Category Archives: Americana

Liberalism, Civil Rights, and LBJ

Americana, Politics

Lyndon Johnson cajoling-

It has been about 50 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act. During that time, my memory of the man who made it happen, President Lyndon Baines Johnson, has faded. And, let’s be honest here, we liberals wanted it to fade…fast. To paraphrase Marc Antony, The evil that Lyndon Johnson did lived after him, the good he did was oft interred with his bones. But only in our memories is that true. In the bright light of now, the good that Lyndon Johnson did is pervasive and the evil is fading.

Of all the presidents that come to mind – of all the people, really – Lyndon Johnson is the one with whom I have the most ambivalent feelings. That was my opening line, but the more I think about Johnson, the less ambivalent I become. Somewhere towards the end of my post, I was going to say And – and it is a huge and – he escalated the Vietnam War in which 58,286 Americans died and 153,303 were wounded. He did escalate that tragic war, but he didn’t start it. Truman started it when he gave the French Colonial Forces air support, Eisenhower started it when he wouldn’t sign the 1954 Geneva Accords. Kennedy started it when he sent in advisors, and Johnson, who couldn’t do anything halfway, escalated the hell out of it. It became Johnson’s War. He knew it was wrong, but he couldn’t help himself.

For that, most Liberals – including me – find it hard to forgive Johnson. As an aside, I was so disappointed in the Vietnam War that I didn’t vote in 1968, even though Hubert Humphrey, the democratic nominee, was an early and strong proponent of Civil Rights and would have made an excellent President. I am very sorry for that now. End aside.

Besides Vietnam – and there really doesn’t have to be a besides – Lyndon Johnson was crude and, often, embarrassing to us effetes. He just looked crude – especially after the refined Kennedys – with his big, goofy, ears and a big nose. He acted crudely, calling his dick Jumbo, narcissistically showing the press his gall bladder surgery scar, lifting his beagles up by their ears. Shit, he even talked crudely, with his deep Texas’ Hill Country accent.

For years, we ended up interring Johnson’s greatness with his bones and only remembered the evil. We forgot his greatness, he was bigger than life; he was Hamlet more than Willie Loman.

During the 1960s Democratic Primaries, before I could vote – minimum voting age was 21 in those days – I was hoping that Johnson would be nominated. I don’t remember why for sure, maybe it was because Johnson was the only guy besides Estes Kefauver, I had heard of before the primaries; maybe it was because I have always been a sucker for smooth-talking Southerners; but it was probably because I was captivated by stories of Johnson and Rayburn meeting in Rayburn’s office, drinking Bourbon and Branch Water, plotting how to turn the country liberal during the Eisenhower years. As an aside, it was one of life’s minor disappointments when I learned that Branch Water was just a Texas way of saying Tap Water. End aside.

In that Liberal era, the 30s through the 50s, Southerns were liberal or, at least, Populist. The New Deal rested on Southern support and that support came with racism even with Liberals like Lyndon Johnson. The only time I have lived anywhere near the South was when I was in the Army, stationed in Texas – at Fort Bliss – and seeing the all-pervasive, undisguised, racism first hand was a shock. I shouldn’t have been shocked though, racism was the water the whole country swam in. In the South, it was more overt, but – everywhere – nice people, good people, admirable people, so-called-thoughtful people, thought Negroes to be inferior. Negroes were considered sweet and hardworking, but simple. Think Uncle Remus.

Then, it was very easy to be a Racist and a Liberal (I never even saw a black person in anything but a subordinate role until I started going to Jazz Clubs in the late 50s). Of course this is an oversimplification – President Harry Truman had desegregated the Armed Forces in 1948 and the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954 – pressure was building for fairness and neither Black People nor a growing minority of Whites liked the status quo. By the 60s, that pent-up pressure was changing the world. In music, movies, writing, art, architecture, everywhere. Lyndon Johnson, now President, changed with it. That is also an oversimplification also; episodes of fairness can be found throughout Johnson’s life. He probably learned it even before  he was a janitor, working his way through Southwest Texas State Teachers College, certainly Johnson’s sense of fairness, his compassion, must have been there by the time he became a teacher at a Mexican-American school in south Texas. Still, he voted with the racist Southern Caucasus most of the time.

But, for whatever the reason, when Lyndon Johnson became president, he became a great champion of Civil Rights. He signed the The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. He not only signed those landmark bills, Johnson was the only reason they were passed. They passed because Johnson cajoled, browbeat, and traded favors with Southern Democrats to get them passed. He knew it was going to ruin the Democratic Party for a generation and he got three major Civil Rights Acts passed that changed our world. When he said, I am a freeman, an American, a United States Senator, and a Democrat, in that order, he was telling the truth.

He was also a transformative environmentalist, signing – hold on to your hat (or skip ahead) – the Clean Air Act, 1963; the Pesticide Control Bill, 1964; a Water Quality Act, 1965; the Water Resource Planning Act, 1965; a Water and Sanitation Systems in Rural Areas Bill, 1965; the Solid Waste Disposal Bill, 1965; Air Quality Acts, 1966 and 1967; and laws forming the National Water Commission. Not all of these were Johnson’s babies, most of them weren’t, but he gladly signed the bills.

He signed laws to give aid to education with Head Start in 1965 and the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which provided additional funds to schools based on the population of low-income students. He signed the Child Nutrition Act of 1966, the National School Lunch Act of 1968, and he signed Food Stamps into law with the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. He was instrumental in establishing the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts and he appointed Thurgood Marshall to the Supreme Court.

Along the way, he advocated and pushed through Congress, two major Health Bills; Medicaid and Medicare. (Yeah!! for Medicare, just ask anybody over 65.)

Now, fifty years later, I am starting to remember that Lyndon Baines Johnson in that short time, from 1964 to about 1967 – became one of our greatest and most influential Liberal Presidents. With that burst, he  might also have become the greatest Civil Rights President in our history.

This rain is good news, but – really – not all that good

Americana, Current Affairs

Screenshot 2014-03-31 10.47.16

It is raining and NOAA tells me that it will pretty much rain all week. Even better, it is cold – for here – so it is snowing in the Sierras. We need the rain and we need the snow even more. Living on the edge of the continent, in a semi-desert, we have based our survival strategy on storing water, as snow, in the Sierras during the winter so that we can have water for the summer.

But we are getting less snow. Here in Northern California – and Southern California, for that matter – the snow is much more important than the rain. We live on an ecological edge of a cliff; we have built our supersized Civilization on that edge. If we don’t get a deep enough snowpack, it will become very hard to maintain that Civilization. We need the snowpack not just to drink and waste in showers, but to grow food.

For a long time, we mined water from the aquifer to make up for the decreasing snow-melt, but the aquifers are going down. While our situation is not as serious – or fanciful – as Las Vegas or Phoenix, we are running out of water. The rain is great and the land is thirsty and stressed and needs the rain, but this rain is not really going to change much.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, Jared Diamond investigates several past Civilizations and their economic and social collapse. Civilizations as diverse as Easter Island, Classical Mayan, and the Greenland Norse – and I would add us – pushed their environments to the very edge of capacity and then they got slammed by ecological change that, in turn, pushed the Civilization into collapse.

It seems to me that we are still in a mindset that explains everything as if it were an exception rather than the new rule and that mindset – of everything is atypical – gives false comfort. It is easy to think that this has been the wettest start to the month of March ever for Seattle because they are getting our rain – that the same, temporary, high-pressure ridge, that is keeping California dry – but it is not our rain, it is our past weather pattern. True, it may not be our future weather pattern, but it is possible that it is. Near Seattle, the rain caused a mudflow that killed somewhere around forty people but the disaster was also caused by over-logging. It is possible that it was not over-logging based on past weather patterns – however, there is evidence that it was – but it is over-logging for what is happening this year.

DROUGHT ridge 011414

According to Diamond, that is typical; it is what happened to other Civilizations that collapsed. Those falls from grace were self created – over-farming, overgrazing, over-hunting, denuding forests, sucking aquifers dry – and, with Global Climate change and our refusal to correct for it, there is no reason to think that the result will be any different this time around.

World War I and Cold War II

Americana, Current Affairs, Politics

Cold War-0289

Those that don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. Yet, those that do read history are doomed to stand by helplessly while everybody else repeats it. From a share by Vern Smith of a United Humanists facebook post.

When you set out to take Vienna, take Vienna.  Napoleon 

I am reading Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War by Patrick Buchanan. Buchanan was an advisory and speechwriter for President Nixon and is way to the right of me, so I am a little surprised that I am reading him. I am even more surprised that I agree with him much of the time. Buchanan’s main premise is that World War I was unnecessary and that the draconian demands – by the Allies in a righteous  fit – put on Germany after the War, led to World War II.

I half agree with him on World War I, after all, England’s king,  George V (George Frederick Ernest Albert), was related to Germany’s king, Kaiser Wilhelm II, and they were both related to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. In many ways, they stumbled into a war that almost nobody wanted. Of course, very few people had any idea how horrific WWI was going to be and, when the carnage was over and the allies had won, the Allies wanted Germany to pay. But Germany didn’t think that World War I was all their fault and they didn’t really feel that they had lost as much as they agreed to stop fighting. Compared to northern France, Germany was relatively untouched, after all, and – in many ways – life in Germany, right after the war, went on as if nothing had happened.

However, at the Treaty of Versailles, Germany was stripped of 13% of her territory and 12% of her population. The Germans had lost the peace and were humiliated. They were seething. That seething provided the energy to bring Hitler to power, it became the motivator for Germany’s rise from their indignation. Instead of being the war to end all wars, World War I became the setup for World War II.

I think that the same thing happened when we won the cold war. Like Germany, Russia didn’t really think the Cold war was all their fault and that they were punished for making peace. The Russians thought that they had lost the peace more than they had lost the war. We stripped Russian of its buffer zone, moving NATO all the way to the Russian border. There are Russians living outside of Russia all around Russia – in Georgia, in Ukraine, in Estonia where one-quarter of the population is Russian, and in Latvia with about one-third of its the total population being Russian – and they had been betrayed by the peace.

By all accounts, Russians are thrilled with the way the Russian bear is roaring, they love Vladimir Putin. They think he is bringing Mother Russia back its dignity. Various politicians and pundits are worrying about the Cold War coming back if we don’t ________________ (insert your own theory). I think that they are almost right, except that the Cold War is already here and has been since Russia’s Duma recognized Abkhazia and the Russian Army rolled into Georgia in 2008 (during the administration of George Bush the Younger, for those with short memories).

Russia is pushing back just like Germany did when its troops marched into the Rhineland, and we will not like it, but there is not much we can do except move troops around and install sanctions. I don’t think that Cold War II will turn into a shooting war but I do think it will involve a lot of pushing around the edges and posturing. It will make it much harder to solve our mutual problems.

A portrait of anger & hate

Americana

 

Fred PhelpsMichael S. Williamson / Washington Post/Getty Images file from The Daily Dish 

Fred Phelps, leader and father, really, of the Westboro Baptist Church, died several days ago. He was an angry, hateful, man who worked hard at being obnoxious. His despicable behavior – from my point of view – hurt a lot of people and, ironically, its collateral effect helped the gay community.

In 2003, 33% of Americans were pro-gay marriage, in 2013  49% were pro. For anybody that was at all up in the air about choosing sides – and the numbers say that there were many – Phelps made it very hard to choose his side. At some level, he must have known that. He must have known that his behavior was counter-productive and, yet, he kept it up. How much anger does it take to fuel that kind of action? And how much fear does it take to fuel that kind of anger?

Fred Phelps was a crusading Civil Rights lawyer in the 1950s and 60s and somehow, he became unhinged over gay rights. In The True Believer, Eric Hoffer writes  of the fanaticism of the right and left as being closer together than they are to the reasonable – for lack of a better word – center. The fanaticism that enabled Phelps to champion Civil Rights in Kansas when it was anti-establishment somehow transmorgafied into hate. It probably wasn’t as big a transformation as it seems. As the social landscape of gay rights changed – in Alyssa Rosenberg words, That trend is part of a long cultural process of not just portraying gay people as normal and unthreatening, but of painting homophobia as distasteful and embarrassing. – Phelps stayed anti-establishment.

Ironically again, by staying anti-establishment as the establishment changed, Phelps went from the front of the Bell Curve as a crusading Civil Rights Lawyer, to the back as he became a reactionary trying to stop the incoming tide. To misquote Shakespeare, May the evil that men do be interred with their bones.

I want to pass this along

Americana

Street Art-

When I was a boy – about the 7th grade – some people dumped garbage on our front lawn. Several times. Because they were cowards, they did it at night. But they did leave a note telling us that they didn’t want us to move to their town because we were Jews. I was so embarrassed of my Daddy who just quietly got up – early – in the morning and cleaned up the garbage. Later I would tell people that If it had been me, I would have waited, in the dark for the fucker and shot him with a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Of course I wouldn’t have, and not just because I didn’t have a shotgun; it was just a fantasy that I used to punish what I thought was my Daddy’s powerlessness.

Somehow though, we  – I – became white over the last 60 some-odd years and I never had to go through that with my daughter. But Black people, African-Americans, don’t get to white out like European-American Jews, even Eastern-European-American Jews.

Every once in a while, I read a blog post by Ta-Nehisi Coates that cuts to my core, that makes me so sad that we aren’t as good – as a country – as we like to brag that we are. This is one of those somethings. If you get a chance, read his post,  The Secret Lives of Inner-City Black Males. It’s short.