Barack Obama and White Bigotry

"Few are willing to brave the disapproval of their fellows, the censure of their colleagues, the wrath of their society. Moral courage is a rarer commodity than bravery in battle or great intelligence. Yet it is the one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change. Each time a person stands up for an idea, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, (s)he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
--Robert Kennedy
“The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities
that make all men human and, therefore, brothers."
--Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, the daddy is thinking about the article that humorist Andy Borowitz wrote for Truthdig. It's an attempt to poke fun at America and racial bigotry n this country. Borowitz writes:

"Pundits and pollsters alike have wondered about the role racists might play in the 2008 presidential contest, but the new survey released today was the first concrete attempt to take the pulse of this key voting bloc.

The poll, conducted by Duh Magazine, suggests that Mr. Obama faces an uphill battle in his effort to win the votes of dyed-in-the-wool bigots.

“We wanted to know, why isn’t Barack Obama closing the deal among racists?” said Charles Plugh, editor in chief of Duh. “The answer seems to be because he’s black.”

In a head-to-head match up, likely bigots chose Sen. McCain over Sen. Obama by a margin of 1,000 to 1, with a majority of racists saying they “strongly disagree” with Sen. Obama’s decision not to be white."

Borowitz, I know humor is your thing and that we all need humor in our lives. But the daddy wants to ask you four questions:

1. With the United States engaged in two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the brink of becoming engaged with another in Iran; with the United States unemployment rate at 6.1% (the highest it has been in years) and climbing; with so many Americans losing their homes to foreclosure; with so many middle income Americans being unable to keep up with things like childcare payments, mortgage and car payments; and have maxed out their credit cards to keep their heads above water-- do you really think this brand of humor is funny anymore, if it ever was?

2. Can you begin to even imagine how angry this must make African Americans of all political persuasions-- Democrat, Republican, Independent, Progressive-- feel, knowing that, after all the cotton they've picked, all the wars they've fought, after all the contributions they've made to this country, one of their own who is smarter, younger and has the best ideas is not picked to be president solely because of his race?

3. Don't you think it's time to call out racist white Americans, including white women supporters of Hillary Clinton, for their failure to come into the 21st century and elect Barack Obama and then push him to implement policies to hlep working Americans?

4. Don't you think that what's left of our declining economy and fledgling democracy depends on it?

Dear Gov. Palin: Critizing Obama's Community Work Insults Us All

"The history of America has been largely created by the deeds of its working people and their organizations. Nor has this contribution been confined to raising wages and bettering work conditions; it has been fundamental to almost every effort to extend and strengthen our democracy."
--William Cahn, labor historian
"Human progress is neither automatic nor inevitable... Every step toward the goal of justice requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle; the tireless exertions and passionate concern of dedicated individuals."
--Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Dear Governor Palin:

Last week, at the Republican convention, you chided the
democrat's presidential candidate for president Barack
Obama for having been a community organizer. You said it was a position with no real responsibilities. But the daddy is writing to tell you three things only a politician working for the rich and a politician attempting to score points to get into office like Palin would make such an ignorant, anti-progressive comment.

Let's be clear: what you really said is that Barack, a graduate of one of the best law schools in the country, an individual who turned down a lucrative income from numerous prestigious law firms to organize unemployed steel
workers and the poor in public housing on the South side of
Chicago, had no responsibilities and was engaged in work of little, if any, importance. But in your attempt to demean Obama, you did something more: you revealed your vast ignorance of the immense and invaluable role that community organizers played and continue to play in the development of this country. Clearly, you have little or no knowledge of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglas,
Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth who ended slavery; union
leaders like John Lewis who got rid of child
labor and gave us health benefits and retirement packages,
overtime pay other benefits; the Betty Friedans, Gloria Steinams and Ida B. Wells who organized so you, a woman, could get the right to vote; the Dr. Kings, Ella Mae Bakers, Bayard Rustins and Fannie Lou Hamers who, though beaten, jailed and murdered, brought an end to apartheid in the southern part of the United States; the Cesar Chavezs' who fought and continue to fight to bring the discrimination and near slave-like conditions of farm workers out of the shadows and to give them full economic and human rights.

But your ignorance and insensitivity to community work and its importance in the development of this country is not the worst thing. Worst of all is your utter insult to black Americans. After all, it is Black Americans who have had to organize and fight continuously and so long to achieve rights and respect that most white Americans take for granted. Indeed, one could argue that it is this struggle, this community work, that is our greatest legacy and our greatest gift in this country. Therefore, in insulting Obama's community work, you, in essence, insulted the historical legacy of an oppressed people who he represents and a struggle that is shared by so many, a struggle that has, at last, gotten this country to a point where the son of a single mother who once used food stamps was nominated the presidential candidate for a major party in the United States.

Besides reading up on your American history, there's only one other way for you to atone for your reckless and ill-informed remarks: apologize to Mr. Obama, his family and the American people for demeaning a history of community work that has made this such a great country.

Sincerely,

Mac Walton, aka. the daddy

Billie Holiday and the Best Video the Daddy Ever Saw

"Although her warm, feathery voice inhabited a limited range, she used it like an accomplished jazz instrumentalist, stretching and condensing phrases in an ever-shifting dialogue with accompanying musicians. Famous for delivering lyrics a bit behind the beat, she alternately endowed them with sadness, sensuality, languor, and irony."
--All About Jazz
"I hate straight singing. I have to change a tune to my own way of doing it. That's all I know...You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music."
--Billie Holiday
"You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave."
--Billie Holiday

Listen up. The daddy wants to ask you something. What’s the greatest video you ever saw?

The daddy votes for the video “Fine and Mellow.” It's the one where the great jazz singer Billie Holiday sings a bitter-sweet blues—her own composition—backed up by what may be the greatest collection of jazz musicians of the swing era: Ben Webster, Lester Young, and Coleman Hawkins on sax; Jerry Mulligan on baritone sax; Milton Hinton on bass; Vic Dickerson on trombone; Doc Cheatham and Roy Eldridge on trumpets, to name a few.

Billie Holiday

The story of Billie Holiday’s early life is shrouded in mystery. "Lady Sings the Blues," her autobiography, has been proven to be inaccurate. But as far as the daddy can tell, these basics seem to be true:

* That she was born Eleanora Fagan in Aril 7, 1915, in Baltimore, Maryland, the daughter of Clarence Holiday, a guy who apparently abandoned her and refused to see or help her until she became a success;
* That, sometimes in the mid-twenties, her mother moved to New York, leaving her in the care of relatives who Billie claimed abused her (At the age of 10, she reported that she was raped);
* That, in 1928, she went to live with her mother;
* That, in 1933, after singing in a number of small clubs, she was discovered by talent scout John Hammond who immediately arranged three recordings for her with Benny Goodman and set up singing engagements for her around New York;
* That, in 1935, under the direction of the great pianist Teddy Wilson, she made a number of recordings. In fact, between 1935 and 1942, she made some of the greatest recordings in jazz, steadily expanding her fan base from black jukebox audiences to radio and club listeners throughout the United States.

Why video was so great?

Billy’s voice. The video exposes the fact that, by the 1950's, after years of destructive drugs and abusive men, her voice had lost some of its projection and vitality. At the same, she retained that distinctive sound and somehow gave her performance perhaps a more effective, emotional delivery.

The interplay between Billie and Lester. The story goes that Billie and Lester, who were once very close, hadn’t spoken in years. They say Lester tired of watching Billie go from one abusive man to another or one drug dealer to another as she slid down the slippery and deathly slope of drug addiction and moved away from her. Whatever, the video clearly showed the interplay between them with Billie nodding her head and smiling approvingly as Lester played the blues the way she loved it--sweet and slow. Yes, she still loved "The Prez," the name she gave him, she said, because he played the saxophone so sweetly.

Musical approaches. But the video displayed more than the relationship between Billie and Lester. It also put up front the difference in musical approach between Lester Young and Coleman Hawkins. Hawkins was known as the fast playing, let-it-all hang out honker; and Lester was known as the economical, sweet playing icon of the “cool jazz’ sound. So it was interesting, indeed, that they both agreed to appear on the same program and play together. Both sound great. And there was no honking. On this night, all the soloists bowed down and played the blues the way “Lady Day" likes it-- slow and bittersweet.

Roy Eldridge. You can take this to the bank: nobody—not Louie Armstrong, not Clifford Brown, Lee Morgan, not Miles Davis— played the trumpet with more passion or more discipline than Eldridge. Indeed, you could argue that everyone knew who would take the final bow to Lady Day on this song-- that everyone knew Roy's soloing would lift the collective group's performance to the heavens and bring it home for sho.

Watch Billie's smile broaden and her head rock with more intensity to the backbeat as Roy, like a carpenter walling a home, builds and builds on his solo. And when he builds to the point where he just screams through his trumpet, watch a smiling Billie turn and look at the other musicians as if to say "Check out this guy! Can you believe how great he's playing?"

But don't believe me. Click here on Billie Holiday and see for yourself. But, first, answer the daddy:

What’s the best video you ever saw?
-----------------------------------------
Fine & Mellow

by Billie Holiday

My man don't love me
Treats me oh so mean
My man he don't love me
Treats me awfully
He's the, lowest man
That I've ever see

He wears high trimmed pan
Stripes are really yellow
He wears high trimmed pan
Stripes are really yellow
But when he starts in to love me
He's so fine and mellow

Love will make you drink and gamble
Make you stay out all night long repeat
Love will make you drink and gamble
Make you stay out all night long
Love will make you do things
That you know is wrong

But if you treat me right baby
I’ll stay home everyday
But if you treat me right baby
I’ll stay home everyday
But you're so mean to me baby
I know you're gonna drive me away

Love is just like the faucet
It turns off and on
Love is just like the faucet
It turns off and on
Sometimes when you think it's on baby
It has turned off and gone
-------------------------------

Seamus Heaney: Three Poems

"This temperamental disposition towards an art that was earnest and devoted to things as they are was corroborated by the experience of having been born and brought up in Northern Ireland and of having lived with that place even though I have lived out of it for the past quarter of a century."

--Seamus Heaney

"To begin with, I wanted that truth to life to possess a concrete reliability, and rejoiced most when the poem seemed most direct, an upfront representation of the world it stood in for or stood up for or stood its ground against."
--Seamus Heaney

Blackberry-Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun For a full week, the blackberries would ripen. At first, just one, a glossy purple clot Among others, red, green, hard as a knot. You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots. Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills We trekked and picked until the cans were full Until the tinkling bottom had been covered With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were pepperedWith thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's. We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre. But when the bath was filled we found a fur, A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache. The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour. I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot. Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication 1. Sunlight There was a sunlit absence. The helmeted pump in the yard heated its iron, water honeyed in the slung bucket and the sun stood like a griddle cooling against the wall of each long afternoon. So, her hands scuffled over the bakeboard, the reddening stove sent its plaque of heat against her where she stood in a floury apron by the window. Now she dusts the board with a goose's wing, now sits, broad-lapped, with whitened nails and measling shins: here is a space again, the scone rising to the tick of two clocks. And here is love like a tinsmith's scoop sunk past its gleam in the meal-bin. 2. The Seed Cutters They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel, You'll know them if I can get them true. They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through. They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potates Buried under that straw. With time to kill, They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes Lazily halving each root that falls apart In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam, And, at the centre, a dark watermark. Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom Yellowing over them, compose the frieze With all of us there, our anonymities. Poetry, Main Collections 1966: Death of a Naturalist, Faber & Faber 1969: Door into the Dark, Faber & Faber 1972: Wintering Out, Faber & Faber 1975: North, Faber & Faber 1979: Field Work, Faber & Faber 1984: Station Island, Faber & Faber 1987: The Haw Lantern, Faber & Faber 1991: Seeing Things, Faber & Faber 1996: The Spirit Level Faber & Faber 2001: Electric Light, Faber & Faber 2006: District and Circle, Faber & Faber Poetry, Collected Editions 1980: Selected Poems 1965-1975, Faber & Faber 1990: New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Faber & Faber 1998: Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, Faber & Faber

Seamus Heaney- the Daddy Loves Him But Can't Say Why

Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
--Seamus Heaney
The Ireland I now inhabit is one that these Irish contemporaries have helped to imagine.
--Seamus Heaney

Today, the daddy is thinking of Seamus Heaney, the Irish poet. You say, "daddy, of course you like Seamus Heaney because he's the Irish guy from a rural town in Northern Ireland who made it big. He wrote more than dozen volumes of poetry, penned numerous articles in literary criticism, performed numerous translations, and wrote two great plays “The Cure at Troy” (his version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes) and The Burial at Thebes (A version of Sophocles' Antigone) ." Great, but the daddy knows a lot of folks who made it and, frankly, he hates many of them (the arrogant ones). So that's not why the daddy likes him.

You say "Oh, please. The guy won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995." Good for him, but the daddy is not impressed with individual titles. Maybe the daddy likes him because he writes poems that recall the days of simple life on a farm in Ireland, poems like “The Death of a Naturalist:”

Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam. I ducked through the hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose-necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The clap and plops were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran.
The great slime Kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would catch it.

Or in “Blackberry Picking” where he writes of tasting that first blackberry late in August:

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk can, pea tins, jam pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Maybe the daddy was an Irish dude in another life and was reincarnated as a black guy and set down in the center of a project in Atlanta, Georgia and now yearns for the simple life of a farm back in the ole country...Or, more likely, maybe the daddy, having grown up in projects in inner-cities, wishes he had the luxury of a more carefree childhood on a farm, playing with frogs in a stream in the back of his house or picking blueberries just up the hill in late August.

Writing with clarity

Maybe the daddy likes this guy because he writes poems with such clarity and specificity about the familiar, the routine, poems like this one where he distills the silent beauty of a woman (perhaps his wife or mother) as the sunlight shines down upon her as she prepares a meal:

“…and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose’s wing
now sits, broad-lapped,
with white nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith’s scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

Something more spiritual

Maybe it's because his writing makes the daddy feels a special kinship to him and to Ireland, especially those poems in the book “North.” For some reason, the daddy keeps coming back to the poem “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing,” especially these lines:

Smoke signals are loud-mouthed with us:
Maneuverings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule.

That Norman, Ken and Sidney signaled Prod
And Seamus (call me Sean) was sure-fire Pape.
O land of password, handgrip, wink and nod,
Of open minds as open as a trap,

Where tongues lie coiled, as under flames lie wicks,
When half of us, as in a wooden horse,
Were cabin’d and confined like wily Greeks,
Besieged with the siege, whispering morse.

So does the daddy love Heaney because he is a reincarnated Irishmen? Because, through Heaney, he can go into a time machine and go to a pond and play with frogs in his backyard?... or because, through Seamus, he can connect more closely to humanity, a humanity that reminds him that wherever there is oppression, there is a Northern Ireland?

Yes, the daddy loves Seamus, but he can't say why.

Ever loved a writer or a book but couldn't say why?

The Freddie King Blues Fest: Dirty Dancing, Flirting and Mournful Hurting

"If heaven allows music (which I don't know why It wouldn't) then you must be having quite a jam with Hendrix, Albert, Stevie, and other legends of Blues, and those who played the Blues like a legend. I hope you have complete happiness and content wherever you are."
-anonymous note left at Freddie King's grave on August 16, 2008.

September 3rd is the birthday of Freddie King, one of the greatest blues guitarists of all times. Every year he is honored in Texas. September 3 is proclaimed "Freddie King Day." And every year "The Freddie King Blues Fest" is held in Dallas, Texas. The last blues fest held a few days ago (August 31, 2008) featured two great blues legends, Bobby Blue Bland, blues singer and Hubert Sumlin, lead guitarist for the great Howlin Wolf. Here's a story about the festival:

Freddie King Blues Fest: Dirty dancing, flirting and mournful hurting

by Thor Christensen/The Dallas News

"He was flirting with a woman who was dirty dancing near the Granada Theater's stage. But he was also summing up the 5th annual Freddie King Blues Fest: It was a night of aging legends trying to prove they've still got it.

Mr. Bland was the perfect headliner for the four-and-a-half hour tribute to Mr. King, the Dallas blues ace who died in 1976. At 78, Mr. Bland has to sit while he performs, but the Memphis-based singer still had plenty of gas in his tank.

Moaning and sighing and uncorking his signature snort, his voice grew stronger as the show unfolded into the wee hours of Monday. When he opened for Van Morrison at the Meyerson Symphony Center last year, he barely got going before it was time to say goodbye.

This time, backed by a brassy seven-man band, he gave fans a wide-ranging set packed with hits ("I Pity the Fool," "Farther Up the Road") and well-chosen covers such as Bill Withers' "Ain't No Sunshine." But the showstopper was "St. James Infirmary," the timeless blues piece about love, death and bad habits. Instead of camping it up like other artists do, he slipped into a falsetto and dug straight into the mournful abyss."

For the full story click here on King. ----------------------------------------

1. Freddie King; official website. 2. Freddie King: general info. 3. Freddie King: good biography. 4. Freddie King: another good biography.

Fannie Lou Hamer by June Jordan

"Whether you have a Ph.D., or no D, we're in this bag together. And whether you're from Morehouse or Nohouse, we're still in this bag together. Not to fight to try to liberate ourselves from the men -- this is another trick to get us fighting among ourselves -- but to work together with the black man, then we will have a better chance to just act as human beings, and to be treated as human beings in our sick society. "
--Fannie Lou Hamer

Poem for Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer

by June Jordan*

You used to say, “June?

Honey when you come down here you

supposed to stay with me. Where

else?”

Meaning home

against the beer the shotguns and the

point of view of whitemen don’

never see Black anybodies without

some violent itch start up.

The ones who

said, “No Nigga’s Votin in This Town . . .

lessen it be feet first to the booth”

Then jailed you

beat you brutal

bloody/battered/beat

you blue beyond the feeling

of the terrible

And failed to stop you.

Only God could but He

wouldn’t stop

you

fortress from self-

pity

Humble as a woman anywhere

I remember finding you inside the laundromat

in Ruleville

lion spine relaxed/hell

what’s the point to courage

when you washin clothes?

But that took courage

just to sit there/target

to the killers lookin

for your singin face

perspirey through the rinse

and spin

and later

you stood mighty in the door on James Street

loud callin:

“BULLETS OR NO BULLETS!

THE FOOD IS COOKED

AN’ GETTIN COLD!”

We ate

A family tremulous but fortified

by turnips/okra/handpicked

like the lilies

filled to the very living

full

one solid gospel

(sanctified)

one gospel

(peace)

one full Black lily

luminescent

in a homemade field

of love
------------------------------------------------
*from The Collected Works of June Jordan (2005)

Autobiography

To Praise My Bridges: An Autobiography. Jackson, Mississippi, 1967.

Books about Fannie Lou Hamer

1. The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer (Women in American History) by Chana Lee.
2. This Little Light of Mine: The Life of Fannie Lou Hamer, by Kay Mills.
3. Fannie Lou Hamer: From Sharecropping to Politics (History of Civil Rights Series) by David Rubel.

Play

1. "I Question America" by E.P. McKnight
2. The Long Road to Freedom (Scholastic.com).