Category Archives: politics

Superman vs. the VFW?

Leave a reply

In the department of stuff you come across while looking for something else, I found this radio show (the link brings on streaming audio). Click, and you can listen to a “thousands of GI’s” protesting “racial discrimination in state hiring,” and a kind of unusual ally has their backs: Superman, who flies in to stop the state troopers ordered to fire on the vets. Not unusual, it turns out, for the Superman radio show of 1940-1951, whose stories never appeared in comics and which also featured Superman vs. The Clan of the Fiery Cross (also known as the KKK).

This is all old news to true geeks, and doubtless other better writers than I, like  Michael Chabon. But I stumbled across it while poking around for something almost no one remembers (sort of my specialty): the American Veterans Committee.

AVC was a short-lived World War II veterans’ organization whose slogan was “Citizens First, Veterans Second.” And that story about the veterans protest was grounded in the same reality that gave AVC nearly a million members at its start.

By mid-1946, when that story ran,  literally 12,000 active-duty soldiers were busy protesting at bases around the world, accusing the Truman administrationof dragging its feet in getting them home. One famously told Truman, “Give us our independence or go home to yours!”  AVC, founded by the fellow below (who is not, as he seems, Orson Welles), had on its board civil rights icon Medgar Evers and Howard Zinn, among others. Many were writers, like Benjamin Bradlee and E.J. Kahn, and doubtless others found their way to that Superman show. In September of ’46, the AVC issued a special commendation to the producers of the show for its quiet linking of veterans with “social tolerance.”

bolteun

Actually, the VFW had issued a similar award the month before, though it was for promoting “the American way” – code for crushing “commie” stuff like those  “tolerant” Superman shows, which shut down in 1951 in favor of the commie-busting TV version.  No place in the new Cold War for such thoughts — or for a veterans group that saw itself as composed of angelic troublemakers (e.g.  sleeping in L.A. streets as a housing protest).  By the time the 1954  Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency tamed Superman completely, the AVC had mostly collapsed under a not-unfamiliar perfect storm of personality clashes, sectarian-left noise (snooze) and McCarthyism. Leaving veterans of that war to choose between the American Legion and the VFW, as odious to them as to many OEF/OIF vets now.  Its founders basically did neither, choosing instead journalism, or film, or think tanks like the Carnegie Foundation for International Peace.

What happened next is still happening: some will be in the book. Stay tuned for some character sketches.

But I wonder if it would be too much of a cheat to lede my “necessary war” chapter with that fictional scene of “thousands of GIs.” (What do you think?)

stray news, necessary wars and fantasy presidents

Leave a reply

It’s been an odd week, since I last posted: and now an odd Thanksgiving, with attention split between the chapter I’m working on (more on that in a bit), family stuff, and the desire to check the latest from Mumbai, as one of those surreally-huge crises threatens to split the world and our brains. Below are some quick links, in lieu of a full post.

Why am I otherwise AWOL? I think it’s like those first weeks working on the Civil War chapter, when I was struck dumb by the hugeness of its pain. Now, writing about what most call The Good War,  I’m similarly cowed.  I do think my chapter’s title will borrow instead from Samuel Hynes, who writes and speaks of a “necessary war,”  as much of an oxymoron as that still feels.  (While I can’t claim to have come up with a satisfactory alternative, that phrase that still feels a contradiction — the tool of the Mumbai gunmen, not sensible people.)

I’ll provide a little more later, but meanwhile:

  • The “Hempstead 15,” that group of Iraq vets and activists arrested October 15 at Hofstra University, have secured equal treatment for their cases by the Nassau County DA’s office. Which is to say that they’ve received the adjournment in contemplation of dismissal (ACD) that was once standard for  direct-action types,  before the Patriot Act: further legal action will continue, with a lawsuit by Sgt. Nick Morgan, whose face was badly damaged when he was trampled, and with the court-martial of Sgt. Mathis Chiroux, who still faces trial for his May refusal to deploy to Iraq.
  • sarah_hale_portraitAt my other shop, an interesting riff on the woman who gave us the Thanksgiving holiday (and Vassar College), Sarah Josepha Buell Hale. While fact-checking the piece, I also found out that Hale’s son went to West Point, and suggested a poem by one of my almost-characters on her magazine: Edgar Poe, he son wrote, “is seen as a man of talent here, but he is too mad a poet to like mathematics.” That line could title a biography.
  • On the good-news front, the reviews of Milk are even better than I’d hoped. Milk, writes David Denby in the New Yorker,  “comes across as an idiosyncratic man, a rule-bound New York Jew who finds his calling in the beautiful and sensually relaxed Mediterranean-style city.” This Bronx shiksa felt the same way for a few years of my life.
  • As for Mumbai, I will not make the mistake of many whose business it is to chat, and default to some usual position — e.g. Fox positing a delay in closing Guantanamo or the rumors of Obama-staff presence that led normally sober media temporarily astray. But here’s the helpMumbai Page, for any Mumbaikers or travelers who might stumble here and want to know how to get/give concrete assistance.
  • And because it’s Thanksgiving week, I’ll give in to the temptation to end with a video joke — but of my geeky sort, which was fortunately shared by enough others to make this clip a Youtube favorite:

and we wonder why we’re invisible

Leave a reply

When the frigging  New York Times “Public Editor” is that clueless:

I said incorrectly last week that Matthew Shepard had been murdered in Colorado. He died in a hospital there. Thank you to readers who pointed out that the fatal beating took place near Laramie, Wyo.

It was all over the news, sir. Before you went to press, you could have double-checked, using The Google. Or even Youtube:

100 million castaways, demanding a home

Leave a reply

100 million: That’s how many people who felt as I did last week. Or at least as many as stood up yesterday to say: Not in our America.

Using the skills that were so essential to the election of the current president, a handful of kids-with-broadband organized the event in cities around the country. They used email, Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube to provide a single, coordinated answer to the question so many were asking: “What do I do now?”

In Philly, the weather complied, with 70-degree temps warming the crowd of 5,000 clustered by City Hall. A group as diverse as my new city, in both ethnic composition and age. Families with small children, parents,  ministers joined folks like myself and Rachel, or the guy with the sign “No More Mr. Nice Gay.” Or like white-haired Cass McGough, 72,  who eyes were a soft match to her carved earrings, and whose sign said simply: I’M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT. I didn’t ask her if she knew Harvey Milk, who would have been proud of the day.

“I never thought I’d live to see a black President,” McGough grinned as the crowd gathered. “But I also never thought they’d leave us so thoroughly out of this moment, either.”

Even more heartening, to me, was the Cataldi family — South Philly types who wouldn’t have looked out of place among my Bronx relatives. Dino Cataldi brought his entire family, whose signs were among those made famous on TV and here: A GAY MARRIAGE IS JUST AS IMPORTANT AS MY FIRST, SECOND AND THIRD STRAIGHT MARRIAGE. When I asked one of them why they’d come, he said “My brother-in-law!” and pointed to Dino, a burly guy with wavy hair and muscle-y arms.

Upon learning his last name, I told Cataldi about my own Italian family, and that my coming-out process felt at best incomplete. “You wanna know how I came out? My father asked me one night at dinner, Are you queer?  Before I could say anything, my brother answered for me: He’s not queer. He’s  gay.” In other words, not creepy, not other. For all my San Francisco-bred comfort with the term ‘queer,’ the story moved me, and I wished I could tell one just like it.

Meanwhile, the kids just kept coming. I felt like I’d seen them canvassing for Obama, and they’d just gone on to the next logical goal. They were passionate about not, as columnists did,  targeting not any demographic group, not even the Mormon Church — instead targeting the indifference of those to whom think gay and lesbian civil rights are a side issue, not worth showing up for.

Now, of course, comes the hard work of making even future protests share a goal. I’ll watch, and show up when I can. This could be the 21st-century ACT-UP, though so far we don’t have the artists to show for it.

(The video is from the 1981 Secret Policeman’s Other Ball, a benefit for Amnesty International. My title’s quote from The Police feels suddenly pretty on-topic.)

Author on Sally Hemings: “she would have been on a coin”

1 Reply

Reed Annette Gordon03
A few months ago Annette Gordon-Reed,  professor, attorney and historian, launched her new book The Hemingses of Monticello. The book comes four years after DNA evidence finally quieted most critics that had claimed that Thomas Jefferson couldn’t possibly be the father of the children of the enslaved Sally Hemings.  (Click the first link for video of her conversation with Charlie Rose.)

A while back,  I caught up with Gordon-Reed for a brief chat— about history and women’s sexual power;  how working at Rikers Island prepared her for controversy;  and how it felt to raise a 15-year-old daughter while writing about a teenager who became pregnant by a President.
First of all,  thanks for an incredible book.  I think of it almost like a painting — it has all these layers and layers, and we kind of watch you apply each one. With each, the picture gets clearer and clearer.

It looks from the outside that  you’ve reinvented yourself a few times, like most women at this point in our lives.  On the way to becoming a breakthrough historian, you went from ow did you go from the uptown New York law firm Cahill ,Gordon & Reindel to general counsel for the New York City Board of Corrections?

Starting out at the firm, I learned how to work hard, and how to do the right thing. But then I saw an ad in the newspaper for this small, obscure agency.  What the Bd of Corrections does is oversee the Dept of Corrections, and what we did is draw up minimum standards for the treatment of inmates.

In addition to helping set standards for religious observances, and so forth, my main job was to hear inmate appeals, for disciplinary hearings – which meant that I spent a lot of time going to Rikers Island.

That’ll change your life, right there.

Especially then, when we were hovering between 19,000 and 20,000 inmates at Rikers and area jails. It was eye-opening, though  also in many ways frustrating and depressing — to see so many young people behind bars.

No wonder you decided to jump to academia.

Well, I’d always wanted to be  a writer. I tried to do it as a lawyer, but I couldn’t make the time.  Becoming a law professor gave me the chance. I’s  thought about getting a doctorate in history —but I couldnt tell my husband, after he moved here with me from Southern California, thanks, I’m gonna stop working.    Being a law professor, you’re supposed to write and publish. I thought about writing about the law, but then I went back to my first love — history.

Did your skills as a lawyer prepare you to handle the controversies around the Jefferson and Hemings families?

I knew that Jefferson is, will always be, in some ways a contentious figure. Especially after I decided to take on what people have written abt Sally Hemings. Continue reading →

why I went to New York this week: video

Leave a reply

Just a brief note to annotate the video above. Filmmaker David Eric Allen, who I met there, did a good job of conveying the event I was there to witness – the arraignment of 15 young veterans and their supporters   — and even intermixed footage of Monday’s events with that of the moment on October 15 when Nassau County police brought in mounted units, on their horses, to keep unarmed veterans away from the the October 15 presidential debate. Allen also told the vet’s attorney (seen in the clip) that he also has footage of one cop saying: “This is New York –  you have no rights.” I may have found my prologue for the book.

I’ve mentioned many of the defendants here. Kris Goldsmith, who led my Winter Soldier piece, looked simultaneously looser and far more exhausted, while Adam Kokesh was as ever more wired than I am, and I was glad to meet the already-iconic Mathis Chiroux, who seemed taller than the rest in more ways than one.

In other shots you see some of the Vietnam vets who have their backs:  Bill Perry, who works overtime helping New Jersey veterans with, well, everything, and Joe Urgo, who ends the clip by saying “On to Boston!” Survivors of the first Winter Soldier, who have helped midwife the second,  both of the latter present as cheerful uncles, masking the dead-seriousness of this task of stopping a war before it goes on longer than the one that still sometimes claims them.

The XX factor in Obama’s transition

Leave a reply

On my way to New York today, where I plan on seeing Jeffrey Renard Allen give a reading in my old ‘hood and cover tomorrow’s hearing for the Iraq vets that make up the Hempstead 15. But to wrap up the election thread for this week, here’s the news blog I wrote for WVFC, since I really do think that the presence of women in Obama’s team has the capacity to be quietly transformational. (For video for all of the women below, you have to click on my original post.)

—

It’s been eight years since we has such a new slate of advisors to look at, and ponder what their role will be in the changes afoot. The women below come from a range of backgrounds, from corporate boardrooms (several on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women) to California classrooms and governor’s mansions.) It would be foolish to make generalizations about a government with so many representatives of The New Menopause in key positions.

But we can dream — that our concerns will certainly not be left behind, and that midlife’s particular mix of idealism, sense of humor, deep worry, and renewed energy can both add power to the new policies being developed and ensure that they’re grounded by real-world, physical realities.

More details later, but here’s an initial honor roll, with as much video as felt appropriate:

At the helm: One of the transition team’s three co-chairs is Chicago attorney Valerie Jarrett, 51, CEO of The Habitat Company (seen above(.  A Newsweek profile in May noted: “Jarrett got her start working for Harold Washington, the city’s first black mayor. Her grandfather ran the Chicago Housing Authority in the 1940s. Obama has long turned to her for advice. When he wanted to run for the U.S. Senate, he first had to convince Michelle and Jarrett that it was a good idea. He’s been seeking her counsel ever since.”

Show him the money:  Speaking of the governor’s mansion, Michigan’s Jennifer Granholm, 49, (above with First Lady Michelle Obama) is a core member of  the newly-announced team of economic advisers. Granholm joins not just Warren Buffet but
Laura D’Andrea Tyson, dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California at Berkeley and former chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisors;  Anne Mulcahy, 57, Chairman and CEO, Xerox;
and Hyatt exec Penny Pritzker. 49.

    In the boardroom:

    Granholm, who was mentioned as a dark-horse vice-presidential candidate, is also on the transition team’s Advisory Board, which also includes Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, 51,  who was profiled by Newsmix in July as a veep prospect; Susan Rice (above), 43, Brookings Institution fellow and former assistant secretary of state for African Affairs; and former EPA chair Carol Browner (below), the longest-serving administrator in the
    history of the agency, staying through both terms of the Clinton
    presidency.

    The long arms of the law: Women helping power the transition’s legal team include  general counsel (and Harvard Law school classmate) Cassandra Butts, former senior vice president for domestic policy at the Center for American
    Progress and senior adviser to Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.);  Lisa Brown, the Executive Director of the American Constitution Society, and Melody Barnes, 43, of the Center for American Progress as co-directors of agency review; and Clinton adviser Christine A. Varney, 52, as counsel for personnel.

    That different voice: Get used to another face next to the familiar Obama spokespersons Robert Gibbs and David Axelrod:  Michelle Obama’s chief of staff, 40-year-old Stephanie Cutter (seen above dueling with Chris Matthews during the campaign). During the Clinton Administration, Cutter worked as deputy communications director in both the White House and U.S. EPA.

    We at WVFC now know we have to get busy deciding who on this list we should try to interview and profile. We’d welcome readers’ comments — both about who we should talk to, and what questions you want to ask them when we do!

    — Chris L.

    A couple mornings after

    2 Replies

    Given what I’ve posted here, you were likely expecting me to be exultant tonight. And I remain heartened, thrilled cautiously hopeful, and glad for the national results. In case you were curious about my little corner of the swing state, Ward 58 went with the wave, 69 percent for Obama — though not precinct 26, where I voted, with its Russian immigrants and many retired cops and firefighters who went for their fellow veteran.

    But I also suddenly want a T-shirt that says “We Are All Harvey Milk.”  Dan Savage, on Salon yesterday, encapsulated what Rachel and I felt:

    Tuesday night I was overjoyed.

    But Wednesday morning, reading the papers and listening to the news on the radio, my boyfriend and I — we’re boyfriends in the USA, husbands in Canada — sat at our kitchen table and had the exact same discussion we had the morning after the 2004 election: When the hell are we moving to Canada?

    The anti-gay politicking that goes on in this country is a bit like a dog whistle: Straight people can’t hear it, but it drives gay people absolutely around the bend. The importance of Obama’s victory can’t be overstated; I’m as moved as anyone else. But the passage of anti-gay marriage amendments in Arizona, Florida and, most heartbreakingly of all, California (and with overwhelming support from African-American voters), along with the passage of an anti-gay adoption amendment in Arkansas, left us both feeling shell-shocked, betrayed and angry.

    We’ll see what happens. Personally, I’m in favor of abolishing civil marriage entirely: everyone gets a legal civil union, and leave the multiple definitions of  marriage to the multiple churches.

    bayard1But it all feels like a dream deferred, as Bayard noticed 20 years ago. That video above is of the new President dancing with a woman whose wedding, seen below, may have just been invalidated. Here’s to dancing with the future, but only if all of us get to do it.

    swing state notes: election day edition

    6 Replies

    _

    The door of the house where I live now has a hand-drawn sign, drawn by my father-in-law: NO POLITICAL SOLICITATIONS. GO AWAY. It’s been a little brutal, here in the 58th Ward: the commercials are relentless, the mail, the phone calls even more so. No matter your sympathies, the cacophony is hard to take.

    Today, the vote itself was a little subdued — and a little odd, for someone who has previously voted only in NY and California. Here, instead of the 500-foot rule I’m used to, campaigns can and do post signs right up to 10 feet from the polling place. And I’ve obviously seen too many movies: the electronic voting machine, with its paper-looking plastic and only red lights to signify my choice, looked more like one of the old machines at Coney Island than anything 21st-century.

    Unlike the hours-long lines I know are still happening in downtown Philly, the recreation center where we voted today was busy but not jammed, though its count of  290 by noon ( me, my girl and  her parents adding 286-290) still counted as record-breaking. But I’m glad we’re now headed into Center City, where election-day energy should be more in force.

    Notes from a swing state

    Leave a reply

    Walking along this suburban-ish street today, I kept seeing young people with clipboards. Using cell phones. I giggled; this is what democracy looks like.

    Those who know me well, or even knew my old blog shop, might feel puzzled that I almost never blog about electoral politics  – especially since I moved this summer to Pennsylvania, which both candidates treat as their jogging track. I didn’t blog Springsteen’s free concert in Philly, or Joe Biden’s frequent invocations of Scranton, or try one whit to write something comparable to the folks crowding my Google Reader — Sullivan, or Ezra, or Coates or Aravosis, or the brilliant Lindsay, who writes in 10 places at once. Because they all do it so well; because I’ve been spending as much time as possible working on the book, and trying to help propel the nonpartisan site that gives me my current day job. I didn’t even think of my feelings the day we lost last time, or how I talked to my students about the long haul – how only organizing could prevent it from happening again.

    I didn’t know that day that someone who didn’t lose his Senate race that day, who had once worked at the very same college where I was now subjecting them to writing drills, would prove an uber-organizer.

    I wonder if this week, any of those students are doing what those kids I saw today were doing. Maybe even today.

    I do know that not a single canvasser, in my usually-leans-Republican Northeast Philly neighborhood, was doing so for John McCain. I’m just saying. (Update, Mon: The others were, apparently, part of a 1.9-million-voters-strong weekend.)