Sailing to Oblivium: July 15, 2017

Some dreadful things won’t die. Hate keeps them alive, though submerged like some cold-war monster waiting to spring on a new generation.

It happened last week.

A posting on unsocial media announced, as if it were true, that a photo of the late Martin Luther King, Jr. had surfaced. The photo, the poster assured us, provided proof of Dr. King at a “Communist training school.”

I hadn’t seen this photo since the 1960s when I worked in Louisiana one summer. Billboards throughout the more dismal areas of the South dotted highways and byways with photos of Dr. King with a group of people, attending a meeting. That’s all it depicted, a group of people at a meeting.

It could have been a meeting about anything anywhere. It actually took place at the Highlander Center in New Market Center, Tennessee, originally named the Highlander Folk Center. It has been around since 1932, originating to offer adult education classes to the poor, teaching them such subversive and incendiary things as how to read material that would allow them to pass literacy tests often imposed on the downtrodden by Southern states.

By the 1960s, the center had entered the civil rights movement. It offered training to activists who were dedicated to helping the least of those among us exercise the ability to vote.

On can be assured that there was more of the Galilean than of Marx taught there. Taylor Branch, in his multi-volume biography of Dr. King, beginning with Parting the Waters, outlines his relationship with the center in detail for those who would rather learn than hate. There seems to be so few of those around anymore.

In all likelihood, the spread of the falsehood connecting Dr. King with Communism oozed from the mind of then director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, who hated King with a virulence rarely seen in politics, and who missed no opportunity to besmirch his reputation.

The odd thing is that such rubbish as the aforementioned photograph should re-surface after all these years. What, in present-day America, could invigorate this deception and motivate someone to thrust it on an unsuspecting new audience?

I guess we all know the answer to that.

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Sailing To Oblivium: July 14, 2017

It’s pretty obvious by now that wealth is not a causal factor in having class. Some rich people have it. Take Oprah Winfrey or Jimmy Carter. Some poor people have it. Lincoln and Gandhi come to mind. You just never know.

For example, I knew a man when I was growing up. His name was Ferdinand Thompson and he had class by the trailer-load. People respected him. Men talked business with him as an equal. He had a good job with the railroad in my home town. Everyone spoke well of him. He was a role model. When the FBI came to my neighborhood doing background for my military security clearance, he was the first person with whom they visited.

He told them that, as far as he knew, I was as good as the next person and trustworthy. That was one of the great honors of my life.

He lived in the depths of the Jim Crow South of the 1950s and he was black as the Ace of Spades. I can’t recall ever having seen him wearing anything other than denim overalls. How did he manage this level of respect? Darned if I know. One person living in a six-room frame-house in the Arkansas Delta has class, that’s all. Some people living in a Manhattan high-rise haven’t a shred, that’s all. One thing is for certain. You can’t buy it. That’s for sure. That’s for danged sure.

People judge class by different standards, I suppose. Years ago, where I grew up, a farmer who didn’t keep his fence rows clean was judged not to have it, as did people who talked too much to others about their religious beliefs. School teachers, police officers, and firefighters were generally deemed to have it, although the latter two represented professions closed to a majority of citizens where I lived.

Sometimes appearance played a part. What they called “short-shorts” were a bad sign, as were flattop haircuts, beards, tattoos, fake smiles, and gold caps on your teeth. Judgements tended to start at an early age. One especially bad harbinger of growing up to lack class was a child's habit of speaking without being asked to. As for adults, one who could afford to, but didn’t help a person in need would never “fit the bill,” so to speak. Those were different times.

Back to Ferdinand Thompson: we know he encountered raw prejudice, but not from people who mattered. Maybe it had something to do with his bearing. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he was respectful to everyone but fawning to nobody. Maybe it was because he was a quiet man, never crude or boastful, who minded his own business and cared for his family. Maybe it was because he spoke well of others and never mistreated or denigrated the least of those among us.

Maybe it was because he was more like the Galilean and less like Franklin Graham.

At any rate, I’ve thought about him many times over the years. I think about him a lot lately.

A former slave, Texarkana, AR
Class personified?

Sailing To Oblivium: July 13, 2017

 Last evening, we watched Rebecca, one of my wife’s favorite films. It has one of the best performances by an off-screen character in movie history.

Life is like that. So many of the people who shape our lives and the future of our country we have never seen, or at least we no longer see them. On the other hand, we see far too much of the people who are currently shaping our futures. We would prefer most of them as off-screen characters, preferably in cartoons.

Back to shaping our future, there is an old economic theory we used to apply to urban economics. We called it ‘location quotient analysis.” In economic terms, location quotient is a way of quantifying how concentrated a particular industry, cluster, occupation, or demographic group is in a region as compared to the nation. It can reveal what makes a particular region “unique” in comparison to the national average. Some used it to estimate potential as well.

What I think about when I drive through the Arkansas Delta is how some thinkers used to apply the location quotient principles to sociological factors, i.e. estimating human potential. It posited how likely a given area was to produce an Abraham Lincoln, an Albert Einstein, a Jonas Salk, a Mozart, or a Robert Johnson.

Of course, the probability of success for any given area depended on a myriad of complex and related characters. It always makes me think, though, as I drive through areas of our country that the modern world continues to neglect. I can’t help but wonder how many people like Harriet Tubman, Isaac Newton, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton, Fredrick Douglass, or Jonas Salk we may squander through our neglect.

Oh well. Let's just build another aircraft carrier.

I freed a thousand slaves. I could have

freed a thousand more if only they knew
they were slaves. - Harriet Tubman

Sailing To Oblivium: July 12, 2017

Sometimes visiting places from where your roots grew is like taking a calming dip in a pool of warm memories. It was for my sister, brother, and me yesterday.

We started out from our home place, a site much altered from our youth. It once contained a small country grocery store with a home attached to it. Our parents bought it and opened for business on January 1, 1940. They reared the three of us there. It disappeared long ago with all the other country stores. To date, no politician is promising to bring them back along with the employment they provided.

Driving south into what is lovingly referred to as “L.A.,” or Lower Arkansas, we passed a site where, in a small shack in 1918, a frail woman was struggling for her life after giving birth, somewhat prematurely, to her eighth child, a girl. The woman was so near death that the doctor laid the infant aside to die, and concentrated on saving the woman with, among another tools, Vick’s Salve, the WD-40 of the medical world at that time. It worked, lucky for us.

The woman was our grandmother and the infant was our mother. This, and much of our family history, was provided by her oldest sister, Hallie Harris Harden, the matriarch of our clan, and a character of great enjoyment until her death at near 100 years of age. I thought of her as we passed a small country church, for I remembered the time I was driving her around and she pointed at it and announced, “There’s where Jesus saved me from going to hell, and your Uncle Carl saved me from being an old maid.” I’m not sure about the timing of the first event but the second occurred when she was 15 years old.

Three years after my mother survived childbirth, her father died. My grandmother was left alone in a harsh rural environment with no means of support, and three young children in hand. Mother never talked much about those awful days except to relate the story of when the local church members acquired new curtains for its windows. My grandmother begged the castoffs from them and made underpants for the girls. My mother never forgot the day she fell on the playground and that embarrassing secret was revealed to a group of cruel schoolchildren. The horrible mask of poverty forms many faces.

Life goes on. Not long after, an older brother married the daughter of a widower whose wife had given birth to 13 children, and then died. The couple carried messages back and forth, and my grandmother ended up marrying the widower and caring for his children that were still at home. The son of one of those children is now Mayor of Mansfield, Arkansas and I see him from time to time. He never fails to say, almost with tears in his eyes, that my grandmother was the only grandmother he ever knew.

We visited the gravesites where our grandparents are buried, near their fathers—one a veteran of the Confederacy and the other of the Union. The unit of the latter saved my hometown, Pine Bluff, from a Rebel assault and the city erected a small monument to it. The obituary of the former stated that he was a “good man who never took part in any of the neighborhood brawls.” Don’t ask.

It was a good day. One final surprise caused me to chuckle. Now first understand, my sister started out in her professional life punching data cards for the state’s electrical utility in the basement of a building in Pine Bluff. She ended it in an office near the top of a high-rise office building in Little Rock running a major department for that same company. She is a serious person, and highly respected as a professional by her former colleagues. She is considered a good person by all, and I doubt she would ever take part in a neighborhood brawl, if they have those where she lives. Did I mention that she is a serious person? We lovingly call her “The General.”

Imagine my amusement when, as we passed over a railroad track near our old neighborhood, she began telling me how she and her girlfriends used to put bags on sticks, walk down those tracks, and pretend they were hoboes. What an image. Times reserved for memories are full of surprises like that.

Overall, the day ended on a happy note to be filed in the “Ps” under “pleasant.”

But … my sister a hobo? That still cracks me up. It really does.

Traveling Companions

Sailing To Oblivion: July 11, 2017

It’s gotten me out of many a jam: “You knew I was sorry when you married me.”

What can she say? It’s true. It’s disarming. She’s nothing left to do but follow the advice of the Galilean to, as I’ve quoted before, “agree with thine adversary quickly.”

It works when you lie.

It works when you deceive.

It works when you are cruel to the less fortunate. Probably, it would even work on more cosmic transgressions.

I’ll bet it would work if one got caught doing damage the foundations of society as we know it.

I’ll bet it would work if one did harm to the least of those of those among us.

I’ll bet it would work if one colluded with a sworn enemy to damage our country.

I'll bet it would work if one bore false witness against one's political opponent.

I’ll bet it would work if one enriched one’s self or one’s family at the expense of our citizens.

I’ll bet it would work if one promised relief to the poor and enriched one’s friends instead.

I’ll bet it would work if one set out to destroy our planet in order to increase corporate profits.

Maybe not. There may be a difference between “You knew I was sorry when you married me,” and “You knew I was sorry when you elected me.”

On the other hand, it just might work, as John Agar used to say when he finally figured out how to destroy the monster spider or whatever. After all, when the damage is spread out over multitudes, we tend to become inured to the dangers that lurk beneath it. Some even vow to love the monster more. As Charlie Chaplin said through the character of Monsieur Verdoux, “Numbers sanctify.”

Just some random thoughts on July 11, 2017.

Just thinking …

Sailing To Oblivium: July 10, 2017

Someone once told me that the ultimate manifestation of true genius in any endeavor is making it look easy. Just watch a Chet Atkins video.

Don’t like music? Try an old film of Brooks Robinson playing third base.

The gift—gift being defined as mind-numbing hours of work or practice applied to natural ability—isn’t always transferable. Take Michael Jordan, for example. His movements in the game of basketball were sublime. When he tried baseball, though, someone described him as “having the grace of a baby deer learning to walk.”

Sadly, that gift of the ultimate can also prove ephemeral. Read what Ernest Hemingway said of F. Scott Fitzgerald:

“His talent was as natural as the pattern that was made by the dust on a butterfly’s wings. At one time he understood it no more than the butterfly did and be did not know when It was brushed or marred. Later he became conscious of his damaged wings and of their construction and he learned to think and could not fly anymore because the love of flight was gone and he could, only remember when it had been effortless.”  - From A Moveable Feast

The gift, if we may call it that, can be used for good or bad. There once was Martin Luther King, Jr. Now we have the promoters of the so-called "prosperity gospel" preaching from the same book.

From a more nihilistic standpoint, consider Joe McCarthy, or one of his modern-day counterparts. Using the art to destroy others or an entire country is a frightening proposition. Some politicians, though, have carried it to dizzying heights.

We see it daily in the news. They lie. They deceive. They divide. They brag. They belittle. They insult. They tear down what is good and replace it with what is bad. They leave us frightened and confused with their sheer talent and audacity.

And they make it look so easy.

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Sailing To Oblivium: July 9, 2017

 Back in my day, many, if not most, kids like me regarded Sunday mornings as consisting of two hours of torture designed to make you appreciate the rest of the week. It could only get better from there.

Of course, we were giving up things on Sunday morning, things like playing sports, picking guitars, building hideouts, stealing and smoking our father’s cigarettes, telling naughty jokes, tormenting other kids, exploring old barns, pilfering, fishing, climbing trees, and learning about “it,” while hoping someday we might understand why grownups considered “it” so appealing.

In short, our dream activities consisted of a duality: the refreshing aspects of activity and discovery nestled into the warm, soft, welcoming bosom of sin. Church offered none of these, with one exception: the music.

Wow! You find an old-timey bouncing pianist who had perfected the “Baptist-Drag” on an old upright piano, coax her into “At the cross, at the cross where I first saw the light,” and you could get the attention of a bunch of boys right away. We joined right in those joyous times.

The adults appreciated our participation, even though many enlightened ones, such as my sainted mother, knew that when we boys got to the hideout that afternoon, and had lighted up, it would be “At the bar, at the bar where I smoked my first cigar ….”

Hell yes, she knew. She taught it to me.

Our unconscionable lyric-swapping aside, those old hymns, bellowed out in a little white Baptist church, with no air-conditioning, really did the job. It was the only religious ecstasy most of our gang ever experienced.

Fast forward to modern times and what one wag referred to as this “Jesus is my boyfriend” music. Couple that with the fact that modern teenagers sacrifice nothing by attending church on Sunday morn. They wear the same clothes and do the same thing there they would be doing if set free. (Hint: It involves cell phones). Add some rock-and-roll music and a feel-good motivational talk, and you have the modern cult church. It ain’t no big thing to sit through that.

There will be no long, hour-an-a-half sermons about how if a bird flew over Mount Everest once every million years and eventually the shadow of that bird’s wings on the mountain wore it away to nothing, the time involved for all that would be a “drop in the bucket” compared to the eternity in which our little bodies would be burning if we didn't straighten up right away.

Oh hell. Let’s sing that one called “Gladly, The Cross-eyed Bear,” and erase that awful image.

I still wonder how such joyous, beautiful music could grow from such a doctrinal garden. I also wonder about the ability of modern church music to elevate the soul. Comparing the old hymns to the new music is like, as one radio pundit on PBS, said, “comparing a Shakespearian sonnet to a Hallmark greeting card.”

As for me and religion, I don’t care what Pat Robertson, or Franklin Graham, says, I just can’t see Donald Trump singing “I’ll fly away.”

Off-key? Who cares?