December 13, 2016--Heap of Trouble

There's more than a month to go before Donald Trump assumes the presidency (though he jump-started his reign by sucking up all the oxygen at Saturday's Army-Navy football game) and already the Democratic field for 2020 is getting crowded.

At least in the eyes of people calling in to late-night radio talk shows.

Here's what I've been hearing--

The front runner for the nomination is Elizabeth Warren. Her closest challenger is former Newark mayor and current New Jersey senator Cory Booker. Lurking is New York governor Andrew Cuomo and of course Bernie is running around the country in quasi-campaign mode--again not showing up for his $174,000 per senatorial taxpayer-funded job, which alone puts him in the top 5 percent of earners. And then there's Joe Biden making noises that he is not ruling out yet one more run at the brass ring.

Just what we need to take the White House back from Donald Trump--two white guys who in 2020 will be nearly 80 years old, one a socialist, a Stanford-Yale-educated former mayor who in seven years as mayor accomplished almost nothing, and a Harvard professor who misrepresented herself as partly Native American so she could get a scholarship set aside for actual American Indians. Then there is Cuomo whose closest aides are likely to wind up in jail soon for bribery and bid-rigging and as part of a plea-bargaining deal could bring the governor down in tandem to what is happening just across the Hudson to fellow governor Chris Christie.

Late night-talk show folks refer to Cuomo as "a heap of trouble." And they're being kind.

These aspirants share one thing in common--a disdainful style of the sort that got Hillary Clinton in trouble with working people all across the middle of the country.

The Democratic Party is tearing itself apart after losing the presidency to someone with orange hair who lives in a gold-plated New York City condo triplex surrounded by buildings literally bearing his name.

They seem to think they had the "wrong message," while the real problem is the unspoken contempt they showed for average people. People with less education and inferior genetics. Ironically, while expressing concern about the plight of middle-of-the-country Americans they more fundamentally believe in a form of Social Darwinism (yes they do, as another mark of superiority, believe in Evolution) in which the meritocratically blessed advance while everyone else--the less fortunate--lag behind. Scatter food stamps for them, they say, and that will take care of the inequality problem. Anything other than looking within themselves in search of their own forms of narcissism and how that and the role they have been playing props up and helps rationalize the system.

Heap of trouble, indeed. And I'm not talking just about Andrew Cuomo.

Andrew Cuomo

September 1, 2016--Political Poetry

Reading Larry Tye's rather good new biography of Robert Kennedy, Robert Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon, I realized that one critical thing missing from the current contest for the presidency is poetry.

This year's campaign is being conducted exclusively in prose.

As Mario Cuomo said, "You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose." He of the 1984 convention speech, "City On the Hill," knew what he was taking about.

The closest thing to poetry we have had was Donald Trump's spritz-rapping during the Republican primaries. In a burst of hyperbole I may have compared him to Lenny Bruce.

Forgive me Lenny on the 50th anniversary of your OD death.

Hillary is not about poetry--she is already governing--and should be commended for no longer using black dialect when addressing African-American audiences nor getting someone with the talent of Ted Sorenson to write speeches for her full of quotes from Albert Camus or Aeschylus.

Tye writes that after the assassination of Bobby's brother, Jack, he sank into a nearly yearlong depression, roused from it largely by reading Greek literature and existentialist or absurdist authors such as Camus.

From this he learned about the meaning that can only come from tragic suffering and the dangers lurking within if we let hubris take us over.

God knows what Trump reads--just Tweets most likely--or Hillary for that matter. One suspects policy papers.

But Bobby Kennedy was comfortable with poetry--he carried with him biblical and literary quotes that he found inspiring and frequently threaded them into his public utterances. Very much including during his remarkable four-day visit to South Africa in 1966, fully 28 years before the end of apartheid.

Speaking to a mixed-race gathering of students at the University of Cape Town, he began--

I came here because of my deep interest [in] and affection for a land settled by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century, then taken over by the British, and at last independent; a land in which the native inhabitants were at first subdued, but relations with whom remain a problem to this day; a land which defined itself on a hostile frontier . . . a land which once imported slaves, and now must struggle to wipe out the last traces of that former bondage. I refer, of course, to the United States of America.

It was not unusual for him to begin speeches this way--leading listeners in one direction and then shifting perspective.

He continued, now in more ode-like cadences--

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total of all these acts will be written the history of this generation. 

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, 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 which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance . . . . 

Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly. It is this new idealism which is also, I believe, the common heritage of a generation which has learned that while efficiency can lead to the camps at Auschwitz, or the streets of Budapest, only the ideals of humanity and love can climb the hills of the Acropolis.

In Soweto