A mea culpa

July 10, 2013Americana, PoliticsSteve Stern

When the Robert’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act is unconstitutional – Section 5 required that certain States and localities must get Federal permission for all voting law changes – it seemed to me that this was profiling and the Supreme Court was right in eliminating it. It seemed to me that the act said, in effect, Alabama is more likely to abuse people’s rights – especially people of color – than, say, Pennsylvania.

I have argued with several people about this since the Supreme Court decision, including Richard Taylor on the 4th, but now I realize that I was wrong. Yes, Section 5 is profiling, but it is like profiling Mohamed Atta, if he had been released from probation 50 years after driving one of the airplanes into the World Trade Center.

My change of mind is driven by two things, first a copy of the so-called literacy test Louisiana required black voters to pass in the 1960’s. It is a nasty test composed of mostly trick questions. A sample question is 21. Print the word vote upside down, but in the correct order. or 24. Print a word that looks the same whether it is printed forwards or backwards. Click through; see if you pass the test, I didn’t.

The second mind changer was an article, entitled The Color of Law, Voting Rights and the Southern Way of Life in the combined July 8 & 15 issue of The New Yorker. The article, which is really a review of several books and movies, goes into some detail on the struggle black people went through to get the right to vote in the first place. It reminded me that people died trying to get the vote.

Think about that. There were people willing to die to get the vote. They didn’t want to die, but they were willing to take the chance. This is not like soldiers sent to war, these are people willing to march for their vote even if it means they may get killed. I didn’t vote in 1968 because I was pissed at Lyndon Johnson over Vietnam, reading this article made me ashamed.

I think that it is important to remember that this law suit, Shelby County, Alabama v. Holder, was brought by Shelby County (duh! it is in the title, Steve). This is the same Shelby County that fought for a hundred years to keep black people from voting, hell! they fought for a hundred years to keep black people from using a white water fountain. To believe that everything is fine now, is to live in a world of fantasy.

(Oh, those KKK idiots above, that’s last week in a different Shelby County, Shelby County Tennessee.)

1984 Redux

July 8, 2013Americana, Current AffairsSteve Stern

It seems we are in perpetual war, just like Oceania and Eastasia, the allies fighting Eurasia in 1984. Without missing a beat, they ended up fighting each other, with Oceania and Eurasia allied against Eastasia. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter authorized the United States Central Intelligence Agency to conduct Operation Cyclone. That was the code name to arm and finance the mujaheddin so they could fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. These are the same mujaheddin we are fighting now, with the same forces – on our side – that the Soviets had fighting on their side.

The good news is, I guess, because war promotes innovation on a grand scale – see a 1938 fighter below and a 1948 fighter below that –

our permanent state of war has given us all sorts of great innovations. Two of favorites are MRE’s – Meal, ready to eat – which feature meat infused with caffeine to help keep our combatants awake, and Kevlar underwear to help keep their reproductive parts safe.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we were willing to spend that kind of money on education.

Gordon French and another thought on Oppenheimer

July 5, 2013AmericanaSteve Stern

I read a couple of days ago that this is the 49th anniversary of President Lyndon Johnson signing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which – among other things – banned whites-only lunch counters and similar discrimination in hotels, restaurants and other places of public accommodation. It reminds me at how close we are to those times and how arbitrarily bizarre they are.

Now I want to say that I have a dog in this fight. America wasn’t just prejudged against blacks, it was prejudged against everybody but White Anglo-Saxon Protestants and I am not one of them. I was born in 1940, I was 20 in 1960, so my childhood was on the edge of the time of American institutionalized antisemitism. I only know about restricted hotels – restricted being code for No Jews, Negros being so restricted it wasn’t even worth mentioning – from novels and plays like Gentleman’s Agreement. But I did know about restricted clubs, we lived near the Burlingame Country Club and they did not allow Jews to join or – according Richard LeVine in Awaking Waves – even into the diningroom although I did go to several dances there.

So when I read about blacks being kept out of someplace or being redlined in a community, I not only think That could have been me, I think Wow, that might have included me. One of the places that was whites only, were swimming pools in Pasadena, California in the late 1930’s. Both Robert and Frank Oppenheimer were socially active during that time and they became involved in integrating a public pool in Pasadena. For which they were arrested. To make the pool safe for white people again, the pool was drained and refilled. In California!

And that brings me to Gordon French. My first inside job – meaning not on a construction site working with the tools – was at Gordon French Construction and a main part of that job was as Construction Manager for Silverado Country Club. But I also worked on an apartment complex in Tiburon. The complex had a great pool built on the side of a hill and one day, shortly after we finished it, a tenet and his black friend swam in the pool. (This would have been about 1967, again in California.) Another tenant was outraged and complained to the manager who passed the complaint on to Gordon.

Gordon thought about it for a minute, maybe less, and told the manager to evict the troublemaker. The troublemaker being the complainer, not the swimmers. I knew I was working in the right place.

Happy 4th and Happy 150th birthday of The United States

July 4, 2013UncategorizedSteve Stern

As the New York Times says – quoting Shelby Foote , who, I think, was quoting somebody else – in an editorial, 150 years ago These United States became The United States. Lee had been badly mauled at Gettysburg and Vicksburg had finally fallen to General Ulysses S Grant giving control of the mighty Mississippi to the Union. It would be only a matter of time before the southern secessionists would be brought back into the Union and that the – in the words of President Abraham Lincoln – government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

It would still be another 100 to 150 years and more before people of all kinds – The People – could march in a 4th of July Parade, carrying the flag, with pride and a feeling of belonging, but that time is coming.

Picking Charlotte up and dropping Another Enigma off

July 2, 2013Art, California, FamilySteve Stern

Saturday, I had the opportunity to go with Samantha to pickup Charlotte from a week of Summer Camp. It was forecast to be well over 100° in the Valley and I was worried about the heat, but I needn’t have. Samantha picked me up at the BART station in Richmond, and we drove up to Mountain Camp in her Audi SUV.

Sort of as aside, Audi names their SUV series Q and that always makes me think of World War I Q-ships. During WWI, the British started hiding guns in freighters to surprise German raiders and they called them Q-ships. Over the years, I have taken it to mean a car that is disguised as being milder than it really is. End of sort aside.

I first discovered Yosemite – as an adult, not a child in tow – in my mid-twenties and drove there, alot, one year, especially in the summer. Crossing the Valley, at night, in an un-air conditioned car, stopping to cool off at a Giant Orange every hundred miles was awful. We would arrive worn out. In 2013, we effortlessly glided through the Central Valley in a cocoon of exactly the temperature we wanted. 68° for Samantha and 72° for me.

The camp is at 5500 feet and at that elevation, it was a nice, warm, summer day. Now, I have no idea what I was expecting, but I was surprised at how similar Mountain Camp was to the camps I was sent to as a child and, much later – while in college – spent a summer as a councilor. The same single wall cabins, dirt trampled by hundreds of kids each summer, but this camp also had a ropes course and a climbing wall – a climbing wall that my Granddaughter climbed to the top of – and fencing instructors, and a Lake. A real Lake, a big Lake, with sailboats and ski-boats.

After she showed us around camp, Charlotte said goodbye to her councilor, Chris,

and we drove back through the baking Central Valley, in perfect comfort, to the Bay Area. When we got to Berkeley, where I got back on BART, it was a pleasant 80°. It wasn’t until I got home that I ran into the heat that, I read, is blanketing the West.

I bought a painting of Mike Moore‘s, Another Enigma of the Sheldon Range, before I ever met him. At the time, I was living in an old farm house in Los Altos Hills and Another Enigma hung the end of the entry/livingroom, when I moved, it moved to the wall in my office. Then Another Enigma stayed with Samantha in Berkeley for a while, and now, it moved in with us at 19 LeRoy where it is in the bedroom.

Now Mike and his wife Linda Fleming are having a major retrospective in Santa Fe and Another Enigma is going down there to be in the show. But first we had to get it to their home in Benicia where it will be loaded on the truck to Santa Fe. I rented a van, loaded the painting and drove to an old Art Deco building where Mike and Linda have made a home in a former brewery. It is a great space filled with art and hard to not just wander around in awe.

We dropped off Another Enigma of the Sheldon Range where it was reunited with some old friends and some new acquaintances.

Then it was back home where the heat is still going on.

Steve Stern's Fieldnotes from a Random Walk through Life (with pictures)

A mea culpa

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1984 Redux

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Gordon French and another thought on Oppenheimer

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Happy 4th and Happy 150th birthday of The United States

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Picking Charlotte up and dropping Another Enigma off

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