A Commonplace Book

The Killings in Connecticut

2010-08-06T02:30:00.003-04:00

I have been thinking a lot about the black man who killed eight people and himself at the company in Conn. In response there have been the usual expressions of bewilderment and incomprehension that someone would do such a thing. There have been expressions of innocence by the company as well as the denials of racism by the family and friends of the eight white people who were murdered. Both the company and the union said that Omar Thornton had not filed a complaint about racism with either of them. I think I understand why he did not file a complaint and why he killed eight people. And I will add that to understand his actions is not to approve of them, because I do not.

More than half a century ago, Ralph Ellison wrote a novel called Invisible Man in which he described the status of blacks in this country as being invisible to the white majority. I don't think blacks are invisible any longer, especially after Obama's election.

However being black still carries with it an element of unreality, meaning that when we leave our homes and go into the white world - schools, jobs, shopping, etc., it is very hard for us to know what is real. I envy white people because they do not have to ask what is real. Let me give an example of something that happens to blacks daily. We are in the check out line at a store, and the cashier is rude. If I were white I would think, "She's having a bad day." But because I am black, I do not know if she is having a bad day or if she doesn't like black people.

That may sound foolish, but it isn't foolish if you've stood in the checkout lane and heard the cashier say hello and how are you to the person in front of me, but when you stand before the cashier you are not greeted or asked about your day. Or the variation on that experience: to take advantage of discounts and sales at many stores, you must have a store card to get the savings. What am I to believe when the cashier asks the person in front of me if he has a card, but doesn't ask me. Now perhaps I'm supposed to assume that I heard the cashier ask the person in front of me for her card so there's no necessity to ask me for mine. But what having to live with racism does to you is that when you're in public you question yourself about the impersonal contacts with whites. Was that person being racist? Did I imagine he looked at me in a certain way?

Many white people think racism is limited to using the n---- word, or as Thornton claimed, drawing that word and a noose on a bathroom wall. But racism is far, far more subtle than that. I believe that Omar Thornton had experiences as I've described above, but he did not have the words to articulate the unreality he was feeling trapped in. The incidents that he considered racist were so small, so insignificant to the white person who offended him that he knew he would appear as hypersensitive if he said something to the person, as looking for racism where none existed or was intended if he filed a complaint. He probably felt he would be laughed at if he filed a grievance against someone who never smiled at him but did so whites, who had an edge in her voice when she spoke to him but not when she spoke to a white co-worker. There was no one at the company he could talk to who would truly understand. And what could be done anyway? Tell someone to smile when she saw him? Tell someone to speak as pleasantly to him as this person did to whites?

The essential element in human interactions is to feel in the hearts of others an echo of our own heart, its yearnings and aspirations, its sorrows and its pains. If such does not happen often enough, we lose touch with the reality of ourselves and thus, the reality of others. And then it seems logical and morally right to pick up a gun and kill some of those you feel are responsible for your unreality.

I think I understand Omar Thornton because I've had more than one day when I have wanted to do what he did. But I know how to use words. Omar Thornton only knew how to use a gun.

© Julius Lester 2010

The Sherrod Debacle

2010-07-22T02:44:00.007-04:00

It has been a long time since I've written here, not because I haven't had things I wanted to write about, but because I didn't want to take the time away from other things I was doing. However, I cannot be silent after the administration's allowing itself to be baited by the right wing deliberate falsifying of the taped speech Ms. Sherrod gave to the NAACP in March. And although President Obama was not directly involved, his efforts to change the tone of politics in the nation have led to an administration that goes out of its way to placate the right wing, and in so doing, gives the right wing more power. And it was this fear of the right wing that led the Secretary of Agriculture to fire Ms. Shirley Sherrod for something she did not say.

What is so appalling in this incident is the utter disrespect the Secretary of Agriculture showed Ms. Sherrod. A doctored tape of her speech is shown over and over on the Fox network, and the Secretary reacted like a Pavlovian dog. Indeed, all the media outlets reacted like Pavlovian dogs. And no one, no one had the decency to ask Ms. Sherrod directly what she said, or ask for a copy of the speech, or a copy of the videotape.

While the administration has apologized and Ms. Sherrod has been offered a promotion, that is insufficient. The president should ask for the Secretary of Agriculture's resignation for his violation of a fundamental tenet of our democracy; a person is innocent until proven guilty.

I do not understand how Democrats allow themselves to be defined by the right wing time and time again. John Kerry did not take the Swift Boaters seriously and they defined his service in Vietnam and him as a liar. The right wing came close to undermining Obama's candidacy by associating him with Bill Ayers, a Sixties radical. And now we have the teabaggers and Sarah Palin who will say anything, like defining a consultation between a doctor and a patient about end of life care a death panel. President Obama does not seem to understand that the right wing has no integrity, knows that if they repeat a lie often enough it will become the truth in the minds of millions, and, above all, it counts on the Democratic Party not to be as passionate about what it believes as the right wing is passionate about what it believes. The president does not seem to under understand that there is nothing he can do that the right wing will approve of. NOTHING!! It takes two to change the tone of politics in the nation, and it is not in the right wing's interest to make that change. Meanwhile, Obama ignores his constituency, those of us who got him elected, in favor of trying to work with people who would rather die than work with him.

I voted for Obama for many reasons, but one was his passion. That passion has been in short supply since he entered the White House. And because he has been afraid to be passionate, he has set a tone in his administration in which the only passion many of his subordinates show is weakness. I hold Obama responsible for the Secretary of Agriculture's firing of Ms. Sherrod, and I will be disappointed if he does not request the Secretary's resignation. Such poor judgment as the Secretary showed leaves me with no confidence in any decision he has made or will make.

I remember election night and the million people in Grant Park in Chicago with tears in their eyes, the millions of us in our homes looking at our televisions with tears in our eyes, and how much we believed that things were going to be different now.

If someone had told me that night that I would write what I'm about to write, I would've thought they were crazy.

I'm beginning to be sorry that Hillary didn't win the nomination.

And now I'm going to make me a soda with cream soda and vanilla ice cream, and get back to The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest.

© 2010 by Julius Lester

Two Things On My Mind

2010-02-18T22:36:00.005-05:00

Tiger Woods is making an announcement tomorrow (2/19). Whatever else he says, I hope he says he will not play golf for the next year, that he will use the time to become better acquainted with himself as a human being, that he will apply the same focus and intensity to the health of his soul that he has applied to golf. I am not morally condemning him. To do so I would have to stand in moral judgment on myself. But I know what it is to separate one's creative life from one's personal life to such an extent that the two scarcely know each other. It is extremely difficult and painful to "know thyself", but not nearly as painful as ignorance of one's self. My wish for Tiger Woods is that his life become as beautiful and awe inspiring as his golf game.

*****************

One of my current pet peeves is the pervasive use of the word "boob" as a substitute for breast. I am especially peeved when women use "boob", a word devoid of dignity. However, given how breast-fixated America is, perhaps the wide use of "boob" is an unconscious effort to combat that fixation. But I think it has much more to do with America's discomfort with talking about anything related to sex. A few years ago, a high school in this area (western Massachusetts) found itself under attack when it was learned that the school was going to put on a performance of "The Vagina Monologues". The reaction could not have been stronger if the play had been titled "The Pussy Monologues". On the other hand, it is interesting that words have such power for some Americans that the mere mention of the word "vagina" sends many people into a rage. If only these people would take seriously and be enraged by words like war, poverty, homelessness. If only.

© 2010 by Julius Lester

Bold Words, Timid Actions: Obama, Year One

2010-01-22T13:14:00.003-05:00

On January 20, 2009, an estimated one million people stood on the Mall in Washington, D.C. to witness the inauguration of Barak Obama. Untold millions around the world watched on television screens. Never in American history had so many witnessed the inauguration of a U.S. president. Never had so many felt so hopeful about the future of this nation.

On the day of Obama’s inauguration I was ecstatic to be done with the reactionary and divisive politics of George Bush, to be done with the self-righteousness of the right wing. At long last the U.S. government would function with a sense of caring for the well-being of those who did not have the means to insure their own well-being.

On January 19, 2010, My wife and I drove to the high school about a mile from our house to cast our vote in the special election of a senator to replace Ted Kennedy. As we drove up the hill to the polling place in the high school gym, we both noticed that there were a number of political signs bordering the road, and they all said “Vote for Brown”. We looked in vain for a sign saying “Vote for Coakley”. We knew that did not portend good for the outcome.

We cast our votes for Coakley, but all day there was a sick feeling in both of our stomachs. That sick feeling only intensified when the results we’d been dreading came in. Massachusetts, one of the most liberal states in the country, was sending a Republican to fill the remaining two years of Ted Kennedy’s terms. How could the mood of a nation change so radically in a mere 52 weeks?

I think the responsibility lies with the man in the Oval Office. It is as if the man who filled us with hope and enthusiasm, the man who vowed to bring change we could believe in was kidnaped, and in his place, someone substituted a person who looked like him but was far more timid in his actions.

This doppelgänger courted the Republican opposition, not understanding that the Republicans would never agree with him, that it was not in their self-interest to work amicably with him, that their vocabulary consisted of “No” and “Boo!” But the false Obama did not want to believe that a political party could be so wedded to negativity and scare tactics.

Even worse, however, is that the false Obama completely forgot the people who had been so enthused by his campaign and his election. He seemed to take for granted the millions and millions whose hopes he had kindled into dancing flames of warmth. When political right-wingers began holding a rallies around the country attacking the false Obama’s citizenship, when the “tea baggers” harassed Democratic congressmen at public meetings, the false Obama and the Democratic Party dismissed them as crazies, as people not worthy of serious consideration.

What he and his party failed to recognize was the passion the “tea baggers” embodied, the passion that George Bush had for his causes - the right to life, the war in Iraq, the opposition to research using stem cells, etc., etc. Regardless of how repugnant Bush’s politics were to me, he was not afraid to speak passionately about his beliefs.

A lack of passion has been the Democratic Party’s Achilles’ heel for decades now. When Al Gore debated George Bush, I cringed every time he droned, “I have a plan.…” When John Kerry debated George Bush I cringed every time he droned, “I have a plan.” Why doesn’t the Democratic Party understand that voters don’t care about plans? What people need to know about a candidate for office is what do you care about, and, are you able to make listeners feel how much you care?

Barak Obama-the-candidate was not timid about showing us his passion and caring. But then, the doppelgänger was substituted for the real Obama. When Congress began deliberating on how to reform health care, the real Obama would have gone around the country repeatedly exhorting us to put pressure on Congress, to protest at the offices of insurance companies. Not only did the false Obama do nothing, he did what Democrats always do; he let the Republicans define the issue. And, Republicans being Republicans did what Republicans do best - scared people by talking about death panels and that the government would kill your grandmother, that medical premiums would go up, that people would no longer be able to choose their own doctors.

The real Obama would have traveled the country speaking passionately about compassion, about our obligation to care about those among us who are ill and are dying because they cannot afford medical care, as did the real Obama’s mother. He would have shown us passionately that he cared, and in doing so, would have reignited that passion in us for a government that is compassionate. And, many of those in Congress who were wavering, and those who were opposed to reforming medical care would have been made to appear callous and unfeeling, and some would have stopped wavering and become supporters while others would have been shamed into silence -- maybe even the self-righteous and arrogant Joe Lieberman.

The real Obama would not have waited until two days before the special election in Massachusetts to ask for people’s support. By coming two days before the election, he appeared as nothing more than a desperate politician in trouble. Frequent trips to campaign on Coakley’s behalf would have sent a message that the President cared abut what happened in Massachusetts, that he believed in Martha Coakley.

Alas, as much as I would love to believe that a doppelgänger was substituted for the real Obama. I can’t, because the disappointment I feel is a response to Obama’s performance as president. I was aware that during his campaign he raised our hopes too high, that he could not meet them. I did not expect that he would abandon those hopes. I did not expect that he would involve himself in a contretemps between a Cambridge, Mass., police officer and a black Harvard professor, and invite them to the White House “for a beer”. He was the PRESIDENT, not a therapist.

I have written here earlier about being glad that Obama was a pragmatist, not an ideologue. I have also written here about my support of his receiving the Nobel Prize. What I did not write about, however, were my misgivings - that he seemed a little too cocky, too confident, that he seemed overwhelmed by the demands of being president, that, maybe, just maybe, God forbid, Hillary Clinton and John McCain had been right: he was too inexperienced.

All I know now, a mere year after his inauguration, is that I am disappointed, that I feel used, that there has not been change I could believe in, and I am heartbroken.. I hope the president finds the Obama I voted for - a man of passion, a man who would fight for what he believed in, a man who would see that he has become a puppet manipulated by the Republican, a man who understands that the moral climate of the nation is the responsibility of the person in the Oval Office, who understands that people who are energized by the moral challenges a president calls us to face can turn more Congressional votes toward his programs than he and his aides can by courting votes on the Hill..

Obama has three more years. Hopefully, at this time next year, the Obama I voted for will have returned from wherever he is now. I liked feeling hopeful about the future of my country.

© 2010 by Julius Lester

Tiger Woods Did Not Cheat On His Wife

2009-12-11T14:58:00.003-05:00

I have never understood why someone who commits adultery is called a "cheater". Cheating is something I associate to having an unfair advantage, or not abiding by the rules in playing a game. A marriage can be many things, but it is far more serious than any game, even the Super Bowl.

To define what Tiger Woods has done as "cheating" is to obfuscate what his transgression really is. Tiger didn't cheat on his wife; he lied to her, and in doing so, he shattered the trust which is mandatory in a marriage. His wife's sense of reality has been destroyed, because she believed that she and her husband were living in the same story. Now she finds out that she has been living in a life that did not exist because Tiger had a secret life of his own.

Given the number of text and phone messages Tiger used to communicate with various women, one has to wonder if he wanted to be caught. Did he truly believe that he could be involved in so many sexual relationships that it would not become public some day? Part of the culture of professional sports is athletes having girl friends in every city the team or athlete goes to. I have no doubt that some men compete with each other to see who can have sex with the most women. Tiger is the most well-known and richest athlete in the world, so it follows that he must have sex with the most women. But any man as indiscreet with his indiscretions as he was is begging to get caught.

Some postulate that he is a sex addict. If wanting sex all the time is addictive behavior, then 99% of all American males are sex addicts. What is not a postulation, however, is that Tiger is a world-class liar. But he has been a spokesman for cars, watches, shoes, sports drinks. and other products. Television commercials and magazine ads lie to us all the time because America's value system places far more importance on satisfying greed than telling us that using a certain product might harm us? Tiger makes (or made) one hundred million dollars a year from being the spokesman for various products, which makes him a very well-paid liar. If he lies to the American people, why wouldn't he lie to his wife?

One more thing that is in the same category of glossing over something through language. Why are Americans afraid to say the word, breast? When did women's breasts become boobs? How can we think we are a mature nation if saying "breast" frightens us so much that we have to call them "boobs"?

The language we use has a profound effect on how we live our daily lives. We call Tiger a cheater when his offense is that he's a liar. We say boobs which is a far more ugly sounding word than breasts.

I shudder to think about all the other things we might be afraid to call by their rightful names.

© 2009 by Julius Lester

Obama and the Nobel Peace Prize

2009-10-12T22:42:00.002-04:00

The criticism of Obama's receiving the Nobel Peace Prize is that he hasn't done anything yet to deserve it. This is truly laughable, especially when it comes from a buffoon like Rush Limbaugh who said that all Obama has ever done is make speeches. And what, exactly, has Rush Limbaugh ever done except talk?

One of the stupidest adages ever spoken is "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me." The three ribs and collar bone that were broken when a truck hit my car eight years ago have healed, but words my mother said to me sixty years ago continue to hurt. Words are not "just" words; words are actions. All Adolf Hitler did was use words, and those to whom the words were spoken took them into their souls, and the consequences haunt us still.

In 1940, a small booklet was published called "Words and Their Meaning." The author was Aldous Huxley, and the following is from that booklet:

"We talk about 'mere matters of words' in a tone which implies that we regard words as things beneath the notice of a serious-minded person.

"This is a most unfortunate attitude. For the fact is that words play an enormous part in our lives and are therefore deserving of the closest study. The old idea that words possess magical powers is false; but its falsity is the distortion of a very important truth. Words do have a magical effect....Words are magical in the way they effect the minds of those who use them, 'A mere matter of words,' we say contemptuously, forgetting that words have power to mould men's thinking, to canalize their feeling, to direct their willing and acting. Conduct and character are largely determined by the nature of the words we currently us to discuss ourselves and the world around us.The magician is a man who observes that words have an almost miraculous effect on human behavior...."

The Nobel Peace Prize committee bestowed the prize on President Obama because his words reveal a respect for others, that his words are inclusive of humanity, his words are a profound change from the intemperate words of those who believe that government is not the solution but the problem. President Obama's words speak to the best that is in us, even the best in those whose words call for his death.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee was not premature in bestowing this prize on President Obama. They wanted not only to acknowledge the impact his words have had around the world, but perhaps the committee also wanted us to value the power of words to make change, and, specifically to be cognizant of how much this president has already accomplished by his words.

© 2009 Julius Lester

The Death of Ted Kennedy

2009-08-26T22:12:00.002-04:00

This is the blog I posted on learning of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor diagnosis.

Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Ted Kenedy

The news of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor is devastating news for those of us who live in Massachusetts. I know he is the butt of jokes about his drinking and is probably not taken seriously by many people but I love the man, though I've never laid eyes on him.

I love him because he was the ne'er do-well Kennedy brother. After the WW II death of the oldest brother, Joseph, the family hopes came to reside in Jack Kennedy and Robert. Not much was expected of Ted. Yet, after the murders of JFK and RFK, Ted Kennedy, to everyone's surprise, took up the burden of the family mantle. While the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquidick Island while in Ted's company ended any chance of him ever becoming president, he became the unstinting, unswerving, uncompromising, and often, only voice of political liberalism in America.

Practically every other Democratic Party politician ran when Republicans turned the word "liberal" into a pejorative. Not Ted Kennedy. He was a liberal and was proud of it, and his compassion for that other America of poverty and joblessness never weakened.

To face his death is like contemplating the death of a close family member. For those of us in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy has always been there. It is impossible for me to imagine the political landscape without his presence.

Well, I know this much. After he dies, and I pray that won't be before his present term ends in 2012, if his name should happen to appear on the ballot for re-election to the U.S. Senate, even dead, he would win in a landslide. A dead Ted Kennedy would be better than a lot of politicians I could name who think they're alive.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Anywhen - At any time.

This is a great word. We use anyhow, anywhere, anywise, why not anywhen?

I'll take Ted Kennedy anywhen over anybody else.

Fighting Back Against the Right

2009-08-12T00:37:00.004-04:00

"Nature does not bestow virtue; to be good is an art."

Seneca

What follows below is from MoveOn.org and was sent to me by a blog reader,(Thanks, Kate!) and I thought it worth passing on. Please feel free to send this to anyone you think would be interested. And for information about putting this statement from MoveOn.org on Twitter or a Facebook page, go to the organization's web site. And don't forget: many of the lies and innuendos are being spread via the Internet, which has become a powerful political tool. We must use it also.

Julius Lester

---------------

The health care fight has turned ugly, fast. Right-wing mobs are crashing congressional town halls, lies are spreading via anonymous email chains, and Sarah Palin bizarrely said that President Obama was going to set up a "death panel," whatever that is.

Many of these claims are just incredible—but if we don't fight back with the truth, the right will continue to poison the health care debate. So as part of our Real Voices for Change campaign this August, we're working to set the record straight.

Check out the list below: "Top Five Health Care Lies—and How to Fight Back." Can you spread the word by passing this email along to 10 of your friends today?

Top Five Health Care Reform Lies—and How to Fight Back

Lie #1: President Obama wants to euthanize your grandma!!!

The truth: These accusations—of "death panels" and forced euthanasia—are, of course, flatly untrue. As an article from the Associated Press puts it: "No 'death panel' in health care bill." What's the real deal? Reform legislation includes a provision, supported by the AARP, to offer senior citizens access to a professional medical counselor who will provide them with information on preparing a living will and other issues facing older Americans.

Lie #2: Democrats are going to outlaw private insurance and force you into a government plan!!!

The truth: With reform, choices will increase, not decrease. Obama's reform plans will create a health insurance exchange, a one-stop shopping marketplace for affordable, high-quality insurance options.6 Included in the exchange is the public health insurance option—a nationwide plan with a broad network of providers—that will operate alongside private insurance companies, injecting competition into the market to drive quality up and costs down.

If you're happy with your coverage and doctors, you can keep them. But the new public plan will expand choices to millions of businesses or individuals who choose to opt into it, including many who simply can't afford health care now.

Lie #3: President Obama wants to implement Soviet-style rationing!!!

The truth: Health care reform will expand access to high-quality health insurance, and give individuals, families, and businesses more choices for coverage. Right now, big corporations decide whether to give you coverage, what doctors you get to see, and whether a particular procedure or medicine is covered—that is rationed care. And a big part of reform is to stop that.

Health care reform will do away with some of the most nefarious aspects of this rationing: discrimination for pre-existing conditions, insurers that cancel coverage when you get sick, gender discrimination, and lifetime and yearly limits on coverage. And outside of that, as noted above, reform will increase insurance options, not force anyone into a rationed situation.

Lie #4: Obama is secretly plotting to cut senior citizens' Medicare benefits!!!

The truth: Health care reform plans will not reduce Medicare benefits. Reform includes savings from Medicare that are unrelated to patient care—in fact, the savings comes from cutting billions of dollars in over payments to insurance companies and eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse.

Lie #5: Obama's health care plan will bankrupt America!!!

The truth: We need health care reform now in order to prevent bankruptcy—to control spiraling costs that affect individuals, families, small businesses, and the American economy.

Right now, we spend more than $2 trillion dollars a year on health care. The average family premium is projected to rise to over $22,000 in the next decade—and each year, nearly a million people face bankruptcy because of medical expenses. Reform, with an affordable, high-quality public option that can spur competition, is necessary to bring down skyrocketing costs. Also, President Obama's reform plans would be fully paid for over 10 years and not add a penny to the deficit.

We're closer to real health care reform than we've ever been—and the next few weeks will decide whether it happens. We need to make sure the truth about health care reform is spread far and wide to combat right wing lies.

The Poisonous Political Climate

2009-08-11T00:44:00.003-04:00

"There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as moral indignation which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue."

Erich Fromm

During the presidential campaign my fear that candidate Obama might be assassinated was more abstract than real. However, in the past few weeks that fear has become real. When the Rush Limbaughs of America pollute the air waves with blatant lies questioning Obama's citizenship, when the irresponsible rhetoric of the Bill O'Reilly's and Glenn Beck's mobilizes people to shout down anyone who speaks in favor of the health care legislation, when demonstrators carry signs depicting President Obama as Hitler, my fear for the president's life ceases to be abstract and becomes very, very real.

If something should happen to the president, the mouths of hatred will be quick to deny that they had anything to do with it because they did not pull the trigger. And this is what is so despicable about these people; they refuse to take responsibility for their words; they refuse to acknowledge that speech is action, that words are not just words because words create emotions, and emotions get translated into actions.

I wanted to believe that Obama's election heralded the beginnings of a post-racial America. This may still be the case, and what we are witnessing from the Right represents the final outbursts of a thinly disguised racism. But this does not mean that serious damage is not being done to the atmosphere in which issues are discussed and decided. When one side has no interest in discussion, when one side has no interest in knowledge, when one side has no interest in listening, when one side has no interest in any truth other than what it deems as truth, when one side will say and do anything to maintain its narrow and self-centered view of life, it must be countered by those who envision a dynamic and creative society in which people listen to and learn from each other in an atmosphere of civility and respect. Wherever those who hate gather to disrupt, they must be met by the anger of those of us who will not permit thus hatred people to poison democratic ideals.

However, I find myself thinking about the political atmosphere in the country in 1963 when it was far from certain that the civil rights movement would succeed, when thousands of white people blamed President Kennedy for what they perceived as his compliance with the goals of the civil rights movement, which, as they saw it, was to destroy their "way of life". There was violence in the air then, and it expressed itself in the murders not only of John Kennedy, but Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy.

There is violence in the air now, and I am afraid.

© 2009 Julius Lester

The Professor, The Policeman & the President

2009-07-31T00:39:00.007-04:00

I, for one, am tired of hearing about the encounter between the professor and the policeman. However I am going to add my words because I've not heard or read anything that reflected my perception of that encounter.

I was disappointed that the president stupidly said that the policeman acted stupidly. But because the president is a Harvard alum and the professor is a member of the Harvard faculty, I suspect that the president felt personally offended by the alleged actions of the policeman. I have no idea what the president hoped to accomplish by having the professor and the policeman come to the White House. Is he now going to invite the antagonists of other such encounters to the White House for a beer? Is he going to stop being the President and become the national Therapist? The president's "beer summit", as some in the media have called it, has made the president the butt of jokes by the late night comedians who, until now, had been unable to find anything about him they could make fun of. Once those who make a lucrative living by making fun of others find a weakness in a president, once a president becomes fodder for laughter, the president's power to persuade and inspire is damaged.

What intrigues me about the encounter between the professor and the policeman is that either of them could have walked away after it was established that the professor was in his own residence. What happened that made it impossible for either one of them to do that?

In any encounter, one person creates the emotional atmosphere by tone of voice, gestures, facial expressions, etc. Who and what created the emotional atmosphere of the encounter between the professor and the policeman, and did so in such a way that the encounter spun out of control so quickly?

Generally, we lose control when we feel that our identity is being attacked. When an encounter which should be impersonal and innocuous becomes personal, communication is impossible, and, the person feeling attacked cannot walk away. When both people feel that their identities are being attacked, the encounter becomes violent, and emotional violence is as damaging to the spirit as physical violence is to the body and spirit.

Like most black men in the United States, I have had encounters with the police, though not in my home. (However, I did have an encounter with two white FBI agents in my home). Nonetheless, in those encounters (and even in the one with the FBI) I sought to create a benign emotional atmosphere by remembering that when the policeman took off his uniform, he was a mere human being; I related to him, not the uniform. Above all, I did not act as if his reason for stopping me was because I was black, even if I was convinced that was his reason. Thus far, over the years, the emotional atmosphere of these encounters has remained benign.

I was most distressed when, after the professor and the policeman met with the president and vice-president, the policeman let it be known that he had not apologized. And the president never apologized for saying that the policeman acted "stupidly". Although the professor did not say that he did not apologize, it is safe to assume that he didn't.

It is deeply regrettable that apologies are seen as a sign of weakness, of giving in, as an act that is self-demeaning. As intelligent as the professor, the policeman, and the president may be, their emotional IQ's are low. An apology is not a statement that I did something wrong. An apology is the recognition and acceptance of the fact that something I said or did was hurtful to the other person(s) in the encounter. Whether the hurt was intentional or unintentional is not important. What is important is letting the other person(s) know that I know that they are in pain, even if I was in the right.

If the president wanted his little tete-a-tete on the White House lawn to be a "teachable moment," he failed. I think he knows now that he should have said that the encounter between the professor and the policeman was a local matter and left it at that. But his own ego identification as a Harvard alum and a friend of the professor, as well as his being black, made him feel that his ego had been attacked by the policeman. One of the odd things in American life is that when we are asked, "What do you do for a living?", we respond by saying, "I am a policeman/professor/whatever". We are asked what is it that we do, and we respond with a statement of identity. Thus, the policeman felt his identity was not being respected by the professor, and the professor felt his identity as a member of the Harvard faculty was not being respected, which led the professor to feel that his identity as a black man was under siege.

But whenever we feel that our identities are under attack, we are saying that the person attacking us has more power over us than we have over ourselves. Doing so puts one in the position of being a victim, and seeing yourself as a victim is a statement of self-hatred. That self-hatred is projected onto the adversary. Thus, men have waged war against other men for the breadth and length of human history, and when I write "men", I am being gender specific.

If you wonder why I've written about the professor and the policeman without using the names of the individuals, it is because I know the professor and do not want my observations construed as an attack on him, and most important, the dynamics of the encounter between the two specific individuals is a dynamic latent in almost any encounter between two people, even of the same race, religion, or gender. If the specific encounter is seen only in the context of race and racial profiling, we fail ourselves by not recognizing how such dynamics all too often play an important part in our relations with those we live with each and every day in our homes.

Thus, I have not written about the professor, the policeman, and the president. I have written about you and me.

Julius Lester © 2009

A Modest Request

2009-07-30T02:08:00.002-04:00

Whenever I publish something on this blog, I am bombarded with comments that are written in Chinese or Japanese characters. Because I moderate comments, these come directly to me, sometimes as many as four a day. I just deleted 11 which have come in the past two days.

I have no idea who is doing this, and I certainly have no idea why he or she is doing it. Whoever you are, you should know that your comments go directly to my spam blocker. I have not bothered to open one in quite some time. I delete them from my spam folder, and I delete them from Moderate Comments of this blog.

One of the negative aspects of this age of the internet is the ability of people to conceal their identities which thus enables them to harass others without risking being identified.

I do not know if this person who sends "comments" in Chinese or Japanese characters thinks it is amusing, or whether this person is angry with me about something I wrote or did. Whoever you are, why don't you try something novel and e-mail me in English whatever may be on your mind, or what it is you hope to accomplish by sending e-mails I cannot read. Perhaps you have a purpose which I cannot understand, and I would like to.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Julius Lester

On the Death of Michael Jackson

2009-06-30T23:43:00.003-04:00

Michael Jackson was an exceptionally gifted singer and dancer. He brought an intensity and joy to his performances unlike any performer I can think of. And because he brought so much joy to so many, I never understood it when the media turned on him with hysterical outbursts when, for example, he held his baby over the railing of a hotel balcony somewhere in Europe, something he did in response to fans yelling up that they wanted to see the child. Did they really believe he was going to drop the infant? The thought is ridiculous.

Jackson became a freak in the eyes of the media, and the Lenos and Lettermans knew they could get a guaranteed laugh if they made fun of him. How could people become so hostile toward someone who had given joy to so many? Why couldn't people be grateful for his astounding gifts as a musician and dancer and leave the person alone?

But what about the charges of pedophilia against him because he slept in the same bed with children? What no one wanted to examine was why did the American mind instantly equate sexual acts with sleeping in a bed with a child? People projected onto Jackson their own prurience. I am reminded of a case in which a father took film to be developed. On the roll were photos of his daughter, naked, in the bathtub. The camera store owner called the police, and the man was arrested!

In his relationships with children, in the fantasy world he created at his Neverland Ranch, Jackson was attempting to retrieve what his father had deprived him of -- a childhood. There was something pathetically courageous in Jackson's efforts to have a childhood. But just as Americans projected pedophilia onto him, he projected his need to be a child onto actual children in an attempt to live through them. Some of the children may have been uncomfortable with this, and perhaps their expressions of discomfort were translated by adults into pedophilia.

Jackson did not understand that he could not give himself the childhood his father had deprived him of. The love and play of childhood would always be closed to him as long as he carried resentment and anger at his father. And the greatest paradox Jackson did not learn to live with was that he would not have become the entertainer he was, that he could not have amassed the wealth he did if not for the tyranny of his father.

Jackson lived in pain, excruciating pain as evidenced by the $100,000 pharmacy bill he amassed over a two year period. He wanted to numb the pain, but the only way to rid himself of the pain was to go through it. This was not possible for someone who probably felt most comfortable when he was on a stage, performing.

As for the plastic surgeries Jackson underwent, the changes in his skin color from dark brown to an unnatural whiteness, these were interpreted as expressions of self-hatred, that Jackson wanted to be a white man. Last week, Deepak Chopra was interviewed by Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, and Chopra said that Jackson had had lupus as well as a skin disease, and it was this that led to the plastic surgeries and the wearing of ghostly white make-up.

The Michael Jackson story is a modern American tragedy that touches other young people who become world famous. I find myself thinking of Michael Phelps and athletes in general. Americans idolize youth, especially in sports and entertainment. Michael Jackson, Michael Phelps & Britney Spears were applauded all over the world for the joy their performances gave so many. And yet, the public turned against them when they transgressed the bounds of the social norms. Opprobrium was heaped on them for something that was not entirely their fault. No one had taught them how to live when they were not performing on their respective stages. Each had their childhoods taken from them by ambitious adults, and each reached a point of rebellion, sometimes self-destructive rebellion.

Learning how to live is a lifelong process. The exceptional abilities of these young people were focused on to the detriment of their minds and their emotional lives. None of them were given books in which they might have seen something of themselves and their lives. Books help us to see ourselves, something we cannot do alone, especially when we are surrounded by sycophants. When I learned that Michael Phelps's life up to the Olympics consisted of swimming, eating pizza, playing with his dog and watching television, I was saddened. But the values of our country have become mired in celebrity and wealth. When many children today are asked what they want to be when they grow up, all too often the answer is "Famous and rich." Our society expects multimillionaire teenagers to be role models, but having a society which wants children to aspire to be heroes/heroines, well, heroes and heroines are confined to books. And adolescent celebrities don't read.

Michael Jackson was a man whose childhood was taken from him, and he tried to have that childhood when he was no longer the age of a child. It was sad to watch. While I am stunned and saddened by his death, a part of me is also relieved that perhaps now he has the peace that seemed to be so very absent from his life.

Saddest of all, however, is that Americans are now expressing their love for him and their gratitude for all that he gave us. This would have meant so much more if it had been expressed while he was alive instead of the contempt and derision heaped on his valiant attempts to learn how to be a person.

Julius Lester
© 2009

A Speech I'd Like to Hear

2009-06-25T01:54:00.002-04:00

I called this press conference because I understand a newspaper is going to print something about my personal life, and I want the people to hear it from me. What the paper is going to report is that I am having an affair. And that is true. Which makes me no different than at least fifty percent of married Americans. Husbands and wives stray from their marriages. The reasons are irrelevant.

Now, I know that I'm supposed to stand here and say how sorry I am for hurting my wife, children, friends, and, for good measure, my dog. Well, part of me is sorry, but another part of me isn't. The relationship I have with another woman is a good and caring one. I am not ashamed for loving her as I do. I knew what I was doing when the relationship became sexual.

It annoys the hell out of me that the press is so eager to report on the sexual lives of politicians but who is going to report on the sexual lives of newspaper reporters and editors? How many of you in this room holding your microphones and scribbling notes are involved in adulterous relationships? It is hypocrisy of the highest order for you to put your noses into my private life, but your private lives are not held up to public scrutiny.

So, yes, I am having an affair. No, I will not resign my office. What I do in my private life does not impinge on my responsibilities to serve the people of this state. I am merely one of millions of people who do exemplary work and have sexual relationships outside their marriages. As for what I am going to do about my marriage and the relationship with another woman is none of your business.

I wish Americans cared as much about universal health care as they do about other people's sex lives. If they did, we'd have health care for everybody tomorrow.

Grow up, people, and get your priorities in order.

© 2009 Julius Lester

Liberals and President Obama

2009-05-25T14:24:00.002-04:00

In recent weeks liberals have criticized President Obama on matters where they disagree with him on principal. The president has said repeatedly that while his administration will not engage in torture of prisoners, neither will he prosecute CIA agents who tortured prisoners, nor anyone in the Bush administration who ordered such tortures. He will also continue the Bush administration policy of preventive detention, meaning anyone deemed likely to be involved in future terrorist attacks on this country will not be released from detention.

Constitutional lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union, and liberal commentators such as Keith Olberman and Rachel Maddow of MSNBC have reacted with outrage. Recently, Maddow, in her faux little girl voice, asked, "Is this Change We Can Believe In?', a sarcastic reference to one of Obama's campaign slogans.

And there's the problem. "Change We Can Believe In." Liberals assumed Obama believed what they believed, that the changes they believed in were the changes he believed in. Liberals projected onto Candidate Obama their own image. And now, they are feeling betrayed because the president is not as liberal as they thought.

I suspect that the change President Obama has experienced is that Candidate Obama did not know how complex and difficult it is to govern, that presidential decisions have consequences which can reverberate for generations. For example, what would happen if President Obama prosecuted CIA operatives and Bush administration officials for their involvement in torturing prisoners, a clear violation of American law and the Geneva Convention? At a minimum current CIA agents would feel betrayed that operatives were being prosecuted for carrying out orders under one administration that are now considered illegal by a new administration. Agents would fear that carrying out orders from the Obama administration would might leave them open to prosecution from a later administration.

Equally, prosecuting Bush administration officials would set a precedent and would lead the next Republican Party president, whoever he or she might be, to prosecute officials from the previous Democratic Party administration for whatever the Republicans could find or make up. I would love to see Dick Chaney thrown in jail, but doing so would split the country even more than it already is. It would also create animosities that would linger for decades, as well as make people reluctant to serve in government.

Preventive detention is clearly against the U.S. Constitution which guarantees one's right to a speedy trial. But what if Suspected Terrorist X is released and six months later Suspected Terrorist X is involved in an attack on the U.S. in which thousands are killed? The blame for releasing Terrorist X would fall directly on Obama. His presidency as well as liberalism would be derided for naivete and an inability to protect the American people.

What liberals failed to see was that Candidate Obama was not as liberal as they thought he was. What liberals also fail to see is that if Obama was an ideological liberal, he would be no different than Bush in his ideological reactionary conservatism. The President of the United States is supposed to govern for the benefit of the American people, not merely those with whom he shares a political ideology. If President Obama is going to be president of the nation, he is going to make decisions I disagree with, and even, abhor.

What liberals fail to grasp is that it is easy to be ideologically pure when you don't have to be responsible for the consequences of putting your ideology into practice. Why can't liberals understand that we have just emerged from eight years of being governed by an ideologue whose allegiance was to his ideology and not to solving the nation's problems?

I trust Obama because on some issues he is liberal, on others he is conservative, and on many, he is pragmatic. Anybody who can piss off liberals and conservatives has the makings of a great president.

© 2009 by Julius Lester

The Toll of the Bell

2009-04-30T04:07:00.002-04:00

I think one of the reasons I have not been wanting to communicate is because in the past month three people I knew have died. In the past year, add three more. One of the aspects of aging that nothing can prepare you for is the deaths of people you know in the generation ahead of you, and, increasingly, the deaths of your contemporaries.

The most personal death was that of David Gahr 11 months ago. He was my spiritual older brother, my mentor when I took up photography, and a wonderful soul. But David was in his 80's, had been in declining health, so I was somewhat prepared for his death, as much as one can prepare for the finality death represents. But with his death I lost an important connection to my past for it was David who took my photograph when I started writing for Sing Out magazine in 1965. It was David who took the photographs of me that appear on the two record albums I made for Vanguard during my days as a folksinger. It is his photographs of me that appear on the jackets of my first books. A part of me which I shared with no one else also died when David did.

The other deaths were not as personal in terms of shared histories, but they were personal in the emotions shared. One was a woman older than me whom I knew through my associations with various Jewish communities in Vermont. We shared an unquestioned love of Judaism. Another was a woman I knew only through e-mail, but we shared a love of books, of Amazon Kindle, of psychotherapy, and I really miss writing to and hearing from her. Another was someone who reached out to me when I was being attacked publicly for something I'd written. At the time, I knew him only by name, but when he heard he called and asked if I needed anything. And, I have never forgotten that phone call and how much it meant when I was feeling very, very alone. Another was a colleague from the University of Massachusetts who always had a mischievous twinkle in his eye which I think I captured in a photograph I took of him which he used for a book of his. And the last was someone I knew only casually. He and I retired from the University of Massachusetts at the same time, and the last time I saw him we talked about the joys of retirement. Apparently his retirement was not as joyful as mine because he walked onto the railroad tracks as a train approached. And, of course, I wonder: did I miss something in our last conversation? Is there something I could have done?

This is the part of aging there is no preparation for, this whittling away at your memories, this snipping of relationships that sever emotional cords as surely as the snipping of your umbilical chord severed you from your mother's womb. It is as if part of the preparation for your own demise is the gradual but steady taking away from you the relationships that have bound you, in love and joy, to this world. And something of you dies as these others die.

I realize that I have been in mourning. Even more, I begin to understand that mourning has become an integral part of my living, that the deaths of people I know is now woven into the fabric of my living, and the number of those deaths can only increase.

Old age is the time when you learn the depths of sorrow, and I am learning that those depths are far deeper than I would have ever imagined.

© 2009 by Julius Lester
julius.lester@gmail.com

An Odd Event

2009-04-25T23:47:00.002-04:00

Friday morning, April 24, I logged on to check my e-mail and found the strangest e-mail I've ever received. Phil Nel, an author and member of an internet children's literature group to which we both contribute, wrote that in my biography on Wikipeida it stated that I had died "peacefully" in my sleep at 6:15 that morning. Though Phil admitted feeling a little odd e-mailing me, I am grateful he did so instead of accepting what he read as fact and telling others.

I went to my biography on Wikipedia and read about my "death". My very first response was to wonder if I had died and hadn't gotten the news yet. Who knows what it's like to be dead? I thought about the old philosophical question: Am I a butterfly dreaming that I am me? I asked my wife to read this "news" of my "death" and her doing so confirmed that I was, indeed, still alive.

I deleted the paragraph describing my "death", though I was touched by the last line which read, "He will be missed by all." I read through my Wikipedia bio and restored verbs to present tense that had been changed to past. Then I e-mailed my children and told them what had happened, in case someone offered them condolences on my "death."

Some might think it would be upsetting to read of one's death. It wasn't for me. I was more baffled than anything else. Why would someone choose me for such a prank? I am not famous enough that news of my death will make the front pages of newspapers or cause television networks to interrupt regular programming to announce it. However, the real negative about this false report of my death is that should I die in the next few weeks, no one will believe it.

The person who perpetrated this obviously does not know me, because I do not want to die in my sleep. I want to know that I am dying; I want the experience of watching death approach -- if that's what happens. To die in your sleep is, I suppose, easy and painless but if I have to suffer pain to know that I am dying, I will choose the pain. However, it would be even more painful to be dying and know that I won't have the chance to write about it. Maybe dying in my sleep isn't so bad after all.

I am glad that I do not allow unmoderated comments on this blog. It would be all too easy for someone to post false information here. And, over the past almost two months I have received "comments" for the blog that have been entirely in Chinese or Japanese characters from "Anonymous". They automatically go to my spam folder, but perhaps "Anonymous" got tired of being ignored by me and "killed me off".

One lesson from this is be careful using Wikipedia. Another is to emulate Phil Nel, and check your information before passing it onto others.

As to my silence since my blog post of March 1, I haven't felt like talking and, I will now return to that silence.

Julius Lester
julius.lester@gmail.com

Catalog Pollution -3

2009-03-01T23:07:00.005-05:00

On November 15 and 25, 2007, I wrote about “Catalog Pollution” and how I was thoroughly disgusted by the number of catalogs I received in the mail each day. So I began a campaign to reduce the number I was receiving by utilizing CatalogChoice.org. This is a non-profit environmental group that operates a web site where you can log on, check the catalogs you no longer want to receive. They contact the catalog, and that will be that.

Unfortunately, it did not turn out to be that easy. My experience was that the majority of companies ignored the requests from CatalogChoice, with some openly saying they would not honor such requests. After eight months I decided it was time to call the companies directly to get off their their mailing lists, and, equally important, to tell them to stop renting or selling my name to other companies.

I kept a record of the catalogs, date contacted, and whether I made the request via phone, e-mail or snail mail. Some companies want you to send them your mailing label, figuring, I’m sure, that very few will go to that trouble. I did.

It took me six months of mainly phone calls, and for a while I was calling companies every day, but, finally, in January the day came when I went to the mailbox and (fanfare), there were no catalogs! At first it was an odd feeling to receive scarcely any mail. Now I feel very clean when I open the mail box and there’s scarcely anything inside.

For the record, I stopped 143 catalogs from coming to our house. Of that 143 I would say that I had ordered from 10-20 companies, and that is being generous. The remaining catalogs I received were the result of my name being rented and sold repeatedly.

Now I order things over the phone. In that way I can request that my information not be sold or rented and thus receive only the catalogs I want.

I also learned that American businesses do not know how to sell. They send out glossy, full color catalogs indiscriminately in the blind hope that enough people will order something. Some companies send out catalogs once or twice a month. From one company I received 11 catalogs in 5 months and had to contact them 4 times before they finally removed my name from their system.

But I was persistent, and I prevailed. I am no longer polluting my soul with consumer pornography. I feel so much better.

© 2009 by Julius Lester
--------------------

I am aware that I started to write about books I'd read and liked last year and have not continued. I probably won't. Instead, I'll add to my posts quotes from the books I liked in 2008.

"Be cheerful, be stoic, be tranquil. In the valley of sorrow, spread your wings."

Susan Sontag, quoted in Swimming in a Sea of Death: A Son's Memoir by David Rieff. He is Sontag's son, and his book is his experience of the last years of her life. It is an intense and searing book.

Julius Lester
julius.lester@gmail.com

Michael Phelps Is Not A Role Model

2009-02-05T13:51:00.003-05:00

A photograph has appeared of Michael Phelps, the Olympic swimming multi-gold medalist, smoking marijuana. From the outcry you would think Western civilization was coming to an end. There have also been reports and photographs of Phelps at strip clubs receiving lap dances. Isn't it interesting, however, that these did not provoke the same negative response?

But what did people expect of Michael Phelps? He is a young man who has devoted practically his entire short life to one act - swimming. Every day he swam; he ate a mountain of food; he sat on the couch with his dog and watched television. This is what he did, year after year after year. His commitment to athletic excellence in swimming paid off with more gold medals than anyone has won in a single Olympics, and this has made him a millionaire several times over.

However, the price of such an accomplishment is that Michael Phelps is emotionally undeveloped. He's an adolescent boy who now wants to act like an adolescent boy. Unfortunately for him, he is finding out that he doesn't get to go back and do all the adolescent boy things now. One of the prices of taking millions of dollars to endorse products is the loss of a private life. Michael Phelps wants consumers to care about (and buy) the products he endorses; consumers have an interest, then, in knowing who Michael Phelps is, and why they should believe what he says about the products he wants us to buy.

What I do not understand is why Michael Phelps, or any athlete, is supposed to be a role model. A role model of what? Yes, the very best athletes are incredibly disciplined and committed, but they are also young. In the United States we glorify youth without recognizing that the majority of our lives are spent not being young. It is the rare athlete who can be a role model for anything except being young, physically gifted, and disciplined.

When I was young I didn't have role models. I had heroes. I was very involved with classical music, played piano, and kept a bust of Beethoven on the top of the piano. My middle initial is "B", and. some time ago, I came across a book from my childhood, and inside I'd written "Property of Julius 'Beethoven' Lester". I had many heroes -- the English poet, Shelly, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus. These were people whose lives awoke my spirit, made me want to strap on wings and soar toward the sun. Heroes stir in us the desire to touch and be touched by the divine. Heroes make us want to be better than we are, to live lives bigger than we could have imagined.

In the United States today, however, "Heroes" is a television show, and we have "role models." I thought a "role" was something someone pretended to be. But a hero does not pretend. A hero makes us ask, what are the values by which you live your life? When I was in college, I read the dialogue of Plato's that describes the death of Socrates, and I remember talking with others in the class and thinking a lot about would I die for something I believed in? In 1956 none of us knew that in a mere four years that question would be made real when the civil rights movement began, and thousands and thousands of blacks and whites would have to as that question - am I willing to risk my life, am I willing to die for the cause of racial equality?

As frightening as the question was (and is), those of us who had grown up with heroes found courage in their lives and works and answered, yes.

Michael Phelps has the potential to become a hero.

So do we all.

© 2009 by Julius Lester
julius.lester@gmail.com

Birthday, etc.

2009-02-01T00:37:00.005-05:00

The Birthday

First, thank you to all those who sent birthday wishes, even from as far away as India.
I was deeply touched by your messages.

My birthdays are always quiet ones. My children called. My wife gave me three cashmere sweaters, and although I own too many sweaters, there's always room for ones made of cashmere. A close friend gave me a wonderful 1998 St. Emilion Grand Cru which I look forward to welcoming spring with. The rack of lamb from Dean & DeLucca was the mildest I've ever had. And the 1998 Chateau Beaucastel Chateauneuf du Pape. Well, I do not have the words to describe the experience of drinking such a wine. So, my birthday was one of quiet sensual pleasures that made me smile outwardly and inwardly.

I usually don't feel anything about my birthdays, but there have been some exceptions. Twenty-five scared me. I'd lived a quarter-century and hadn't done anything. Forty was a happy one because I felt like I was, finally, an adult. Fifty was very depressing for reasons that depress me to talk about, so I won't. As I've thought about what it feels like to be 70, the word that keeps coming to mind is gravitas - Latin from gravis, "serious". Seventy is another country, and I am looking forward to exploring what it has to offer me.

A Little Blog Business

A blog reader, Lindsey Brown, e-mailed to ask if she could use in a class what I'd written about the inauguration. Even though it's probably too late, the answer is, yes. I was not able to respond to her directly because when someone sends a comment on a blog post, I am not given that person's e-mail address. So, to you Lindsey, as well as others, my lack of response to your comments and, sometimes, questions is not indifference on my part. This blog hosting site does not allow me to respond to you directly. If someone needs a direct response from me, do not send a comment to the blog but e-mail me julius.lester@gmail.com

Football

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. For serious football fans like me and my wife, it is a day of mixed feelings because it is the last serious football game until preseason games in August. As we all know, sports reflect societies, and in this country, at least, sports have also been agents of change.

One of those changes is seen in football. The home crowds at football games have become an important element in games. They are encouraged to make noise to make it difficult for the visiting team players to hear the signal calling. Sometimes, in crucial situations, a player will move before the ball is snapped and thus incur a penalty for his team. When this happens the crowd yells even louder on the next play.

And yet, not too many years ago, there was a rule that the home team could be penalized five yards if the noise of the crowd interfered with the ability of visiting team players to hear the quarterback's signals. I remember stadium announcers asking crowds to be quiet so the home team would not be penalized. I remember players and coaches of the home team gesturing the crowd for silence. I liked the element of fairness invoked by not allowing the noise of the home team crowd to influence the play of the visiting team.

But, at some point, the National Football League decided to allow crowd noise to become an integral factor in games. In so doing, they also contributed to the coarsening of public life. This coarsening not only has to do with encouraging crowds to be loud and boisterous. It also gives us permission to deaden our feelings towards others.

This creates a subtle but definite shift from values of fairness to others (the visiting team), to the value that says nothing is more important than my ego identity, (the home team), and anything I can do to feel good about myself (my team wins) is not only acceptable but commendable.

And thus we come to the Republicans in Congress who continue to root only for Republicans, who continue to act as if only they matter. President Obama is sincerely trying to change the tone of political discourse in the United States. Perhaps the place to start would be asking the National Football League to reinstate the rule that penalized the home team when the noise its crowd makes puts the visiting team at a disadvantage. Transforming the tone of public discourse might begin with changing the tone of football games.

© 2009 by Julius Lester
julius.lester@gmail.com

Today I Am Seventy

2009-01-27T01:40:00.002-05:00

Today I am seventy. I’m not sure I know what that means. Knowing of this birthday people have commented, “You don’t look seventy.” But what does seventy look like? What is it supposed to look like? I have no idea.

If you were to ask me what it feels like to be seventy, it depends on when you ask. Some days I think I have as much energy as I had when I was thirty-five; other days I am tired from the moment I wake up and remain tired for the day. Also, I take more naps in the afternoon than I used to. However, except for living with emphysema, I am in excellent health, but I take more pills to maintain that health than I used to, and I’m losing most of my teeth.

Today I am seventy, but I haven’t done anything in particular to reach this age. I think of all the people I’ve known who deserved to reach such a day in their lives and are dead. I read an obituary recently of a woman who never smoked and died of lung cancer at age 43. I smoked for 32 years, (stopping in 1988), and here I am, age 70. My wife believes that, at birth, each of us is given a certain number of breaths, and once we reach that preordained number, we die. This makes more sense than believing that I did something to merit reaching my 70th birthday. I know better. But I am grateful that I have reached this age. It is the best time of my life.

I would not want to be young again. I look at the young, and I know what they face -- defining their lives, negotiating the perils of marriage(s), raising children, the deaths of friends, relatives and parents, facing the prospect of not fulfilling their dreams and living with the cold knowledge of failure. One of the joys of being seventy is knowing that I have been through those stages of life -- and survived. However, I am not unmindful of the fact that I have been successful far beyond anything I could have imagined. For that I am deeply grateful.

And yet, when I look back, there is so much I regret. My painful shyness stopped me from having relationships with people I met and could have known better, perhaps - Hannah Arendt, Richard Avedon, W. Eugene Smith, and many others. And yet, who knows? Perhaps that shyness protected me. Other regrets have to do with people I hurt, some unintentionally, others with malice aforethought. I regret, also, that I was not a better parent, or a better caretaker of my mother during the last decade of her life. I can say that I did my best, but, sometimes, one’s best is not good enough. That’s life, but it is not a justification. It is a pain one lives with when one is seventy.

I am going to celebrate this day very quietly. Being a lover of wine I bought a 1998 Chateau de Beaucastel Chateauneuf-du-Pape recommended by my wine seller. It will accompany a rack of lamb from Dean & DeLucca. My wife will cook the lamb; I will uncork the bottle of wine, and the two of us will have a quiet meal of complex and wondrous flavors.

This birthday is a time to experience the wonder of having lived this many years. It is a time to look back. For the first time, I am going to read the more than forty books I have published since 1968. This is also a time to express gratitude to those people who have been important in my life over these years, and I will be telling them so in various ways throughout this year.

With great anticipation I look forward to becoming eighty. Just as I could not have imagined the awe of this day, I really cannot imagine the awe of that one.

That is how it should be.

The Inauguration - 2

2009-01-23T00:48:00.003-05:00

When I was young I used to feel sorry for old people. Being young I knew that what I did was going to have an effect on the future, but old people were, well, old, and to be old was to belong to the past. I was convinced that old people were envious of us, the young, because youth was life.

However, there were also terrifying moments when I realized that one day I might be old, and being old I would be jealous of the young. How did the old live with the despair of knowing their lives were over? How did they live knowing that the only thing the future held for them was death? How awful to be old and filled with jealousy of young people and all the wonderful things they were doing.

But as I watched the pre-inaugural concert on Sunday and the inauguration itself, I did not feel sorry for myself, envy the young, nor miss my own youth. Instead I was happy to see and feel the energy and vitality of youth as a part of political life again.

And the celebratory energy of the young people at the inauguration was different than the energy we had in the Sixties. Our energy was angry, but it was also threaded with anxiety and uncertainty. We did not know if what we were trying to do - end segregation, end the war in Vietnam, change the way Americans thought about race, etc. - was going to succeed. We felt ourselves to be engaged in a battle, and the consequences could be death, as it was for some in the civil rights movement and on college campuses.

The sheer happiness on the faces of the young (as well as the old) at the inauguration is unlike anything I've ever witnessed. It is a different kind of energy, a much needed energy, an energy that is transforming in and of itself on a national scale. For people to come together in public space - not in anger, not because they're against something, not to be entertained - but to affirm changes in the qualities of our relationships to each other is profoundly different.

It is especially wonderful to have youth in the White House, and I mean the President and the First Lady, not their children. One of the important things a president does is set the emotional tone for the entire country. The tone set by the Obamas is one of love for each other, one of pleasure in clothes, in sports, in people. They are comfortable in their bodies. And President Obama's smile can brighten a day for the entire country.

So I am thankful to the young for renewing the spirit of this country, for bringing joy into the public arena, for affirming the good, but not in any narrow moralistic sense. I am talking about that universal good which can be evoked by something as simple as a smile that starts in the soul and floods into the eyes and raises the lips upward and opens to reveal the teeth while looking at the person next to you.

Smiles like that are powerful political statements.

© 2009 Julius Lester

The Inauguration

2009-01-21T17:00:00.004-05:00

It was a day of more emotions than I think I have ever experienced. I had not know there were so many shades of wonder, astonishment, joy, and disbelief. I started watching television around 10:15, around the time the Obamas arrived at the White House for coffee with the Bushes. I don't know why my eyes teared up at that moment, but they did. There were many such moments but there are two that stand out on this day after.

The first is the relief that flooded my body as George Bush boarded the helicopter, and later, the plane that took his pathetic self back to Texas. He liked to talk about good and evil, never imagining that there were many of us who saw him as that evil. For eight years we had to listen to that sniveling voice, we had to look at that smirk, we had to endure his ignorance and his world-view that allowed for no questions, no doubts, no learning. In another era he would have been locked in the pillory on the town square, and we would have walked by and thrown garbage at him.

Didn't it feel good to wake up today and know that George W. Bush was not in the Oval Office and Barack Obama was?

The second moment that will endure in my emotional memory is not any of the speeches or the pageantry, (excluding Aretha Franklin's hat). What will endure is the sight of those millions of people standing in the cold cheering this enormous change in the quality and nature of the political leadership, cheering themselves for getting involved and making a difference. What will endure is the sight of all those people, especially blacks and whites, side-by-side, united, sharing the same experience, and part of our nation's problem has been that there are too few experiences that blacks and whites have shared as equals. Let yesterday be the beginning of many thousands.

Part of the political genius of Obama and his advisers was that they organized outside the confines of the Democratic Party. Obama's vision brought people into the electoral process who had been indifferent because no one spoke to them. Obama's vision energized young people who had become cynical because all they saw on the political scene were childish adults with the most narrow of self-interests committed to the triumph of ideology over people.

I loved looking at the joy and the tears on the faces of people in the crowds. My wife observed that the reverence with which many of them held small pictures of President Obama was as if they were holding saints' cards. Joy and reverence are infectious emotions that have spread throughout the land like a healing balm soothing our many wounds from these past eight horrific years.

As I live with the emotional memory of those millions of people on the mall in Washington, joy pouring from their bodies as if it were a radiant light, I realize that the revolution we fought for in the 60s is finally over, and we won.

All of us. We won.

We won.

© 2009 by Julius Lester

Thoughts on the Day before the Inauguration

2009-01-19T17:07:00.002-05:00

When I was young, seven, eight years old, I liked to listen to old people talk about their lives. I would look at them and wish I could see the images inside their heads as they told me about their lives. My maternal grandmother was born in the 1880's, and I was in awe of the changes she had experienced over the course of her life. (But she never adjusted to the idea of electricity, refused to have her house wired, but finally, in the late 1960's she gave in, and for the first time, she had electric lights. Shortly after, however, the house caught fire and burned to the ground. She survived, regretting her decision to get electricity when she'd lived for almost ninety years with a wood stove and kerosene lamps).

Yesterday as I was thinking about the inauguration (which is only 18 hours and 46 minutes away at 5:14 p.m. EST), I realized: I have become that old person I talked to as a child. I thought about my childhood in the 1940s and 1950s when racial segregation was the law, and we had no hope that it would ever go away.

Racial segregation was not only signs indicating where blacks and whites sat on buses, what entrances we used at movie theaters, and where we were not allowed to go at all. Racial segregation was an ethos, a culture of racial superiority so deeply embedded that it was taken for granted by blacks and whites. It was a way of life that governed every aspect of dailiness, one that could be enforced by any white person, even a child, against any black person. The system of racial segregation that existed was, in short, a form of fascism practiced by the government and the majority white population. Even though I grew up under such a system, looking back it is even hard for me to believe that it existed, but I still carry the wounds that cannot heal.

When I look at Barack Obama, I see a man who grew up in a world in which legal racial segregation had become something read about in history classes, a man who does not remember the lynching of Emmett Till, a man who did not put his life at risk so that the words "with liberty and justice for all" would mean what they say, and I am thrilled that he knew none of that.

Yesterday's concert at the Lincoln Memorial ended with Beyonce singing "America the Beautiful," and she sang it with such tender love, with such emotion, a love and an emotion I do not have because of the time and places in which I grew up. But tears came to my eyes as I watched and listened to her, and I am so happy that she is able to express such love for this country.

I feel blessed that tomorrow, one week from my 70th birthday, I will witness this incredible change in the American ethos from the matter-of-fact psychological and physical violence of the racial segregation of my childhood to an American ethos in which a black man spoke to that which is good and decent in people, and they have responded with their hopes and dreams for what we in the early years of the civil rights movement called "the beloved community."

I know that I am going to cry tomorrow as Obama takes the oath of office and as he delivers his inaugural address.

I know, too, that I will not be the only one crying.

© 2009 Julius Lester

January 17, 2009

2009-01-17T22:29:00.002-05:00

*** I am recuperating well from the surgery I had on January 9th. I am still waiting to learn the results of the biopsy but am confident it will be negative.

***It is bitter cold here in western Massachusetts with the temp reaching -17 two nights ago, and more snow is expected tonight and tomorrow. This is how it should be in New England in January.

***Two days and thirteen hours until the inauguration. A friend came back a few months ago after living in France for two years. She brought with her a bottle of champagne which she has been saving for a special occasion, and that occasion, she decided, is to toast President Obama and a new era in United States history. January 12 was "Coming of Age Day" in Japan. Tuesday, January 20, will be Coming of Age Day for this nation.

***For those of you who may be curious as to what I sound like, I was interviewed this week by radio station WBUR in Boston. Click on the link to hear some of my thoughts on the coming Obama administration and to see a few of the photographs I took in the South in 1966.

In last Sunday's "New York Times Book Review," there was an essay-review of a book, Little Rebels: A Collectioin of Radical Children's Literature . The reviewer, Caleb Crain, referred to "High John the Conqueror", a folk tale I'd retold in my Black Folktales (1969). I wrote a letter to the NYTBR in response to his stupid remark. In case the Times does not publish it, here it is:

"In Caleb Crain’s essay, 'Children of the Left, Unite!' (Jan. 11), reference is made to my retelling of the 'High John the Conqueror' folk tales (Black Folktales, 1969). Crain characterizes their inclusion in Little Rebels: A Collection of Radical Children’s Literature, the subject of his essay, as 'Inappropriate' because the anthology’s editors give 'no warning' that the tale 'deploys the N-word with gusto.' The High John the Conqueror tales originated in slavery when 'the N-word' was a part of the ordinary speech of blacks and whites. Its use in this (and many other tales from slavery) show how the 'N-word' was used by slaves to show affection for each other as well as to make class distinctions between those who worked in the plantation owner’s house and those who worked in the field. How the word was used revealed much about the sociology of the slave community. And yes, the word was often used with 'gusto', and appropriately so."

Julius Lester

Books Read, 2008 - Ones I Liked - 1

2009-01-07T12:29:00.002-05:00

First, the mysteries. Three writers stood out for me this year, one very good, the other two extraordinary.

Margaret Coel writes a series set among the Arapaho of Wyoming. Until the most recent book the series had featured a Catholic priest and Arapaho woman lawyer. Coel bases her mysteries on historical incidents in Arapaho history, which gives them an added interest. Her plots are strong, and her descriptions of the land are quite good. Like most mystery series, it is best to read her novels in order of publication because the central characters, the priest and the woman lawyer, evolve. You can find a chronology on her website.

The first of the extraordinary novelists is Fred Vargas, Fred being short for Frederique. Vargas is a French anthropologist and one of the best-selling novelists in the world. Unfortunately, only three of her novels have been translated from French into English, and I despair that my French will ever be good enough to read the books that have not been translated.

Her character is Paris police Chief Inspector Adamsberg, a man who functions almost entirely by intuition. Thus her novels are as far from police procedurals as is possible. Indeed, her novels are characterized by an almost aimless meandering quality, and one's interest is held not only by the most perplexing mysteries but also by the panoply of unusual characters. Vargas excels at novels with multiple and quirky plot lines that, somehow, all converge in the end.

A few quotes from Seeking Whom He May Devour:

"That's what makes human beings so hopeless, really. They cling to the worst things they've known."

"Camille rather liked Suzanne who took verbal crudity to an incandescent intensity that could only inspire admiration -- Camille's mother had taught her to consider vulgarity as a way of coping with life."

"Yes, of course he [Adamsberg] was in love with Camille, deep down inside, in the unknown country you carry along inside you like some private but alien submarine world. Yes. And so what? Nothing says that you have to put every one of your thoughts into action."

From Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand:

"You love someone, you've got to give something, haven't you now, but if all you want's a good time, you don't have to."

"At eighty-six, the old woman was capable of giving herself without stinting."

From This Night's Foul Work:

"Spring is capricious, Adamsberg thought, you can't expect her to arrive punctually on the morning of 21 March, when you think of the astronomical quantity of buds she has to deal with, not to mention all those larvae, roots and seeds, things you can't see but that must certainly take up a huge amount of her energy."

"She was a tall, rather angular woman who moved around cautiously, as if she was surprised to find herself alive. Her chatter was composed of the most trivial non sequiturs, some pointless, some completely odd, and she could evidently keep it up for hours. In a sense, it was a work of great artistry, a lacy network of words, woven so fine that it contained only holes."

"If something feels sudden, it's only the end of a long hidden process that one may not have been aware of."

"The world of fantasy fills the gaps in people's knowledge."

The other extraordinary writer I read last year was the Swedish mystery author, Henning Mankell, but I will write about him another time.

On a personal note, I am going to have minor surgery on Friday, but any surgery means major pain to accompany recovery. So the next period of silence on this blog will have a discernible reason.

© 2009 Julius Lester

What Story Do You Live By?

2009-01-03T23:21:00.002-05:00

Each of us lives by stories - those told to us and about us by family members, those we have about ourselves that no one knows but us, stories friends tell about us, etc. But generally there is an overriding story to our lives, the theological story - Judaism, Christianity, Islam, agnosticism, atheism - the story that creates a sense of order in our lives, that helps us understand who we are in the face of the universe and eternity.

As an American my story includes a belief in democracy and individuality. As a black person born in 1939 my story includes growing up under racial segregation in the south, which inflicted wounds that still throb. But being born in 1939 I came of age at the dawn of the 1960s, and my involvement in the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam war movement are important elements of my story. But nothing in my story enables me to understand the story in the lives of the people in this item from Saturday's New York Times:

"Criminals believed to be linked to witch doctors killed an 8-year-old albino boy in eastern Burundi and took two of his arms and a leg, a rights group and an official said Friday. Killings of albinos, whom many central Africans believe to have magical powers, have increased in the past year to support a growing trade in albino body parts. Three men with machetes attacked the boy in Cankuzo Province, said Kassim Kazungu, head of Burundi’s Albinos Association. The killing, which occurred Thursday, was confirmed by a prosecutor in the neighboring province. Mr. Kazungu said six albinos had been killed in Burundi since last September, while a seventh is missing. Smugglers in Burundi are believed to take albinos’ organs and limbs to Tanzania, where witch doctors use them for charms. In Tanzania, at least 35 albinos, mostly women and children, were killed in 2008, according to the Tanzania Albino Society."

The thing about stories is that not all of them are good. And, all too often the stories we have about others - Burundis about albinos, Arabs about Israelis, Israelis about Arabs - end with the deaths of those whom we demonize in our stories.

We need to start telling new stories.

© 2009 by Julius Lester

Books Read, 2008 - Ones I Didn't Like - 2

2008-12-27T23:02:00.006-05:00

As I've written here previously, I read a lot of mysteries. I've been a fan of the genre since I discovered the Perry Mason novels of Erle Stanley Gardner when I was fourteen.

Writing mysteries is like eating Lay's potato chips: you can't just write one. The dedicated reader of mysteries expects their favorite authors to publish a book every year, or they'll lose interest in the series and find other authors.

However, it is almost inevitable that the writer of a mystery series will grow tired of the detective who is the focal of the series, run out of interesting plots, or just plain get bored. And three of my favorite mystery writers published books this year they should not have.

I've read all of Patricia Cornwell's novels about Kay Scarpetta, a medical examiner. Cornwell's novels are known for the forensic details the author brings to the novels, as well as complex plots and an interesting group of core characters. One reads Cornwell as much for the changes in the lives of Scarpetta, her lover, an FBI profiler, her niece, a wealthy, gay computer geek, and the retired policeman who works for Scarpetta and is in love with her, something she never notices.

Book of the Dead is an unbelievably bad book. Where Cornwell almost always writes from the point-of-view of Scarpetta, in this novel she uses third person omniscient, which could be a sign that she is bored and needs a new way to tell a story. But this change in p.o.v. only confuses a boring story. She either had a deadline to meet, or she is taking her readers for granted and thinking we will like anything she writes. I’m glad I got this one on my Kindle and didn’t pay as much for it as I would've paid if I'd bought in hard cover.

Bad, bad, bad.

One of my favorite mystery authors is Archer Mayor. His series centers around a Vermont policeman named Joe Gunther, and Mayor brings a thoughtfulness and compassion to Gunther that is very different for a mystery. His latest, The Catch, like Cornwell's book, uses multiple points of view, which is a radical departure for Mayor. The strength of the series is Joe Gunther's decency, and the reason I like the novels is that I like spending time with Gunther.

In this novel the reader is taken inside the minds of the criminals as well as other policemen, but Mayor doesn't make us care about them. In addition, most of the novel takes place in Maine rather than Vermont. When writing about Vermont, where Mayor lives, he is obviously writing about what he knows. But Maine is not embedded in his psyche like Vermont is. I could tell he'd done a lot of research about Maine but I didn't get the feeling that he loves Maine. I felt I was reading his research.

The worst aspect of the book is that the reader is taken on a wild goose chase. A policeman is murdered in Vermont. Because the suspected killer is a drug dealer, the trail seems to lead to Maine. But the murder was committed by the policeman's former mother-in-law and could have been solved in the first 15 pages.

As a reader, I felt disrespected.

The third writer is Bill Moody, a jazz pianist. He does not write a book a year, and his latest, Shades of Blue is only his sixth in this series featuring Evan Horne, a jazz pianist, who finds himself in situations that involve not only having to solve a murder but also some mystery in the history of jazz.

The series is interesting because Moody writes about jazz from the inside, being a practicing musician, and his descriptions of improvisation as well as his insights into the music are always interesting.

In this novel the main story line does not deal with solving a murder but on searching for the widow of his mentor. He learns, however, that the widow is his actual mother and his mentor was his father. This part of the novel is really good, but Moody mucks a fine story up with two unnecessary subplots.

One subplot deals with a grad student from UCLA who had been taking care of his mentor’s dog. Evan inherits the house, meets the grad student, and they develop a very nice relationship, the grad student obviously falling in love with Evan. This creates a little tension because Evan has a girl friend, an FBI agent whom I don’t like, whom Evan isn’t sure of. Out of the blue the grad student is killed accidentally. I felt Moody didn’t know what to do with the developing relationship between Evan and the girl, didn’t want to have to deal with her in the next book, so he killed her off. I thought it was a cheap trick to kill off a character Moody had made the reader really like.

The second subplot is even too dumb to mention. Neither subplot supported the main plot. It was like Moody felt like he didn’t have enough material for a book so he padded it with subplots which sabotaged what could have been an even more moving story.

Cornwell has a new novel out, Scarpetta, but I don't think I'll read this one as the reviews I've seen have been very negative. However, I'm hoping that Mayor and Moody return to form in their next novels.

Next time I'll write about mystery writers whose books I read this year and loved.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Chanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas

2008-12-24T19:53:00.005-05:00

Chanukkah is not a major holiday on the Jewish calendar. But in America, Chanukkah is attaining a significance that is changing it from the commemoration it was intended to be into a commemoration of the exact opposite.

First, the history. It is the second century, B.C.E. Palestine is under the control of the Greeks, and the Greeks have brought with them their culture and civilization, in other words, their value system. The Greeks understood that the most effective way to conquer a people is not by military might alone. Instead combine military might with persuading the people to accept your value system, to make your way of life attractive.

The Greek way of life became so attractive that Jews began changing their names to Greek ones. In Jewish cemeteries Greek inscriptions began appearing on headstones rather than Hebrew ones. Jews became so fluent in Greek that they could no longer read the Torah in Hebrew. The Greeks loved masculine beauty and would exercise and participate in athletics in the nude. Some Jewish men were so eager to be accepted into Greek society that they had operations to have their circumcisions reversed by having a piece of skin reattached so they could exercise in the nude and pass for Greek.

However, trouble ensued when the Greeks set up statues of Greek deities in the Temple in Jerusalem. They went into villages with pigs and demanded the Jews worship the animal. In one such village, however, when a Jew stepped forward to bow to the pig, a Jew named Mattityahu stepped forward and killed him. Thus began the revolt that eventually led to the reclamation of the Temple, its cleansing of idolatry, and the miracle of the oil that burned for eight days.

The war that led up to the reclamation of the Temple represent the first instances in world history of what we now call guerilla warfare, and the tactics used in that war are taught to this day at West Point. That war also represents the first time in history that a people fought for the right of religious freedom. In other words, Jews fought for the right to live and worship as Jews.

Because of Chanukkah's proximity to Christmas, Chanukkah, the Jewish holiday which was a rebellion against assimilation, is becoming the holiday of assimilation.

While I can understand the good intentions of Gentiles wishing me a "Happy Chanukkah," I have problems when Jews do it. In a Jewish context, the words are meaningless. The word, Chanukkah, means "dedication", dedication to Jewish values. Unfortunately, the eight day observance is becoming a dedication to assimilation. And nothing represents that more than the increasing proliferation of the word, "Chrismukkah".

It will not be too many more years before Christmas and Chanukkah will each be devoid of meaning.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Books Read, 2008 - Ones I Didn't Like - 1

2008-12-22T23:35:00.010-05:00

As I've written in previous blogs, I keep a personal "commonplace book" in which I write about the books I read and record the sentences and paragraphs I underlined. I try to read at least a book a week, and this year I read fifty-five.

I'll begin with books I really, really didn't like:

Foreskin's Lament by Shalom Auslander:

Auslander was raised as an Orthodox Jew with a yeshiva (religious school) education. The book is his screed against his upbringing. It is supposed to be funny, and in places, it is. But overall, this is an angry, ugly book.

He details his early rebellion against kashrut [the laws that govern what an observant Jew can and cannot eat] by sneaking off to eat non-kosher foods, his love of pornography, and most of all, his disgust with the concept of God as the Being who metes out punishment for every little violation of Jewish law.

What is clear is that Auslander never had a religious experience. If a religion is nothing more to you than restrictive rules, I suppose one response is Auslander’s.

Perhaps my response would be different if I were younger, or if were a born Jew. But I am neither and I found this to be an unpleasant book.

In the Shadow of Fame: A Memoir by the Daughter of Erik H. Erikson by Sue Erikson Boland

This was an odd book. I was looking forward to reading it because I’d read Robert Coles's book on Erikson, as well as Erikson’s books on Martin Luther, Gandhi and his book on childhood and society, These books were important to me in my own attempts to forge my identity.

His daughter’s book addresses the disparity between her experience of her father and that of the many who idolized him. The Erik Erikson who wrote with such insight about childhood was not much of a father. The disparity between her father’s image and his actuality as a father leads her to what becomes her life’s work - an analysis of fame and how people project onto the famous their need for heroes.

I didn’t find what she had to say about fame, the famous and projections to be very original or insightful. And, though she wrote more than once that she loved her father, the love does not come through. That Erikson was not as good a person as his words did not surprise me or bother me. But she does not include any of his words, and perhaps there was a good reason.

Once she was going to deliver a paper about her father to a group of colleagues, a paper that eventually led to this book. She began by playing a videotape of her father speaking. Too late she realized that she had lost her audience because they were totally captivated by her father. If she had included excerpts from his writings in this book, readers might not have believed her words about him. But including some of her father’s words would have given a more balanced experience of him.

When I finished the book I wondered why she'd written it, or, perhaps more important, why she published it. I sure she would find it ironic that all she accomplished for me was to make me want to look again at his books and Coles's biography to see what I'd underlined in them, and I recall that I underlined a lot. Erikson's writings were crucial in my journey to defining myself.

She does admit, however, that her older brother, Kai, had a very different relationship with their father because Kai became a prominent sociologist, and he could talk with his father about things that interested them both. I would have found the book to be more honest if she could have acknowledged that she was writing as much, if not more, about herself and not her father.

Reading the book I could not help trying to imagine what one of my children might write about me, if their memories of me as a father would be a record of all I did not do that they wished I had? In so many relationships, the hurts we experienced live within us for decades, and the joys, that were part of the same relationships, are scarcely remembered, or, if remembered, have little meaning for us.

I hope that my children will be merciful to my memory, when that is all that remains of me, that they will know that I did my best. And if my best was not good enough for them, that is neither my fault nor theirs. This is merely what it is to be human.

An Apology and Words

2008-12-06T22:54:00.002-05:00

Well, it seems that the economy recovery program I supported in my previous blog was based on poor arithmetic and wishful thinking. Several people e-mailed to point out that however many trillion it was divided by however many million results in $425 per person, not $425,000. Well, it was fun to fantasize about.

Words. The Times of London reports that Collins Dictionary has announced that it is going to drop some words because they are no longer used. Well, how can we use a word if we don't know it exists? Here are the words, some of which I can definitely use.

Abstergent: Cleansing or scouring

The word itself sounds cleansing.

Agrestic: Rural; rustic; unpolished; uncouth

I can now tell someone they're being uncouth, and they'll think it's a compliment.

Apodeictic: Unquestionably true by virtue of demonstration

I have no idea what this means. Collins can take it out.

Caducity: Perishableness; senility

If I can remember this word, it'll prove I'm not senile.

Caliginosity: Dimness; darkness

Compossible: Possible in coexistence with something else

Embrangle: To confuse or entangle

I need this word. I get embrangled a lot.

Exuviate: To shed (a skin or similar outer covering)

Fatidical: Prophetic

Fubsy: Short and stout; squat

Has something of the onomatopoetic about it.

Griseous: Streaked or mixed with grey; somewhat grey

Malison: A curse

Mansuetude: Gentleness or mildness

Muliebrity: The condition of being a woman

I had to look this one up. It comes from the Latin muliebris and means, "the female genitalia." In the Merriam Webster Unabridged muliebrity is defined as "the state of being a woman, or of possessing full womanly powers."

Niddering: Cowardly

Nitid: Bright; glistening

Olid: Foul-smelling

Oppugnant: Combative, antagonistic or contrary

One of my favorites. Makes me think of the kind of person who, no matter what you say, takes the opposite side because they like playing "devil's advocate". Instead of telling him or her to stop being an asshole, I can say "Don't be oppugnant."

Periapt: A charm or amulet

Recrement: Waste matter; refuse; dross

Roborant: Tending to fortify or increase strength

Skirr: A whirring or grating sound, as of the wings of birds in flight

I love this word. A true onomatopoeia. It reminds me of one of my favorite words - drizzle. I just love the sound of that word whether it's drizzle rain or if a recipe says "drizzle butter...." Which reminds me of my favorite onomatopoeia, ronron which is French for a cat's purr. Say it with that French "r" rolling from the throat and it sounds exactly like a cat.

Vaticinate: To foretell; prophesy

Vilipend: To treat or regard with contempt

I hope there's a word here that you can adopt. I hate to think of a word dying.

Julius Lester

An Economic Recovery Plan That Would Work

2008-12-02T22:19:00.002-05:00

This economic recovery plan comes from someone named Bill Searle. I do not know who he is. It was sent to me by a college classmate, Lesley Green Huffaker. If you like it, share it with as many people as you can. It certainly makes sense to me.

My Dear Fellow Americans ,

I'm against the $85,000,000,000.00 bailout of AIG. Instead, I'm in favor of giving $85,000,000,000 to America in a We Deserve It Dividend.

To make the math simple, let's assume there are 200,000,000 bonafide U.S. Citizens 18+. Our population is about 301,000,000 +/- counting every man, woman and child.. So 200,000,000 might be a fair stab at adults 18 and up. So divide 200 million adults 18+ into $85 billion that equals $425,000.00. My plan is to give $425,000 to every person 18+ as a We Deserve It Dividend..

Of course, it would NOT be tax free. So let's assume a tax rate of 30%. Every individual 18+ has to pay $127,500.00 in taxes. That sends $25,500,000,000 right back to Uncle Sam. But it means that every adult 18+ has $297,500.00 in their pocket. A husband and wife has $595,000.00. What would you do with $297,500.00 to $595,000.00 in your family?

Pay off your mortgage - housing crisis solved.

Repay college loans - what a great boost to new grads

Put away money for college - it'll be there

Save in a bank - create money to loan to entrepreneurs.

Buy a new car - create jobs

Invest in the market - capital drives growth

Pay for your parent's medical insurance - health care improves

Enable Deadbeat Dads to come clean - or else

Remember this is for every adult U S Citizen 18+ including the folks who lost their jobs at Lehman Brothers and every other company that is cutting back. And of course, for those serving in our Armed Forces.

If we're going to re-distribute wealth let's really do it instead of trickling out a puny $1000.00 ( 'vote buy' ) economic incentive that is being proposed by one of our candidates for President(Obama).

If we're going to do an $85 billion bailout, let's bail out every adult U S Citizen 18+!

As for AIG - liquidate it. Sell off its parts. Let American General go back to being American General. Sell off the real estate. Let the private sector bargain hunters cut it up and clean it up. Here's my rationale. We deserve it and AIG doesn't.

Sure it's a crazy idea that can 'never work.' But can you imagine the Coast-To-Coast Block Party! How do you spell Economic Boom?

I trust my fellow adult Americans to know how to use the $85 Billion. We Deserve It Dividend more than I do the geniuses at AIG or in Washington DC.

And remember, The Searle plan only really costs $59.5 Billion because $25.5 Billion is returned instantly in taxes to Uncle Sam.

PS: Feel free to pass this along to your pals as it's either good for a laugh or a tear or a very sobering thought on how to best use $85 Billion!!

--
When told the reason for Daylight Saving time the old Indian said...'Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket and sew it to the bottom of a blanket and have a longer blanket.'

Thanks,

Bill Searle

The Economic Crisis

2008-12-02T01:30:00.002-05:00

The current economic disaster shows just how rapacious a system capitalism is. Why are millions of people having their lives destroyed? Because a minority of people thought only of themselves and satisfying their lust for money. It's really just that simple. The central idea of capitalism is that the individual is more important than the group, and that the highest principle is the satisfaction of greed. And nothing is going to change until these precepts are overturned and replaced by ones that say the individual and the group are of equal importance, and the highest principle is compassion.

By definition, capitalism appeals to our most narrow self-interests. Capitalism makes a virtue of selfishness. Capitalism makes greed sacred. Capitalism preaches that it is better to be in debt than it is to save. Capitalism makes us crave THINGS, and we go into debt in order to buy THINGS. The economy needs us to BUY THINGS. And, worst of all, perhaps, capitalism has convinced us that this is the best way to live, and dammit, we seem to be convincing the rest of the world of this.

Maybe out of the current economic debacle, more and more people will begin to see the capitalism primarily benefits a minority and pacifies the majority with THINGS and dreams that one day members of the majority can join the wealthy minority.

Tomorrow, I'll pass on an economic plan someone passed on to me from someone who passed it to her. I hope you'll pass it on to others.

And even though Barack Obama believes in capitalism, as of 2 A.M. (EST), I'm still happy that in 49 days, 10 hours and 1 minutes, he will become the 44th president.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Why Black Americans Are Indebted to White Americans

2008-11-28T01:30:00.004-05:00

One of the real ironies of Barack Obama's election to the presidency is that it was white Americans who recognized and believed in this possibility long before blacks. I remember getting e-mails in January from two white friends in California who were raving about Obama and wanted to know if I'd read his books. They were already working for his campaign and kept telling me that I had to read his books.

But like most blacks, I didn't think a black man had a chance of being elected president, especially a black man with a foreign name. To be honest, I think the initial black response to Obama's chances came not only from our perception of a racist white America. That initial black response came also from residual feelings of black inferiority. President-elect Obama was quite right when he said that white America was not ready for someone like him, and neither was black America.

But when Obama won the Iowa caucuses, I and other blacks started to pay attention. We knew that the number of blacks in Iowa numbered between zero and one, excepting Des Moines and the towns where the University of Iowa and Iowa State were located. Iowa got our attention but we were not yet believers. However, we became believers after Obama's wins in the Super Tuesday primaries, and especially after Bill Clinton started attacking Obama personally.

So, this is a thanks to all those white Americans who believed that Obama could become president and worked to make it happen when most blacks thought they and Obama were a little crazy. My personal history of growing up under racial segregation and my involvement in the civil rights movement to overthrow racial segregation limited my ability to perceive the new movement of change being born before my eyes.

But when my eyes began to see truly, my heart was made glad and it becomes gladder and gladder with each day's sunrise.

Oh, by the way, at 1:54 a.m. (EST) it is 53 days, 10 hours and 5 minutes before Barack Obama becomes president.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

I Give Thanks for my iPod Touch

2008-11-27T02:21:00.003-05:00

For my wedding anniversary at the end of August, I bought two iPods, one for my wife and one for myself. I already had a previous generation iPod, but when I learned that I could download a French dictionary to the iPod Touch, I was sold.

I had thought I would fill this iPod with music as I had done with my previous one, but the iPod Touch is an entirely different experience. It has changed my life. First, there is the convenience of internet access. When I'm sitting in my chair and need a particular piece of information, I simply Google what I'm looking for on my iPod Touch, and within seconds, I have it. In addition to internet access, I have an address book, calculator, notepad, calendar, and then, there are the applications created for the iPhone and iPod Touch, and for those who don't know, the iPod Touch is an iPhone without the phone.

On my iPod I have the American Heritage Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, the Oxford Concise Dictionary and Thesaurus, two French dictionaries, two e-Book reading programs, a database into which I've put all the books from my upstairs library so when I'm in a bookstore, I can check to see if I have the book already. Other programs on my iPod Touch are The Weather Channel, which tells me not only the temperature but how cold it actually feels, two programs which give me still shots and videos from Fashion Week in New York, London, Milan, and Paris, WebMD, a couple of astrology programs, and a Channukah Menorah whose candles will not drip wax. Oh, yes, and also a solitaire app which contains I don't know how many games of solitaire. The program keeps track of the number of hours you've played a game. I will not tell you how many
hours I've racked up so far on just two games.

Some iPod apps are free, and prices for others range from $.99 to $35.00 for the Concise Oxford Dictionary and Thesaurus.

And the most wonderful thing of all about the iPod Touch is that you do whatever you want to do by the merest of touches on the screen. I find myself touching other things now and being surprised that nothing happens.

But, what led to all of this praise for the iPod Touch is this: As I type, my iPod Touch is informing me that there are 54 days, 9 hours, and 22 minutes until the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th president of the United States. Behind the digital counter are photos of Obama that change as well as quotations from his books and speeches which also change. This is a free application in the Entertainment Directory of the App Store at iTunes.

So, on this Thanksgiving I sit here and watch the Obama Inaugural Countdown on my iPod Touch and just smile, smile, smile as the seconds counter speeds along.

I give thanks for my iPod Touch which brings me joy every day.

And, I give thanks for you who read my words and tell me that they mean something to you.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Slow Blogs

2008-11-25T00:59:00.002-05:00

In this past Sunday's New York Times, there was an article about what seems to be a new "movement" in the blogsphere, which is "slow blogs." I'm glad someone has come up with a respectable name and made a "movement" out of something which came to me naturally, which is, only writing this blog when I feel like it.

The problem with blogs is becoming snared by the desires of others who want you to post something everyday, or at least more frequently than once a month. While I am flattered that people want to read about what I'm thinking, my motto since I retired at the end of 2003 is something I saw on a T-shirt: "I don't want to. I don't have to, and you can't make me. I'm retired." The beauty of being retired, for me, at least, is not having the pressure of being obligated to do something. Each day my time is there to be shaped according to my desires and no one else's.

Now that I have a name for my approach to blogging, I am hereby informing you that just because I don't post anything for a month or two, it's all right. This is a slow blog.

---------

It appears that political "progressives" are upset with Barack Obama even before he is sworn in because he is not adhering to their agenda. They fail to understand that Obama is not an ideologue; he is a problem solver, and if ideas from political conservatives help him solve problems, he will apply those ideas. What is important is solving problems. We do not need a continuation of the last eight years when adherence to ideology created problems more complex and devastating than any in my almost seventy years. To substitute adherence to "progressive" ideology for that of conservatives would not constitute substantive change.

I am pleased that Obama wants Hillary Clinton to be Secretary of State. He is showing us that you can have sharp differences with someone and still work closely with them. It has been a long time since we've had someone in the White House who welcomes ideas that don't mirror his own. It has been a long time since we've had someone in the White House who was not an absolutist, and "progressives" can be as absolutist as conservatives. Both create an atmosphere of a righteous Us against a nefarious Them.

I do not want a president who seems himself as leading a crusade. I am grateful that we will have a president who wants to clean the air and rivers, make bridges and highways safe, and help us feel secure and at peace in our homes. I am grateful that we will have a president who will leave us alone to believe whatever we want to believe.

And this Thanksgiving I will also express my deep and sincere gratitude that George Herbert Walker Bush will very soon no longer be president of this country.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Observations Post-Election - 3

2008-11-18T01:26:00.002-05:00

Barack and Michelle Obama were on "Sixty Minutes" Sunday evening for the entire hour. I cannot remember ever liking a president. I like this man. I believe that the man I see and experience is the man as he is. He is someone I could imagine having a conversation with. He is someone I could imagine inviting to my house, and those who know me know that I hardly ever invite anyone to my house.

I have been thinking about the massive outpouring of emotion at his election, not only here in the United States but around the world. I cannot think of any head of state whose election to office has been responded to by universal hope. Our despair was deeper than we knew that his election brought forth our tears, brought forth a deep exhalation and a relaxing of muscles that have been tensed for the past eight years.

Can one man withstand the weight of the world's hopes? I am convinced that this man can. I am so convinced because he is rooted in his family. I believe it was the French writer, Stendahl, who said, "Be as bourgeois in your life as possible so as to be as revolutionary in your work as possible."

What a wonderful feeling it is to trust the president of the United States. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president when I was born, but the first one I remember is Harry Truman. This is the first time I have given my trust to the man sitting in the Oval House. And he will not abuse that trust. Of this, I am sure.

Julius Lester
© 2008

In A Lighter Vein - 2

2008-11-14T00:35:00.002-05:00

One sunny day in late January, 2009 an old man approached the White House from across Pennsylvania Avenue, where he'd been sitting on a park bench. He spoke to the U.S. Marine standing guard and said, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

The Marine looked at the man and said, "Sir, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here."

The old man said, "Okay" and walked away.

The following day, the same man approached the White House and said to the same Marine, "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

The Marine again told the man, "Sir, as I said yesterday, Mr. Bush is no longer president and no longer resides here." The man thanked him and, again, just walked away.

The third day, the same man approached the White House and spoke to the very same U.S. Marine, saying "I would like to go in and meet with President Bush."

The Marine, understandably agitated at this point, looked at the man and said, "Sir, this is the third day in a row you have been here asking to speak to Mr. Bush. I've told you already that Mr. Bush is no longer the president and no longer resides here. Don't you understand?"

The old man looked at the Marine and said, "Oh, I understand. I just love hearing it."

The Marine snapped to attention, saluted, and said, "See you tomorrow, Sir."

In A Lighter Vein

2008-11-12T01:17:00.002-05:00

These were posted on a list I'm on, and I wanted to pass them on. You do the same.

TEACHER: Maria, go to the map and find North America .
MARIA: Here it is.
TEACHER: Correct. Now class, who discovered America ?
CLASS: Maria.
____________________________________

TEACHER: John, why are you doing your math multiplication on the
floor?
JOHN: You told me to do it without using tables.
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glenn, how do you spell 'crocodile?'
GLENN: K-R-O-K-O-D-I-A-L'
TEACHER: No, that's wrong
GLENN: Maybe it is wrong, but you asked me how I spell it.
____________________________________________

TEACHER: Donald, what is the chemical formula for water?
DONALD: H I J K L M N O.
TEACHER: What are you talking about?
DONALD: Yesterday you said it's H to O.
__________________________________

TEACHER: Winnie, name one important thing we have today that we
didn't have ten years ago.
WINNIE: Me!
__________________________________________

TEACHER: Glen, why do you always get so dirty?
GLEN: Well, I'm a lot closer to the ground than you are.
_______________________________________

TEACHER: Millie, give me a sentence starting with 'I.'
MILLIE: I is..
TEACHER: No, Millie..... Always say, 'I am.'
MILLIE: All right... 'I am the ninth letter of the
alphabet.'
_________________________________

TEACHER: George Washington not only chopped down his father's
cherry tree, but also admitted it. Now, Louie, do you know why his
father didn't punish him?
LOUIS: Because George still had the axe in his hand.
______________________________________

TEACHER: Now, Simon, tell me frankly, do you say prayers before
eating?
SIMON: No sir, I don't have to, my Mom is a good cook.
______________________________

TEACHER: Clyde , your composition on 'My Dog' is exactly the same
as your brother's. Did you copy his?
CLYDE : No, sir. It's the same dog.
___________________________________

TEACHER: Harold, what do you call a person who keeps on talking
when people are no longer interested?
HAROLD: A teacher
__________________________________

The Shape of Things to Come

2008-11-10T02:02:00.002-05:00

In Monday's New York Times there is an article, "Obama Weighs Quick Undoing of Bush Policy" which outlines some of the actions President-Elect Obama is planning to enact by executive order when he takes office. Indeed, in August, before he had been formally nominated at the Democratic convention, a transition team was already at work going over executive orders signed by President Bush that Obama could countermand by executive order. Among these are limits on stem cell research and the expansion of oil and gas drilling into national parks, the latter announced last week by Bush.

As I read the article I remembered one charge made by Hilary Clinton and John McCain was that they would be ready on Day One, that they would not need "on the job training". Guess what? Obama is going to be ready before Day One.

The Times article stated that on Bush's first full day in office, he reinstated an executive order prohibiting taxpayer money from "being given to international family planning groups that perform abortions and provide abortion counseling." This EO will probably be overturned by Obama.

The change that a great majority of us were aching for was a change from an ideologically based presidency in which allegiance was given to abstract principles that showed no compassion for the impact of its ideology on the lives of people. Bush is a true believer, and is no different than the Taliban mullahs, Iranian ayatollahs, and all the other religious and political tyrants who have made millions suffer in the name of their religions.

January 21, 2009 cannot come fast enough!

Julius Lester
©2008

Observations Post-Election - 2

2008-11-07T00:13:00.003-05:00

During the Democratic party primaries, one of the things Hillary Clinton criticized Obama for was his ability to use words, and John McCain repeated this from time to time. I, for one, am looking forward to listening to a president who uses language well, who speaks in a way that inspires people.

What Clinton and McCain failed to recognize was that words are not merely words. Words are action when they touch our hearts and make us want to do better, to be better. To stand in the Lincoln Memorial and read the words of Abraham Lincoln, to stand in the Jefferson Memorial and read the words of Thomas Jefferson is almost a religious experience because their words lift our souls out of the day-to-day and into the realm of the ideals that have shaped our nation, ideals that have been lost, especially over the last eight years.

It will be good to have a president who understands that an important part of his task is to reintroduce us to these ideals. The words with which we think about another, the words we use to talk about another determine how we treat another.

President-elect Obama's words will be chief among his most important actions.

Julius Lester
© 2008

Observations Post-Election

2008-11-06T00:38:00.002-05:00

Watching the coverage Tuesday night after Obama was declared to be our next president, I was most moved by the number of people in the streets of America's cities. I cannot recall any election of a president that elicited such an outpouring of emotion. Seeing those faces and especially the expressions on the faces of the young took me back to the 1960s and what it was to feel like you were a part of history, that you had been a part of bringing about significant and meaningful change.

As I watched I also couldn't help remembering that the last time I was in Grant Park in Chicago was in 1968 during the Democratic convention when police rained violence on people who had gathered in peaceful protest against the war in Vietnam. I was covering the convention for radio station WBAI-FM in New York and sensing that violence was in the air, I got my black behind out of the park before the police attacked. I much preferred the images on my television screen last night.

It is wonderful to feel hopeful again, to feel that there will be a man in the White House whose allegiance is to people and not ideology, who will listen to those who disagree with him, who acknowledges that good ideas can come from those who disagree with him as well as those who agree.

Whether those who disagree with Obama will respond to his appeals for civility remain to be seen. I was speaking with another daughter today who lives in Denver. Outside a mall she visited on Wednesday stood people dressed in black who were saying that Tuesday was a sad day for America, and they were already preparing bumper stickers reading, "Don't Blame Me. I voted for McCain."

Obviously the damage done to our nation by eight years of George Bush will not be healed in the next four or eight years. Perhaps it will not be healed until a generation of people who fear change die off. No matter. The election of Obama is a revolutionary change in our society, not primarily because he is black but because of his values.

As I said to my wife a while back, if Obama wins, he'll be our first woman president. Who would've ever dreamed she would take the form of a black man.

Julius Lester
© 2008

I'm Back

2008-11-05T00:58:00.004-05:00

I wasn't sure why I stopped writing here. I thought it might have something to do with my anxiety about the outcome of the presidential election. A few hours ago when it was announced that Obama had won, and I cried, I felt that I was ready to write here again.

My joy at Obama's election has little to do with the fact that I am black and he is black. Yes, I never thought I'd live to see a black man as president. But if a black
man had been elected tonight who shared John McCain's political philosophy, I would have cried for entirely different reasons.

My joy at Obama's election has much more to do with the fact that he is thoughtful and compassionate. As my daughter said on the phone a few minutes ago, "He's not a politician; he's a leader." And it has been a long, long time since we've had a leader in this country.

Now, there's a new anxiety which I'm sure I share with many. Will Obama be allowed to live until this night in 2012? There are forces in this country that hate him far more than I hate the present occupant of the White House. Will we once more have our hopes and dreams shattered by a bullet from a rifle? Or, will even those who are in as much despair tonight as I was on this night eight years ago and four years ago, will they come to see that Barack Obama is a decent man, a man who, in the words of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, "increase tenderness in the world."

I certainly hope so -- for my sake and theirs.

Julius Lester

The Election

2008-08-31T15:07:00.005-04:00

For the first time in many, many years, this year's presidential election does not put us in the position of having to choose the "lesser of two evils". The choices are as clear cut as they can be. Do you want to continue living in the past, or are you willing to take a chance on the unknown future? Do you choose a world view that believes in war as a diplomatic tool, that believes in imposing American ideals on other nations so that the United States can more easily exploit that country's natural resources? Or, do you choose a world view that believes it is a sign of strength to talk with one's enemies?

Do you choose a man who is so cynical that he chooses a woman as a running mate simply because she is a woman? Or do you choose a man who did not take the easy and more popular course and choose a woman?

The so-called political pundits are maintaining the McCain's choice of Governor Palin has changed the course of the presidential race. Nonsense! Do McCain and the pundits really think that Clinton's women supporters are going to vote for him because he is running with a woman who is opposed to abortion even when a woman's life is endangered? McCain's choice of Palin is sexist because there are many people in the Republican Party who are as reactionary as she is and could have been his running mate. The only reason she's on the ticket is because she's female.

The pundits are saying that Obama must be careful in how his campaign responds to her. Nonsense! Obama responds to her by calling her what she is - a right-wing zealot who would do her best to get Rowe v. Wade overturned and to give Alaska and the environment to the oil companies.

Given Palin's lack of experience, it is likely that the attacks on Obama's alleged inexperience will diminish. Even if this is true, the point which the Obama camp has not made is that experience in government is the problem. Dick Cheney has 40 years of experience in government from being a congressman to Gerald Ford's Chief of Staff to being Secretary of Defense before becoming Vice-President. If the past 8 years is what experience gives us, then it is past time to choose experience of a different kind, and that is experience that is not rooted in the past but experience that sees the complexities of the present and the challenges of the future.

I am two years and five months younger than John McCain. He and I have this in common: we have more years behind us than in front of us. Indeed, our memories exceed the number of years Obama has been alive. I feel much better with someone as President who has more of his life ahead of him. He will care about the future in ways that neither John McCain nor I can. We don't have a stake in the future beyond the next twenty or so years.

While McCain and I belong to the same generation, I cannot entrust the future to a man who has never experienced the Internet, who has no conception of how the Internet has significantly changed the ways we live in and think about the world. Is John McCain even aware that in the next ten years, it is probable that most newspapers will cease to exist? I bought an iPod touch a couple of weeks ago, and it has revolutionized how I organize my life. John McCain is as obsolete as a quill pen.

This is a crossroads election for the United States. If McCain wins or is able to steal the election as Bush did twice, I believe the nation will become as divided as it was at the time of the Civil War. While Obama's world view is broad enough to include portions of McCain's, McCain's world view is narrow and moralistic in the worst sense. His election will cause millions of people to become not only disaffected with the system but antagonistic to it.

I do not know what form(s) a new civil war would take, but I am convinced that a McCain victory will lead to a war between the past and the future.

If so, count me in. But, dear God, I pray it does not come to that.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

A Different Kind of Olympic Games

2008-08-25T00:08:00.003-04:00

I wonder what it would feel like to watch an Olympics where there were no flags, where nothing indicated what nation athletes were from. I wonder what it would feel like to watch an Olympics in which the athletes were not representing the hope and the pride of their respective nations. I wonder what it would feel like to watch an Olympics only to admire the celebration of youth which is what the Olympics really is.

The Games are a marvelous exhibition of what amazing things the body can be trained to do. They are a marvelous exhibition of the physical beauty the human physique can attain. And, if you are no longer young, the Games are poignant because those young men and women with their well-trained bodies do not know just how brief a span of time being young occupies over the course of a life.

For all these reasons it would be wonderful to watch an Olympics in which no national anthems were played and no athlete felt obligated to run around the track draped in his country's flag. It would be wonderful to watch an Olympics and cheer as loudly for those who come in last as well as those who come in first. Those who come in last may have worked just as hard, even harder than the athletes who win gold and feel that all their years of hard work paid off, finally.

The Olympic Games reward success – gold, silver, bronze. I would like an Olympics in which the definition of success is broadened, so that the sheer love of engaging in athletics is also rewarded. The English author, G.K. Chesterton, wrote: "A man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well."

Those words are applicable to, perhaps, most of the athletes of the Olympic Games. Such love deserves our admiration. Such love merits emulation.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Stress and the Olympic Games

2008-08-20T01:58:00.002-04:00

It is hard to imagine the stress under which Olympic athletes perform. They have devoted their young lives to this event, to a space of time which, for some, is counted in seconds and microseconds, and for others, like marathoners, is counted in hours -- a lifetime of preparation for the glory of being known as the best, or one of the best at what they do.

But being able to function at the highest level while under tremendous stress is something many of us do, and, at some periods of our lives, we do so for months and months. There is no way to train for the stress of losing jobs, failing marriages, being laid off at an age when getting a new job paying as much as the old one is close to impossible. There is no way to train for the unexpected and life-threatening illness of a spouse or child. There is no way to train for the death of a spouse or child.

Yet, most of us endure. Some of us live well with stress and mentally place a beribboned gold medal over our heads to dangle brightly where only we see it.
Most of us, I suspect, are more akin to the last runner who completes the marathon, the one who stumbles onto the track of the Olympic stadium long after the other runners have showered, dressed and left. We made it but we hope and pray we never have to go through anything like that again.

As I watch the athletes, most of them basking in the arrogant beauty of youth, I wonder how they will handle the stress when their youth inevitably fades. How will they respond to the stress of having their gold medals fade into the memory of the records, they and their triumphs remembered by fewer and fewer.

An article in the August 18 issue of The New York Times reported on two studies of what life is like for these athletes after the Olympics. A 1982 study of 163 Czech Olympians found that "only 17 percent made the transition to the workplace without significant emotional distress, including substance abuse and depression." The most complete study was done of 57 American Olympians in 12 sports. Forty percent had "serious problems post-Olympics."

I do not envy the Olympians, especially the medal winners. They do not know how short our memories are, as I cannot tell you who won a medal in any sport at the last Olympics. I do not envy them because I know the stresses that will weigh on their souls as they begin to create their lives outside the athletic venues which gave their lives meaning and significance. Sometimes, the stress of just getting through the day will be far greater than any stress they knew as Olympians.

None of us can train for what life presents us with, but, somehow, many of us endure, and more often than not, we triumph. But only we can see the gold medal shining against our bodies.

And that's enough.

The Olympic Games - Random Comments, Week 1

2008-08-17T01:40:00.002-04:00

* I wish I had the time to watch the telecasts of the events that don't draw large crowds - fencing, rowing, shooting, etc. I did watch some of the badminton matches on my computer, and it is my hope that NBC will keep all the videos online for long time. The Olympics are still fun to watch even when you know who won.

* Michael Phelps won the eight gold medals he set out to win and beat Mark Spitz's record of seven gold medals in one Olympics. But when Spitz was in the Olympics, there were only seven gold medals that he could have won. As he observed, if there had been eight, he would have won eight. Seeing an old film of Spitz swimming in the Olympics, I was struck by the fact that unlike swimmers now, swimmers at that time did not wear caps, shave their bodies, or wear swimming suits. Spitz wore swimming trunks like any guy on the beach. Olympic athletes at that time did not have dieticians, sports psychologists, computer analyses of their training techniques, etc. Michael Phelps' achievement is truly awesome, but it should not be permitted to diminish that of Mark Spitz. Both did the best they could with what they knew. That is the most that can be said of any of us.

* I have watched Olympic gymnastics since the mid-1960s and Nastia Luikin's floor exercise in the all-around finals brought tears to my eyes. It was the best I have ever seen.

* Have you noticed how the first week of the Olympics the athletes were primarily Euro-American, and the second week will have many more Africans, African-Americans, and blacks from the Caribbean? Make of that what you will. I just find it interesting.

* One event I will watch on my computer, if it is not televised, is rhythmic gymnastics. There are many who do not consider this a sport, perhaps because it is so beautiful and requires the more refined skills of agility and timing. And there is no equivalent sport for men, so it can't be athletic, right? For those of us who believe that the world is in dire need of beauty, rhythmic gymnastics is the highlight of the Olympics.

TODAY'S QUOTE

"For the most part the spectator's stake in the proceedings is the gratification that comes from identifying with success. Whoever can provide such vicarious joy needs no other justification as a human being. The capacity of one man's actions to buttress the self-esteem of another is demonstrably a potent force -- a force that has been exploited whenever possible by the entrepreneurs of sports events."

Michael Roberts, "The Vicarious Heroism of the Sports Spectators," New Republic, Nov. 23, 1974

Birch Trees

2008-08-14T14:19:00.002-04:00

We think of autumn as beginning in October with the full spectrum of red, yellow, and orange-leafed trees, and mornings of cool air with a biting crispness.But that is not when autumn starts.

When I get up every morning the first thing I do is open the curtains and look out the window across the field and into the woods. Last week I noticed that the leaves on the birch trees were turning yellow. Driving home yesterday I saw red leaves on a tree whose leaves were green last week.

Autumn begins in mid-August. It merely reaches maturity in October. This is how it is with all the seasons. They begin in the midst of the preceding season. One year I smiled at crocuses in snow. In February when I see buckets hanging on maple trees, I know the sap is running and spring has begun.

Change functions similarly in our lives. We don't reach decisions as much as we recognize a change within and realize that the decision has been unfolding within us for some time, and the decision has already been made. We just haven't announced it to ourselves.

This may sound like a prelude to my announcing a decision, but it isn't. I simply noticed that the leaves on the birch trees are turning yellow and wanted to let you know – autumn has begun.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S QUOTE

"Nature is always hinting at us. It hints over and over again. And suddenly we take the hint."

Robert Frost

For those who may be wondering why I haven't written anything here in several weeks --

Blogs can be like beasts whose appetites can never be satisfied. Blogs demand words, and I read about people whose lives are devoted to writing on their blogs. Whenever I sense this blog criticizing me for not feeding it, I take a vacation. There are also times when I have nothing to say, or I may have something to say but don't want to say it aloud. Sometimes I have a lot of energy for writing here; other times I have none.

The times of words need the times of silence.

The Last Ride

2008-07-29T01:26:00.002-04:00

"Crystal Lake, Ill. -- Jeff Hornagold loved being a UPS driver. So, when the suburban Chicago man died this week of lung cancer, longtime co-worker Michael McGowan agreed to take him on one last delivery.

McGowan transported Hornagold's body from Davenport Family Funeral Home to Saturday's funeral services in his UPS truck.

Hornagold was a UPS driver for 20 years, and his wife Judy Hornagold described him as 'just the happiest UPS man alive.' She says the special delivery was the perfect tribute."

It used to be (and still may be in some places) a Jewish custom to carry the deceased's body past the places he loved one last time. I don't much care what vehicle carries me to my funeral, but if that vehicle wanted to carry me past a few of the bookstores at which I've spent a ridiculous amount of money, that would be fine.

Of course, if Mr. Hornagold had lived in Africa, he could've been buried in a replica of a UPS truck. There are places in west Africa where people have been buried in their cars. And I did read recently of a man who has already had his coffin made of beer cans, and he sleeps in it.

I understand that. I've instructed my wife not to cover my casket with dirt. Just dump in all the magazines and books I haven't read!

TODAY'S QUOTE

From an interview in Paris Vogue. The person being interviewed is Malgosia Bela, a fashion model.

Quelle lumière pour une nuit d'amour? (What kind of light for a night of love?)

Son désir incandescent et mon aura lumineuse. (His incandescent desire and my luminous aura).

And it just doesn't sound the same in English.

Summer

2008-07-22T02:08:00.004-04:00

I hate hot weather. Every year about this time I silently thank those African ancestors of mine who got themselves captured and brought on a slave ship to these shores, thus sparing me from having to curse the African sun. But who knows? Maybe they hated the heat, too, and took their chances that the slave ship was going someplace cooler.

I grew up in Kansas, Arkansas, and Tennessee in the 1940's and 50's when, for the most part, air-conditioning was non-existent. You might think we got accustomed to the heat. We didn't. During these times poor people didn't have refrigerators, and a man would come through the neighborhood on a mule-drawn wagon selling 25 and 50 pound blocks of ice. People would put a block of ice in a galvanized washtub and let an electric fan blow across the ice. It sounded good in theory, but it didn't help. Nothing did. Hot is hot!

A few years ago I was in Maine and happened to see a college classmate. She grew up in Alabama, and when I asked her what she was doing in Maine, she said, "I looked at the map to find a place that was as far away from the heat as I could, and this was it."

I understand. I read a novel that was set in a town that was above the Arctic Circle. I seriously thought about moving there until my wife said that was grounds for divorce, which goes to show that love does not conquer all.

The only thing that gets me through summer is knowing that winter is coming. I just wish it was coming tomorrow.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Roozles - Wretchedness of mind.

Now, there's a word. Roozles! How do you define "wretchedness of mind"? How do you recognize a "wretched mind"? What would someone say that would cause others to nod and say, "Tsk. Tsk. His mind is roozled." Am I suffering from the roozles because I hate hot weather? Well, I am going to keep my eyes and ears open, and if I come across anything that I thinks reveals the roozles, you'll read about it here.

2008-07-18T02:20:00.002-04:00

"Don't believe everything you think."

Bumper Sticker, 2008

Picktooth: Leisurely, as it is in leisure moments that the toothpick is used.

We could all use more picktooth moments in our days. Tooth picks are cheaper than alcohol and tooth picks do not lead to drunken driving and drunken driving can lead to maiming or killing others. Instead of buying a bottle of whiskey, buy a box of toothpicks. The picktooth way of life could be America's salvation from itself.

2008-07-17T02:23:00.002-04:00

"The poor need bread. Did those books of yours solve the problems of the world?"

"Not all problems are economic," I said gently.

Anais Nin

TODAY'S WORD

Wuther: The rustling of the wind among tree branches.

2008-07-16T01:20:00.003-04:00

"The universe gives me the creeps."

Willem de Kooning

TODAY'S WORD

Lick-for-leather: being at full speed.

My days of going lick-for-leather are over, and I am so glad!

I Am A Flip-Flopper!

2008-07-15T01:56:00.002-04:00

One of the most interesting elements of Malcolm X's short life and career was that he did not hesitate to change his thinking when he learned more about a particular issue. The Malcolm X of the Nation of Islam was not the Malcolm X who was killed in 1965. He had moved from a defensive black superiority to an inclusive world view that did not revolve around a black sun.

Why is it that changing one's opinions has become a negative in American political life? Four years ago the Republicans successfully defined John Kerry as a "flip-flopper", and they're trying to do the same to Barack Obama. I never understood why John Kerry did not say, "Yes, I am intelligent enough to change my views when I am presented with information and knowledge I did not have previously. It is regrettable that President Bush does not exemplify the same intelligence."

But to call someone a flip-flopper because he changes his mind is a thinly veiled attack on intelligence. Many of us laugh at George Bush because he seems incapable of speaking in coherent sentences. However, many Americans find this aspect of Bush reassuring because it makes them feel like he is one of them. Bush and Kerry were contemporaries at Yale, but Bush was proud of not having been a good student. Many Americans who never made it to Yale were also not good students, and Bush redeemed their lack of academic achievements.

My fear is that Barack Obama can lose the election because of his obvious intelligence, his preference for nuanced thinking rather than polarizing positions on issues, and his willingness to rethink what he advocates and change his mind accordingly.

Intelligence should not be an object of contempt in a presidential campaign. But it was four years ago, and it is threatening to be so again.

It's time to stand up, people! Someone needs to make bumper stickers, T-shirts, and buttons so that we can proclaim loudly, "I'm a Flip-Flopper. I Think!"

© 2008 by Julius Lester

2008-07-14T03:47:00.003-04:00

"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."

Thomas Mann

TODAY'S WORD

Slotter: To make a noise with the palate while eating.

I fell in love with a young woman once, but when I took her out to dinner, she slottered. I didn't know then that's what she was doing. All I knew was that she chewed with her mouth open. In China slottering is a way of showing appreciation for the meal. This woman would have been a prized dinner guest in China. Now, you might say that if I had truly loved her, her slottering would not have made any difference. But you didn't hear her. I did. Love can conquer a lot of things but not slottering. Except in China.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

2008-07-11T03:12:00.003-04:00

Today I bent the truth to be kind, and I have no regret, for I am far surer of what is kind than I am of what is true."

Robert Brault

TODAY'S WORD

Wuzzle - To mingle

You might learn a lot about yourself if you divide your friends into those you like mingling with and those you like to wuzzle with. Wuzzling sounds much more erotic than mingling.

Jesse Jackson & Barack Obama

2008-07-10T02:15:00.006-04:00

It must be painful for Reverend Jesse Jackson to watch Barack Obama succeed where he failed, i.e. become the first black to be the presidential candidate of a major party. It must be painful for Jackson to watch Obama win the Democratic Party's nomination without any help from him who was the self-appointed spokesman for black Americans for so many years. It must be painful for Jackson to feel that he has been pushed aside as irrelevant, though he's been irrelevant for a long time and doesn't seem to have gotten the news.

Thus, it is not entirely surprising that on Sunday, July 6, Jackson was waiting to be interviewed on Fox News and an open microphone overheard him whisper to a guest, "See, Barack's been talking down to black people. I want to cut his nuts off."

Jackson was referring to Obama's Father's Day speech at a black church in which he criticized black fathers: "We need them to realize what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child -- it's the courage to raise one." Jackson thought Obama's context was too narrow in that he failed to mention the effect that high levels of unemployment, home foreclosures and violence have on black men. "We have some real serious issues -- not just moral issues," Jackson contended. But this is not the first time Jackson has attacked Obama. Last fall he criticized Obama for "acting like he's white."

When I learned of Jackson's ugly and self-serving remark, I thought of Hillary and Bill Clinton. I remembered the various comments and outbursts by Bill Clinton that certainly hurt his and Hillary's esteem in the eyes of blacks. At the time I thought that, unconsciously, Bill was trying to undermine Hillary's campaign.

Our behavior as humans is not always governed by what we think we believe. The Socratic admonition to "Know thyself" is daunting because knowing ourselves means seeking to be aware of what is unconscious within us. Jackson's unconscious envy and resentment of Obama led him to express it where there was an open microphone.

While I can understand the political expediency in Obama having the Clintons campaign for him, I fear what lies in their unconscious. I fear that their anger and resentment that Obama ran a better and more well-organized campaign will find expression when there happens to be an open microphone around, that they will find some way to sabotage Obama as I think Bill sabotaged Hillary.

The simple fact is that Jackson and the Clintons had their days in history. They should be satisfied that they did their jobs as well as they could, and that they helped prepare the way for someone like Obama.

But Jackson and the Clintons ceased to grow in their thinking, ceased to expand their visions of what it means to be an American in 2008. They don't seem to realize that fifty years have passed since 1968. Believe it or not, the nation has moved from "We Shall Overcome" to "We Are Overcoming."

© 2008 by Julius Lester

2008-07-09T00:55:00.002-04:00

"Life is short and we do not have too much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us, so be swift to love and make haste to be kind."

Henri-Frederic Amiel

IN MEMORIAM, New York Times, July 3, 2008

WEILER, Gerald

Gerry, love you and miss you. Please help the Yankees.

love,

Helen

2008-07-08T02:59:00.002-04:00

Julius Lester,

My name is Ronald Kipchirchir. I read somewhere today about your contest on the usage of the word mundivagant. I am a student of Kenyan descent partaking of pre-law studies here in America. Despite the fact that you do not know me, I just want to say that I, too, love words. I suppose the contest became stale long time ago but I would love to contribute, nonetheless.

"I come to invoke your spirit of good-samaritanism; not as a mundivagant beggar with a bowl in hand and kneepads upon my knees, but as a wounded friend, seeking not an ordinal sedation, but a lifelong immunization from the agonies of life and anomalies of history."

Actually, I used the sentence about two months ago in a speech contest. The speech was a calling on people of goodwill to help salvage my beloved country from the jaws of death (in regard to the post election chaos that had engulfed Kenya during the month of January and February).

TODAY'S QUOTE

"Let us not look back in anger, nor forward in fear, but around in awareness."

James Thurber

Obama's Rightward Turn

2008-07-07T01:30:00.002-04:00

One of the dilemmas any Democrat running for president faces is that he or she must appeal to the party's liberal core to win the nomination. However, to win the presidency that Democrat must move to the center to win the votes of America's conservative majority. And by conservative I do not mean those reactionary Republicans who have sullied the word "conservative". These Republicans are not conservative but are as radical as the Left was in the sixties. Both sought to remake America in its image.

The majority of Americans are conservative because their primary interest is in conserving their way of life, its virtues and its sins. However, unlike reactionary Republicans who are wedded to an ideology and seek nothing less than the triumph of that ideology, conservatives are willing to change when events force them to. The civil rights movement of the 1960s succeeded in its primary goal of desegregating public life and insuring voting rights because the conservative majority was convinced by demonstrations and riots of the need for change.

It is this majority to whom Obama is now introducing himself, not as a political liberal but as someone who shares and understands the legitimacy of their concerns. And if he is elected president, this will be part of his responsibility. On inauguration day the president takes an oath to serve the American people. The overriding arrogance of George W. Bush was to lose the popular vote and govern as if no one mattered except those who shared his political philosophy.

I am reassured by Obama taking positions with which I disagree because it indicates that he wants to be president of the American people, not just of liberals who can be as ideologically dense and obtuse as reactionary Republicans.

TODAY'S WORD

Gubbertushed: Having projecting teeth.

I once had a crush on a girl who was gubbertushed, and I thought she was very cute.

From My Reading Journal - Always Wear Joy

2008-07-04T00:30:00.003-04:00

Always Wear Joy: My Mother Bold and Beautiful by Susan Fales-Hill

What a wonderful, delightful book! I came to it out of curiosity about Susan Fales-Hill. I had seen her picture often in the New York Times and in fashion magazines at various dinners and charity balls attended by socialites, and she was almost always be the only black person. So, I wondered who she was, came across a mention of this book somewhere, and got it.

She is the daughter of Josephine Premice, a black actress and performer whose name I remember from the black newspapers and magazines of my youth. Her father is a white man from a wealthy background. Fales-Hill belongs to what I would call black royalty because she grew up knowing many black and white celebrities - Belafonte, Diahann Carol, her mother’s best friend, Richard Burton, with whom her mother had an affair, Roscoe Lee Brown, Sammy Davis, Jr., Lena Horne, and on and on. She went to the Lyceè Française and spoke French with her mother, Italian with her nanny, and possibly Creole because her maternal grandparents were from Haiti. She grew up in a world where dressing well was taken for granted, and thus the ease with which she moves today in a world in which haute couture is taken for granted.

One of the key elements in liking a book is whether or not one likes the writer, or perhaps I should say, the voice in which the book is written. I absolutely adore the voice in Always Wear Joy. She is very funny but also sensitive and honest in talking about the negative qualities of her parents as well as her own.

“Mom, what do I put down on the school form where it says ‘Mother’s Occupation’ when you’re not acting in a show?” – Enrico Fales, age 8
“Tell your teacher, ‘My mother’s an unemployed legend.’” Josephine, age 41

“Your baby is beautiful. His father was white?” Roman woman to Josephine.
“I don’t remember.” Josephine to Roman woman.

“My mother’s packing motto has always been, ‘If you can’t decide, take it all.’”

“We had devoted countless hours of our lives as mother and daughter to pondering the eternal question. For us this was not, What is the meaning of life? but, What are we going to wear?”

The quotes do not do justice to all that is in this book, especially the descriptions of the racism encountered by black actors. Fales-Hill was a television writer for some years working on the Cosby Show, “A Different World,” and others. Her stories of the racism in television were infuriating.

This is a wonderful book. I enjoyed spending time in Susan Fales-Hill’s company.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Even though the contest to use mundivagant in a sentence is over, I received a
wonderful sentence from Edi Campbell who teaches English in Taiwan:

"I live a mundivagant life based upon hopes and dreams with no concrete plans to steady my step."

I like that phrase "...to steady my step." There've been times my step needed steadying and I hadn't had anything to drink, either.

2008-07-03T02:42:00.002-04:00

“Love does not exist, only demonstrations of love.”

Jean Cocteau

TODAY'S WORD

Gumbled: Awakening in the morning, the eyes are said to be gumbled.

Awakening, she looked around with gumbled eyes, decided to call in sick and went back to sleep.

From My Reading Journal - The Secret Life of Bees

2008-07-02T02:06:00.002-04:00

The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd

This is the kind of book I think of as popular literary fiction. It is well written, lots of nice turns of phrases, figures of speech, etc. But there is something about it that comes close to sentimentality, i.e. a very skillful avoidance of the harder realities.

The novel is set primarily in South Carolina in 1964. Lily, the teenage heroine, lives with three black sisters and ends up having a crush on a teenage black boy. He drives around with her without any sign that he could be lynched. That is simply not how it was in the south in 1964. He shows no hesitation or fear about being seen in the trunk with a white girl beside him. And, in a climactic scene, he drives into town with her in the truck, gets arrested and no one wonders why he is with a white girl. This simply would not have happened in a southern state in 1964, the summer when Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney were murdered in Mississippi.

There is also a glaring historical error. There is a reference in the book to a metaphor used by Martin Luther King, Jr., “drum major for justice.” However, this metaphor wasn’t used by King until a few weeks before he was killed. He used it in a sermon and a tape of that part of the sermon was played at his funeral.

The book was a good read but not a good book because of its disregard for the social and political truths of the time. But I underlined some things.

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they do, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.”

“…it washed over me for the first time in my life just how much importance the world had ascribed to skin pigment, how lately it seemed that skin pigment was the sun and everything else in the universe was the orbiting planets.”

“…you can be bad at something, Lily, but if you love doing it, that will be enough.”

“…it’s something everybody wants – for someone to see the hurt done to them and set it down like it matters.”

“There is nothing perfect….There is only life.”

“Drifting off to sleep, I thought about her. How nobody is perfect. How you just have to close your eyes and breathe out and let the puzzle of the human heart be what it is.”

“Not just to love – but to persist in love.”

© 2008 by Julius Lester

From My Reading Journal - 2004

2008-07-01T00:11:00.003-04:00

E.E. Cummings: A Biography by Christopher Sawyer-Laucanno, 543 pp., excluding notes.

Not sure why I bought this. I’ve never read that much Cummings and the poems I like are the ones anybody likes of his. Part of it, I suppose, is a New York connection. Though Cummings died the year after I moved to New York, I walked past Patchin Place, where he lived in Greenwich Village, more times than I can count. There was also a tree in Washington Square Park to which Cummings would speak, and I always wondered which one it was. I can’t say that I have understood Cummings’ poetics, and don't have much more of an understanding after reading this biography, and that’s not the fault of the biographer.

But, even after all these years, I am still fascinated by the lives of creative people, and I am still seeking insights into my own creative life. I did not find Cummings's life to be very satisfying. However, I do envy him the early exposure to languages - Greek, Latin, French - all of which he knew fluently.

Reading the biography I became aware of how much of I have lived and created alone. I have stayed away from having writers as friends, perhaps because I have never ego-identified with writing. Writing is something I do; it is has never been who I am. I have never taken myself seriously as a writer in the way that the writers of Cummings’ generation did. I have never believed that literature and art have an enormous impact on the way things are; I have never seen poets as “the unacknowledged legislators of the world,” as Shelley proclaimed.

However, reading the biography took me back to my days at Fisk [the small black college in Nashville, Tennessee, from which I graduated in 1960] and the excitement of discovering so much literature and so many writers. What an exciting time that was reading Joyce, Faulkner, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Andre Gide, and so many others for the first time. And there was also the excitement of talking about existentialism and the Beat Generation with classmates and teachers.

But I think religion has engaged my soul in ways literature never has. It was and is the spiritual journey I identify with, that is, at root, my passion. Maybe this is why photography is so important to me, because through images I can more directly express the fruits of my spiritual journey than I can in writing. There is a dimension of the spiritual that only begins where words end, and it is this which can be expressed in the silence of a photograph.

What I found unsatisfactory about Cummings’ life were the ways in which he never grew up. He never held a job and lived primarily off wealthy friends and his mother. And he did not take responsibility for his relationships. It was rather shocking to read about his daughter, Nancy, and how she grew up thinking someone else was her father. Cummings told her the truth when she was an adult and promptly had little more to do with her. She is 80 now and lives in London and will probably read this biography with great curiosity and interest, or not read it at all. So, there are fundamental ways in which Cummings did not mature. He devoted his life to poetry and art, but I did not get the sense that there wasn’t room in his life for taking responsibility. He simply chose not to.

I don’t condemn him but it is not a life I would want. Some quotes:

“Concerning Mr. Derry [his high school Greek teacher], let me say that he was (and for me will always remain) one of those blessing and blessed spirits who deserve the name of teacher: predicates who are utterly in love with their subject; and who, because they would gladly die for it, are living for it gladly. From him I learned (and am still learning) that gladness is next to goodliness.”

“Eater of all things lovely — Time!”

“Sound emerges from& retreats with silence.
Every sound has its own peculiar silence!”

“...the ponderous ferocity of silence.”

God, I love that line!!

“but from the endless end
of briefer each our bliss —
where seeing eyes go blind
(where lips forget to kiss)
where everything’s nothing
— arise,my soul; and sing.”

© 2008 by Julius Lester

McCann is old, and so am I

2008-06-29T23:19:00.009-04:00

If you're a fan of mystery novels as I am, and even if you aren't, the Swedish writer Henning Mankell writes wonderful novels, and the solving of murders is merely one plot element. Over the weekend I reread his first mystery, Faceless Killers, and the following passage helped me clarify something: "A new world had emerged, and he hadn't even noticed it. As a policeman, he still lived in another, older world. How was he going to learn to live in the new? How would he deal with the great uneasiness he felt at these changes, at so much happening so fast?"

The character speaking is Kurt Wallender, a Swedish police detective in his forties. However, his words clarified for me why I have been uncomfortable with John McCain seeking the presidency at age 71. I know it is not politic to question someone's age, but since I am only two years younger than McCain, I can talk about his age without being accused of age-ism.

It is fascinating to watch myself age. For example, I subscribe to both Us and People magazines but am debating if I should let my subscriptions lapse because I have no clue who anybody is anymore. Blake Lively? Spencer Pratt? Heidi Montag? Leighton Meester? I could find it out easily who they are, but, at age 69, I don't care.

One of the reasons I retired from teaching at the end of 2003, after 32 years, was realizing that to continue to be an effective teacher I would have to learn how to do Powerpoint presentations and set up websites for my classes, and I just didn't have the interest or the energy to do this. If I was going to learn new technologies, it would be for my personal creative projects.

I have a cell phone which I turn on once a month or so to see if there are any messages, and if there are, they are so out-of-date by the time I hear them, I can ignore them. I do not text message. I read my youngest daughter's Facebook page but do not comprehend half of what is on it. I do have an iPod and I have transferred much of my cd collection to it and I download music and videos from iTunes and emusic.com. regularly. And I am computer literate, having bought my first one in 1986.

But the question I face and the question John MCain faces is the same Kurt Wallander faced: How do we "learn to live in the new"? John McCain and I do not feel an urgency, or even a need to "live in the new". And more, to what extent are we capable of even recognizing "the new"?

In traditional societies the old are honored and are responsible for the spiritual life of the group. But such societies do not change and thus, the old are the best ones to insure continuity.

But not since the invention of the printing press has the world gone through such enormous changes as it is undergoing now, but changes now are happening at a much faster rate.

John McCain and I are too old to comprehend all the changes and too old to keep pace with them. We cannot "live in the new". Nor should we expect ourselves to.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

RESULTS OF THE FIRST COMMONPLACE BOOK CONTEST:

The challenge was to use the word "mundivagant" as an adjective.

The winner is Jonathan Shaw of Annandale, Australia, who submitted two
wonderful sentences.

"Jules Verne is responsible for giving us the mundivagant Phineas Fogg."

"Just down the road from us is a backpackers, and the revelries of mundivagant youth enliven our evenings."

I questioned Jonathan about "is a backpackers" and he explained that "is a backpackers is what an establishment aimed at that clientele is called here." For us on this side of the equator, the sentence would better read, "Just down the road from us are backpackers, etc."

Another fine entry came from Roberto Delgado, a former student of mine:

"It is a lie to settle when you feel called toward a mundivagant fate."

2008-06-27T01:03:00.003-04:00

"He was a wall I chose not to scale."

Martha Cooley, The Archivist

Isn't that a wonderful insight? Haven't we all met someone and, for reasons we can't specify, have decided to walk quietly but quickly away from any relationship with that person? But we do that because of the walls we climbed and had a helluva time finding the way back over the wall. And what about those occasions when we were/are the wall someone else chose/chooses not to scale? But we won't talk about that.

TODAY'S WORD

Mundivagant - Wandering through the world.

The book from which I took the word does not indicate what part of speech it is, so I'm not sure how to use it in a sentence.

Well, I just looked it up in the Oxford English Dictionary and learned something interesting. The OED gives the first printed usage of a word, but mundivagant has never been used in a sentence! The only two references cited are two seventeenth century dictionaries. How, pray tell, does a word end up in a dictionary if it has never been used, and since it has never been used, who would go to the dictionary to look it up? But I just did, didn't I?

I also learned that mundivagant is an adjective, and I've been scratching my head trying to figure out how to use it in a sentence as an adjective. I'm stymied.

So I am announcing the First Commonplace Book Contest. The first person who can use mundivagant in a sentence as an adjective will receive an autographed copy of Falling Pieces of the Broken Sky, a collection of my essays that is now out-of-print.

Send your sentence to me at julius.lester@gmail.com Please put Sentence Contest in the subject line.

2008-06-26T02:03:00.001-04:00

“I mean by a picture a beautiful romantic dream of something that never was, never will be, in a light better than any light that ever shone, in a land no one can define or remember — only desire — and the forms divinely beautiful.”

The quote is from a letter written by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Edward Burne-Jones. What follows is from my reading journal, January, 2005:

"This is the gift of the imagination, isn’t it? This is the magic of the imagination. And, I wonder if this is the only kind of beauty that endures. The beauty of a flower is evanescent. The beauty of a woman changes with age. I look at Weston’s photographs of Charis, and her physical beauty exists now only in the photographs. I look at the Joyce Tenneson photograph, “Suzanne, 1985,” that I bought a few month ago. Suzanne does not look like that now, twenty years later.

"So, does this mean that the only physical beauty that endures is that which comes from the imagination? Is this why we love art because in art we can create beauty that is not subject to the changes that time inevitably brings? The Grecian urn endures. We decay.

"Looking at some of the photographs from southeast Asia since the tsunami, at survivors and rescue workers with masks covering their nostrils and mouths so they won’t have to smell the bodies. After we die, we stink. All of us.

"In art, all that is good in us is preserved. Milan [my wife] and I go to museums and look at paintings and we wonder who they people were. They are nothing but bones now. What remains is what an artist put on canvas, and what the artist put on canvas may or may not have been who the person was. Certainly, when one looks at photographs of the women painted by the Pre-Raphaelites, they were pretty ordinary and homely looking women. But, in the paintings of Burne-Jones and the others, they were transformed into a beauty that never was but is in the realm of the imagination."

And today, three years later, I would add that one of the sins of the 20th century has been the devaluing of the imagination and of beauty. The consequence is a coarsening of life on every level, especially the spiritual.

TODAY'S WORD

Pewfellow: One who sits in the same pew, hence, a companion.

One cannot have too many pewfellows in life, even if you don't go to church.

2008-06-25T03:19:00.002-04:00

“He was a lucky man to be sitting beside Elinor in the garden in the last green days of May. He had loved her for so many years, he would just go on doing it, with or without her.”

Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future

TODAY'S WORD

Sandillions: As numerous as the sand on a beach.

Sandillions is much more expressive than gazillion and softer on the ear.

2008-06-24T03:19:00.002-04:00

“‘That’s the thing those boys don’t understand,’” Matt told Stella. “‘Just because you don’t feel pain, doesn’t mean you don’t experience it.’”

The quote above is a good description of what it was like to grow up under racial segregation in the south during the nineteen-forties and fifties. We couldn’t allow ourselves to feel the pain on a daily basis but we sure as hell experienced it, and, even at age 69, I continue to experience that pain.

Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future

TODAY'S WORD

Weeping-ripe: Ready to weep; ripe for weeping.

It's not a bad thing to be weeping-ripe.

2008-06-22T23:53:00.002-04:00

“Stella had seen so much death, that one Saturday morning she’d been compelled to sink down onto the linoleum floor, overwhelmed not so much by the sorrow of it all, but by the human dignity, the almost supernatural ability to face the abyss and still order scrambled eggs and toast for breakfast.”

Alice Hoffman, The Probable Future

TODAY'S WORD

Pixilated: Led astray, as if by pixies; confused, bewildered.

It makes me feel a lot better to blame the pixies for all the times I've been confused.

And Now It Has Begun: A Followup

2008-06-20T02:20:00.002-04:00

On Wednesday I wrote about a button that was sold at the Texas Republican Party convention this past weekend, a button which read, "If Obama is President, will we still call it the White House?" (For any who may have missed it, there is a photo of the button in Wednesday's blog.)

In a story in Thursday's Dallas Morning News it was reported that the button vendor, Jonathan Alcox, apologized, and the Texas Republican Party announced that is donating the $1500 Alcox paid them to lease his booth to the American Red Cross Relief Fund to help flood victims in the Midwest. Additionally, the Texas Republican Party said it was unaware that Alcox would be selling such a button and it will never again permit Alcox to sell anything at their conventions. Hans Klingler, spokesman for the Texas Republican Party, said party leaders found the button distasteful and hated that it was being sold.

Alcox operates two websites, republicanmarket.com and democratmall.com, where he sells political paraphernalia. Politically he is an independent and said he became aware that the button could be seen as malicious after talking with a black man who had seen the button on the Dallas newspaper's blog. Alcox says he had made only 12 buttons to see how they would sell. He sold only 4, and 2 of those to the reporter who broke the story.

He went on to say that his web site has been hacked, his life has been threatened, and he has lost the business of the Texas Republican Party, his biggest customer.

I am happy to be able to present this followup and am glad that people, including Texas Republics, were outraged enough to make Mr. Alcox's life miserable and to have a negative effect on his earning power.

When large numbers of white people are as angered and hurt by racism as blacks, that is a sign of fundamental change.

IN MEMORIAM, from the New York Times, Thursday, June 19:

"Christian Jetter Harrison, June 19, 2006

I had to lose you to find you in me.

Willie"

Americans Get Fat While the Poor....

2008-06-19T01:00:00.007-04:00

These are people in Haiti searching for food or something to sell from a dump. The April 23, 2008 issue of Paris Match reported that there have been demonstrations protesting high food prices and food riots in Haiti, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Mexico, Mozambique, Cambodia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Senegal, and Kenya. Some weeks, PM reports, "riots explode on all the continents."

The obscenity is that this situation does not have to exist. In the Sunday (June 15)"News of the Week in Review" section of the New York Times, Donald G. McNeil, Jr. wrote, "The whole world has never come close to outpacing its ability to produce food. Right now, there is enough grain grown on earth to feed 10 billion vegetarians." So, what is happening to all this grain? Well, a lot of it is "being fed to cattle, the S.U.V.'s of the protein world." And who is eating the beef from these grain feed cattle? Affluent North Americans and Europeans.

"Theoretically," McNeil writes, "there is enough acreage already planted to keep the planet fed forever….But success depends on portion control." There is something radically wrong when people on every continent are eating from garbage dumps and rioting for bread while Americans are worried about an "obesity epidemic."

According to McNeil, there is a simple solution to the famine being faced by those Paris Match refers to as "les damnés de la terre" who "ne veulent pas mourir de faim" – the damned of the earth who do not want to die of hunger. That solution is to end the "subsidies to American and European farmers" which artificially raise prices. Ending subsidies "would let poor farmers compete which…would push down American food prices and American taxes."

There is an additional solution. The capitalist system engenders an ethic of individualism, greed and selfishness. Simply by living in the United States we are educated to think primarily of ourselves and not care how our behavior affects others – to the point that by 2025, according to the United Nations, 1.2 billion people will suffer from hunger.

Right now 33% of American adults are classified as obese. What will that number be by 2025?

We cannot continue to live as if we are the only people on the planet. Well, sadly, that's not true. We can continue living as we do – uncaring about how our behavior assaults the lives of billions and hastens their deaths.

And, we probably will.

Text © 2008 by Julius Lester

It Has Begun

2008-06-18T01:03:00.007-04:00

It has begun, the snidely racist Republican attacks on Barack Obama. The above button was on sale at the Texas Republican Convention this past weekend. In all fairness to Texas Republicans, I don't know how many buttons were sold, but the fact that the Texas Republican Party did not issue a statement expressing their disgust with the buttons says enough.

"Lets [sic] Keep the White House White" is a rubber stamp. This bill was found on Staten Island, one of the five boroughs of New York City. This is more insidious than the button because that has to be purchased. A piece of currency with that message stamped on it can appear in my wallet. Republicans "Swift-boated" John Kerry in 2004 with the Internet campaign attacking his military record during the Vietnam War. Foolishly, Kerry waited too long to respond.

The only way to fight the racism represented by the two items here is for record numbers of people to register and vote in November. But there is a chance the Republicans will steal this presidential election as they stole the last two because the state of Louisiana, for one, is already having problems registering the number of blacks who want to vote. On election day in November many blacks will go to the polls believing they are registered voters and will be told they are not because their applications were incomplete or invalid. The evildoers are already at work disenfranchising blacks.

Fortunately the Obama campaign is aware of problems registering voters in Louisiana and other states. At least in this election McCain does not have a brother who is governor of the state that can swing the election.

Unrelated to the above: I was sitting in the dentist's office last Friday afternoon when I heard over the radio that Tim Russert had died. Like everyone else I was shocked, but I do not consider his death to be an event worthy of the platitudes being bestowed upon him. A writer on the Psychology Today website wrote that Russert's death "produced the greatest national outpouring of grief for a single 'civilian' since John Lennon was killed in 1980." (Americans grieved far more for Princess Di.)John Lennon has been dead for 28 years and is still remembered by millions. Five years from now Tim Russert will be remembered only by those who knew him personally.

For the the record I want to say that I never liked Tim Russert, thought he was egotistical and filled with too great a sense of self-importance. I was saddened by his death but, as I indicated in yesterday's blog, I am saddened by the deaths of those whose names I know only because I read them on the obituary page.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

Grief

2008-06-17T02:12:00.002-04:00

I read the obituary column in the New York Times every day, not only the obituaries the paper thinks are noteworthy but also the paid death notices. I pay particular attention to the column of "In Memoriam" notices that appear at the end of the paid death notices. This is where people pay to have published a few words they write about a loved one on the anniversary of the person's death or birthday.

These are sometimes very raw expressions of grief. One "In Memoriam" notice consisted of one sentence: "I long for you". Another read: "It is 12 years since your brutal murder. I still pray for justice."

What impresses me most is that grief does not end. A few days ago there was an "In Memoriam" notice for a parent who had been dead forty-five years. The ultimate human paradox is that the deeper our love for someone, the more intense and unbearable our grief at that person's death. The grief becomes our most immediate expression of the love.

When looking at the photographs of parents grieving the deaths of their children in the recent earthquakes in China, I realized that grief is a language common to everyone on earth. We understand so deeply what it is to experience the death of someone to whom our hearts are bound.

Why, then, do political and religious zealots believe it is their holy calling to create grief? Regardless of what these maddened people think they are doing, what they are accomplishing, without a doubt, is adding to the population of mourners.

Perhaps a time will come when enough of us feel grief at the deaths of those we don't know, when we will share the grief of those who mourn those they knew. If such a time comes we will have learned to value every human life as if it were our own, and it will be impossible to even imagine killing others because they don't believe as we do.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

FROM THE DEATH NOTICES OF THE NEW YORK TIMES, SUNDAY, JUNE 15, 2008:

"Michael Cunningham

"Deep peace of the running wave to you. Deep peace of the flowing air to you. Deep peace of the quiet earth to you. Deep peace of the shining stars to you. Deep peace of the gentle night to you. Moon and stars pour their healing light on you. Deep peace of the world to you."

An Anniversary

2008-06-16T01:13:00.002-04:00

Forty years ago this month my first trade book was published, Look Out, Whitey! Black Power's Gon' Get Your Mama! (I had published a prior book, The Twelve String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly, but it was an instruction book based on teaching records Pete Seeger had done, so I don't count it as my book.) To mark this anniversary in my life I've decided to read all 46 of my books.

I never read my books from cover to cover when they are published. It can be a year or more between my turning in a manuscript and a book's publication. By that time the book represents where I was and not where I am.

Look Out, Whitey! was the first book published on Black Power, and I still remember the morning I picked up the New York Times, and to my shock and surprise, there was a review of LOW, a good review. The book placed Black Power in the broad context of American history as well as the history of blacks in America. What made it different was the language. It was, in essence, a scholarly book, well-researched and with footnotes and a bibliography but the language was passionate, provocative, and its tone was the music of the street. The opening paragraphs:

"In June of 1966, James Meredith, the first Negro to graduate from the University of Mississippi, began what he called a "march against fear" through his native state....With this announcement black people across the country began crossing Meredith's name from the list of those in the land of the living. Hustlers began checking whether they could take out insurance policies on his life, naming themselves as beneficiaries. Ministers looked through their files, searching for old sermons about martyrdom. In a few places florists hurriedly placed orders for funeral wreaths, to be sure they would have enough on hand. They weren't being cynical. They were black and they knew. Mr Meredith had announced his death.

"On the second day of his march, surrounded by state troopers and FBI men, Meredith was shot. Fortunately, the omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent and omnimerciful Lord God Almighty took pity on this man from Kosciusko, Mississippi, and selected the poorest-shooting white man in three counties for the job. Mr. Meredith was not murdered. He received superficial wounds and a telegram from [Vice-President] Hubert Humphrey."

Recently I read LOW for the first time. I have vague memories of sitting in the basement of the Atlanta office of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the civil rights group for whom I worked as a photographer from 1966-68, cold, trying to see how many cups of tea I could make from one teabag, and pounding away on a typewriter at this book. But I remembered little else, and it was as if it had been written by someone else, which, in many ways, it was. I found the book to be surprisingly good, and I wondered how I had written it. I had never studied writing non-fiction, had never even written a decent paper during my four years in college.

I still agree with much of what I wrote, but I’m sorry that once I referred to women as “bitches” and I used “nigger” a lot more than I wish I had, though both words were used casually in those days. At times I was uncomfortable with the angry voice in the book. I wrote the book in the voice of all those blacks who could not speak for themselves and be heard, but I was never as angry as the book makes me appear, and I was never anti-white. However, I still chuckle when I recall the headline of the review that appeared in a newspaper in Indiana: "Lester Out To Get White Mamas." (Little did they know.)

As a description of the mood of young blacks of the time and an explication of black nationalism in the guise of Black Power, it’s a good book. Much of what I wrote is still true, unfortunately, but my view of people and events is more complex and nuanced now, the result of age and experience and reading.

In 1968 I had youth and anger on my side, and that was a good thing. It makes me wonder why aren't Americans angry today? Well, they are -- over the price of gas. I'll save that for later in the week.

Anyway, I’m enjoying becoming acquainted with myself through my books. I'll let you know how the reading goes.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

2008-06-13T03:41:00.004-04:00

“Each disease is uncertain in its outcome, and within that uncertainty, we find real hope, because a tumor has not always read the textbook, and a treatment can have unexpectedly dramatic impact. This is the great paradox of true hope: Because nothing is absolutely determined, there is not only reason to fear but also reason to hope. And so we must find ways to bridle fear and give greater rein to hope.”

Jerome Groopman, M.D., How People Prevail in the Face of Illness: The Anatomy of Hope

TODAY'S WORD

Day-spring: The first appearance of light in the morning.

Isn't that a great word? It is far more accurate than sunrise, since we know the sun doesn't move and yet we persist in the ocular illusion. But what really happens is that as the earth turns, day springs up from night. Speaking of which, I'd better get to bed. It's almost time for day-spring.

2008-06-12T01:07:00.001-04:00

“To hope under the most extreme circumstances is an act of defiance that permits a person to live his life on his own terms. It is part of the human spirit to endure and give a miracle a chance to happen.”

Jerome Groopman, M.D., How People Prevail in the Face of Illness: The Anatomy of Hope

TODAY'S WORD

Bellitude: Beauty of person; loveliness, elegance; neatness

Do you know anyone who has bellitude? If so, tell them.

2008-06-11T02:30:00.002-04:00

“'Look deeply into that which you love,’ [her teacher] said in his initial talk. 'That is where you will find the dharma, the Truth, as it is revealed in your life, your situation. Only give your body permission to actively love what it loves. Love is not complete without an active manifestation and expression of it in one’s living actions, thoughts, and words.'"

Anne Rudloe, Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen

TODAY'S WORD

Flathers: Rubbish

How great would it be if, at President Bush's next press conference, somebody yelled "Flathers!" after every sentence he uttered. Or the word could be used in a book title: Flathers! The Bush-Cheney Years.

2008-06-10T02:40:00.002-04:00

“We spend so much time trying to be something other than what we think we are. It’s very difficult and very painful. It’s important to just be in touch with what we are, to be aware of and enjoy the gifts we have, and to avoid the obviously destructive things in society. The way we are in each moment determines the quality of our life and our environment. If we really take care of ourselves, then we will also take care of everyone around us.”

Anne Rudloe, Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen

TODAY'S WORD

Ramfeezled: "To exhaust oneself with work, to wear oneself out."

Isn't that far more expressive than saying, "I'm tired," or "I'm beat." Imagine how
much better it would feel to come home from work and announce, "I'm ramfeezled!"

2008-06-09T03:05:00.002-04:00

“If we can learn to let go of likes and dislikes as the dictators of our actions, then we can apply this experience to other aspects of life that we must engage, be they personal relationships, work situations, or health problems. Likes and dislikes never disappear, but they can lose their authoritarian power.”

Anne Rudloe Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen

TODAY'S WORD

Woonkers: A word used to express wonderment or surprise.

Isn't that a great word!! It is so much better than "Jesus Christ!" or
"Holy Shit!" Definitely a word worth bringing back into use.

"The Democratic Party primaries are over!"
"Woonkers!"

2008-06-07T01:42:00.002-04:00

“Zen practice emphasizes staying aware of each moment as we live it….The world is full of subtleties, and a lot of the time we are so preoccupied with our personal agendas, reviewing the past or anticipating some future moment, that we overlook most of what is before us in the present.”

Anne Rudloe Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen

TODAY'S WORD

Traveltainted: Fatigued with travel.

Having spent most of my adult life traveling, I am so traveltainted that I only leave the house one, maybe two days a week.

2008-06-06T01:56:00.002-04:00

“When asked by a visitor to write the essence of practice, Zen Master Ikkyo simply wrote, ‘Attention.’ When pressed for more, he wrote “Attention, attention, attention!” Frustrated, the visitor asked what attention means, and Ikkyo said, “Attention means attention.”

Anne Rudloe, Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen

Paying attention. It seems like that would be simple to do. But it isn't. To pay attention means that all of the senses, as well as the mind, especially the mind, are focused on one "whatever". When we focus our entire beings on a face, a flower, or whatever we become painfully aware that we've lived practically all of our lives being inattentive.

TODAY'S WORD

Shivviness: The feeling of roughness caused by a new undergarment.

There's a word I am happy we no longer need, except it could be given new life and used to describe 1-ply toilet paper. A few years ago I decided I was too old to be scratching my behind any longer and switched to 3-ply paper. Whenever we travel someplace by car, I bring along a couple of rolls of 3-ply paper. I am too old for shivy toilet paper.

Two Cheers for White America

2008-06-05T01:55:00.002-04:00

Wednesday morning's New York Times had a subhead that I imagine was on the front of most American newspapers about Obama being the Democratic Party nominee: "First Black to Lead the Ticket for a Major Party".

Whenever I see the words "first black" to do anything, the implication is that this is an enormous achievement for black people, that we've broken through another color barrier.

In reality, the "first black syndrome" is an enormous achievement for white people. Since 1619 black people have known that we could do anything white people could do. It has taken white people almost 300 hundred years to figure that out. If white people had had their heads on straight it would have been obvious to them that Frederick Douglas would have made a far better president after the civil war than Ulysses Grant. If white people had had their heads on straight they would have known that W.E.B. DuBois would have been a far superior president to Woodrow Wilson.

But white people had this narrative stuck in their heads that they were superior to everybody whose skin was darker, and those of us with darker skins suffered the consequences. But slowly over the last almost 50 years that narrative has begun to change, and lo and behold, Barack Obama is the Democratic Party candidate for President of the United States.

I want to congratulate white America on the progress it is making in seeing as people those of us whose skin color isn't white. I hope white America continues making such progress and helps elect Obama to be president.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Psychomachy: A conflict of the body with the soul.

I was in a constant state of psychomachy for the first 50 years of my life!

Obama for President

2008-06-04T00:06:00.003-04:00

I never dreamed I would live to see a black man as a major party nominee for president. And I am happy to see that Obama does not make a big deal out of being black. It is part of who he is but not his totality.

There are many who wonder if a black man can be elected president. That is not my fear. I wonder if someone who as intelligent as he is can be elected president. Time and again I have been impressed by his eschewing simple solutions as when he rejected McCain and then Clinton's suggestion to institute a summertime federal gas tax holiday. I was impressed by the very nuanced speech he gave on race in Philadephia. Obama's biggest liability is not his race; it is that he is not afraid of complexities, that he does not speak in political cliches or always say what he thinks people want to hear. He is a man who thinks.

Americans tend to vote for the lowest common denominator. During the primaries Obama, attracted the more educated voters, and Clinton pandered to the racism of the not so educated. Here's hoping that Obama will not "dumb" himself down in a vain effort to broaden his appeal.

There is the saying that people get the leader they deserve. We deserve a president who is intelligent, articulate, who knows that the answers to our problems will not be easy to find.

Will we get that president? Obviously I don't know, but we will if the young vote in unprecedented numbers. Their votes for Obama can offset the votes of those who can't bring themselves to vote for a black man, those who resent his intelligence and his refusal to hide or minimize it.

I used to wonder how I would feel when a younger generation came along and wanted to be in control.

I am ecstatic! I hope I will be even more ecstatic on election night in November.

TODAY'S WORD

Thorough cough: Coughing and breaking wind at the same time.

I can't recall if I have ever thorough coughed, but it sounds like it could be an uplifting and cleansing experience.

2008-06-03T03:33:00.002-04:00

"Everything is our teacher, if we just pay attention."

Butterflies on a Sea Wind: Beginning Zen by Anne Rudloe

TODAY'S WORD

Flurn: To show contempt by looks; to scorn

If I were to meet George Bush, I would flurn him.

Update - Catalog Choice

2008-06-02T00:17:00.003-04:00

Last November I wrote about a new group, CatalogChoice.org, a non-profit group dedciated to helping the environment by reducing the number of catalogs weighing down mail deliverers and our mailboxes. You go to CatalogChoice.org, register, and then find the names of the catalogs you don't want to receive. CatalogChoice contacts the company. You can log on any time to check the status of your requests.

To date I have submitted the names of 154 catalogs. Of the 154 names submitted, twenty-one companies have confirmed that they will no longer send me their catalogs. But 48 companies have not responded at all, even after repeated requests. And, most surprising to me, 7 companies have refused to take my name off their catalog mailing lists.

I have learned several things:

1. American businesses are wasteful. They send catalogs to people who have never bought anything from them and continue sending catalogs to people who have said they don't want them.

2. But American businesses make considerable money from selling their mailing lists to companies offering similar products. Thus, it is not to a company's advantage to remove names from their lists.

3. As much as I enjoy shopping online, I have decided to do as little as possible because I am only making my name available to be sold to as many companies as possible.

4. American businesses only think of short-term profit. They do not understand that their contempt for the consumer will lead to consumer contempt for them.

But CatalogChoice reports that 893,245 people have opted out of receiving 11,611,223 catalogs. Most encouraging is that 211 companies have joined CatalogChoice as companies that will cooperate in removing names from their mailing lists.

I think I'll restrict any online shopping to these companies.

TODAY'S WORD

Quanked: Overpowered by fatigue.

Quankness is the American way of life.

Growing Old

2008-05-30T03:35:00.002-04:00

I'm learning something new this week about growing old. And please, no e-mails assuring me that at 69 I am not old. I'm proud of these years, and I've earned them. Although we live in a country that glorifies youth and denigrates age, I've always preferred being around older people than younger. But the older I get there will be fewer and fewer people older than me, and with that comes a psychic cost.

On Sunday someone I've known for more than 40 years died. David Gahr was an extraordinary photographer who took the photographs of me on the cover of the two albums I did for Vanguard as well as the jacket photographs of me on a number of my books. He was primarily known as a photographer of musicians - folk, jazz, rock - and if you go through you album/cd collections and look at who took the photographs, I can almost guarantee that you'll see his name.

David was 16 years older than I am and was like my older brother. He was the one who helped me buy my first camera, who let me go with him through the streets of New York when he went out to photograph. If not for David I would not be a photographer now.

A photograph is actually the picture of the relationship of the photographer to the person or object being photographed. A photograph does not tell you as much as about the subject as it does about how the photographer feels about the subject. It was through David's photographs that I learned joy and something about what it is to love. In the early 70's I put together a book of his photographs (and a few of mine)along with poems I wrote based on the photographs. The book is called Who I Am. It has been out of print for decades but I see copies on line. If you want to experience the depth of one man's humanity, look at David's photographs in that book.

But with his death at age 85 I am experiencing not only the loss of an important person in my life but more, I am experiencing the loss of sharing memories that belonged only to the two of us. At age 69 the generation before me is beginning to die, as well as my contemporaries. And with these deaths there comes an increasing loneliness. The older you become the more memories you have, paradoxically, the fewer with whom you can share those memories.

But then I must stop and smile because the older I get, the less I remember, and maybe that's how Nature gently balances the losses we experience in the deaths of those with whom whom we've shared a lifetime.

As much as I will miss David, my gratitude for having him as a friend for so many years is far, far greater.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

2008-05-29T02:22:00.001-04:00

“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”

Anais Nin

TODAY'S WORD

Heart-quake: A trembling of the heart.

How many times a day do you have a heart-quake?

2008-05-28T02:35:00.002-04:00

“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious convictions.”

Pascal

TODAY'S WORD

Coup de Soleil: A disease produced by the exposure of the head to the rays of the sun.

So that's what the Texas sun did to George Bush!

2008-05-27T03:00:00.002-04:00

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

Winston Churchill

TODAY'S WORD

Chicken-pecked: Under the rule of a child.

Watching parents with their children, a lot of mothers and fathers I see are chicken-pecked.

2008-05-26T00:40:00.002-04:00

“There have been many studies of elite performers — international violinists, chess grand masters, professional ice-skaters, mathematicians, and so forth — and the biggest difference researchers find between them and lesser performers is the cumulative amount of deliberative practice they’ve had. Indeed, the most important talent may be the talent for practice itself...the most important way in which innate factors play a role may be in one’s willingness to engage in sustained training...top performers dislike practicing just as much as others do. (That’s why, for example, athletes and musicians usually quit practicing when they retire.) But more than others, they have the will to keep at it anyway.”

Atul Gawande, Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes On An Imperfect Science

TODAY'S WORD

Bouffage: A satisfying meal; from Old French bouffer to swell. Any meat that, eaten greedily, fills the mouth, and makes the cheeks swell.

Tonight my wife cooked lamb in a mustard sauce. It was quite a bouffage!

How to Apologize

2008-05-24T01:33:00.003-04:00

During an interview Friday with the editorial board of a South Dakota newspaper, Hillary Clinton justified staying in the race because “My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.”

One of Clinton's rationales for remaining in the race has been that Obama might make a colossal mistake or something might happen. I guess we know now what she unconsciously wishes to happen. Or, maybe not so unconsciously.

When she became aware of the outrage being expressed on websites across the internet as well as by some pundits, she "apologized", saying, in part, "And I regret that if my referencing that moment of trauma for our entire nation and in particular the Kennedy family was in any way offensive. I certainly had no intention of that whatsoever."

You do not begin an apology with "if". When people are expressing outrage about something you've said, it is obvious that they are offended. And saying your intention was not to hurt anyone is not taking responsibility for what you said.

But, in general, people seem to feel that if they did not intend to hurt someone, then they didn't. But someone was hurt, and it is that hurt that should be addressed, not the intention. Sometimes being so clueless that you don't stop and think that what you're about to say or just said hurt someone is worse than intentionally inflicting a hurt.

But Hillary Clinton is incapable of taking responsibility for anything, it seems. We know that if Barack Obama had made the same statement, she would be screaming that he was unfit to be president of the United States and would be rallying her supporters to demand that he drop out of the race.

If she understood what it means to apologize she would have said something like this: "I am very, very sorry for my remark. It was wrong; it was beyond insensitive. Those people who are outraged by my remark are justified in their outrage. Regardless of my intention in making an analogy, my reference to the assassination of Robert Kennedy was wrong and could only evoke painful memories for the Kennedy family and all Americans who lived through that tragedy. My reference to his assassination could only evoke fears in all Americans regarding the safety of Senator Obama, as well as anyone who seeks high office, including Senator McCain and myself. I have no explanation for why I said what I did. I can only ask that people forgive me. I am deeply ashamed. I am going to suspend my campaign and take this holiday weekend to make a decision about the future."

To apologize is to take responsibility for having hurt another, regardless of intention. To apologize is to feel the hurt you've caused another and make that hurt a part of yourself. Apologies on this level are difficult to offer because to apologize is to acknowledge that I was wrong, and no one likes to be in the wrong. But all of us are from time to time.

This is one bruzzle Clinton cannot overcome.

©2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Bruzzle: To make a great ado, or stir.

Hillary's Hypocrisy

2008-05-23T01:35:00.003-04:00

This week Hillary Clinton and many of her supporters claimed that misogyny is the reason behind the failure of her candidacy, that people prefer to vote for a black man instead of a woman. Yes, this is true of some people, but, hypocrite that she is, Clinton does not acknowledge that some people prefer to vote for a white woman instead of a black man, like the 20% of voters in Kentucky who told pollsters they could not vote for a black man. More hypocritical yet, Clinton has made overt and covert appeals to the racism of white people. But she dares now to play the woman-as-victim card.

If she were honest she would look at herself and her campaign to see what went wrong. She entered the primaries thinking her nomination was inevitable and would lead to her being crowned the First Woman President, a distinction that seems incredibly important to her. By the time she figured out that Obama's people had out-organized the vaunted Clinton organization, it was almost too late.

Equally as important, Obama did not make the mistake Al Gore made in 2000 by beginning every paragraph with "I have a plan...." He did not make the mistake John Kerry made in 2004 by beginning every other paragraph with "I have a plan...."People do not give a damn about plans. They want someone who will speak to their hearts, and this is what the Republicans have been doing.

As much as I loathe their politics, the Republican Party cares deeply and passionately about their issues. Obama is the first Democrat since John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who is not afraid to be passionate about being liberal. He is not afraid to speak to people's hearts about the issues that matter to him. Clinton tries but her language is hackneyed and, somehow, I, for one, just don't find her believable. I can't shake the feeling that she says what she thinks people want to hear.

Of course there were people who didn't like a woman running for president just as there were people like seeing a black man run for president. This is America! Did anyone expect that misogynists and racists would stop being misogynists ad racists?

But misogyny isn't the reason your campaign failed, Hillary. The sad truth is that the more many of us listened to you say whatever you thought you needed to say to get votes, the more we listened to you pander to the so-called white working class, the more we disliked you.

Now your hypocrisy has reached heights rivaling Mt. Everest. You are threatening to take your insane ambition to the convention to force a fight over the seating of the Florida and Michigan delegates. We know that if Obama had campaigned in Florida and "won," if Obama had kept his name on the Michigan ballot and "won" while you had removed yours, you would be screaming that to award those delegates to him would be unfair and unjust to you who observed the rules. Awarding him those delegates would be just more "proof" of how much men wanted to keep a woman from being the nominee.

Hillary Clinton is showing herself to be as crass a politician as there is in America today. And I thought feminists were supposed to bring a new sensibility and different values into the political arena.

Ironically, the candidate exemplifying the more so-called feminine values is not a woman. That probably begrumples Hillary most of all.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Begrumpled: Displeased

2008-05-22T02:11:00.002-04:00

“Yes, of course he was in love with Camille, deep down inside, in the unknown country you carry along inside you like some private but alien submarine world. Yes. And so what? Nothing says that you have to put every one of your thoughts into action.”

Fred Vargas Seeking Whom He May Devour

TODAY'S WORD

Babies-in-the-eyes: The miniature reflection of yourself which you see in another's
eyes.

Ted Kenedy

2008-05-21T02:05:00.002-04:00

The news of Ted Kennedy's brain tumor is devastating news for those of us who live in Massachusetts. I know he is the butt of jokes about his drinking and is probably not taken seriously by many people but I love the man, though I've never laid eyes on him.

I love him because he was the ne'er do-well Kennedy brother. After the WW II death of the oldest brother, Joseph, the family hopes came to reside in Jack Kennedy and Robert. Not much was expected of Ted. Yet, after the murders of JFK and RFK, Ted Kennedy, to everyone's surprise, took up the burden of the family mantle. While the drowning of Mary Jo Kopechne on Chappaquidick Island while in Ted's company ended any chance of him ever becoming president, he became the unstinting, unswerving, uncompromising, and often, only voice of political liberalism in America.

Practically every other Democratic Party politician ran when Republicans turned the word "liberal" into a pejorative. Not Ted Kennedy. He was a liberal and was proud of it, and his compassion for that other America of poverty and joblessness never weakened.

To face his death is like contemplating the death of a close family member. For those of us in Massachusetts, Ted Kennedy has always been there. It is impossible for me to imagine the political landscape without his presence.

Well, I know this much. After he dies, and I pray that won't be before his present term ends in 2012, if his name should happen to appear on the ballot for re-election to the U.S. Senate, even dead, he would win in a landslide. A dead Ted Kennedy would be better than a lot of politicians I could name who think they're alive.

TODAY'S WORD

Anywhen - At any time.

This is a great word. We use anyhow, anywhere, anywise, why not anywhen?

I'll take Ted Kennedy anywhen over anybody else.

2008-05-20T01:26:00.002-04:00

“Camille rather liked Suzanne, who took verbal crudity to an incandescent intensity that could only inspire admiration – Camille’s mother had taught her to consider vulgarity as a way of coping with life.”

Fred Varagas, Seeking Whom He May Devour by

Fred Vargas is the pseudonym of Frédérique Audoin-Rouzeau, a French historian and archaeologist who is also the author of some of the most interesting and quirky mysteries I've read in a lifetime of reading mysteries (my favorite genre) since starting with Perry Mason and Sherlock Holmes when I was 14. Unfortunately, only five of her fourteen or so novels have been translated. She is a wonderful writer and I recommend her even to those who don't like mysteries. Her characters are always interesting.

TODAY'S WORD

Another wonderful book is The Word Museum: The Most Remarkable English Words Ever Forgotten by Jeffrey Kacirk. I'll be quoting from it a lot in the coming weeks. If you, like me, love obscure and obsolete words, you can't go wrong with this book.

Aforcing - Stretching the amount of a dish to accommodate more people.

2008-05-19T01:00:00.002-04:00

“If you have a friend who pays enough attention to you to ask the right question, you’re lucky; if you have a friend who listens to the answer, thinks some more, and asks the second question, then you’re blessed.”

Brian Morton, Breakable You

TODAY'S WORD

Aflunters (a-FLUNT-ers): In a state of disorder

One cannot grow spiritually unless one is aflunters.

2008-05-18T02:07:00.002-04:00

“After twenty years of listening to people tell stories about themselves, I sometimes think that life is nothing but plot, if you think of plot as the choices we make. You could say that neurosis is a condition in which we think we don’t have choices. And you could say that the goal of therapy is to help someone see that he’s already making choices, and that he could be making different choices.”

Brian Morton, Breakable You

TODAY'S WORD

Cabobble (ca-BOB-ble): To mystify, puzzle, confuse.

I've lived in the United States all my life and this country still
cabobbles me sometimes.

2008-05-17T01:24:00.001-04:00

“It’s probably true that you’re forging your own character during every minute of every day, with every decision you make; but there are some moments in which this is more clear than in others.”

Brian Morton, Breakable You

TODAY'S WORD

Pilgarlic (pil-GAR-lik): A hapless, bald-headed man.

John McCain is pilgarlic.

Obama's Vice-Presidential Choice

2008-05-16T00:18:00.002-04:00

The biggest mistake Barack Obama could make is to ask Hillary Clinton to be his running mate. Just because she has run second to him does not justify her being on the Democratic Party's presidential ticket. Deliberately or unconsciously, the Clintons would do everything they could to undermine the campaign.

However, there will be some who say that not to ask her to be his vice-president would be disrespectful. This election is not about Hillary and Bill Clinton's egos. Far more is at stake than their wounded feelings.

The only way Obama can avoid asking Clinton and upsetting her supporters is to name another woman as his running mate. Just as Obama has energized young and black voters, Clinton has energized a number of women voters. Clinton's campaign has given many women a sense of having a stake in the system. A woman deserves to be his runninig mate, just not Hillary.

I have two suggestions. The first is Kathleen Sebelius, two-term Governor of Kansas. Any Democrat who can be twice elected governor of a Republican state like Kansas knows something about how to appeal to "red state" voters. She has been married for 33 years, has two sons, and is the daughter of a former governor of Ohio. Given Ohio's status as a "swing" state, her ties to Ohio could be an asset. She is also a Catholic, and though she has been banned from receiving communion for her support of abortion, her Catholicism would be a counterweight to those white people who want to believe Obama is an Arab Muslim.

My other suggestion is House majority leader Nancy Pelosi. She is a woman of Hillary's generation, married with five children, a Catholic from California with its 55 electoral votes. In addition she knows how to play the politics on Capitol Hill, and I'm not sure Obama does.

A real test of Obama's being the representative of a new politics will be his vice-presidential choice. The primaries have demonstrated that a woman deserves to be on the ballot with him. I, for one, will be very disappointed and more than a little disillusioned if he chooses a man.

© 2008 by Julius Lester

TODAY'S WORD

Quaestuary (KWES-tyoo-er-ee): Profit-oriented; money-making.

The United States' fatal flaw is its quaestuary political philosophy.

julius.lester@gmail.com

Clinton & Obama

2008-05-15T01:59:00.003-04:00

When the Democratic Party primary season began I was a Hillary Clinton supporter. After Obama's victory in the Iowa caucuses, I started paying attention to him. Clinton's victory in the New Hampshire primary found me still supporting her but not as much.

It was the injection of race into the South Carolina primary by Bill Clinton that made me anti-Clinton, and my antipathy to her has only grown since. In the recent West Virginia primary she became the Great White Hope, saying in not so subtle ways that white working class people will not vote for a black man to be president. What Hillary Clinton has failed to mention is that only 35% of the white working class voted for Bill Clinton, that neither Al Gore 2000 or John Kerry in 2004 carried the white working class. The white working class is not going to vote for the Democratic candidate, white or black.

But this is only one of the many examples of the dishonest and pandering campaign Hillary Clinton has run. Equally disappointing is that her ideas are old. She's 60, and she sounds like she hasn't had a new thought in the past 40 years. I say this as someone who is 9 years older than she is, so I know an old idea when I hear it. I listen to her and all I hear is the same ol' tired politics I've been hearing since Richard Nixon was president. If by some miracle she becomes the Democratic Party nominee for president, Americans will have to choose between Old and Older.

Even worse, however, is her pandering to white racism has made us a far more racially divided nation than we were before her march to the White House was stopped by Barak Obama. I cannot ever forgive her for that.

TODAY'S WORD

Bedrabble (bed-RAB-ul): To befoul with rain and mud

There have been sunny days when I've felt bedrabbled!

julius.lester@gmail.com