Category Archives: Americana

The 2012 Eclipse

Americana, Current Affairs, Photography, Sierras

Michele and I went to Pyramid Lake, Nevada to see the eclipse. (Photo above grabbed from the web.) Well, more accurately, Michele went to Pyramid Lake to see the eclipse – because the center line of the eclipse path went over the southern part of the lake – and I went because I wanted to see the people watching the eclipse. We met Michele’s sister at the family cabin in Squaw Valley and then drove the long way to Pyramid.

Starting at Squaw in the Sierras, we drove north through pines and aspens to Sierraville where we semi-picniced.

Sierraville is a scenic little town at the western edge of a large valley – surprisingly enough, named Sierra Valley – that grows drier as we drive to Nevada, heading  east and getting deeper into the rain shadow of the Sierra Nevadas. By mid afternoon, we ended up at the north end of Pyramid Lake and saw our first Eclipsers.

From there, we worked our way south to where Michele had figured would be the optimum viewing place. We found the perfect place: great eclipse viewing for Michele and great wacko people viewing for me. And I mean wacko people in the best possible way; anybody willing to drive this far to see what is essentially a non-event, is my kind of person. I learned a long time ago, when I went to my first Cactus and Succulent Society meeting, that people who are interested in the out-of-the-ordinary are the most interesting people of all.

A couple of portraits by Michele.

Then it was back to Reno through the fading light for a beer and sandwich at the Great Basin Brewing Company. All in all, a very nice outing.

 

 

“even Jimmy Carter would have given that order”

Americana, Politics

Obama is using the anniversary of SEAL Team Six killing Osama bin Laden in a campaign ad and it seems to be driving the Republicans nuts. They say he shouldn’t be politicizing it.  I can understand that argument although bragging about one’s successes seems to be fairly standard political fare. Romney, in trying to discount President Obama’s call on ordering Team Six into Pakistan said “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order” as if it were nothing.

I am not a big Jimmy Carter fan, I don’t think he had the right personality to be president – certainly not at that time – but Romney’s offhanded, even casual, slur against Carter pisses me off. Carter has more military expearance – ten years as a officer on Nuclear subs – than Romney’s whole family – about ten years more – and a much better idea of the risks involved. Cater’s call was gutsy and failed – it was close to working according to Mark Bowden in The Desert One Debacle – ruining Carter’s chances of reelection.

Romney will say anything in his effort to get elected. What an asshole.

College Daze

Americana, California

 

Last Saturday, my Little Brother, Edwin, his mom, and I went to San Francisco State for their Sneak Preview Open House. Edwin has been accepted at SF State but has not yet decided to go there so this was a good chance for him to see the lay of the land. I had taken two psychology classes at SF State, in 1966, so I considered myself somewhat of an expert. Well, I, at least,  knew how to find the University, but, it turns out that is about all I knew.

Surprisingly, much has changed since 1966. It is much larger – I think, at least it feels larger than I remember – with an enrollment of about 25,000 and there are a lot of new buildings including a stunning new library.

What else has changed is the general tenor. When I went there – using the term went there in the very loosest sense – San Francisco was the center of the counter culture movement. Cal Berkeley especially, but also SF State were major engines of change. This was the time when protesting students were firehosed on the stairs of San Francisco City Hall for protesting HUAC1  hearings; this was the time of the start of the Free Speech Movement – about a year after Mario Savio was arrested for saying fuck in public – this was two years before the Summer of Love in the Height Ashbury. This was one year after – as the official history of SF State says, brags really – that the Psychology Department’s Psychedelic Research Institute is inaugurated to test the creative power of LSD. Subjects are asked to bring with them professional projects on which they’ve been working; while taking LSD under the auspices of the Institute, one man solves a major design problem of Stanford’s linear accelerator, and another subject manages to complete a set of plans for a shopping center that he’d been commissioned to design.

As an aside. Less than a year before I took those two psychology classes, I had been a sergeant in the United States Army. I don’t remember it being much of a culture shock. End aside.

I want to say that San Francisco State is a more conservative place now, but, in many important ways, it really isn’t. The world has changed. What was radical then is pretty average now. I hope that Edwin decides to go to SF State, it has a great past that it looks like it is building on.

1 House Un-American Activities Committee.

The Obama I expected and didn’t get until now

Americana, Obama, Politics

When Michele and I started working on the Obama Campaign in 2007, I was drawn to Obama by his message of change. The idea of change that he represented and promoted. During the primary, he said We can’t change the way Washington works unless we first change how Congress works. and It’s not just enough to change the players. We’ve gotta change the game.

In December of 2007 in Des Moines, he said We can’t afford to be so worried about losing the next election that we lose the battles we owe to the next generation.  The real gamble in this election is playing the same Washington game with the same Washington players and expecting a different result.  And that’s a risk we can’t take. Then he got elected and chose the same Washington players and pretty much got the same results.

But yesterday, Barack Obama nominated Dartmouth College president Jim Yong Kim to be head of the World Bank. He is Change we can believe In. Way to go Obama. And, if you have any doubts, check out his resume and video below (starting at about 2:00 for the impatient).

Ulysses S. Grant, General Order No. 11, and Judaism in America

Americana, General U.S. Grant

General Order No. 11, issued by my hero – General Ulysses S. Grant – was the most notorious anti-Semitic official order in American history: “The Jews, as a class violating every regulation of trade established by the Treasury Department and also department orders, are hereby expelled from the department within twenty-four hours from the receipt of this order.”

I first read about Order #11 in Grant Moves South by Bruce Catton – maybe, twenty five years ago – and I just sort of ignored it. Ignored it as in in pretend it wasn’t there. I sort considered it a mote in Grant’s otherwise perfect veneer. I did know the root of Grant’s Order #11, but I didn’t know the aftermath except that Lincoln immediately cancelled it. That mote as well as its aftermath are the subject of an interesting article by Jonathan D. Sarna. It turns out that the story ended very differently than it started.

General Grant had a very strained relationship with his ill-tempered father, Jesse Grant, who owned a tanning company for which Ulysses Grant worked before the war when he was out of work and desperate. He hated the work and, by all accounts, he did not get along with his belligerent and overbearing father. Father Jesse was also a little bit of a operator, for lack of a better word, and – in December of 1862, twenty one, or so, months after Grant had left his employment – visited his son, now Major General Grant, hero of Fort Donaldson. Father Jesse accompanied several members of the Mack family of Cincinnati. They were Jewish clothing manufacturers trying to purchase cotton and they had formed a secret partnership with Jesse Grant. He was to get 25 percent of their profits for his work acting as their agent to “procure a permit for them to purchase cotton.”

According to an eyewitness, General Grant was upset and embarrassed at his father’s attempt to profit from his son’s new military status. He took his anger at his father out on the Macks and enlarged that to all Jews expelling them from his war zone. Once again, the Jews were being treated as a different and separate class to be discriminated against.

Even though the order was quickly cancelled,  Sarna points out that the memory of what his wife, Julia, called “that obnoxious order” continued to haunt Grant to his death….the sense that in expelling them he had failed to live up to his own high standards of behavior, and to the Constitution that he had sworn to uphold, gnawed at him. Grant apologized publicly and privately told people that he been wrong.

In this day and age – probably every day and age, actually – lots of people apologize for some stupid thing they said or did with a lame statement like If I offended you, I am sorry or I may have used the wrong wording, but my point was.… Grant apologized and changed his behavior. As president, he made more Jewish appointments than all previous presidents put together. In an effort to help the plight of the Jews of Romania, who were being terrorized by Russian pogroms, he appointed a Jewish ambassador to Romania. As president, he attended the dedication of a synagogue further legitimizing and empowering American Judaism.

Grant cultivated friendships with some of the foremost Jewish leaders of the time, inviting them to the White House and entertaining them socially. All this was during a time when much of the United States was becoming reactionary. It was a time of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a time when the Christian National Reform Association was making headway into getting a Constitutional Amendment to make the United States a Christian Nation. It was a time, much like today, when the forces trying to turn the clock back were gaining power.

Grant believed in the Constitution – took it’s deeper meaning seriously – fought to save it, and then became the first  Civil Rights president. The ONLY Civil Rights president for almost seventy-five years. Twenty three years after General Order #11, at his funeral march – witnessed by over a million people – the pallbearers included Union generals William Sherman and Phil Sheridan, Confederate generals Joseph Johnston and Simon Buckner, and Rabbi Edward Benjamin Morris Browne. The following day, the Jewish Record reported  Seldom before, has the kaddish been repeated so universally for a non-Jew as in this case. General Grant would have been proud.