marched again, for the right to vote, created the rising tide of national feeling behind the passage of civil rights legislation, the legislation not only of 1965 but of 1964 and 1957. That feeling did so much to make the legislation possible. It has taken me scores of pages in my books to try to describe that heroism, and all of them inadequate. But it also took Lyndon Johnson, whom the black leader James Farmer, sitting in the Oval Office, heard “cajoling, threatening, everything else, whatever was necessary” to get the 1965 bill passed and who, with his legislative genius and savage will, broke, piece by piece, in 1957 and 1964 and 1965, the long unbreakable power of the Southern bloc.

“Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans,” I have written, “but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.”

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.”

Robert A. Caro, who has won Pulitzer Prizes for his biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson, is at work on the fourth and final volume of his Johnson biography.

Because or ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME?

Example 8612 of why Facebook "Friends" are not necessarily real friends. In real life, nobody asks me, "You're a Democrat?!" And yet. Oh, Wendy and I were real life friends, back in the day. But every since our high school reunion we just play stupid word games and have quick chatty conversations that usually mention vodka and work and kids and promises to get together (I make them, she breaks them--13 months and counting). Nothing of any consequence, until I mentioned the girl went up to see Obama. And then the, "What?" and the, "Why?"

Along with pointing out to her that having a toddler and a teenager at the same time must be Republican karma, I thought Jim Leach provided the makings of an excellent reply:

From The Boston Globe
courtesy of Truthout.org
August 27, 2008

THE BEST way to watch a political convention is on C-Span. That way Americans can make their own judgments unfiltered, without being told what to think by the nattering nabobs of TV commentary. The latest "narrative" making its way around the Democratic convention here is that the Obama campaign hasn't learned the lesson of John Kerry's 2004 convention, in which the nominee failed to directly attack President Bush. CNN commentator Soledad O'Brien even asked late Monday night whether Michelle Obama's introductory speech shouldn't have been tougher on the Republicans.

Of course, if the early days of the convention had presented a more negative tone, the talking heads would be complaining that the Democrats can only say what they are against, not what they are for.

Had the commentators not been so busy filling airspace and paid closer attention to what was happening on the podium, they might have had a different take. On Monday a speech by former Representative Jim Leach, an Iowa Republican, ably set the framework for his own party's failings, besides delivering a bipartisan endorsement of Barack Obama. His address wasn't electrifying TV, but it was a more articulate critique of the Republicans - and from a former loyalist, too - than many Democrats have mustered.

More in sorrow than in anger, Leach described how the Republican Party has abandoned its core principles. "The party that once emphasized individual rights has gravitated in recent years toward regulating values," he said. "The party of military responsibility has taken us into a war with a country that did not attack us."

The litany went on: The party that championed arms control had undermined international treaties from the nuclear test ban to global warming. The party that put the "conservative" into conservation had become antienvironmentalist. And "the party historically anchored in fiscal restraint has nearly doubled the national debt, squandering our precious resources in an undisciplined and unprecedented effort to finance a war with tax cuts."

He didn't have to add that the party of Lincoln had jettisoned its historic commitment to civil rights with a cynical strategy to win the white Southern vote.

In a way, the power of Leach's criticism was precisely in its understatement. There may be more scathing critiques of the Republicans and John McCain to come - for example, when Obama's running mate, Senator Joe Biden, speaks to the convention tonight. But there is unlikely to be anything more devastatingly true

A First

Hillary Clinton just gave me goosebumps. Maybe there's hope yet.

Contact

Keystrokes and pixels. Her phone to my inbox. Casually transmitted with the flick of a thumb. Three months ago, a daytime SOS still would have meant a detention. Now it's a lifeline cast out with a click of Send. A secret cry from a mostly-grown girl with nowhere much to turn. That much is clear since she's coming to me now that the doctors have told her dying mother, "Sorry, that's all we can do."

I stare at the message, beg it to reconsider. Re-read and hope to find some less desperate news. No luck. Now what. How do I respond to this burdened child, who may be the one--who will almost certainly be the one--to explain to her sister that they are about to lose their mother? My mind is empty and my fingers are still and the time stamp on her note is aging.

I click across windows, rearrange virtual letters and half-formed thoughts, tell a friend. Take advantage of my luxury long as I dare. Come back and wade in with a wish and a prayer. I don't know what to say; I say it. The reply is near instantaneous.

And then it's a dozen messages. Trying to ask but not pry, suggest. Be some kind of comfort. Offer or guide. A distraction. Be whatever it could possibly be that would lead her to my name in that phone. We don't have that much history. Just enough, maybe. A contact. A chance. A connection.

The bitter end

While my blogmate was dancing in the dark at a Bruce Springsteen concert, I was drafting a fantasy football juggernaut. Meanwhile, my former college professor was decomposing in an Iowa City park. She wins this Saturday night, but I'll gladly take the silver.

Type rest of the post here

One more for the road

Iowa--Ames, Iowa City, Waterloo. Los Angeles, San Francisco, Austin, Brooklyn, Jersey, Indianapolis. Chicago. France. Italy. Winnipeg. Washington, D. C. Our new friends from Toronto. And that's without even trying, just the hometowns of the fans who happened to be right near us, on the floor or in line. I'd almost swear besides the local sports columnist, Tony LaRussa, and Mrs. Bob Costas my friends and I were the only locals there--and we all live in Illinois. Such is the power of Bruce. Especially at the end of the tour, maybe, especially when the rumors are flying. Maybe Clarence is not well, maybe Max will be tied down with Conan. Maybe things are about to change forever. Or, rather, change some more, given the passing of Danny. Regardless, how remarkable to be surrounded by people from everywhere, all in town to see a band. But not just any band, but the heart stoppin', pants droppin', earth shakin' love makin', Viagra takin', legendary... E STREET BAND. And though we were quite late to this party, now having crashed it, we totally get it, and can't believe there's not a time machine to be found. Ah, well. It ain't over yet. And at least one of us is in Kansas City, crashing with folks from Toronto, sitting with their friends from Ames.

The Boss

So that's how it got started, with a song that hadn't been played in concert--according to those who know such things, and believe me, there are plenty who know--since August 23, 1975: how's that for symmetry? And then 3 hours and 15 minutes later--29 songs, including a nine song encore--including three after the song that's always last, except when it's not--it was over. Except for the three hours we subsequently spent with a couple of his traveling fans. Amazing's not even the word. And now I've got a ticketbastard page open for tonight's show in KC. I mean, I could almost make it home in time to get up for work.

I choose to take this as a sign

My brother, whom I know has at least one Bush vote to account for, and my daughter and the girlfriend are sitting on the curb in front of the (incredibly cool, I swear) Lincoln museum in Springfield. They're waiting to catch a view and a listen of Obama on a Jumbotron screen because the line to get in front of the Old Capitol was fourteen blocks long. Of course, it was probably mostly backed up because--this just in via text message--security was making people throw away the weapon-like (NOT) buttons they'd just purchased, but still. Way to turn out, Illinois. And way to go, little brother.

from the backseat

"Both hands on the wheel!"

A little voice, persistent. Perceptive. And a little paranoid, if I might add. No harm had ever come. But whenever she noticed--and how could she notice, from back there? The command would repeatedly come. She's always been one for rules. So I'd slide my hands up from their lackadaisical grip until the pattern inevitably repeated.

At some point she gave up, lost interest, became preoccupied with other things. She still sits back there, though she's as big as some grown-ups. It's just safer, it's just habit, though if she asked to move, I'd let her. Probably. Maybe. Because if she sat beside me, I'd never see her in the rearview, watching herself sing my music. I'd never get what I got tonight:

I sneak glances as I drive across town, and my grin becomes laughter with the pure pleasure. She hears me and trails off.

"What?" she half insists, half giggles, though she knows exactly. Chin up and smiling, she starts to explain, "I lip-synch in the mirror in my room to my 80s CD." There's no self-consciousness in her. Still smiling, I look back in the mirror, shrug, turn the song up a little louder. I drive on and we sing it together: "You can't start a fire without a spark."

I think this about says it, don't you?

Procrastination

Goodness I have lots to do. With school about to start, at home and at work, and football season on the horizon, I should be fired up and ready to go. But I'm not. Well, I'm fired up, but my readiness is questionable.

I don't mean to make excuses, but the flood changed everything. I wasn't even a victim, but we're all affected. These are desperate times. I take no solace in the misery of others, but I'm obviously not alone.

I don't remember most of my college professors, but one of the few that I do has had a rougher summer than most. Allegations of gropes for grades recently became public and the downward spiral began.

He's currently missing with a high powered rifle. His request for a handgun was denied by the sheriff, but apparently no permit is required for a long gun. Go figure.

God save us.

Bad math

Rules are rules, and if they are not followed, well. I have no one else to blame. You'd think by now I'd remember the consequence of not having the music up loud enough in the car: first one thought creeps in, and then another, and before I realize what doomed path I'm on, I've calculated that my first students, seventh graders from out on the prairie, must be nearly thirty! Twenty-nine at least. Good lord. Good grief! And to think I've gone more than a year without having a seizure.

Empirical Proof of Osmosis

"So I'm kind of surprised your uncle wanted to go." My brother is going to take my daughter to see Obama announce his running mate, whatever second or third choice he--surely not she--may be. This outing was totally his idea.

"I know. I didn't think he was political." The sixth grader is surprisingly excited to go see some living history, despite the hour or so in the car.

"Well, for a while there he thought he was a Republican." In my family, akin to saying, "he thought he was from Mars."

"I guess he just realized what is really going on."

A perk

Honestly we don't even know each other's names. There is the one who I got to know over the story of my teen mother, the one who was my sister in endless Springtime bronchitis, the one who envies my flip-flops now that she's back wearing her uniform shoes, the one whose eyes narrowed and whose lips pursed when she realized my students were "them"--well, never mind about her--the cafeteria ladies are my mid-day grown-up company, and I really am quite fond. Mostly we do each other the favor of being someone to talk to besides a fifteen year-old punk kid. In a building full of a thousand teenagers, that's a special gift. But perhaps not as special as what one of the Ladies did for me today. I was wandering through the stations, trying to find something tolerable, when she gestured at the "Chicken" Rings, that totally natural part of every chicken that was my favorite crappy lunch until they went and ruined it by trying to make it more healthy-- an especially futile gesture considering they can't possibly even be meat. (Though the soy content is probably redeeming.)

"They're baked," she sighed. We've had this conversation before. I even agreed to complain to her boss, in a show of aggrieved employee solidarity. Baked "Chicken" Rings are a literally pale imitation, an affront to junk food everywhere. And while they may not literally taste like crap, they certainly have the same texture.

"I know," I moped, as I contemplated my options.

But then--but then--this was so exciting--my best lunch lady friend broke the rules and threw some in the fryer! "Don't tell the kids," she warned, giggling.

"Are you kidding? This is the best lunch ever. You just made my day!" Life may not always be sweet, but sometimes it is indeed artery-clogging good.

The domino effect

Joe Biden for vice president? You don't say. He was my pick for secretary of state, but hopefully there's someone better, I hope.

I naively had the bulk of the cabinet filled out months ago. Before I knew John Edwards was a fraud. Even still, I think he'd make a kick-ass attorney general. New Mexico's Bill Richardson was my VP, but he doesn't seem to be in the picture. Come to think of it, he'd be good at secretary of state.

And John Edwards would still make a kick-ass attorney general.

Paperless society, my ass

Then again, one of them is a paycheck.

One girl, two stories.

"They told me again today not to let anyone in the halls." This is the new attendance secretary, apologizing again for doing her job, for asking that young family to wait on the couches.

"Oh, no. I think that's a good idea, actually. I'm not trying to subvert. I'm just saying someone eventually will come and be surprised at the new rules. Just call and let me know. But I'm not expecting anyone. Sooner or later, probably. Who knows."

I cut through the commons, unlock my door. I sit down at my desk, and the phone rings.

"Are you serious?" I get up and re-lock my classroom.

At the door to the attendance office is a teenager bearing flowers and a box of dollar-store tissues. She knows I always forget to buy them. She greets me with a hug, updates me on the scant three months since graduation. Tells of new jobs, a break-up, another worrisome operation for her father. The move she did not make. The sad evidence that her sweet brother is dealing south of the border. We exchange phone numbers and say, again, goodbye.

Or.

At the door to the attendance office is a teenager at loose ends. She is not in college. She is not headed out of town. Today, she is not working, and she has cut the boyfriend free. So, here she stands, sincerely strategic, on the outside looking in.

"Let's go down to your room," she says, and starts to walk away.

"New rules," I say, holding my flowers-- her ticket in, as previously conceived. Her face falls a little when she realizes she won't be holding court, won't be seeing her friends, won't be back where she knows how to be. But, she stays and makes do with an audience of one for the few minutes I have. Promises to visit. We'll see.

I listen to her stilettos click across the lobby and to the front doors as I lean in to the attendance secretary. I have seconds to get to class, and I am holding a grocery store bouquet and a dollar box of tissues.

"This is the story of my life, " I say. I am smiling.