Big Brown and the great black axishole of evil

The election of 2004 marked a sinking of U.S. society into a fearful submission to fascist-modeled totalitarianism. Like the people of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 , a majority of the U.S. voters believed the blatant libels contrived by Republican operatives against the likes of John Kerry and Tom Daschle. They were held in trembling fear by a war contrived as a blackmail device to instill in the people a cowardly fear that their only salvation from Al Qaeda was to cower and tremble in submission to the likes of George W. Bush, Old Shoot-in-the-face-Cheney, and the Shoot-Everybody-in-the-Foot crowd led by
Donny Rumsfeld (remember him?). The first eight years of the 21st century were not proud ones for America. For many of us who have served our country with pride and diligence, they were a time of betrayal and disgrace. The willful deceit, the subversion of fundamental rights and freedoms, and the insanity of mindless, arrogant incompetence and failure in every aspect of maintaining our democracy remind us once again of the level of intelligence and diligence it takes to keep the promise of Americas. But the atrocity of sending more than 5,000 of our young troops to their deaths on a mission which has the intimidation of U.S. citizens into fearful submission as its sole discernible objective has still to be called into full account.

It seemed as the country could suffer no more insult and humiliation. George Bush is approved of by only 27 percent of the citizens, so it seems he cannot inflict any more damage on the country. But the sulking malevolence which seems to be the official posture of the Republican party took on new, perverted twists of nastiness. George Bush was invited to appear before the Knesset to mark Israel's 60th anniversary as an independent, democratic state. He used the occasion to liken the call of people, especially Barack Obama, to deal with our most obstinate enemies openly and forthrightly face-to-face as appeasement of the kind which ceded part of Czechoslovakia to Hitler. It would be hard to surpass that moment for malevolent dishonesty and degradation. But Mike Huckabee tried. When something fell backstage during a speech he gave to the NRA, he said it was Barack Obama hitting the floor whe someone pointed a gun at him. Dementia has become a party platform. Let's hope it will be covered in our healthcare reforms. While these people need treatment, the country needs respite from insane degradations they impose on it.

In all this, the most admirable and inspiring thing we can find is a horse named Big Brown. He has the easy moves of a Michael Jordan, and his win at the Preakness lifts hearts and spirits at the display of a creature of accomplishment and honest nobility. I hope his easy sprint to the finish line foreshadows Obama's finish in November.

If we aren't all sucked into the great black axishole of evil before then.

Your mama is so ugly....

A colleague of mine and I were at an open house yesterday and discussed the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's performance at the National Press Club. Neither of us thought it was as outrageous as the media has portrayed it. In many respects Wright was theologically on the mark.

A point that confused some people was when Wright said the black church has the tradition of "playing the dozens." Actually, the term is usually "counting the dozens."

It is a term that covers an instance where the slaves used language to satisfy the ears of the white folks while giving succor to the hearts of the black people. It comes from the attempt to use Christianity as a mandate for the institution of slavery.

Slaves were forbidden to read or write. They were drilled to memorize passages from the Bible that seem to endorse slavery and were steered away from those passages which called it into question, or said things like "let my people go." To the slave owners the safest passages were the genealogy "begat" section from Genesis which go on and on about who begat whom and how long they lived. The slaves dutifully memorized and recited the dozens of genealogy accounts of who begat whom and called it counting the dozens. However for their own edification and amusement, they turned it into a parodic game, as in "yo mama begat something so ugly it scares the mules." The point was to retort with a better insult such as "yo mama so ugly, she press her face in dough to make gorilla cookies." Which might lead to "Well, yo mama's ass so big, it.....[supply your hyperbole of choice]."

Often the genealogy cited referred to old master and old mistress. But the main point was to ridicule the notion that the counting of the dozens fooled anybody from knowing that the scripture also held out the promise of freedom and equality in the eyes of God. The liturgy of the African-American Christian church is probably the most explicit in expressing the actual teaching of Christ. Playing the dozens was a means of making fun of the perverted foolery imposed on the slaves by their oppressors.

It became a ritual for jazz musicians to put themselves and their audiences in a good humor by playing the dozens on the bandstand. However, as the custom moved away from its satirical origins, the insults were taken as personal and resulted in offense being taken and fighting.

The circumstances of counting the dozens are more complicated than what this short explanation covers. but the idea was, as with spirituals, to satisfy the ears of the white mzn while speaking to the soul of the black.

It might be dangerous to count the dozens in your own home. Especially this close to Mama's Day.

Brown County Dems: Donate to campaign offices

The Aberdeen Barack Obama campaign office held its open house this afternoon and introduced four young but seasoned campaigners who will coordinate the effort in this part of the state. They are signing up volunteers to man the telephone banks, canvass the precincts, and provide general help in restoring America to what it can and should be. The office also needs equipment such as tables, chairs, office equipment, and food preparation appliances to fuel the campaign.

The office is right next door to Rep. Herseth Sandlin's Aberdeen field office.

The campaign is sponsoring a primary watch Tuesday at 7 p.m. at the Ward Hotel.

Later this month a coordinated campaign office and aTim Johnson campaign office will open in Aberseen. There will be no lack of opportunity to help rebuild the country this year.

What I know about Obama

I am from Illinois. I was raised, schooled, and worked there 45 years before I moved west for a professorship. I have family in Illinois, I have an interest in many enterprises in Illinois, including politics, and so I keep up with goings on in that state.

While I lived n Chicago at various times. I was for the most part a downstate resident, living on the western border on the Mississippi River. Chicago is a political behemoth in Illinois because of the huge concentration of population around the shores of Lake Michigan. To get any kind of political equity in Illinois, no matter which party one identifies with, politicians have to learn the art of creating working relationships with people with whom they do not agree on many issues. Developing this kind of working rapport to get things done has been essential since the time of Lincoln.

One of Illinois' most successful politicians at working with people from all affiliations was the late Sen. Paul Simon. He first made his mark as a journalist who formed a group of downstate weekly newspapers into a force for investigative journalism and reform. He was a fiscal conservative and social liberal whose focus on government was for the welfare of the people and the success of the communities. During a campaign for the presidency in 1988, he said "Government is not the enemy; Government is simply a tool that can be used wisely or unwisely. We can do better, my friends." Doing better was his guiding standard.

After deciding not to run for re-election in 1996, Paul Simon returned to Illinois to establish a school of public affairs and service at Southern Illinois University. He continued to be a force for reasoned politics and reaching across party lines and ideologies to work for the good of the people and the country.

Paul Simon called attention to Barack Obama, at that time a member of the Illinois Senate who had accrued an admirable record as a community organizer in Chicago. He urged Obama to run for the U.S Senate. Paul Simon died following heart surgery in 2003 but his endorsement of Obama was used posthumously and Simon's daughter actively supported Obama in the campaign.

Once in the U.S. Senate, Obama's incisive intelligence, his work to rise above the petty partisanship, peevish bickering, and insane personal attacks as the stuff of politics quickly showed him to be presidential material. A huge segment of Americans realizes that one of the biggest threats to the nation is the stupidly partisan deadlocks, the peurile bickering, and the low-life nastiness that so many people think is the stuff of ,political discourse.

As Paul Simon pointed out, Obama may represent our last best hope at pulling our nation out of the demented morass in which it is mired.

Barack Obama has appealed to those who recognize the cheap, malicious, and partisan-bound discourse that is purveyed by the media and its emulators as the biggest impediment to decent, intelligent government. He is the only candidate who has shown that he wants to lead America into the enlightened state so many of us want to be.

Somewhere there's democracy; how high the moon

Dizzy Gillespie

Ken Blanchard offered some welcoming words at my return to blogging, and I appreciate them. He noted our shared love of jazz, and noted that he has instituted a web log on jazz, for which I heartily commend him and hope to enjoy the exchange of information on America's original art form.

Ken notes my fondness for the Prez, Lester Young, one of the great innovators on tenor sax, and mentions him as a special favorite of mine. Actually, there are few jazz musicians who aren't special favorites. He also mentions Miles Davis.

If I hold special favor toward any jazz musicians, it is trumpet players. I was/am one. If my fingers were working, I might still put on a CD and play a few choruses with one of the masters--for my ears only, however.

Miles Davis was a lyric minimalist whose renditions are still the most listened to classics among jazz lovers. But I guess the figure for whom I have special reverence is Dizzy Gillespie. As a young man, I decided not to pursue the trumpet as a career because he made me realize there was talent out there I could never approach. As an aspiring trumpet player, I realized there existed virtuosity and talent I could not approach. Dizzy was by no means the only musician to inspire some intense self-assessment of my own prospects, but he broke the limits that the instrument was presumed to possess. He did things with the trumpet that had b een considered musically impossible. He was also an exceptionally witty and funny man, an entertainment genius, and he composed some of most enduring jazz classics.

He was the epitome of what I learned was a fundamental of playing jazz. That fundamental was explained at a college jazz club meeting when I was an undergraduate which featured a former member of a band led by the legendary cornetist Bix Beiderbecke . A student said he had heard of a musical confrontation between Bix and Louis Armstrong. The old banjo player said if the two ever appeared together, it wouldn't be for the purpose of trying to cut each other down; it would be to see how good they could play together to make music. They might challenge each other to higher levels of creativity, but they wouldn't try to compete for superiority. If you think jazz is a contest, you don't understand it, he said. Jazz is a matter of musical contribution, not seeing who is better than someone else.

Over the years, I have seen and heard Dizzy with many groups, and while his solos were always spectacular, so was his effort to support the ensemble and other soloists to reach for musical heights. The last time I saw him he was touring with the Northern Illinois University jazz band. He set the standard, he joined the ensemble in a way that moved it to swinging discipline, he prodded the young musicians to devote themselves to the creation of music, not the display of their egos. Musicians of talent do have a struggle with not letting their egos get in the way of the music. Dizzy was constantly busy nudging the brass section with his trumpet, spurring the reeds with his voice, amplifying the rhythm section with a multitude of percussion instruments he found in Africa and South America. He worked constantly to intensify the jazz experience.


A story that demonstrates the "jazz ethic" concerns a concert that Dizzy and other masters of hard Bop organized to help a beleaguered Charlie Parker. Parker had been institutionalized for his addictions. He had hocked his alto sax. Gillespie and others got his instrument out of pawn and organized and promoted a huge concert in Canada that drew fans from all of North America.
Parker played some of his most brilliant music that night. But there was Dizzy behind it all giving Parker all the support and musical challenge possible, and prodding the other musicians to do likewise. It was a legendary moment in music and re-established Parker as one of the most formidable players of jazz.

Behind that concert was the element not well understood about jazz and the black experience which is part of the art form. It has to do with working in concert to achieve those things that benefit everybody. It is a music of freedom and democracy. No one played it better than Dizzy.

Hillary in the pillory, Obama in the noose

(After months of non-functioning hands because of hand surgery and events leading up to it, I can now keyboard with digits 3,4, & 5 of each hand. You can expect some vitriol on our health care system in coming months as a result of a medical episode that began in an emergency room in Colorado and will, hopefully, come to positive issue in the physical therapy facility at the new Aberdeen regional YMCA.)

Anyone who does not see the trappings of racism and sexism and other forms of mental degradation as major issues in the presidential primaries has their brain pan firmly implanted in their lower colon. The media, particularly blogs, are in a state of titillation at exchanging euphemisms for issues of sex, race, and other preferred bigotries,

Lou Dobbs of CNN visibly struggles to choke back the N-word when he rants against Obama. The regressive blogs, some with tendentious fatuity that professors try to pass off as “reasoned discourse,” others with the weird bigotries that make no pretense to reason, have taken up the issues of Hillary’s personality and Obama’s racial identity with a cacophony but very discernible sexism and racism not well disguised by the contrivances they muster to avoid the overt use of “bitch’ and “n-word.”

For three months I have been electronically silenced by hands that could barely click a mouse. Occasionally, I have found blog entries that aspire to discourse and somewhat thoughtful and apt expression of ideas, But most blog posts are devoted to crude self-adulation or an ad hominem tirade against someone of a differing political stance. I have become convinced that those who espouse negative derogation as the most effective form of campaigning are right. It is what a large portion of the populous lives for. If blogging is the journalism of the people, we have a surplus of nasty-assed people out there,

Matthew Arnold said literature is the best that humans think and write. Blogs are at the bottom of the scale of human expression. They tend to be dementedly mean, crudely written, and reveal little egos living out lives of desperation. Our education system seems to have elevated the sounds of primal frustration to the ultimate measure of self-expression.

The outright examples of verbal dishonesty I have noted in the press and on the blogs in the past months are enough to fill volumes. A few blogs, which I will reference in weeks to come, have acted to set the record straight.

Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, has been represented by blatant misquotation and racist finagling. He has corrected the dishonesty. But the press and its parasitic bloggers would rather let the n-word resonate.

Hillary has a forced laugh and can get shrill and unlikable. It is more important to let the b-word resonate than to hear her ideas.

If this is what our democracy has come to, what’s the point? But there is huge population who neither writes nor reads blogs and pays little attention to cable news.

May they prevail.

Hope and expectations for Northern Illinois University

When a place you know well becomes the site of a horrific tragedy, the landscape is irrevocably altered. A tragedy becomes part of the history and, therefore, the identity of a place, but there is a danger in letting the shadows of horror and grief obscure the bright and vital essence of a place. That is true for Northern Illinois University.

The University launched so many productive and distinguished lives, the recent shootings should not be allowed to discourage or dissuade people from perceiving it as a place of opportunity and resource for building and sustaining significant lives.

NIU is a part of my personal landscape. As an undergraduate at Augustana, I had many friends who came from the area around DeKalb--Sycamore, Downers Grove, Rockford--and we had much interaction with students from what was then Northern Illinois State Teachers College. It had a reputation for being a classy state college with an educational emphasis, and I can recall one gorgeous spring afternoon on the campus for a tennis match.

I have other memories. My ex-spouse earned her master's degree there, and I was impressed with the caliber of instruction offered. A cousin went there for a time. I worked with faculty and staff from there on academic and moonlighting projects and always took pleasure in visiting the campus. Its ivy-covered brick buildings seemed the epitome of the Halls of Ivy kind of institution.

Like all education institutions, NIU has had its time of trial. In the 1950s, it was a teachers' college much like the institution from which I retired, Northern State University. As enrollments burgeoned during the 1960s and it was transformed from a teachers' college to a university of 25,000 students, it struggled with poorly designed and badly constructed buildings. An arboretum near the campus became better known for sexual assaults than for tree specimens. And once when a car struck a student and sped off, a coed recognized it as belonging to the university president. Like all communities, universities have their problems. But they are also equipped better than any other kind of community to confront and solve those problems.

While we give our condolences and best wishes to the families of the young people who were killed and to the wounded, we also need to keep them in our memories as a reason to resume the business of the university and get back to work on February 25.

School shootings are a problem that needs the best information and the most dedicated minds brought to bear on it. The faculty, staff, and students at NIU can lead us out of this dark time in higher education. They have our thoughts, best wishes, support, and appreciation.