Labor Day

While normal fifteen-year-old boys were discovering fifteen-year-old girls, I was on the frontline saving the world. It was 1948. Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger albums played in my head and Paul Robeson’s bass baritone voice shivered me to the core. We had the best songs and I had Truth in my back pocket.

I was given a stack of leaflets promoting Henry Wallace and the Progressive Party. Among those papers was the argument for repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act which was designed to break the unions. The bill had passed over Truman’s veto. It prohibited the closed shop, jurisdictional disputes and mass picketing which ultimately led to the severe decline in membership in the C.I.O. and A.F. L.      

I covered several five-story apartment buildings, slipping my election material under doors running from floor to floor, while eluding the superintendent. I was a foot soldier, and we lost the war.

At that time unions represented over one-third of American workers. Today, that figure is less than eleven percent. This, in spite of 10,000 Starbucks and 2,500 Amazon workers recently signed up which may signal a new awakening.

Like most holidays, Labor Day has lost much of its historical roots. It is celebrated as just another three-day weekend replete with mattress sales and backyard barbeques.

The struggle for a decent wage and healthy working conditions needs to be restored to the forefront of our national heritage. Both noble and ignoble acts ranging from Lincoln’s son who helped break the Pullman strike in 1894, to the sit-down strikes during the Depression, to the sanitation worker's strike in Memphis in 1968 in which M.L King gave his life. Those who labor give their lives for a certain dignity, for a recognition of their humanity.

On the other hand, the working class is not free of racism or misogyny. Sadly, there is a long history of denying Blacks membership in unions. Could it be while folksingers sang their praises during the Depression, some may have been Klansmen or part of lynch mobs? Today, right-wing populism consists largely of White workers, gullible and misdirected and incited by fear and loathing.

Our Capitalist system rewards greed which translates to cheap labor. To this end sowing bigotry and discord among the workers serves the bottom line. The great achievement of corporate America has been getting the exploited to vote for their exploiters.

Unionism is still largely a progressive force. But I have come to realize the trap of extolling the rank and file and painting them with such a broad brush. Absolutes belong to fifteen-year-olds.

 

 

 

An Eloquent Hush

Yes, it's true, I am a news junkie. In case of a nuclear attack or tsunami, I don't want to be among the last to know. I doubt if information overload is life-threatening, but it isn't covered by my HMO. From now until election night, I'm afraid my ears will have to endure a verbal assault from politicians, pundits, panels and pollsters ... all of which makes me yearn for poetry, its promised transport.

After the sound and fury dies, there is the eloquence of a hush, a signifying gesture, visual arts that speak volumes, the sign language my daughter orchestrates with her fingers in flight and the simple discourse between lover's eyes.

How many restaurants will I never return to because every menu item comes with noise? If the decibel level is too subdued, they insist upon playing music loud enough so we must lipread across the table. Candlelight dinners with conversation are no more.

When we watched a Marx Brothers movie, we saw Groucho overthrow a government with a raised eyebrow and flick of his cigar. After all the fast talk from Chico there was always a segment with Harpo breaking our hearts as if he was communing with the firmament.

One of the hidden aspects of a baseball game is the wordless communication going on between pitcher and catcher. If the camera zoomed in on the manager, we might catch him hitching up his trousers or pulling on his ear sending signals to his players with strategies. 

Antonio Gaudi's vision sings to us through his daring design and architecture. His aesthetic is a choir of mosaics, an astonishing vision that stills our tongues but stirs our wings.

In past centuries among women of a certain class, messages were conveyed in the way they positioned their fans. Carrying the fan in her right hand meant, follow me; in the left hand, we're being watched. Or I love you, her eyes behind the open fan. Of course, with air conditioning and texting, yet another mysterious enchantment is lost.

Van Gogh regarded himself as a musician of paint. We hear the anguish in his painted shoes and the ecstasy of his night sky. His iris still vibrates for me from the Amsterdam museum, thirty-five years ago.

In 1919 Nijinsky danced for the last time. He spun and twirled and fell crashing through a window into the snow. Deemed to be mad, he said he had danced the revolution and his own exile. 

On November 6th we will either be dancing in the streets along with most of Europe or gathering at the border in a massive emigration. No words necessary.

Two Vice Presidents

The office of Vice President has often been a place in which to disappear or become the answer to a trivia question. Who remembers Alvin Barkley (Truman's), Dan Quayle (George HW Bush's) or John Nance Garner (FDR's)?  

And then there is Kamala Harris who has emerged as a charismatic presence after three years in relative obscurity. Rising to such prominence to lead the Democratic Party in a matter of a few weeks is an American phenomenon. It is a testimony to both the power of social media along with her robust grasp of the moment, met with a fierce intelligence, buoyant and compassionate nature, grace and authenticity, rarely seen on the political spectrum.

Enter, Hubert Humphrey, Lyndon Johnson's much-maligned V.P. He was not treated fairly during his term (1964-1968) nor is he enjoying a notable afterlife. I feel for the guy and want to apologize for not giving him my vote 56 years ago.

He was a pharmacist (of all things) who completed the two-year course in six months. Like many druggists of his day, he wanted more. I know the feeling. Our sameness ends there.

Humphrey was unknown nationally when he addressed the 1948 Democratic convention and stirred the conscience of the delegates plus 60 million radio listeners. His words caused Mississippi and Alabama to storm out of the hall. 

To those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say to them we are 172 years too late! To those who say, this civil rights program is an infringement on states' rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America for the Democratic Party to get out of the shadow of states' rights and walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights!

The pro-civil-rights plank was narrowly adopted and as a result the South splintered off from the party and formed the Dixiecrats which projected Truman’s defeat except that good sense and an aroused Black vote prevailed, returning him to office.

This champion for civil rights also spoke out for disarmament and was the first to propose Medicare in 1949 and the Peace Corps. He was elected senator three times before and twice after his term as vice-president.

As vice president, Humphrey played a key role in securing the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. He persuaded and cajoled the moderate Republicans, under Everett Dirksen, to gain their vote. In those days the Democrats needed 67 votes, not 60, to break a filibuster and they got it. The final bill received more Republican votes than Democratic. It is a matter of dispute how much credit goes to LBJ or his V.P.

In 1964 Humphrey spoke out at a cabinet meeting against the Vietnam War. His opposition to the bombing put him in LBJ’s doghouse for the next four years. He was shut out of cabinet meetings, never asked to Camp David and never flew on Air Force One… until invited, years later, by Jimmy Carter. Every public statement had to be cleared by Johnson.

By 1968 he became closely (and wrongly) identified with the president’s war policy which led to the protests in Chicago. The anti-war movement disowned him, and the election went to Nixon by less than half a percent in popular vote. It was said that Johnson actually wanted Humphrey defeated.

After a year in academia, he was returned to the Senate by a twenty-point margin. However, he is largely remembered as a muffled (perhaps muzzled) voice of Liberalism; a fiery Liberal who flamed out, another tragic political figure of the 20th century whose principles got crushed in the machinery of the system.

America has a chance now to atone for its sin.  

May Kamala Harris' fate be otherwise. She has been embraced by the sitting President, the high command of the Democratic Party and indeed the swell of public opinion. She has exceeded all expectations, and her ascendance may even change the way we look at the office of Vice President forevermore.

Like Humphrey before her, Harris' candidacy comes at an inflection point in American history. Thousands of lives could have been saved had Nixon been defeated in 1968.  Another disgraced ex-president must be denied a far worse imperial presidency in 2025. 

Convention Takeaways

To cleave or not to cleave, that is the question. Answer yes and you can’t go wrong.

The MAGAnites preach cleaving as in dividing, with their threats and insults. Their rhetoric is punitive regarding dissent, heedless to the water we drink and air we breathe, restrictive to what we read, and reckless by inciting acts of violence.  

The Democrats have emerged from their convention with a message that has the feel of a movement. The forward vision is of a nation cleaving as in bonding. Their tent, already inclusive, is now even broader as they are reaching out to centrist independents and former Republicans repulsed by Donald Trump.

Trump’s bluster smells stale. His complaints are being heard as whining. His indecency is contrasted with Walz’s reference to neighborliness and the lessons of a winning football team. Where Trump has delusions of a country in the throes of an apocalypse, Democrats hear America singing.

As former Republican speechwriter David Frum put it, this election pits an arsonist who sees America burning against the firefighters.

Listening to politicians is generally hard on my ears. Where others get aroused, my ears go numb. Their words feel limp from exhaustion after a few minutes. Oratory reaches for poetry but settles for heightened rhetoric. However, Pete Buttigieg stood out for me. Without slogans or whipping the delegates into a frenzy he seemed to transcend the moment.

Tim Walz had a similar grasp with his language attuned to the heartland. It wasn’t the Gettysburg Address, but his message and delivery had the feel of alignment with the entire hall and beyond. Rather than political bloviating he spoke plain talk and common sense. 

Who knows why people vote as they do? As an aggregate they seem more persuaded by subliminal factors than by issues. A herd instinct stampedes logic. May it be that the vitality of the newly constituted Democrats be a gentle wave riding us to prevail in November. 

 

Evolving

All those As and B+'s did me in.

Rules like bricks upon rules. 

Six plus eight would always be fourteen,
Elegant in its way and rigid as the square of the hypotenuse,  
or the rote of presidents in order.
Knowing them all was plenty of nothing.

I mouthed the words by the dawn's early light, 

white with foam, my eyes saw the glory of the coming.

Like Vasco da Gama I explored 

and inched free by subtraction.

but the geography in my head 

was missing a hemisphere 

for which there is no syllogism or structural formula.

Slowly I heard sentences sprout, 

listened to orchid's tongues,  

the cello in a phrase, clash of cymbals in the oil slick.

I set sail inside the watermelon 

and parted the red sea.

Rafting down the river of tears, 

the smile of a gibbous moon,   

I own my blurts, first words, best words. 

I am bridging the hemispheres merging and emerging 

fluent in the lost language of reverence, 

of love aligned sufficient to surpass myself.

How sonnets have overthrown the eight + six 

yet every word from the heart is lyric 

and rhymes with itself. 

Through increments of teal this verdant life evolving,

the leaf, when fully evolved, is withered and gone.

Roots

Today is the third anniversary of my late wife Peggy's death. It must not go unnoted. However, I'll reserve my celebration of her life for her birthday. With the help of a genealogy book written by her great uncle in the 1880s she was able to trace her ancestry to the mid 1600's when her many times great grandfather landed in Narraganset County in what is now Rhode Island. 

I have no such records which only inflames my imagination as to my progenitors. 

45,000 years ago, give or take a week, Omar Levine left Africa walking upright, shed some fur, and made his way to the Eastern Mediterranean. He knew good real estate when he came to the Fertile Crescent. 10,000 years later Olof Levine was still looking for a good night’s sleep free of growls and snarls. Contrary to family lore his first words were likely, Your cave or mine? or maybe, How’d you light that fire, again? We’ve always been slow learners.

All this comes from the scrapings inside my cheek which my daughters arranged to be sent to Family Tree DNA. They traced my double-helix back from whence we came. The footprint of our beginnings is mapped by my haplogroup. It doesn’t reveal much of anything I didn’t know before but after staring at the genome for a while it begins to speak.

Given my propensity for staying out of fights I overheard my forefathers saying how they survived skirmishes as the ones hiding under rocks or high up in trees. They knew enough not to hang a left to Spain 20,000 years later though if they’d been there during the Inquisition I’d have been raised as a Roman Catholic altar boy. Faced with the multiple choice: conversion or expulsion or…boiling oil, I expect my forefathers would have said, What else have you got? I’ll be anything you want… except chopped liver.

As it is, they headed north by northeast. The Levites were the scribes and they scribbled like scriveners, writing blogs in Yiddish whether in Lithuania or Ukraine. One day during a particularly nasty pogrom, my father’s father huddled in the root cellar while the Cossacks were busy doing the only thing they were good at, pillaging and looting. He escaped on the shoots of potato wings and their ferment.

Without enough points for an upgrade, he took the passage in steerage. Grandfather Lior slept in the hold with potatoes; they became his skin and his misshapen dreams. Did he scramble above deck to wave at the famous torch lifting its lamp, seeing himself as the wretched refuse…, tempest-tost? It’s a good bet he did. By a twist of fate, he also ended up in Rhode Island; Providence yet. A taste for drink combined with gout had its way with him. He named his first two sons Shmuel; Sammy meet Sammy.

Had we arrived in Los Angeles earlier we would have been the ones racing down Wilshire Blvd toward the ocean hoping the mastodon got caught at La Brea in the tar pits. We knew enough not to do combat with saber-tooth tigers or any other creatures in need of orthodontic work. The DNA inside my cheek has gotten me and my daughters this far. Embedded in there is a winning combination of cowardice and luck and a fair share of Peggy's irrepressible pluck and spunk. 

A Samuel Beckett Docudrama

Four of us went to see Dance First, the unlikely name for a biopic of melancholic Samuel Beckett. I recommend it with some reservations.

One has to know a bit about Beckett’s body of work to be inquisitive about how he came to be one of the pre-eminent writers of the 20^th century. His plays are immediately recognizable and unforgettable, like them or not. Waiting for Godot speaks to the predicament of existence without any intervention by a supreme being. Somehow, he managed to evoke both futility and hope. I can’t go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.

The task of a filmmaker is to capture a writer’s genius; an aspiration with only a slim chance of success. Yet we can be generous with the honorable failure.  One’s inner life doesn’t yield easily to a visual medium. And this movie shows just how unattainable that can be.

The first scene is so inventive and surreal as to have delighted Beckett himself. Gabriel Byrne embodies his disdain for the Nobel Prize by climbing the wall of the Stockholm auditorium into another dimension where he meets his alter ego.

Unfortunately, this level of artistry is not sustained for many of the scenes to follow. But the narrative did have enough Beckett-like vignettes to keep my attention on alert.

One such was the domestic scenes with James Joyce in which the wisdom from the master was always undercut but his wife Nora and her announcement of dumplings.                                                     

Upon reflection, the first three women we are introduced to are unloving, dominating (his mother), a house frau with no appreciation of her genius husband (Joyce) and his unconvincingly bipolar daughter; all women with no agency.

One takeaway I have come to accept is how my immediate response may not be in accord with my more severe assessment the day after. This is where the title Dance First applies. Beckett’s advice to a student was his way of asserting the primacy of sensation over the filters of the intellect. While it may seem as if his theater pieces are cerebral, he might see them as issuing from a more visceral place and the dialogue, conversational.

I note how my critical faculty shouts down the immediacy of my enjoyment. As a prescription to myself I would suggest staying with the dance of his eccentricities, iconoclasm, his dark humor and vision of life’s absurdities.  Go see the damn movie and pay no attention to the flaws inherent in such a doomed enterprise.

 

 

Spooked By Caution

I have never been attracted to horror films, but it is even worse living inside of one. These past eight years have been a Nightmare on Elm St. with Citizen Kane meeting the Godfather in the Cuckoo’s Nest. The script is so unlikely Louie B.  Mayer would have turned it down as a B-movie. A storyline of an ignorant and arrogant American cult leader would surely have no legs. It sounds like a Texas Chainsaw Massacre cleaving the country right down the middle.

But wait. Suddenly an opposition has grown overnight or fortnight. Two robust candidates have emerged and captured the narrative. Echoes of Frank Capra. The emperor is seen to be naked. The flim-flam man lost his megaphone, and the cardsharp has nothing but arm up his sleeve.

I know I should bask in the limelight but there is still another act to go. Maybe the groundswell will see us through to November 5^th and beyond. Maybe there will be a wakening from the somnambulance in the heartland.

Not so fast, my friends. Even though Democrats have commanded the storyline for the past few weeks, there is so much to be spooked about with what ifs.  My early movie-antennae tell me to be aware. We may be living in a bubble that can burst before the credits roll. I’m getting the whiff of nefarious deeds being set into motion by MAGA operatives and their overseas allies.

Aside from voter suppression and plots to decertify ballots there is also a very eminent threat that the tension in the Middle East could ignite into a regional war. Netanyahu is not averse to a conflagration drawing us in and serving the Trump agenda along with his own. Such horrors concern me at a visceral level even more so than the genetically modified tomato that ate Chicago, soon to be released at a theater near you.

It could be that too many horror films have spooked me for life. My cerebral cortex has no defense against my reptilian medulla. Or maybe this is no Apocalypse Now but a documentary.

Mystery Unsolved

This morning, I did a triple-double, full-layout with a half twist and nailed the landing………and that was just getting out of bed. Every day is a gold medal at this age. There is a green landscape outside my window. Veins of leaves are bursting with chlorophyll, dappled with a dialectic of eastern sun.

I am thick with forest; it’s a made thing, this clash of light and shade. A jungle in my mind of bamboo shoots and sprouts of fern. Leafy trees bent and twisted for a sliver of a solar charge.

I climbed fruit trees as a kid and swiped a few backyard peaches. Mostly I liked sitting under their green umbrella imagining the shadowed world.

Now I am thinking great thoughts. They are so great they don’t fit in my brain and probably weren’t meant for me anyway as they circle the earth. These are the lyrics to a music of the spheres. The only anthem I observe.

Agatha had Hercule Poirot ravel the unraveled, as if. All suspects are to gather in the library. Why the library? Because perpetrators hide there in the pages.

Villainy arrives reliably and I let the detectives detect. The casual remark, the sneer or glimpse of a gun in act one, will explain everything as the curtain falls and all wrongs are righted.

Yet unsolved mysteries of the heart remain, exuberance unaccounted for, along with a disobedient illogic for which there are no alibis. Holmes needs Moriarty to test what is elementary my dear Whatshisname.

Someone will win the marathon but on the other side of town Sisyphus like all sleuths will never quite reach the finish line.         Still unanswered is why the Trojan War or any such abomination persists. No inspector inspects the crime of squandered lives.

Was it Helen’s face that launched the thousand ships or men's yearning for the feminine principle? Human folly lives alongside reverence for life and love unending.