8 responses to “Do the right thing.”

1. 

   johnthebasket

   01/19/2022

   In the summer of 1965, President Johnson gave a speech in support of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the unlikely help of Everett Dirksen and other Republicans of conscience, the Act passed, and gave minority Americans the same voting rights European Americans enjoyed. Dr. King helped apply social pressure on Congress, and let the celebration when the bill passed. Thus, it is a good time to look back briefly.

   I remember that day clearly. We still loved LBJ (Vietnam was just starting to heat up) and hoped like hell he was going to become our generation's FDR, replacing the leader we had loved and lost, Jack Kennedy. My family's story starts earlier . . .

   My dad's mother and her family were from Alabama, and decided to try their luck farming in Lake City (a settlement on American Lake, now part of Lakewood in Pierce County, Washington) rather than in Alabama. My grandmother's name was Antoinette Collier; she met and married her husband Edward in Lake City. He went blind when their four kids were still young. Antoinette had to find a job to support the family and herself. She began working at a fairly small munitions production facility in Dupont which became a huge munitions production facility after the Pearl Harbor attack. Her kids were grown by then. Dad's youngest brother was 16 and managed to join the Navy.

   Antoinette continued to work the ordinance assembly line throughout the war. Her work partner was a Negro lady named V. Alma Boone, and they became lifelong best friends. I have many wonderful memories of going out to Grandma's and seeing Mrs. Boone on Sundays when she would visit after church. She was an old woman by the time I met her, but she dressed and looked like a movie star, had more Church hats than seemed possible, and wore exotic perfumes. She'd get my sister on one knee, me on the other and sing to us and tell us stories.

   Grandma told us that in the 30s, Grandma's father came to visit, found V. Alma there, and told his daughter (Grandma) to get the nigger out of the house. Grandma was a quiet, polite person, but she banned her father from her house for years for using that word to describe her best friend. The word was in common use, including in Washington state, but Grandma would not have her best friend attacked or embarrassed.

   After the incident with her father, Grandma became more interested in what came to be called the Civil Rights Movement. She was in her 60s by then, but she stood by V. Alma and other African Americans. I had an opportunity to watch President Johnson's speech with Grandma and V. Alma, and it became obvious which side was the correct and decent one. I never looked back. In that house, Harry Truman was The Man, partly because of his decency and integrity, and partly because he began the desegregation of the Army.

   I was 15, and on that day LBJ, Grandma, V. Alma Boone and history conspired to make me a lifetime advocate of equal voting rights for all. Those people all lifted me up and allowed me to see the future. I will not allow that future to be co-opted by redneck dipshit racists.

   Reply
2. 

   Doug Holland

   01/20/2022

   Damn, that's a lovely story, John. We're old, you and me, so I'll assume your Grandma and Mrs Boone are gone. Posthumous hugs for both of 'em.

   I can't see the humanity in any humans alive and conscious in that era who stood with the other side. And more and more I feel the same about the 2020s.

   Reply
3. 

   johnthebasket

   01/21/2022

   Poem of the Week

   My high school days were not as hellish as yours, Doug, but I had a very small circle of friends, and I mostly tried to keep my head down. It wasn't my best time.

   However, I did have two or three damn good teachers. One of them was Carl Moore, a youngish math teacher who was also the school's cross-country coach. One day we walked into class and Carl announced that we'd be reading the best poem ever written. This raised a couple questions in my mind, to wit:

   1) What, if anything, did the best poem ever written have to do with differential equations?

   2) How did Carl Moore establish that this was the best poem ever written? Was this something the foreign press voted on like the Golden Globes?

   3) Carl was a "by the book" guy. What was he doing hanging around poetry?

   Of course I didn't get any of those questions answered until decades later when I figured them out for myself. Here's the poem . . .

   Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird

   by Wallace Stevens

   I
   Among twenty snowy mountains,
   The only moving thing
   Was the eye of the blackbird.

   II
   I was of three minds,
   Like a tree
   In which there are three blackbirds.

   III
   The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
   It was a small part of the pantomime.

   IV
   A man and a woman
   Are one.
   A man and a woman and a blackbird
   Are one.

   V
   I do not know which to prefer,
   The beauty of inflections
   Or the beauty of innuendoes,
   The blackbird whistling
   Or just after.

   VI
   Icicles filled the long window
   With barbaric glass.
   The shadow of the blackbird
   Crossed it, to and fro.
   The mood
   Traced in the shadow
   An indecipherable cause.

   VII
   O thin men of Haddam,
   Why do you imagine golden birds?
   Do you not see how the blackbird
   Walks around the feet
   Of the women about you?

   VIII
   I know noble accents
   And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
   But I know, too,
   That the blackbird is involved
   In what I know.

   IX
   When the blackbird flew out of sight,
   It marked the edge
   Of one of many circles.

   X
   At the sight of blackbirds
   Flying in a green light,
   Even the bawds of euphony
   Would cry out sharply.

   XI
   He rode over Connecticut
   In a glass coach.
   Once, a fear pierced him,
   In that he mistook
   The shadow of his equipage
   For blackbirds.

   XII
   The river is moving.
   The blackbird must be flying.

   XIII
   It was evening all afternoon.
   It was snowing
   And it was going to snow.
   The blackbird sat
   In the cedar-limbs.

   Reply
   1. 

      Doug Holland

      01/21/2022

      I've never much noticed blackbirds, and didn't even know until I googled just now that there are 16 kinds of blackbirds in America, including the ones with orange flourish.

      Did Mr Moore answer your three questions, and if so what were his answers? Also, did he allow you to call him Carl?

      The poem is poetic and I liked it, bits of it very much. I am inclined to disagree that it's the best poem ever written.

      Pertinent Doctor Who, because Doctor Who is always pertinent:

      BILL: I'm wondering what you're supposed to be lecturing on. It's like the university lets you do whatever you like. One time, you were going to give a lecture on quantum physics. You talked about poetry.

      DOCTOR: Poetry, physics, same thing.

      BILL: How is it the same?

      DOCTOR: Because of the rhymes.

      Reply
4. 

   johnthebasket

   01/21/2022

   We called the crewcut Mr. Moore Mr. Moore.

   Yes and no, which is often the answer:

   It wasn't the best poem ever written: just Mr. Moore's favorite.

   Dr. Who was broadcast by the Beeb starting in 1963, although I think it wasn't available in the US until much later. I'm guessing that Mr. Moore hadn't seen the good Doctor, although he might have answered the poetry/physics question the same way (allowing for a broad definition of "rhymes".

   I think Mr. Moore spent a half hour on this poem because the class was going pretty well and he wanted to show us a glimpse of the road ahead.

   I also suspect that Mr. Moore, who was something more than just a crewcut, believed that, like mathematics, poetry could reveal something interesting about the universe. For example, we spent a little time on the standard Fibonacci sequence with seeds 0 and 1: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, … Not by coincidence, this sequence is displayed in nature again and again and again, particularly in blooms and other growth patterns of plants. The bees understand, in their own way, the Fibonacci patterns and pollinate in a sort of Fibonacci way. The sequence was introduced to Europe without use of a digital calculator by the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa, later known as Fibonacci, in 1202.

   In retrospect, I think Mr. Moore was letting us know that without need of mysticism or esoterica both mathematics and poetry could reveal deeper truths about the universe, but I'm just guessing.

   I have number XIII framed on the wall of my home office/bedroom because it reminds me of snowy afternoons in the Pacific Northwest and because it rhymes in its own way.

   John

   Reply
   1. 

      Doug Holland

      01/22/2022

      Mr Moore certainly sounds like something more than a crewcut. I like the cut of the man, and your descriptions of him.

      Reply
5. 

   Shannon

   01/21/2022

   I don't expect much but bluster from Dana Nessel. She's the Atty Gen who dropped the investigation and didn't prosecute over the water contamination in Flint.

   Reply
   1. 

      Doug Holland

      01/22/2022

      Well, fuckshit. I hadn't heard that the prosecution was scuttled. Nessel is a Democrat, so I guess I should've seen it coming.

      Reply

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