congenial-speak #41

Congenial-speak #40

Antiquated writing

I'd never written a memoir before. I didn't think I was old enough. For a writer, it's a misconception to think memoirs need to be restricted to the old, the over 60 demographic whose lives are complete enough to catalog. Ten Years and Change portrays a time in my life. It was also a span of time during the Vietnam War marked by proliferation. In 1965 the war took a turn from which it could never come back. As the bombs rained on North Vietnam, civil protest in America grew. It (as I) never stopped growing. I grew with the war, around those who vehemently opposed it. I grew up because of it, abundantly aware of the disdain towards it we, as a family, nurtured It is a “Liberal Boyhood” for obvious reasons. The ideology fit, but it is much more than that. It is liberal as opposed to a censored boyhood, a coming-of-age. As soon as I could cognate what politics was offering, what the “dissident Democrats” goals were, I grasped it in my hand (literally when I dropped literature myself) and never let go.

There was a solvent story to tell. I was 48 when I set out to create what I hoped would be seen as a tribute to an effort made by many 45 years earlier. How that time, growing up in the wake of its abrogation, welling in the men and women of “constant sorrow,” anger, frustration, affected me I thought was worth noting. The memories were remarkable. They were tangible to me as I reached into the pasts bag of mnemonic devices. I thought I could present a bit of the war while also telling our—and my own—story as they related to it. Along the way I tripped over treasure troves of incidents in my heritage. They came out, finally, and will now likely go back in their respective troves. They had their say, their telling. They had their way of breaking the complacent mold I'd cultivated all theses years, the rampant “half-fro” that has long since had its scurrilous curls. There were stories I found that yearned to be told, that were integral as they entwined themselves in a significantly cataclysmic period in America. They became codependent. Their remembrance and remunerations existed because of the historical context in which they had occurred. There was a cathartic urgency to Ten Years and Change.

Segue

When I began writing my book, America's future as a democracy was arguably the brightest it's ever been. The first black president was in the middle of his second term. I have never felt so confident, never so filled with a feeling that 'we the people' shall overcome, that the amends to the disparity in this country, the ancient disproportion (which felt its first concerted lift with Johnson's 'Great Society') will survive to the finish line. The book, at least, almost made it. It almost collected itself to roll through a print machine. In early 2016 I watched the caucuses on TV. I went to my local caucus to cast my vote for Bernie, another hopeful for a reversal of America's unmitigated division of fortune. I had more confidence in him than I even had in Obama in terms of forever setting America on the road to permanent equivocation, for promoting and cementing health care as a right and not a privilege, for ending his predesessors' wars judiciously. The other gal won. Hillary espoused all the political ideals I uphold, but she wasn't Bernie. She lacked that willingness to cut clean from PACS or Kochs. She lacked the tenacity to snatch the baton from the runner who has held the 98% back for decades. She did not profusely refuse to have no business with Wall Street. She was not as adamant in her intent to break up the banks, to dismantle Wall Street, which I see as a key to the great economic disparity in this country.

My book is published in early 2017. America now can not be further from the inspiration I felt when I first sat down at my keyboard. Trump, all through the previous summer, had talked smack about this country, in some way insulted every minority group in it, and generally displayed his utter lack of anything remotely resembling a president. He gave a glib nod to Bernie, a facetious condolence for his loss of the nomination, saying he had been the victim of a rigged electoral system. Thus began the exercise in futility, the simulated pretense of “making America......” well, you know. It is ironic that my book came out as America began its descent, when democracy faced its greatest threat since the Civil War. In Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota I recall a ten year slice in time when democracy was tested by a war, the epic and unprecedented opposition to it, assassinations, and demand for social change. So for me now, when a biographer of Trump will say his tenure will be short-lived and then activist film maker Michael Moore advises us to hunker down for as long as seven more years, the times I write about mean more to me. I grew up in the backdrop of a convulsing democracy. However, unlike today, it was never in grave danger. I mean really, think about it. You could kiss the small-worted America goodbye. If Trump succeeds in winning another term, the America I knew could be gone. But every bright side somewhere has a dark side. My generation saw men walk on the moon. We saw 'a small step for mankind.' Man, and eventually women, were still in the game. Yesterday, this younger generation wore dark glasses to watch the moon eclipse the sun. Glean from nature, from human nature, do what thou wilts.

Congenial-speak #39

Raising Hate

Kids rarely learn hate. Those that do, by the way, are the young adults we saw in Charlottesville. We did not know hate on any level like this in the 70s. (A few in Vietnam may have. Yet another side effect of that war.) I was the beneficiary of a liberal environment, with judicious and harmonious senses from which to grow. At some point we were exposed to the worst human behavior in modern history. We came to know, through travel, TV, stories told, books, America's and Europe's history, warts and all. It was an overt education, subtle, almost subliminal, at our curiosity—as I mention in my book. My dad is a Holocaust refugee. Gradually, we learned of the violence he witnessed as a boy in Germany. We also were made aware of the precursors to that violence. He told us of the gradual removal of rights for Jews. The laws began in 1933 and escalated to the two-day pogrom known as Kristalnacht (night of broken glass) in 1938. But, more importantly we learned of the consequences of turning a blind eye, or not realizing the harm intended, of thinking it will run its course and be done. We learned of consequences. We learned of 6,000,000 of them, usually at our Passover meal. All Jewish children's brains are encrypted with the words NEVER AGAIN. I can't forget to never remember what my dad saw. As an eye witness to the sparks that engulfed into what produced round the clock “black smoke from crematoria, my dad imparted the lessons to us, to me and my sister. I will never forget what he, his family, and the lucky ones of '39 narrowly escaped.

Immersion

Politics was usually somewhere on the table at our house. In August 1968, in the chapter from Ten Years and Change called “When Cats Walk,” my dad went to the Democratic National Convention as a delegate for Gene McCarthy. I was three-years-old and doubt I comprehended much of what went on. I am certain though that I knew of the violence that went on in Chicago well before I wrote my book. As a delegate, as were most inside the amphitheater attending the convention, my dad was unaware of the extent of the violence. In writing my book I asked him about his experience, overall, at the 1968 DNC. To me what he said had a different texture. He said he was learning a lot, meeting people, generally happy to participate in a, I must say, much splintered democracy and Democratic Party. His reaction seemed to not quite equal the “sickness” within the party that US Representative Alpha Smaby identified. He did not seem horrified, surprised that a city's police force could use “Gestapo tactics” on its own people. He probably was very satisfied to have been chosen as a delegate, to have followed and supported his candidate from the local to the national stage. My guess, as I state in my book Ten Years and Change: A Liberal Boyhood in Minnesota is that the brutality by Chicago's finest did not have the same shock value on him that it had on natural-born Americans like Smaby. He'd seen it somewhere before in his past.

I imagine that when my dad saw the mobs, the swastikas, the torches (tiki? Com'on) that the fear of reliving the past, that's been omnipresent since January 20—eerily close to the date in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor—took another angry step forward. People who survived the Holocaust can identify. But, let's be serious, any educated human with a good heart could have seen this coming. Anyone, on either side of the aisle, to whom preservation of American ideas trumps party politics, can see the corrosive impact a man like Donald Trump will have.

Who fingered Fred (Trump)

Hate can lurk beneath the most pleasant, unoffensive exterior. It cringes deep in the channels that marrow through the jaw-bones of the most docilely silent asses. Look in the mirror. Is the image you see painted with white? Is it white to your chagrin, to your shit-eating grin? Can you see Charlottesville in the background? Can you easily imagine the angered young men, now identifiable, wearing starch white peaked sheets? Can you see the man who swore an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States (the one the founding fathers wrote) embracing the hooded mobs? If you answered yes to just one of these, I would take another hard look. What are you really? Who the hell are you? What have you been telling yourself and others you are? Rachel Maddow, who scrupulously tenders her show to be objective, pointed out in her MSNBC show that many of the alt-right comprise young angry men. They are frustrated young men who have been failures with women and other aspirations. These are the putzes whose arms suddenly rise to a full 90 degrees from a nascent part of their being.

The truth of this is sketchy, but police records from 1927 show that 22-year-old Fred Trump was arrested in the Queens borough of New York at a KKK rally. Decades later, when confronted with the incident, Fred's son Donald profusely repeated that “It never happened.” My money's on that it (like the Holocaust) happened. Donald was born almost a decade later. The behavior, the intolerance, the paranoia and bigoted mentality was passed on to him. Many stories of his learning the real estate business at his father's side suggest he learned to hate, to not rent to blacks, to know stereotypes like wanting Jews only for lawyers and accountants. It is glaringly obvious he was never taught of the consequences of those ideas, the long-term ramifications of those prejudices. So, surprise, surprise, it is a product, a benefactor of ignorance that we have resting his fat can in the chair that launched so many decisions to build a democracy. I doubt he even knows the half of history, of the teeth pulling progress of civil rights through the decades. As Orthodox Jews it see like a safe assumption that Jarred and Ivanka know of the centuries of oppression, of the calculated attempts at the annihilation of Jews. They are either a ganz shande (total shame) für the Jews, or father Trump is too self-absorbed to listen. He does not care about any consequences except those that might steer his nail-biting base away. I also believe there is little communication in the Trump family. Daughter and son-in-law never gave dad a history lesson. You lean to hate or not to hate. You learn the consequences of hate. And, if given the education, you choose to pay close attention to or ignore the lessons.

Congenial-speak #38

A Dichotomy for Loyalty

It can't be both ways. You choose friends in high or low places. You choose how you want to go down, how you want to be remembered, to be castigated. It's implausible to cover all the bases all the time, to save all your support systems all the time. Angering someone is essential in the game of life.

Friday August 11 we saw the faces. The co-version, the secrecy and intimidating sheets of wizardry were gone. The repugnance in their faces, the disturbed pride in their eyes, the identity was illuminated for the world to see. Tawdry hardware store “tiki” torches lit the night. They engulfed to expose the right to the world, to family, to friends, to bosses. Those individuals will forever carry those torches. They earned themselves places on the ash heap of society. I already read of a father disowning his son for attending, for being a willing participant in the alt-right. I can only hope individuals lose their jobs, friends, any shred of hope to ever be accepted again the same way as they were by anyone. I can only hope society turns their back on the for the gutter slime they are.

Associations with people are tenuously cast. A certain amount of differing opinion is par for the course, enough on which a friendship can survive. The majority of the GOP sees Trump for what he is, a charlatan who panders to the lowest common denominator to ingratiate himself. They see that his rhetoric is void of any true American ideals. They see that he has surrounded himself with reactionaries, racists, and sycophants. Trump is trying to appease his core supporters. To effectively do that he can't, for example, decisively denounce David Duke. Sitting on a fence, watching the early configurations of CWII (the second Civil War), Trump can't be anything like a Lincolnesque figure. This is the same man who, a few months ago, claimed that the Civil War was preventable. He thought that the posthumous actions of Andy Jackson could have spoken louder than the words he failed to find Friday. Alright, if Jackson is Trump's hero, who he claims saw the Civil War coming and was “very angry,” why is he doing nothing to prevent what could escalate into CWII? Unlike Jackson, who died 16 years before the CW, Trump is here, alive and angry. His talk is cheap. Its flawed mostly because it comes out of the mouth of a narcissistic dumb-ass with tiny balls and even smaller brains.

When someone supports an abomination, a figure cast in diametric opposition of what the vast majority of Americans know implicitly, they become its baggage. Personally I struggle with the morality, my own cognitive dissonance of being around people like this. Individuals you shared good times with all your life come out of the closet, so to speak, brazenly flouting those racial back bones in their bodies. They are far, but they are in their mirror, smiling, joking, closer than they appear. That is the conundrum with which I and, ironically, Trump must wrestle. Cut the losses for the good of, in Trump's case, a nation, and accept it. Or, give a facile nod to the demons at the door and maintain the carnivorous base of support. Either way it's a win for him. For me, for anyone in such a dilemma, it's only a matter of conscience.

Congenial-speak #37

Ten Years Gone

I was thinking about victories when I began—spacial, personal, political, wins against an establishment. I was dealing with trying to make some stark realities from the past speak to me or my audience with their contrasts. When I decided to write a political memoir, I was treading on new genre. In my historical fiction and often in poetry politics is usually wrapped—or warped—in my writing somewhere, between the lines, at the little toe of a foot note, with debate poised on a literary tongue. It comes naturally, with a comforting commonality that's been my safe word since I was a four-year-old dancing on our dinning room table. I had never written a memoir though. My background was in writing stories of personal experience. How accurate did I need to be? Could I write about people who, for the most part, were living. Could I serve them justly, give them the justice they may not have found then? What liberties, if any, could I take? I thought I handled them with care. My job was to somehow, believably, integrate my personal history, those of family, friends, neighbors, with the Vietnam War and its unimpeachable history. Textbooks, research articles, online compilations can only define the consensus. A personal sense filters it. As an adult writing this book 45 years after the facts, I was well acquainted with people who had been in the game then. My parents, friends of theirs, people like Vance (Opperman),who I've never met but did know a good friend of his, all added to the authenticity of the book. I lived vicariously through them. I put my feet in their shoes, related to what they told me, what I had (as a kid) seen locally. I watched interviews with Gene McCarthy, Vance, and people my parents knew. I read articles of the exploits of the head of the McCarthy delegation of the Minnesota DFL and future state AG Warren Spannus. I studied the campaign of Hubert Humphrey and the shorter ones of Robert Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.

My 22-year-old niece was compiling a time-line with her grandmother, my mom who, among many other things, nominated Shirley Chisholm at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. She has always been humble, certainly not expecting any credit or even a slap on the back for the things she did, her incidental swats at the glass ceilings for housewives on our block, while raising me and my sister in her 30s. I think I caught whiff of the time-line in an Email one day in 2013. I don't think the '72 convention was even on it. I took it as an opportunity to write some kind of book about that whole scene, that chapter in the lives we all shared. It occurred to me that it was a compelling story; a Jewish Holocaust refugee (dad) marrying an ultra-liberal progressive from the Bronx, coming to the land of the all-night DFL, adopting a biracial child, and growing together when said child is rehabilitating from a head injury in the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the many societal changes it facilitated. There might have been, albeit unconsciously, a hint that some recognition for past reparations could be appreciated. Some form of literal remunerations of those years was warranted. It was a time when to them windmills likely offered the best, most worthy fight. I grew up seeing the frustration, hopelessness, and obfuscation of any peaceful alternatives to senseless destruction. The people I write about, my family, friends that I'll never know again like I did, their lives unfolded, sometimes hinging on the way the war winds blew. For me it was a door, a Pandora's box, opening for better or worse. A progressively liberal environment was the stimulant, the motif, by which I grew. These ideas and values held by my parents were helpful, for example, in my re-entry into my public school system. (In my book I show the car accident I had in 1971 and say how it required me to go to a different school). They were fortuitous in having the vocational needs I had met by a school system just beginning to take issue with such demands. I learned at my father's side as I tagged along to see him rise through the levels of local politics. I came of age watching government work, democracy fought for in its day. I remember in my book the circumstances our family was in surrounding democracy's greatest perceptual challenge in my young life—the vitriolic 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Bouillabaisse

Today it is a far different kettle of fish. As the short-lived “Mooch” said, it stinks from the head down. We need look no further than the events in Charlottesville, VA for evidence of that. But, as I said, that is a different kettle of fish, another blog post or worm can to be kicked at some more, or some. Democracy, as I was introduced to it, is as close as it's ever been in my relatively long life to becoming extinct. In January of this year the trajectory, the arc that Obama spoke of, took a turn off its true course. Like a writer follows a story arc, I followed America's story live since 1965, when the war escalated with the North Vietnam bombing mission called Operation Rolling Thunder. This offensive move by Johnson, promulgated by the illegitimate Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, raised a growing consciousness in America that this war was illegal, immoral, and ultimately unwinnable. Communism was all the rage. Johnson feared its proliferation through Southeast Asia. And guess what, in April of 1975 when the last chopper left the US Embassy, within hours South Vietnam fell to Communist rule.

Throughout the beginning of the 21^st century it has been alarmingly evident that fascism is now the “ism,” the tonic, the acerbic sponge to fear on the world table. The vestigial ghosts of the Cold War have faded as much as transparencies can. Certainly with the current ad-hock administration, whose puppet head can't seem to find the words to criticize Putin for anything, Communism, the “Red Menace,” our rivals in hockey or space exploration is in a land of old times long forgotten. Although how the cotton made its way to the gin has not slipped our minds. The meeting in April of 1865 at Appomattox, VA is planted in the northern-most mindset. Robert E. Lee, the statue whose removal was the base of the upheaval in Charlottesville, surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant. Personally I couldn't have cared less about Lee's statue, providing of course that somewhere there is one of Grant. The statue of Lee is a reminder that the South lost the Civil War, that those ideas lost, that white supremacist mentality that has no home in America. It has no place on this planet but, again, that is another kettle of fish.

congenial-speak #36

Foul-mouths and browner noses

It must be a myopic phenomenon. Congressmen and women don't see how they are letting themselves be degraded. As one watching daily reports, footage of the mouths they go in, willingly, I can't help but think that somewhere they know. In a part of their brain that closed, when one opened around the spring of 2016, they know nothing good can come of attaching their band wagon to the gaseous ball called Trump. They know they boarded a sinking ship. Mitt and Chris would have been riding that wave of failure and humility right now. Bobble-head Rudy was in there hoping for a job in Liealot. They would have joined the sycophantic ranks of Prebis, Pence, Ryan, Spicer, and that dirt-bag hoover, that sucking foul-mouthed douche Scaramoochie. And along comes Stephen Miller, a programmable Jewish Hitler youth who might have served both sides. HE is a shande for the Jews.

These are white men, 98.5% of them. They range in age from 36 (Kushner) to 71 (Trump) and have stolen democracy and the GOP. They have—or intend to—pervert it into something right out of Orwell's book 1984. Years before he ran for president Trump was heard in a interview saying if he ran, the the Democrat would run as a Republican. He claimed that they were stupid enough to buy his oils. Apparently they are, and they did. Over half-way into his first year polling indicates that safe stupidity is beginning to wane. All the boot-licks, lap-dogs, and sycophants are not that much wiser than the populace, the redneck uneducated white male demographic that were in the counties of red states with high electoral votes. Trump ran as a populist. These were the interests of ordinary people, fan fare for the common man? Walls and rabid paranoia? Scares from the Islamic community calling back the day of the red menace? Well, they were at one time, I guess, the interests of a handful of Americans. But I'd argue that they were not true Americans. Those few, biding their lives and folding their flags every night, must not have paid any attention in history class. Trump, evidently, was a believable fraud. Romney said it, and Trump gave everyone his word he was going to make America great again. They were sure of it bobbling their heads in a red hat. That's all they got, an IOU to shadow their face, hide the shame.

Congress, if not the disgruntled populace, is gradually growing tired of his game. I think it started about when the anti-bellum Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III became Trump's tether ball. It is curious to me that ANYONE has ever given this man-behind-the-curtain without any existential brain credit for having one. It riles me to believe that any thinking adult conceives of ideas from the mind of Donald J. Trump. The very idea that a 4 or 5 star general condescends himself to break bread with this man is perplexing. I guess the alternative would end in disaster. In that respect, they really are American heroes again—off the battlefield—allowing themselves to act like they take this lunatic seriously, swallowing their pride everyday to keep their country safe. Trouble is, I gather their advisories fall on deaf, dumb ears. Trump does as he wishes and really never processes their words, doesn't have the attention span.

The elephant in the room is keeling over. Trump is not emblematic of the GOP, he never was. He is a renegade, an acerbic pitchman from upper Manhattan who sees making this country great again as just another real estate deal he can tailor to his specifications, hire contracting immigrants, and screw them. As Mitch postures himself, like a bug-eyed turtle with a shell game, on the senate floor he tries to breathe life into his dying pachyderm. Trump lumbers around the WH, listening for his people to stop listening to him