Monthly Archives: July 2023

07/22/2023
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Joe Biden, Radio, Ron DeSantis

1000 Words: Old Joe, Crazy Ron, & Radio Dies

What If…?

Old Joe Biden sure is looking…, well, old these days.

My pal, the Clay City farmer/economist Eli (whose purchase of a Prius last year branded him among his geographical peers as the bastard child of Karl Marx) says Biden’s physical appearance at the NATO summit in Vilnius, Lithuania this month reminded him, a bit, of Roosevelt at Yalta.

For the history-deprived among us, the Big Three — Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin D. Roosevelt — met in the Crimean resort town of Yalta in February 1945 to discuss carving up Germany once the Allies finished kicking the hell of of them. Roosevelt at the time was damned lucky to be alive. His blood pressure regularly was topping 200. He looked wan, lifeless. His complexion sallow. His eyes sunken. Roosevelt’s perilous medical condition was well-known among those close to him but was well-concealed from the public.

It was a public, after all, that largely did not know Roosevelt was a cripple. Of course we live in a different day and age now. In fact, even going back almost 40 years, the general populace was apprised of the number of polyps removed from President Ronald Reagan’s colon during a routine colonoscopy. Some 20 years later, we were fully informed about President George W. Bush’s battle with alcohol abuse. In between, we learned about President Bill Clinton’s fondness for cigars innovatively marinated.

Anyway, Biden certainly doesn’t look as bad as Roosevelt did in the waning months of WWII, but he sure doesn’t look like a guy with a long future ahead of him.

Leading me to wonder what will happen if Old Joe keels over in, say, April or May, at the end of the primary season. What’s the Democratic Party going to do? Simply pass the mantle on to Kamala Harris like the Dems did in 1968? The party that year lost by assassination the candidate with the most momentum, Bobby Kennedy, after he won the last primary in California. They screwed over the candidate with the most delegates, Eugene McCarthy, and gave the nod to Vice President Hubert Humphrey, pretty much throwing the election to Richard Nixon. The nation wanted change and Humphrey sure wasn’t it. The backroom kingmakers, though, cared little for what the nation wanted.

This time around, though, my guess is the nation doesn’t want change, especially if the economy remains un-tanked. And should Old Joe turn in his keys to the White House any time between now and, say, this coming November, then a few ambitious Democrats’ll just declare for the primaries and the party’ll select a nominee in more or less normal fashion.

In any case, I hope party sachems are thinking long and hard about these possibilities. I figure they have to be if they’re paying any attention to Biden’s appearance these days.

Psychopathy

Florida’s state board of education this week adopted teaching guidelines that assert American slavery wasn’t all that nasty. In fact, by golly, slaves in this holy land actually benefited from their chains. Gosh dang it, slavery, under these teachings, just might turn out to be yet another example of this country giving all the advantages to black people.

Y’know, the canard that lunkheads have been shrieking about for decades now. The canard that reached a deafening roar when a certain incurious, unprepared, insensitive, uncaring, un-read, greed monkey somehow was elected president in 2016 and hasn’t subsided since.

People like Ron DeSantis saw how imbecility paid dividends for the 45th president and the FL Guv has clearly determined to go the multi-indicted pussy-grabber one better. One better? Hell. One hundred times better. The Florida school board was hand-picked by him and he had to have known precisely what they would do once they got their thumbs all over the state’s book learnin’ policies.

So, after musing on the mortality of the sitting president above, I now turn to the potential for the aspiring next president to demonstrate further lunacy. Clearly, he’s doubling down on appealing to the anencephalic mob that loves him. Usually, when people run for president, they tone down their previous edginess. I fear DeSantis, should he remain in the race through the GOP primaries, will only go further.

Don’t be shocked if by this time next year, DeSantis will have carped, espoused, fretted over, or executive ordered the following:

  • Florida’s unemployed and underemployed citizens will be inducted into slavery where they can “develop skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
  • Germany’s Nazi Party will be honored by Florida for establishing concentration camps where Jews gained a sense of unity, pride, and determination
  • In an effort to reinforce the sanctity of binary genderism, all Florida males must wear trousers that expose their genitals (Be proud, Florida men!)
  • All Florida females must have their genitals sewn shut (to be unsewn only by husbandly order)
  • Specialized trucks will begin spraying Florida’s neighborhoods with the COVID-19 virus — what better way to strengthen Florida citizens’ immune systems?
  • Florida’s children will be limited to one hour or less of book reading a month so they may do more shopping and praying
  • Florida’s air will be taken over by private industry and made available to breathe for the affordable price of $10 a day per person.
  • DeSantis will declare that should he win the presidency, his replacement as Florida governor will be a daily revolving cast composed solely of Florida Man.

Wither Radio?

It’s a damned shame. WHPK, the student-run radio station of the University of Chicago, is facing hard times. Real hard times.

The university’s Program Coordinating Council has slashed the station’s funding from a requested $57,000 (peanuts, really) to $20,600 for the 2023-24 school year. The station is appealing the cut but don’t hold your breath.

College radio has been the birthplace of countless professional DJs, show hosts, and administrators as well as big music acts. The reason anybody outside of their own families ever heard of REM, De La Soul, the B-52s, Nirvana, the Cure, Sinead O’Connor, or any of a hundred other eventual big acts is their early airplay on college radio.

It’s unknown how WHPK will weather this withering.

07/17/2023
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Civil Rights, Jesse Jackson, Racism

1000 Words: Warrior

Jesse Jackson isn’t on people’s minds these days as much as he was, say, 30 years ago and more. Especially white people.

He was more or less a bête noir (pun intended) back in the days of St Ronald Reagan. When the most virulent anti-Jacksonists weren’t dropping N-bombs on him in their private conversations, they were publicly calling him a grandstander and a publicity hound. As if white leaders were shrinking violets who all cared only for the good of humankind and had no interest in reaping laurels and riches from their work. Y’know, people like to-be-president Donald Trump.

Jackson in 1983.

Jackson ran for president in the Democratic primaries of 1984 and ‘88. Competing against seven other Dems in ’84, including former vice president Walter Mondale, former Dem presidential nominee George McGovern, Ohio senator and retired astronaut John Glenn, horn-dog Gary Hart, and others, Jackson garnered a fairly respectable 18 percent of the primary vote, winning four contests. Four years later, facing another group of Dems including future vice president Al Gore, Hart again (his horn-dogginess forced him out early in that race), Paul Simon (not that one; this one), and others, Jackson did quite well, earning better than 29 percent of the primary vote and winning 12 states plus the District of Columbia. He ran second to the eminently forgettable Michael Dukakis that year. Many observers credit Jackson’s ’88 campaign with paving the way for Brack Obama’s successful run for the nomination and eventual accession to the presidency in 2008.

Jackson’d been a close associate of Martin Luther King, Jr. during the height of the civil rights fight in the late 1960s. In fact, he was present when King was shot and killed at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968. Jackson was in the motel parking lot when the shot rang out. Later that evening he appeared before cameras wearing a blood stained shirt. Andrew Young — future congressperson, mayor of Atlanta, and US ambassador to the United Nations — vividly remembered the scene in an interview for a PBS Frontline documentary, The Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson. Young said:

After they removed [King’s] body, Ralph Abernathy got a jar and started scraping up the blood and said, crying, it was Martin’s precious blood. This blood was shed for us. It was weird. But people freaked out and did strange things. Jesse put his hands in the blood and wiped it on the front of his shirt.

Lots of white people seemed to be far more offended that Jackson would perform such a showboating display than they were that the nation’s leading civil rights activist had been slain by a white supremacist loner.

(L-R) Jackson, King, and Ralph Abernathy on the Lorraine Motel Balcony.

For my money, Jackson’s act only proved he understood, innately, that politics is mainly theater. To many church-going blacks, Jackson’s blood-stained shirt demonstrated that he would carry on King’s legacy and work, just the way Roman Catholics drink wine transubstantiated into the blood of Jesus Christ. Religion, too, is mainly theater.

In that sense, Jesse Louis Jackson, an ordained Baptist minister, straddling both types of stage, is a thespian as accomplished and heralded as Meryl Streep or Marlon Brando.

Journalist Robert McClory wrote in Illinois Issues back in 1984 that criticisms of Jackson’s desire for the spotlight were pretty much spot on. “First of all,” McClory wrote, “let’s clear the air on the Rev. Jesse Jackson and admit the criticisms of him.

“Yes, he possesses a large, demanding ego. He has a deep-seated need, as some of his oldest and closest friends will readily admit, to be at the center of things, to achieve, to prove conclusively that he is somebody. That undoubtedly is related to his growing up poor, black and illegitimate in his native Greenville, South Carolina, and it all makes interesting material for psycho-biographical analyses….”

Jackson gained King’s attention in 1965 when he, Jackson, participated in the historic Selma, Alabama voting rights marches. King named Jackson, a South Carolina native, the leader of the Chicago branch of Operation Breadbasket in 1966. It was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference‘s national economic and business advocacy organization. According to lore, Jackson presented himself to then Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, the Democratic king-maker and reputedly  the second most powerful man in the country at the time (exceeded only by President Lyndon Johnson). Jackson asked Daley what he could do to help in Chicago. Daley, it is said, offered him job as a cashier in an expressway tollbooth.

Jackson never forgot the slight, the story goes. If the tale is true, Jackson got his revenge on Mayor Daley in 1972 when he co-led a successful revolt against the Daley-led Illinois Democratic contingent in the party’s 1972 national convention.

After serving as eventual national leader of Operation Breadbasket, Jackson would found Operation PUSH (People United to Save Humanity, later changed to People United to Serve Humanity). PUSH later would merge with the National Rainbow Coalition to form Rainbow/PUSH. That iteration is still very much active, pushing for universal healthcare, living wages, fair housing, voter registration, gender equality, affirmative action, and environmental justice.

Early on, Jackson would exhort crowds at PUSH events to shout out the mantra, “I am somebody!”

Rainbow/PUSH Headquarters in Chicago’s Englewood Neighborhood.

For a grandstander and a showboater, Jesse Jackson sure has had a profound influence for good in this holy land. Of course, that has never been of much interest to the people who called him a grandstander and a showboat.

In any case, Jesse Jackson, now aged 81 and confined to a wheelchair, has announced he’s retiring from his leadership position in Rainbow/PUSH. As far as I can determine, he’s the last of the King coterie to remain active. Abernathy, Dorothy Cotton, Bernard Lee, Georgia Davis, James Orange, and King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, all have died. Young is in his 90s.

When it came time for America to elect a black president, only a not-too-black, Harvard-educated, mostly middle-of-the-road  figure like Barack Obama would do. The fiery orator, the angry black man, the King protege with blood on his shirt would never do.

Much of white America had apoplexy when the relatively safe Obama took up residence in the White House. The Tea Party, many white anti-government militias, the Trump presidency, and the January 6th insurrection all ensued from that breakthrough.

Imagine how a lot of Americans would have reacted had the fiery, angry Jackson been elected to lead this nation.