November 2015 - Page 6 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

You don’t sound black

It’s that mindset that gives political correctness a bad name.

The cartoonist Keith Knight, a/k/a Keef is “the creator of three popular comic strips: the Knight Life, (th)ink, and the K Chronicles.” I haven’t followed (th)ink, which is a one-panel editorial strip, but The Knight Life is syndicated in several daily newspapers, including the local Times Union; you can read it HERE.

Arguably his best strip is K Chronicles. Keef says: “K Chronicles is like an indie film and the Knight Life is like a (good) network sit-com. Read his September 2015 strip Not Black. (I’ll wait.) I so relate!

When I was first working in my current job, we provided library services not just for New York State, but all around the country. In those largely pre-Internet, and even pre-email days, I would talk with SBDC counselors on the telephone, taking their questions. Then we would go to the national conference to tout our services. Invariably, I’d see white people, shocked that I was black. And black people, PLEASED that I was black.

More than once, I’ve gotten into debates with people about whether I “sound” black. My argument: I’m black, this is what I sound like. Ipso facto, I sound black.

Oh, the picture above is from a 2009 K Chronicles that created a kerfuffle. Students at Slippery Rock University in western Pennsylvanian school were “outraged” that “the black cartoonist Keith Knight dared to draw a black guy in a noose.” The objection is “extraordinarily stupid… once you read the actual comic strip in question.”

It’s that mindset that gives political correctness – whatever that means – a bad name, especially at colleges. In fact, The Atlantic had a lengthy article in September 2015, The Coddling of the American Mind. “In the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and mental health.” So the idea of lynching is so offensive that when Keef is making an anti-lynching point in the drawing, the greater truth is lost.

TV: commercials, debates, Watergate

Butterfield was asked “Are you aware of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the White House?”

During the first two rounds of the baseball playoffs this season, the networks seemed to have run the same 17 commercials over and over and over again. One was this ad for Viagra, featuring a white woman in a football uniform top. I thought it was an interesting choice to run that ad into the ground, rather than to alternate it with one of the recent ads featuring a black woman (Date Night) or an Asian woman, actress Kelly Hu, both of whom were wearing dresses. There’s some sociological observation to be made here too, I suppose.

Two other overplayed ads were for these fantasy sports sites. I tend to root for teams, not individual players, so this interests me not all. Still, there is a question about insider trading, whether someone working at one company can pick up enough info about the popularity of a player to have an advantage playing at another major site.

During the third Republican debate in late October, when a debate moderator asked one of his rivals about whether the federal government should regulate fantasy football the same as gambling, Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey interrupted: “Are we really talking about getting the government involved in fantasy football? Wait a second, we have $19 trillion in debt, we have people out of work, we have ISIS and al-Qaeda attacking us and we’re talking about fantasy football? Can we stop?”

OK, so it wasn’t the most important question on the American landscape. But it was topical, it played to what I think as Americans’ perception of “fairness,” and I thought Christie’s disparaging remarks, about a question not even addressed to him, was mostly to bash the moderators.

Speaking of the debates, the New Yorker has humorously suggested that Republican National Committee and the television networks have agreed that “future Presidential debates during the 2016 campaign will strictly forbid questions about things the candidates ‘said’ or ‘did’.” Even when questions are not as robust as they might be, the responses can be interesting.

That said, the idea of having opening and closing statements makes sense to me. Currently, there is a disparity in the amount of time the ten candidates on stage receive over the two or three hours, and this would somewhat mitigate that.

Speaking of Republicans, I saw Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield on CBS News. When he left the White House, he took 20 boxes files with him, including some documents classified as “Top Secret.” Recently, he turned them over to Bob Woodward who, along with Carl Bernstein, broke the Watergate story for the Washington Post.

During the Watergate hearings, Butterfield was asked “Are you aware of any listening devices in the Oval Office of the White House?”
Butterfield: “I was aware of listening devices, yes, sir.” The man asking the question was lawyer Fred Dalton Thompson, who believed, incorrectly, that any tapes would vindicate the President.

Thompson would go on to act in several movies and television shows, including several iterations of Law & Order. He was also a US Senator from Tennessee for about a decade and ran for President in 2007 and early 2008. He died this week at the age of 73.

Some controversy over the segment of 60 Minutes called Heroin in the Heartland, which a writer suggests was just a Cliff Notes version. Weirder for me: there was NO sound on that piece when I played it back on the DVR, or watched it live, but all the other segments were fine.

I see this LA Times headline: Bill Cosby can be deposed in Janice Dickinson’s defamation suit, judge rules. I swear I read the headline, “Bill Cosby can be deported.”

Roz Chast: Cartoon Memoirs at Norman Rockwell Musuem

As spring ended, I told the family that the one thing I really wanted to do during the summer was going to the Norman Rockwell Museum to see the work of cartoonist Roz Chast, having loved her material in the New Yorker magazine for decades. When my friend David Brickman reviewed the show, which had opened on June 6, in July, it just intensified my desire.

Life being what it is, we didn’t make it to the Stockbridge, MA site until October 24, a mere two days before the close of the Chast exhibit, even though it’s only an hour away from Albany, NY. As it turned out, they were having a show outdoors featuring vintage cars; it cost $10 per carload, but the price would apply to going inside the museum, so no big deal.

The linchpin of the Chast portion of the exhibit was her first graphic memoir, Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (2014), about her aging parents, “who were in the same fifth-grade class.” There was “her gentle, worrywart father, George” (d. 2007) and “her strong-willed mother, Elizabeth” (d. 2009), educators both, “who subscribed to The New Yorker and inspired” their only child’s “art and world view.” I could have read the whole book right there, on the walls, but I perused enough to know that it’ll be on my Christmas list.

The Daughter preferred some of her other work, such as What I Hate from A to Z, also shown in its entirety. The video about the Brooklyn-born artist was quite entertaining as well.

We’d been to the museum at least twice before, but there were works by Rockwell I had never seen before, notably Glen Canyon Dam; the texture of this painting is lost in the photograph, because, up close, this is a STUNNING piece.

Oddly, a section called Love a Vet: Honoring Our Veterans was already open; the website had given the dates as from November 7, 2015, through January 5, 2016. The playing card format of the works from various artists was very effective.

Finally, I checked out the vehicles outdoors, which were of many makes and models from the 1930s to the 1980s. I’m not a “car guy,” but the 1936 Rolls Royce was, as they say, sweet.

Ten and a half

If I know the topic I might tackle, it’ll kick around in my head, subconsciously.

126 months of blogging, 10.5 years, every day, without fail. I’ve been without Internet access, I’ve been sick. And still, I blog.

I wrote to a couple of my blogging buddies at the end of August to announce – the title of email was “This is sad” – that I had written a blog post for every day in September, save for two, and those two are the link posts, which I can’t put together beforehand UNLESS I were psychic, which, alas, I am not.

And the last one I wrote wasn’t for September 29, it was for September 11, because I needed to find a fresh angle. This is not to say I didn’t write about anything I experienced in September, or that I pushed them off until October.

This was a good thing because my output for October was dismal; 20 posts written in 31 days. So it ebbs and flows. Something Eddie wrote about blogging is true of me as well: “Once I get out of the habit of doing something, it gets harder and harder for me to get back into it, even if it was something I really loved doing.”

Basically, there are three types of posts that I write: those that need to be on or near a date (holidays, birthdays, ABC Wednesday), those that should be sooner than later (news items, movie reviews), and those that are evergreen, or nearly so (quizzes, odd musings). When I decided to write a bit about the death of Wayne Dyer and others that month, I bumped something to four days later, and THAT piece got bumped a month.

I had a Labor Day post scheduled for September 7, but then I realize that was also my half birthday, and someone (OK, it was Arthur) had written a blog post about half birthdays, which was a swell idea. Half birthday wins, Labor Day post gets moved up a day.

The Daughter I ALWAYS write about on the 26th of the month. If Thanksgiving is November 26, I write about turkeys on the 25th. The 26th I’ve written about her EVERY month, and I’m not messing with success.

All this moving around of posts means that I often have NO idea what will pop up on my blog on any given day, which is kind of nice. Sometimes I don’t remember until it shows up on my Facebook feed and someone LIKES it.

It does help a lot to know WHAT I want to write about. If I know the ABC Wednesday, or other, topic I might tackle, it’ll kick around in my head, subconsciously. And I absolutely do NOT write them in order. D was written before B. Heck X was written before J, because, having FOUND an X, I was loath to have the opportunity to let it slip away.

Dustbury wrote about not blogging for the money; that’s right. Periodically, I get offers to “monetize” this blog. I don’t know how many of them are legitimate, but I’ve eschewed almost all of them, and I should have avoided the one I took, which gleaned me almost $100 some years ago, but wasn’t worth the effort.

BTW, is Facebook “blogging”? I don’t know. Apparently, I don’t think so, in part because one can post random things, such as cute kittens, or paeans to God, not written by oneself. Or some political bit that’s as likely wrong as correct. And it’s too easy to manipulate the narrative on FB, because some prankster thinks it sounds like something another person might have uttered.

While I’m perfectly capable of making errors in the blog – we won’t even talk about typos, or words left out – the ease of LIKE and SHARE on FB makes it feel like…something other than blogging. And, as I’ve mentioned, I used to find it disconcerting to get more LIKES from some FB repost than from something I actually put some thought and time into writing.

Also, the nature of FB is that I’m less likely to read something a person posted there a week ago than a blog item someone composed a month ago, which I might link to in my blog. I almost never link in the blog to a Facebook posting – if I can even find it again.

This I found odd. It was a picture of a flag-draped casket, and the caption, “it is not about a three-day weekend.” But it was actually early September, and Labor Day most assuredly IS about the three-day weekend. If it had been Memorial Day, it’d been another thing.

Thus endeth my semiannual rambling about blogging. Amen and amen.

Paternal grandfather McKinley Green, “Pop”

Though married to my grandmother Agatha (Walker) c. 1932, McKinley Green was NOT living with her or my father in 1940,.

Some months ago, this fellow named Jack, who worked with my paternal grandfather, sent me something on Facebook:

Roger, I have an old Binghamton [NY] Sun Newspaper dated May 23, 1959 that has a story about WNBF-TV-AM-FM and their move to the Sheraton Inn. They show pictures of the staff and a brief story about each. Here’s one on your Grandfather, Mac.

“McKinley Green, Maintenance – A World War I veteran, McKinley hails from Bloomsburg, Pa., and now lives at (yes, they actually posted his home address) He has a 32 year old son who is a World War II veteran. McKinley is a member of the WNBF Employees Club and of the Elks. His Wife belongs to the Order of the Eastern Star.

Thanks, Jack. I’ve not done as much searching on Pop, which is what we always called him, than I did with other branches of my family.

Some of what I found in a quick Ancestry.com search.

Military registration card:
Name: McKinley Green
Address: Bloomsburg, Penna.
Date of birth: Nov. 2, 1895
What’s your present trade: laborer
By whom employed: Tide Water Pipe Co
Married or single: Single
Race: colored
He was tall, medium build with brown eyes and black hair, according to the document of 6/2/17 (2 June 1917)

I never knew his birth date, and he never wanted to celebrate his natal anniversary.

Yet the 1910 US Census tells a slightly different story:
Name: Mckinley Green
Age in 1910: 14
Birth Year: abt 1896
Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Home in 1910: Bloomsburg Ward 3, Columbia, Pennsylvania
Race: Black
Gender: Male
Relation to Head of House: Son (Child)
Marital Status: Single
Father’s name: John Green
Father’s Birthplace: Maryland
Mother’s Birthplace: Maryland
Household Members:
Name Age
John Green 47
Mckinley Green 14
Dewey Green 9
Wilbur Green 7

I wonder what happened with his mother?

And the 1940 Census tells another variation:
Name: Mckinley Green
Age: 43
Estimated Birth Year: abt 1897
Gender: Male
Race: White
Birthplace: Pennsylvania
Marital Status: Married
Relation to Head of House: Lodger
Home in 1940: Binghamton, Broome, New York
Inferred Residence in 1935: Binghamton, Broome, New York
Residence in 1935: Same Place
Resident on farm in 1935: No
Sheet Number: 81A
Occupation: Laborer
Attended School or College: No
Highest Grade Completed: Elementary school, 6th grade
Hours Worked Week Prior to Census: 40
Class of Worker: Wage or salary worker in private work
Weeks Worked in 1939: 52
Income: 508
Income Other Sources: No

They got the race wrong, and the year is fuzzy, but this was my grandfather. Though married to my grandmother Agatha (Walker) c. 1932, he was NOT living with her or my future father, Leslie, in 1940, but in a lodging house with about 45 other people. Agatha and Les were residing with HER parents, as they were in 1930.

By the end of 1953, Mac and Agatha were living upstairs at 5 Gaines Street, Binghamton, NY, while I, with my father and my pregnant mother, were living downstairs.

The more I know, the less I understand…