April 2010 - Page 4 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

MLKing National Memorial

As I’ve noted recently, this month marks the 42nd anniversary of the death of Dr. Martin Luther King. I remember the particulars of 4/4/1968 as much as I do 11/22/1963, for instance. I have recently elucidated about the importance of Dr. King in my social development.

I’ve only recently discovered a group that is “commemorating his life and work by creating a memorial in our nation’s capital. The Washington, DC, Martin Luther King, Jr., National Memorial will honor his life and contributions to the world through non violent social change.”

There is a website, mlkmemorialnews.org, that includes videos, photos, banners, and an opportunity to donate money to the creation of the memorial.

“After many years of fund raising, the memorial is only $14 million away from its $120 million goal.”
***
Poll Finds Tea Party Anger Rooted in Issues of Class (NYT, 4/14)

The fierce animosity that Tea Party supporters harbor toward Washington and President Obama in particular is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are
disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

Why is this absolutely unsurprising?

Interestingly, Dr. King’s last efforts were not based on just racial equality, but on economic justice. But economic justice is like water on dry ground; it lifts ALL boats up.
***
Democracy Now! spoke to the mayor of my hometown yesterday, Binghamton’s (NY) Matt Ryan. “He’s taken an unusual step to remind the city’s residents about the expanding costs of the wars. Early next week, the city of Binghamton plans to install a large digital ‘cost of war’ counter on the facade of City Hall. The counter will show that the residents of the city have already spent $138 million on the wars since 2001.” More here.

This reminds me that MLK’s opposition to the Vietnam war in 1967 was not exactly a popular move, either with the LBJ administration or with most civil rights leaders.
***
I got an message from an old high school chum. (Why is it that certain people you remember instantly, and others are…who is that again?)
He wrote: “I can remember a speech you gave one day in an assembly. The idea being that racial equality had to do with even more than having a black person star in a deodorant commercial (which at the time was progress!) It made an impact that lasted…you never know what will, do you?”

Boy, I wish I could remember the context of that speech…

ROG

Taxing day

One of the things that my wife and I did a few years ago that has almost certainly saved our marriage was to get someone else to process our taxes. In the the first few years, we calculated them ourselves and it took FOR-EV-ER. Well at least in my mind. It made me cranky, and my crankiness made HER cranky.

In the years prior to us filing jointly, I had always filed a 1040-A or even a 1040-EZ. No muss, no fuss. There was also no calculating of itemized deduction. Compare this with calculating not only all of our charitable contributions but also using Schedule C to keep track of all of the expenses of the rental units in the two-family dwelling we lived in, and did NOT live in the next few years. My wife figured out most of this latter info, but still, it was torturous.

Worse, almost every year, we made some math error on our state and/or federal taxes and have to do an amended return, generally not in our favor.

Now, you might observe, “Hey, you could have gotten a tax reduction all those years you didn’t itemize from all your contribution to your church and other organizations.” This is no doubt true. Yet, it wasn’t the reason I MADE the donations, so I did not care as much; still don’t, actually. There’s a friend of a friend who does some very good work for the poor and disenfranchised, and his organization deliberately is NOT eligible for a tax deduction. His philosophy is, and I tend to agree with it, that if you want to contribute, you should be doing it from the heart, not just for the write-off.

In the last few years, we have had an accountant do our taxes. We still have to gather the information, but it’s a lot less onerous. Even since we sold the rental property, interestingly corresponding to the arrival of The Daughter, it’s still worthwhile.

So, it was a bit of a shock to the system to get a letter from the IRS last month saying we owe $749 for the 2008 tax year. Seems that the IRS saw the line on The Wife’s W-2 and thought there was $5000 being contributed by her employer for child care. In fact, the $5000 was HER contribution to child care on a flex spending account. However, the accountant did make ANOTHER mistake, so we DO owe some money. But the accountants are paying the penalty and interest. At the end of the day, we’ll have our 2009 return pay for what we owe in 2008.

Still, all of this was MUCH less stressful for me than the DYI model.
ROG

The Confederacy? WTF

OK, I was on the road and I somehow missed this: Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell proclaims Confederate History Month, for which he later (sort of) apologizes. The President of the United States (psst! he’s BLACK, so OBVIOUSLY, he has a racist agenda) upbraids the governor for leaving slavery out of the equation. Certain right-wing pundits kvetch: “My God, they’re talking about slavery AGAIN? Why can’t they let it go?”, oblivious to the inability of others to let go of a cause that one could reasonably consider sedition. There is an article in Salon which addresses this. I was particularly fond of this comment: “History has a peculiar habit of becoming revisionist drivel when it comes to culture & politics. Romanticized to the point of nausea, even dark days are brightened with an artificial hue.”

The best discussion of this phenomenon appeared even before the McDonnell proclamation. Once more, I must point you to Bill Moyers while I still can; he’s going off the air soon. Specifically, the show broadcast on the anniversary weekend of Martin Luther King’s death, which reflected on his legacy.

“Two talented lawyers who’ve dedicated their careers to fighting inequality, Michelle Alexander and Bryan Stevenson, join Bill Moyers on the JOURNAL to examine justice and injustice in America 42 years after King’s death.”

Specifically to this point about race in America:

BRYAN STEVENSON: Other countries that have confronted historic problems of racism and gross ethnic conflict have recognized that to overcome that, there has to be a period of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, they had to go through truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, there had to be truth and reconciliation. In this country, we’ve never had truth and we’ve never had reconciliation. And so, the day to day reality for the clients where I work, the people I work with is one that’s still hurt, angry, broken.

I keep hoping for that “conversation about race” we’ve been promised, so we CAN “get over it.” This seemed obviously to be great opportunity. Yet I’ve seen from more than one quarter that the idea about bringing up the slavery issue is merely liberals being (eye roll) “politically correct”. Not to be confused with “historically correct”, or “factually correct.”

The lawyers make some other interesting points. Much of the conversation after Obama’s election was that “we HAVE overcome”, that the struggle with racism was over, something I always thought was a lot of bunk.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER:…I think individual black achievement today masks a disturbing, underlying racial reality. You know, to a significant extent…affirmative action, seeing African Americans…go to Harvard and Yale, become CEOs and corporate lawyers…causes us all to marvel what a long way we have come.

But…much of the data indicates that African Americans today, as a group, are not much better off than they were back in 1968. When Martin Luther King delivered his…”The Other America” speech.

And interesting observation about terrorism – and some, though by no means all of these groups who idealize the antebellum South, seem to be attracted to a violent fringe element in this country.

BRYAN STEVENSON:…older people come up to me, and they say, “Mr. Stevenson, I’m tired of hearing how we’re talking about– we’re dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation’s history.” They were antagonized by the rhetoric around 9/11. They would come up to me and they’d say, “Mr. Stevenson, I grew up with terrorism. We had to worry about being bombed. We had to worry about being lynched. We had to live in communities close to each other, because the threat of violence was constant…

Ms. Alexander has written a book about The New Jim Crow, not that dissimilar to the old Jim Crow.

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: …just a couple decades after the collapse of the old Jim Crow system, a new system of racial control emerged in the United States. Today, people of color are targeted by law enforcement for relatively minor, nonviolent, often drug-related offenses. The types of crimes that occur all the time on college campuses, where drug use is open and notorious. That occur in middle class suburban communities without much notice, right?

Targeted, often at very young ages, for these relatively minor offenses. Arrested, branded felons, and then ushered into a parallel social universe, in which they can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in many of the ways in which African Americans were discriminated against during the Jim Crow era…

The Reagan Administration actually hired staff whose job it was to publicize crack babies, crack dealers in inner city communities, in the hope that these images would build public support for the drug war and persuade Congress to devote millions of more dollars to the war.

So that it was possible to convert the war from a rhetorical one into a literal one. It was part of a larger political strategy. And once the media became saturated and our public consciousness began to associate drug use and drug crime with African Americans, it’s no surprise that law enforcement efforts became concentrated in communities defined by race as well.

BRYAN STEVENSON: The reality is, is that in poor communities, the police do raids all the time. I’ve worked in communities where the SWAT team comes and they put up a screen fence around the public housing project. They do searches. They stop people coming in and out. There are these presumptions of criminality that follow young men of color.

And whenever they’re someplace they don’t belong, they’re stopped and they’re targeted. And so– and because you don’t have the resources actually to create privacy and security, you’re much more vulnerable to prosecution… we could do the same thing, but middle class communities, elite schools in this country would not tolerate drug raids from federal law enforcement officers and police. Even if there’s drug use.

And so, there is this way in which resources and economic status actually makes you more vulnerable to criminal arrest and prosecution. And it becomes a self-fulfilling story. So that when I walk down the street in the wrong kinds of clothes, if I’m in the “wrong place,” there’s a presumption that I’m up to something criminal.

It goes on, but the point is that the “good old days” of the 1950s, or the 1850s, weren’t that good for some. Certainly the antebellum South holds no warmth in my heart. The lawyers on Moyers also describe how poor and middle-class whites are manipulated to see blacks as, if not the enemy, then at least people to be suspicious of, a deliberate manipulation going back to Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy”, then perfected by Ronald Reagan. They argue that the huge growthin the prison population makes us less safe, not more.

I mention all of these other issues because I believe these aren’t just individual events, bloopers of a thoughtless politician or pundit, but rather a pattern of racial insensitivity that needs to be continually looked at in the broader context.

ROG

M is for McFerrin

“There is something almost superhuman about the range and technique of Bobby McFerrin,” says Newsweek. “He sounds, by turns, like a blackbird, a Martian, an operatic soprano, a small child, and a bebop trumpet.”

Back in the early 1980s, I had heard of this a capella singer who performed in the jazz mode, making near orchestral sounds with his voice and body, named Bobby McFerrin. I was familiar with him mostly because every album had a some pop music covers. [Here is a live cover version of the Beatles’ Blackbird.]

Almost every season of the popular sitcom called Cosby Show had a different version of the theme to open the show. For Season 4 (1987-1988), the opening was performed by McFerrin.

In the summer of 1988, I was in San Diego, riding in the car of my sister’s friend Donald, when I heard a song called “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” for the first time. I thought, “That could be a big hit in southern California, but I don’t know if anyone else will buy it.” Of course, it hit the national charts on July 30, and went to #1 for two weeks, starting on September 30. (Here’s one video, and this the video featuring McFerrin and Robin Williams.

Skip to in 1989, when he he formed a ten-person ‘Voicestra’ which he featured on his 1990 album Medicine Music. I happened to catch McFerrin and Voicestra one morning on NBC-TV’s Today show. After a couple songs, I recall that Bryant Gumbel, then the co-host of the show, noted that McFerrin had said in an interview that he would no longer perform “Don’t Worry, Be Happy”, his only #1 hit, and that now he (Gumbel) understood why.
Sweet in the Morning from Medicine Music, featuring Voicestra.
Discipline, Featuring Robert McFerrin & Voicestra

I bought about a half dozen copies of that album to give as Christmas presents in 1990.

I was watching that episode with our brand-new new church choir director, Eric, who was crashing at our apartment until he found a place of his own. A couple years later, he arranged the McFerrin version of the 23rd Psalm for three guys in the choir to sing, Bob, Tim, and with me singing the highest part, all falsetto. On the recording, McFerrin sings all three vocal tracks, overdubbed, himself, which you can hear HERE.

McFerrin has also worked in collaboration with instrumental performers including pianists Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, and Joe Zawinul, drummer Tony Williams, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma; this is Ma and McFerrin’s version of Ave Maria.

My wife and I had the great good fortune to see bobby McFerrin live at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center on August 6, 1999. Here’s the review, from which I want to highlight the following:

Whether conducting the classics, improvising on an original tune plucked from thin air or cavorting within the ranks of the Philadelphia Orchestra, the affable McFerrin charms all in his wake.

Finding descriptive labels for the multitalented McFerrin seems futile. His talent is so broad and diverse that there seems to be nothing he can’t do well, including stand-up comedy. There’s a serious side, too, as the wunderkind leads the likes of the Philly through compositions by major composers such as Sergei Prokofiev and Felix Mendelssohn.

McFerrin’s uncanny ability to do “voices” put the audience on the floor with
all the characters from “Oz,” the most memorable of which was Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch line — “Come here, my little pretty!”
[This was HYSTERICAL.]

McFerrin invited singers in the audience who knew the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” to sing along. McFerrin sang every note of Bach’s rippling arpeggios for accompaniment, while several audience soloists sang Gounod’s wonderful melody over the top.
[This was absolutely extraordinary. One of the soloists was only a few rows in front of us.]

The Philly sang (yes, sang) the “William Tell Overture,” for encore.
[A hoot.]

Listen to CircleSong Six from the CircleSong album.

As an Amazon review says:
“Despite the undeniable uniqueness of his gift, Bobby’s music is always accessible and inviting. When he invites his fans to sing along, as he almost always does, few can resist. Inclusiveness, play, and the universality of voices raised together in song are at the heart of Bobby’s art. Bobby McFerrin was exposed to a multitude of musical genres during his youth–classical, R&B, jazz, pop and world musics. ‘When you grow up with that hodgepodge of music, it just comes out. It was like growing up in a multilingual house,’ he says. Bobby McFerrin continues to explore the musical universe, known and unknown.”

A Bobby McFerrin discography.

Bobby McFerrin turned 60 on March 11, 2010.

ROG

ABC Wednesday

35 Questions Meme

Before that, though, deaths to note. The crash that killed the Polish leader and more than seven dozen other leaders was tremendously sad for that country; I found it deeply affecting. The guy who was dean of my library school when I attended died of cancer. Dixie Carter also succumbed to cancer; yes, I DID watch Designing Women, initially because it was between Newhart and Cagney & Lacey, but eventually on its own merits. Finally, I think the only thing that will create real mine safety is if someone from the WV mining company gets indicted and convicted of 29 counts of manslaughter, and that mine owners continue to be be held criminally liable; obviously, even heavy fines are treated as just the cost of doing business.
***
Sunday Stealing, again.

1. How far away is the last person you kissed?

About a foot away.

2. Has someone ever told you they would be with you forever?

More than once; didn’t always work out. To be fair, that was a mutual pledge.

3. Last person you were in a car with?

The Wife and Daughter.

4. Any plans for tomorrow?

Play racquetball, go to work, come home; same as today.

5. How long does it take for you to take a shower?

10 minutes. Less when I’m in a hurry.

6. Best friend or close friends?

Close friends.

7. Is tomorrow going to be a good day?

Sure, why not?

8. Did you kiss anyone Friday?

I’m sure I did.

9. Ever thrown up in public?

Well, yes, actually, twice. The first time I remember quite vividly. I was at a party in my college town of New Paltz, NY and everyone, including me, was drinking. I was consuming a large amount of this Polish vodka, and I was really quite lucid. In fact, I had become the de facto host of the party because the host had passed out. The Polish vodka ran out, so I started drinking some Johnny Walker. In five minutes I went from sober to smashed – a late-arriving guest confirmed that he thought I was clear-headed only minutes earlier – to sick, fortunately in the bathroom. Lesson learned: don’t mix drinks.

The other time, I had some flu or food poisoning. I had had a drink or two, but hardly enough to get sick. I always felt badly, though, because my friends Jean and Rich probably thought I was just drinking too much.

10. What’s on your mind RIGHT NOW?

Baseball. Or sex. Or sleep. Or money. Wait, music.

11. Who was the last person you talked to?

The Wife.

12. What is the WORST subject they teach at school?

I don’t know that there’s a “worst” subject. There are things that I am more or less interested in.

13. Have you seen anyone lately that you don’t get along with?

Not in person.

14. What is your favourite colour top to wear?

Blue. I have more blue shirts than any other.

15. Have you ever been in a car accident?

At least two that involved medical attention, one which put me in the hospital for a day and a half. Plus the bike avoiding the car thing. And a handful of lesser events.

16. What’s the closest thing to you that’s green?

When your name is green, your mother’s, sisters’, wife’s, daughter’s niece’s names are all Green, so it is difficult to say. Oh, lower-case green: An ancient book called Play the Game: The Book of Sport that I used to read as a kid.

17. Where would you like to be right now?

On vacation. I just WAS on vacation.

18. Write down some lyrics to the song you’re listening to?

Love is just like a baseball game
Three strikes you’re out

Up to bat
I thought I hit a love run
But to my surprise
I found I didn’t hit none

Threw her love so fast
She put me in a daze
Never knew that love
Could come so many ways

(Here’s a recording.)

19. How many dogs do you have?

Zero. Haven’t had one in decades.

20. Is anything bugging you right now?

Yes. Fred Phelps’ “church”, among other things.

21. Is life going right for you now?

It’s more than tolerable. But I have a physical tomorrow, so we’ll see.

22. Is there someone you care about more than yourself?

Yes.

23. What made you laugh today?

The Daughter: something she said.

24. What was the last movie you watched?

Crazy Heart.

25. Whats the last conversation you had about?

Housecleaning.

26. What were you doing at 7:00 this morning?

Will be getting ready for work.

27. Do you like your hair long or short?

What hair?

28. Do you want to see somebody right now?

If I had the power of teleporting, I’d use it a lot.

29. Do you like the rain?

In moderation.

30. Did you have a valentine this year?

Why, yes.

31. The last person you kissed needs you at 3 am, would you go?

Why not?

32. Would you honestly say you’d risk your life for someone else?

Yes.

33. Honestly, if you could go back 1 month and change something would you?

Not so much. Well, actually, if you said TWO months ago, then the answer would be yes.

34. How do you feel about boys smoking?

I hate smoking, no matter who is doing it.

35. Could you see yourself with someone forever?

I have my hopes.

ROG