White, Black and the Blues

When the curtain rose on Buddy Holly and the Crickets at the Apollo Theater in 1957, the cheering audience was stunned into silence. The African Americans who filled Harlem's most famous theater had expected the band to be black. Years later, according to the documentary, Muscle Shoals, Paul Simon called Al Bell at Stax records and said, "Hey man, I want those same black players that played on 'I'll Take You There'."

"That can happen," Bell replied, "but these guys are mighty pale."

"These guys" were the Swampers, a group of north Alabama country boys.

"We didn't expect them to be as funky or as greasy as they were," Aretha Franklin remembered.

American music has been one of the most unifying forces in our history, transcending differences that have polarized the country. In a recent lecture on "Gershwin, Ellington and the Search for an American Sound", Georgetown professor Anna Celenza described a music, anchored in folk, blues and gospel, that has sprung from the lives of Americans, both black and white, and mostly poor. It influenced not only Gershwin ("Rhapsody in Blue") and Ellington ("Symphony in Black"), but such classical composers as Charles Ives, Aaron Copland and Antonin Dvorak, the Czech native whose use of folk melodies had a huge impact on American music.

"They saw music as a way of creating community," said Celenza, and I like to think of the American Sound as the bedrock of our sprawling culture, creating harmonies in a land that seems elsewhere discordant and fragmenting.

Naked in the Modern World

Not only the government is shut down. Yesterday, as I was downloading a new application, my computer crashed, creating a catastrophe I had not foreseen: the disappearance of every file, program, family photo, financial record and song into some black hole, from where, the experts inform me, they are never coming back. My new back-up time capsule had been incorrectly configured, so it too was empty. The perfect storm. My life had literally evaporated into cyberspace. My first thought was to blame my enemies, although I didn't believe them  capable of such a feat. Then I became paranoid about identity theft, imagining that a heavily bearded James G. Blaine running AK47s over the Khyber Pass, while my bank accounts were being drained. But since all my passwords were on my computer, I can't verify that. I had literally ceased to exist, and since it had not been a good day to begin with, that was a depressing thought. But nothing clears the mind like a good crisis, and I remembered all those existentialist heroes who believed we must create our own meaning in an absurd world. I was free of so much detritus, most of it of my own making. I seem to be the same person without it. The lessons? Be careful downloading new programs and make sure your back-up system works. But remember that you can survive a shutdown and emerge refreshed. Just as America can if our president holds firm against the extortionists.

Beacon of Hope

There is much to abhor about the Catholic Church, from laundering money to repressing women to abusing young boys. Not to mention the Inquisition. The new pope brings hope of change. The first sign was his name: of the 266 popes, he is the first to choose Francis, the gentle 12^th- century monk who was canonized but never ordained. St. Francis didn’t just preach to birds. In the view of some historians, he represented an alternative path – ministering to the dispossessed and advocating the equality of all things before God, rather than their subjugation by man – which the church systematically stamped out. Pope Francis’s first official trip was to the island of Lampedusa, the destination of millions of African migrants seeking a better life in Europe. Thousands never make it, drowning at sea in smugglers’ boats. It is a place much like the American southwest, but the pope’s plea that Lampedusa be “a lighthouse in all the world” is rarely heard in Arizona. “How many times,” Francis asked, “do those who seek this not find understanding, reception or solidarity?” Last week, he linked the horrific shipwreck off Lampedusa to the “inhuman global economic crisis, a serious symptom of a lack of respect for the human person.”

“Today is a day of tears,” he said. “Such things go against the spirit of the world.”

Remember our own better self? “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses learning to breathe free . . . I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”

Mama Warned Me

My mother was displeased when my daughter, Annie, moved to Houston. “I don’t like Texans,” she said. “They’re so conceited. They just talk about how much better Texas is than the rest of America.”

She loved making spectacular generalizations out of very few data points – her opinion was based on two fliers in my father’s World War II Marine squadron, one of whom became my godfather. And in truth, Annie spent two good years in Texas, and one of my closest college friends is from San Antonio.

Still, my mother’s words echo. Texas has always been unruly. After breaking away from Mexico in 1836 and forming a republic, one powerful faction wanted to expel the Native Americans and expand to the Pacific. Texas joined the union in 1845, but was soon gone again, deposing Governor Sam Houston and seceding in 1861. That sentiment never died: over 100,000 Texans signed a secession petition this year.

And emboldened by the country’s most in-your-face Congressional gerrymandering ten years ago, Texas Republicans are leading the fight against Obamacare and manning the barricades against compromise. It’s not just Ted Cruz. Congressman John Culbertson compared the GOP antics to “let’s roll” of 9/11. Steve Stockman and Blake Farenthold talk of impeaching the president. The legislature is considering a nullification bill, and Governor Rick (Oops) Perry opted out of the Medicaid expansion to insure his state’s poor. This week he declared the implementation of Obamacare “a criminal act”.

So guess which state has the worst health coverage in the country?

Yep. Texas.

One Good Gig

I may have mentioned on these pages that I ran for Congress in 1996. My opponent had spent 24 years in the Pennsylvania legislature, where the pay is good and the benefits are even better. I’ll pass over his dreadful politics, other than to say that he doesn’t much like government and he can’t stand the federal government. So he promised the voters he would serve 10 years in Congress and then come home. Seventeen years later he’s still in Washington, rising enthusiastically to every roll call to shut the government down. Government, he says, is bad for us. But it has certainly been good for him. Pennsylvania’s legislative salaries rank fourth in the country, exceeding 150% of the state’s median household income. And that’s just the beginning, what with per diems, allowances, lobbyists’ nightly parties, and of course the most comprehensive health care our money can buy. The legislators get it for life, along with their defined-benefit pensions, which the private sector has long considered unaffordable. These he brought to Washington where he found life even better – and unaffected by the recession, which he blames on . . . government.

Our mythology tells us that public service is a sacrifice made on behalf of the republic. But this is by far the best job he could ever get, and he has held it for 41 years. He is not alone (Ted Cruz spent one year in the private sector). We have created a professional class of government haters who live off the government.

Birdie Africa

Twenty-eight years ago, Michael Ward survived one of the most searing events in Philadelphia's history: the siege of the heavily armed MOVE compound at 6221 Osage Avenue, which ended when police dropped two bombs from a helicopter, obliterating three city blocks and killing 11 people. Ward, then named Birdie Africa, ran naked from the house, a malnourished, unloved, illiterate, horribly burned 13-year-old boy. A subsequent report excoriated Philadelphia, which became known as “the city that bombed itself.” Ward, who rarely discussed the misery of his early years, slowly recovered, graduated from high school, served in the army, became a long-haul trucker, married and had two children. He drowned last week in a hot tub on a Caribbean cruise ship named "Dream”. He was 41. “In a way, I’m glad it happened,” he once said of the bombing. “The only regret I have is about me being hurt and my mom dying and the other kids. I feel bad for the people who died, but I don’t have any anger toward anybody. See, I got out.”

When I first read that, I was stunned by the contrast between the drama of the event and the banality of the words to describe it. “The slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts,” George Orwell wrote. But we also use language to blunt our memory of tragedy and to survive in the face of true horror. Each time I read Ward’s words, the more articulate they become. Rest in peace, Birdie Africa.

The GOPs Must Be Crazy

Yesterday, John Boehner announced that the 2012 federal election will be held (again) next week. Still unable to distinguish between thinking they should have won last November and actually losing by 3.5 million votes – and buoyed by Obama’s poll numbers, which are falling nearly as fast as their own – House Republicans apparently believe they deserve a do-over. So in exchange for supporting a temporary increase in the debt ceiling to prevent America from defaulting on its current obligations and spurring a global economic crisis, they are demanding the immediate construction of the Keystone pipeline, increased energy drilling both offshore and on federal lands, an end to EPA regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and coal production, Medicare cuts, and a delay to Obamacare (which they have voted 43 times in vain to defund). Having previously cut food stamps and extended the Bush tax inequities, Boehner has now produced a list of proposals that brought people like me to the polls last fall. And we won. Didn’t we?

“That’s why we’re paid the big bucks – right? – to figure these problems out,” said Blake Farenthold, an overfed Texas congressman who abhors food stamps, loves his health benefits and remains skeptical about the “legitimacy” of Obama’s presidency. Actually, Congressman, that’s why we have elections. In the meantime, this doesn’t seem like a very good time to shut down the government.

In other news, Ted Cruz voted in favor of the motion he had spent 21 hours trashing, which then passed the Senate, 100-0.

Go figure.

“Why Should Dreaming Be a Privilege?”

While Ted Cruz makes headlines trying to bring down the government, I turn to people who are building things. This week in Louisville, Kentucky, nine entrepreneurs, some of them very young, presented their ideas to a group of investors. Both entrepreneurs and investors are part of a growing movement called “impact investing”, in which profitability is one criterion in a business that also addresses social and environmental issues – the so-called “triple bottom line”. The focus of the three-day event, presented by Village Capital, is the intersection of energy and agriculture, and its goal is to encourage entrepreneurs who address major societal problems.

The ideas have been imaginative, grounded and exciting for me: an insect-monitoring device that reduces pesticide use; a precision irrigation system; a plan to repurpose “gray water” for urban hydroponic growers; platforms to determine shellfish size before harvesting, streamline solar panel installations and lower costs for electricity consumers in East Africa; a battery that will double the energy and life of current batteries at half the cost.

My two favorites are a patent-pending technology to measure crop-water use over an entire field and a plan to turn old electric car batteries into low-cost power packs for schools in rural India, where electricity is both expensive and unreliable. “Why,” asked company founder Shiv Rajendran, “should dreaming be a privilege?”

I believe in a positive government, but I am certain that America’s future has more to do with nine idealists in Louisville than Ted Cruz’s claptrap on Capitol Hill.

Big Money

I long believed that the two-party system was the backbone of America’s political stability because it pushed each party to seek coalitions rather than ideological purity. In times of national trauma, those coalitions fractured, as before the Civil War, or one party assembled an unbeatable coalition, as in the Great Depression. We are now in a time when the Republican demand for purity threatens the government, and the two-party system seems unable to cope with it. One reason is money. Legislators are beholden to those who have it, and the Supreme Court ended decades of efforts to regulate it with its abysmal 5-4 decision in Citizens United v Federal Election Commission. “It’s a bad decision,” a friend who knows it well told me. “It denies the legislative process the ability to treat corporations and labor unions differently from individuals. It’s a raw case of the court’s exercise of political power.” But the court is not going to reverse itself, and there isn’t much stomach for reform among legislators who depend on the current system.

What can be done to break the closed loop of money and politics? One step is to make politics local again: Encourage unaffiliated candidates to run, reform ballot-access laws, curb gerrymandering. These are small things, but they might lead people to challenge the monopoly of the two-party system – which may be the only way to rescue our electoral process from the grasp of big money. We’d better hurry. The Koch Brothers are already working that territory hard.

The Hollow Men

We are the hollow me We are the stuffed me Leaning together Headpiece filled with straw. Alas! T. S. Eliot

• Yesterday the Republican majority in the House of Representatives voted to cut $40 billion from food stamps and to kick 3.8 million people out of the program. This, in a nation with 46.5 million people in poverty.
• That same majority is bent on shutting down the government at a time when the long-sputtering economy is finally gathering steam.
• It is goading its wretched leadership to default on the national debt when over 11 million people remain unemployed and we are seeking negotiations with Syria and Iran.
• It has voted 41 times to defund Obamacare, treating it as a partisan bill, rather than the law of the land, passed by both houses of Congress, signed by the president, upheld by the Supreme Court, a law that will ultimately insure 48 million people currently without insurance.
• It is eating its own young. The nation’s ten poorest states – Mississippi, Arkansas, West Virginia, Alabama, Kentucky, New Mexico, Tennessee, Louisiana, South Carolina and Oklahoma – have 44 Republicans in Congress and only 10 Democrats. In Mississippi, the country's poorest state, 40% of all children receive food stamps.
• It is destroying the safety net, which is the glue that holds communities together.
• It is unraveling the social contract, which is the foundation of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution that these “patriots” claim to revere.
• It is the meanest collection of bullies and hypocrites that have ever claimed to represent America.

Sayonara, Larry Summers

A friend who worked with Larry Summers once told me that he is not as smart as he thinks he is. To which I replied, how could he be? Thankfully, he was smart enough last Sunday to remove himself from consideration for chair of the Federal Reserve, a move that delighted the stock market, liberal senators and me. Summers has an impressive pedigree (both parents teach economics at Penn and two uncles, Paul Samuelson and Kenneth Arrow, have Nobel Prizes in economics) and resume (World Bank Chief Economist, Treasury Secretary, Director of the National Economic Council, President of Harvard). Yet his career has been like the Peter Principle (in which people “rise to their level of incompetence”) on steroids. He has been wrong on almost every major issue he has touched. He advocated massive deregulation of the banking industry and vigorously opposed any oversight of derivatives. These policies, combined with the Bush doctrine of massive tax cuts for the rich and off-the-books military invasions, produced the worst financial disaster since 1929. Less well known is Summers’ hostility toward environmental regulations, especially for greenhouse gases, because of their perceived adverse impact on growth. Summers boasts that his policies pushed America into the 21^st century, but in a nation where 95% of all recent income gains have gone to 1% of the population, where income disparities are greater than they have been since the Gilded Age, and where global climate change is still scorned, he has actually helped usher us back into the 19^th.

Warning Shot

Two months have passed since George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing Trayvon Martin by pleading the Second Amendment. For how else can you interpret the jury’s refusal to convict a man who – in violation of explicit police instructions – pursued an unarmed man in a quiet neighborhood and shot him dead, except as the swagger that comes with carrying a gun? It’s less than a year since Adam Lanza killed 20 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School, a massacre that led to modest regulations in many states. But fear not, the NRA has risen to the challenge, and its efforts to snuff out any remnants of a national conscience are escalating across the country. Last week in Colorado, voters recalled two state senators who had voted in favor of Colorado’s rational gun laws. Similar efforts are under way in all 50 states. It’s easy to castigate the NRA and leave it at that, but the image of gun-toting yahoos doesn’t really describe what happened in Colorado. Democrats and Independents outnumbered Republicans at the polls, and gun-control advocates, led by Michael Bloomberg, outspent the NRA by 5-1. Colorado’s legislative branches, governor and U.S. Senators are all Democrats. The NRA didn’t just galvanize voters around a single issue; it appealed to a broader sense of alienation among people who feel disempowered. That feeling is not limited to two senatorial districts in Colorado, and those recall elections should awaken us all to the need to start listening, not just to ourselves, but to each other.

A Love Story

We don’t know why we’re here. We don’t know where we’re going. And we don’t control what will happen to us along the way, much as we like to think we do. When John Vigiano, a retired New York City firefighter, woke up 12 years ago this morning, he had no idea that his only two sons would be dead before noon. John Jr., 36, was a firefighter and his brother Joe, 34, was a police detective, and both men lost their lives at the World Trade Center. Their father recorded his memories of that day in a four-minute video, animated by StoryCorps, which my daughter Annie sent me. Watching it, listening to the father’s voice, is how I imagine a religious experience – a four-minute moment of awe, without any false emotion. John and Joe each called their father as they were heading to work. The calls ended with the words, I love you. “We had the boys – John for 36 years and Joe for 34 years,” said Vigiano. “I wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s not many people that the last words they said to their son or daughter was ‘I love you’ and the last words they heard was ‘I love you.’ So, that makes me sleep at night.”

There is no mention of heaven or hell, of Christians or Muslims, of vengeance or the American flag. This is the ultimate resurrection story, the triumph of love over the tragedy of life.

Annie’s message with the link said simply, “I love you.”

Trusting Ty

“Hey, I’m Ty,” he said, as he launched himself from the top of the stairwell, a tiny misguided missile hurtling straight at me. I caught him (he wasn’t very large) – and that’s when I learned that the essence of teaching is trust. I had started an after-school program in a Boston inner-city housing project, and Ty – and his less rambunctious twin brother Troy – had just arrived. It was September 1975, and Boston schools were enflamed by the issue of busing to achieve school integration. That era is history now, but the question of how to educate America’s children is no less urgent. A friend sent me a piece on the new Common Core State Standards, the latest national effort to reform our schools. Both teachers and parents are understandably wary of another grand plan. (The opinion of students is rarely solicited. I mean, what do they know?) But after years of a mind-numbing focus on standardized test scores, not as evidence of learning but to make administrators look good, the new standards do two important things: they provide clear goals without dictating how teachers should teach and they encourage critical thinking rather than rote learning. That seems simple, but it requires something that is too often absent from our schools – a deep trust in teachers to teach and in students to learn.

I often wonder what has happened to Ty. Did he find teachers who sough to nurture his exuberance or a system that tried to crush it?

Millennial Thinking

“Jamie, assuming that you do another piece on the Syria bombing, you might want to consider the fact that this will be the first time in the history of the U.S. House of Representatives that the RAPTURE will be a significant if unstated force in favor of passage.” The Rapture is the evangelical belief that the elect will be swept up into the clouds to meet Jesus when he returns to dispense ultimate justice to the rest of us. It was brought to prominence in the New World by Increase and Cotton Mather, the father-and-son team of 17^th-century Puritan divines who were the driving force behind the Salem Witch Trials. When you have no doubt of your own righteousness, you have little fear of Judgment Day.

Remember, in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions that followed, how horrified we were by the epidemic of suicide bombings that killed thousands of innocent people? Who could do such a thing, we asked? Only zealots, we were told, young men (mostly) who had been drugged or blackmailed or, above all, promised a paradise filled with dark-eyed virgins just for them. Such fanaticism, we were assured, is the foundation of radical Islam. This is not a clash of civilizations. We are engaged in a war between civilization and barbarism.

For those who are convinced of their place in heaven, the fate of the earth becomes less important. We should beware of going to war for those who eagerly anticipate Armageddon.

It’s Only a Phrase

“There are 78,000 abandoned buildings in this city standing in various levels of decay,” the article begins. “Services have fallen into dysfunction, and debts are piling ever higher. Yet for all the misery, Detroit’s bankruptcy gives an American city a rare chance to reshape itself from top to bottom.” “From top to bottom.” It’s only a phrase, I know, but what if the reporter had written of rebuilding Detroit from bottom to top? Consider the difference in our images of what is happening in that distressed city. In one we picture planners, experts, outsiders, people with the answers imposing their solutions from above. In the other, we start with the struggling communities and impoverished people seeking to nurture whatever will help them survive. We need both approaches, to be sure. Detroit cannot heal all the wounds inflicted by 50 years of disintegration and misrule without a lot of help, but how you describe the problem determines, at least in part, how you define the solutions.

Half a world a way, in the remote villages of Dertu, Kenya, and Ruhiira, Uganda, Nina Munk reports on Jeffrey Sachs’ quest to eradicate poverty from Africa. Yet “with almost every intervention,” writes Joe Nocera, “she documents the chasm that exists between the villagers and those running the project.”

For whom are we building villages and rebuilding cities if not for the people who live in them?  Words matter. You do not build a community from top to bottom. You build from the ground up.

Sneak Attack

I once watched Tiger Woods stop his golf swing a nanosecond before hitting the ball because a spectator had clicked his camera. Woods swings at 128 miles-per-hour, so his back-wrenching reverse was mind-boggling to watch – much like Barack Obama’s back-wrenching reverse on Syria. First, contrary to all theories of the importance of surprise, Obama declares we will attack Syria. He’s a little fuzzy on why – take “a shot across Assad’s bow”? Salvage America’s “credibility”? Reinforce the “red line” against gas? Send a proxy message to Iran? But he’s clear the missiles are coming. Then he pulls the rug out from under everyone, particularly John Kerry, by announcing he will submit the question to Congress, which (a) is on vacation and (b) hasn’t passed any meaningful legislation in years. Yet, with this stroke of inadvertent brilliance, Obama restored the Constitution – which gives Congress the sole power “to declare war” – and placed Congress in a pickle. For how can they shut down the government if they are simultaneously going to declare war? I believe that internationalism and human rights should be foundations of American foreign policy, and there is horrific suffering in Syria. But I don’t see what sending missiles to enforce rules of civilized slaughter in a war in which the good guys may well be worse than the bad guys will accomplish, beyond escalating the carnage. Congress has not declared war since 1941, an interval filled with disastrous efforts to impose American values at the point of a gun.

A Fable

Once upon a time long ago, there was a republic known for its civic tolerance, diverse cultures and passion for innovation. The glue that held it together was the people’s belief in an open political system and a tradition of civic debate. But hard times hit, and the republic went into a recession. The old communal bonds weakened. Parties purged their ranks of dissenters. Moderates became an endangered species. Demands for ideological purity triumphed over pragmatic efforts to build the coalitions required to govern in a pluralistic society. Voters increasingly turned out in support of extremists, and eventually the commitment to maintain the republic itself was called into question. There was plenty of blame to go around, but one right-wing group was especially relentless in pursuit of its agenda. Under the banner of patriotism, its members manipulated national symbols to vilify foreigners, non-whites, gays, Jews. They actively sought to shut down the government and ultimately to bring down the republic. Few took them seriously at first. They seemed a laughable bunch of bombastic buffoons, ranting against a society that was leaving them behind, shouting down their political opponents. One day powerful interests asked the leader of the party to become the leader of the nation so that order could be restored. And that’s where the fable ends. Because the rest is history: Immediately after being named Germany’s chancellor, “Hitler rushed to his headquarters and told Goebbels with tears in his eyes, ‘Now we are on our way.’”

(Drawn from Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman by Jeremy Adelman)

A Disturbing List

24/7 Wall Street published a list of America’s ten fastest-growing jobs over the last decade. They are: (10) Skin Care Specialists; (9) Personal Care Aides; (8) Personal Financial Advisors; (7) Coaches and Scouts; (6) Human Resources Specialists; (5) Massage Therapists; (4) Interpreters and Translators; (3) Music Directors and Composers; (2) Petroleum Engineers; (1) Service Unit Operators, Oil, Gas and Mining. There are lots of ways to interpret this list – the authors point to an aging population and “non-conventional” fuel sources. But what jumped out at me was the absence of any jobs focused on building communities, or on building much of anything, really. Instead, I see a people absorbed with taking care of ourselves, both physically and financially, while becoming increasingly oblivious to – and dependent on – extractive energy policies that threaten the health of the earth, which is the ultimate source of our own well-being. I was heartened by the presence of composers as evidence that we still value the creative arts, until I read that one “factor driving job growth for this occupation is the expected greater need for original music scores or transcriptions used in commercials.” We need translators because globalization has exposed our weakness in other languages, a weakness we exacerbate by insisting that good Americans only speak English.

Reading this less-than-robust list, I kept thinking of the decline of Rome, destroyed by the self-indulgence of a people no longer involved in their own governance. And that music, I wondered? Could it be the sound of Nero fiddling?

Early Morning, Low Tide

The sea is so calm this morning. I sit on the rocks sipping my coffee, looking out the “western way,” which lies almost due south between Cranberry Island and the Manset shore, the silence broken only by the sound of a few birds and the occasional melancholy clang of a bell buoy. Later the water will be filled with boats, both working and pleasure, but now I can see only two small sails far in the distance, one carrying its passengers away, the other coming toward home. A handful of gulls skim soundlessly above the water’s surface, landing without effort on a rock or the waveless sea. Somewhere, out of sight, a boat’s motor breaks the silence. There is just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay, and it is so clear that I look far out to a horizon, which the Episcopalian burial liturgy tells us is “nothing save the limit of our sight.” Or more fully, “Life is eternal, and love is immortal, and death is only an horizon, and an horizon is nothing, save the limit of our sight.” I imagine what lies beyond, but am mostly immersed in my surroundings here, so absorbed that my coffee has gone cold. I think, I don’t have the words to describe this, which suits me because they would limit what is limitless. My religion taught me early on to fear God. I sit in awe of this.