Mobtown Blues

Night of the Living Also-Rans

I had the opportunity to attend last night's All-American Presidential Forum for Republican candidates, hosted by Tavis Smiley and held at Morgan State University.  I didn't attend for a couple of reasons.  For one thing, the tickets became available after I had already committed to attending my Quaker meeting's monthly spiritual formation gathering.  For another, if the four GOP frontrunners didn't care to show, well, I wasn't going to worry about it too much either, frankly.  It's not like there's a huge chance of me voting Republican in the upcoming presidential election to begin with.

K and I did manage to catch the last half of the debate on TV when we got home last night.  My principal reactions were disgust at the cavalcade of benchwarmers and never-will-bes who took the stage, and exasperation and disappointment at Rudolph Giuliani, John McCain, Fred Thompson, and Mitt Romney for the "scheduling conflicts" that ostensibly prevented them from making an appearance.

Okay, so I wasn't born yesterday.  I realize that: a) African-American voters break overwhelmingly Democrat, particularly in a presidential race; b) the GOP is in serious trouble as they move into primary season, since no candidate has emerged who can unify and galvanize the party; c) this Sunday marks the third-quarter fundraising deadline for presidential hopefuls, and the Republican candidates need to raise as much cash as they can to demonstrate that they can seriously contend with Democratic big dogs Clinton and Obama; and d) every moment that a Republican candidate spends at a forum that will never yield the money or votes he needs is a moment he could be using to raise bucks and gladhand the party's base.  So the campaigns of the top contenders surveyed the landscape, did some pretty basic math, and told their candidates that there were more productive uses of their Thursday night than to engage in quixotic attempts to court a demo that is certain to remain firmly in the other camp.

But still.  Think of the missed opportunity for these candidates to have engaged in a serious discussion about issues of real importance as they affect African-Americans: affirmative action, poverty, Iraq, health care, drugs, the death penalty, minorities in the military, intervention in Darfur.  Or, on a more prosaic note, think of the good PR that would have been generated by having the top tier of Republican presidential candidates coming to a historically black college to field questions from some of the finest journalists in America: Smiley, Cynthia Tucker, Juan Williams, Ray Suarez, and Tom Joyner.  With the low expectations of Republican contenders in such a venue, one of the frontrunners could have distinguished himself from the rest of the pack, perhaps even scoring some points with moderate voters in the process.

Instead, who did we get?    Well, for one, Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, whose campaign site currently shows him brandishing a handgun and who, according to Rolling Stone, advocates bombing Mecca, receives support from a white supremacy group, and favors repealing all immigration, illegal or otherwise.  For another, Congressman Ron Paul, an obstetrician from Texas who, as a self-proclaimed libertarian is for an immediate pullout from Iraq, against adoptions by same-sex parents, for massive tax cuts, against gun control in any form, for campaign finance reform, against affirmative action, and who, if last night's histrionics are any example, is a total loon. 

Then there was archconservative Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, who, in addition to apparently regarding the proliferation of pornography as a priority issue on a par with terrorism, is a co-sponsor (with Democratic Senator Joe Biden) of an amendment that would create a three-state solution for Iraq that would involve partitioning the country along religious and ethnic lines.  'Cause, you know.  That worked so well for India and Pakistan.

Let's see, who else?  Oh yeah, there was California Representative Duncan Hunter, who is such a fan of our constitutionally enshrined right to freedom of speech that wants to cut off all federal funding to Columbia University, in retaliation for the schools' allowing Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak there this week.  Rumor has it that Congressman Hunter is a much more vigorous supporter of the Second Amendment than he is of the First.

Alan Keyes brought his own unique brand of crazy to last night's proceedings.  The perennial candidate and onetime highest-ranking African-American in the Reagan administration has made a name for himself in recent years by defending Judge Roy Moore, attempting to intervene in the Terry Schiavo case, and lashing out at homosexuals, this last despite the fact that his own daughter is a queer activist.   More recently, Keyes carpetbagged his way into the 2004 Illinois senate race, where he was handily defeated by Barack Obama.  Keyes brought to the Morgan State forum the same understated dignity that he used when he declared that Jesus Christ wouldn't vote for Obama.

It says something when a paleoconservative, creationist, Southern Baptist minister like former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee comes off as intelligent, rational, civil, and even presidential compared with the other candidates on stage.  Huckabee is wrong (at least in my opinion) on gays, guns, the death penalty, and evolution.  But he's okay on health care, and immigration, and he received overall high marks as governor.  It was interesting to watch how he articulated his positions.  While his issue stances are pretty much diametrically opposed to mine, K and I found ourselves responding his tone, which was measured and reasonable-sounding. 

That tone, and in fact Huckabee's very appearance at last night's forum, reflected sentiments expressed in remarks earlier this month, in which he said, "  "If Republicans don't win minority votes and votes that we traditionally don't get, Hillary Clinton's the next president."  Of the crowded field of GOP candidates, including the top four contenders, Huckabee is the one I find most interesting.  But that, to be sure, is damning with faint praise.

Why I believe in God

In Germany, neurosensory scientists discover that migrating songbirds possess internal compasses that enable them to see magnetic north.

In Burma, Buddhist monks protest a brutal regime, knowing that they will be beaten, arrested, jailed, tortured, killed.

The way we recognize patterns in tea leaves and in the stars.

That poem of Borges in which the master of labyrinths writes about "fingernails, growing at nighttime and in death," about "algebra and fire."

A tulip tree blossom seen a decade ago in a squat, grey office park in Columbia, Maryland.

In Baltimore, a woman is raped by her stepfather at 14, thrown out on the street at 15.  By 16 she is addicted to heroin.  Against all odds she learns to read, acquires her GED, frees herself from drugs, seeks job training, finds a well-paying job, marries a good man, has three healthy children.

Friends who like you anyway.

The great, wracking sobs of grief that punctuate Bach's Chaconne, about which Johannes Brahms is said to have written to Clara Schumann: "If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind."

People who hold on to their humanity, even after losing everything else.

Milosz: And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned, / My face covered with a coat though now no one was left / Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid, / My shames not eternal, base deeds to be forgiven.

When I was nine years old, I looked up at the sky over Lilongwe, and the track of the Milky Way was so dense and white that for a moment I thought I could reach out and touch it.

Yanar Mohammed.

The silver notes of a soukous guitar.

A cold morning in a meditation hall in Litchfield, Connecticut: eyes raw from lack of sleep, my knees throbbing from hour after hour of zazen, my mind occupied with nothing but thoughts of breakfast, when suddenly someone struck the bell, and I was the one who rang.

My love for my father, in spite of everything.

The view from Gunung Gede at sunrise, the clouds rolling into the bowl of the volcano like the tide.

Job 38.  Prime mover unmoved, prime neuron unfired.

My wife, who chases away nightmares.

Hope.

Some things to do in north Brooklyn

Take a nighttime stroll past defunct canning factories that will eventually become condos.
Eat pierogies in Greenpoint.
Hope to catch a glimpse of Paul Auster and feel like a total rube for doing so.
For a fleeting, drunken second, consider paying $300 for a bottle of Sam Adams Utopia at Mugs Ale House.  Opt instead for the ostrich burger and a decent porter.
Cross the Verrazano and immediately start affecting an obnoxious Italian-American accent.



Compliment your friends on the size of their apartment.
Stumble across a chopper street festival outside Indian Larry's on 14th street.
Look at the Manhattan Skyline from the Promenade and be awed all over again.
Learn what DUMBO stands for.
Listen to a mediocre thrash band live.
Get lost looking for the BQE.



Pass a gallery opening on Wythe Avenue and catch the hard, haunted, raccoon eyes of an overly made up young woman wearing what appear to be Kimora Lee Simmons' bedroom drapes.
Listen to a jingly truck drive slowly by; think that it's the Good Humor man, only to find out that it is, improbably, the knife-sharpening truck.
Remember old friends and years past. 



Search in vain for kopi luwak at Brooklyn Label on the serendipitously named Java Street.
Marvel at rowhouses resplendent in the tackiest shades of formstone and vinyl and chrome.
Light a cigarette in the drizzly chill on on Franklin Street and feel like a character in a song. 
See a chunk of Plymouth Rock at Henry Ward Beecher's church.
Impress friends with your parallel parking skills.
Crowd into a Williamsburg flat to eat greasy pizza and sing loud hymns.



Get accosted at the gas pump by a heavily accented, one-eyed street person in Little Poland: "You need help, maybe?"
Get the hairy eyeball from New York's finest.
Take in the graffiti.
Feel the age coming off the asphalt.
Wipe away tears at sunrise.
 

A song for any trial

Lord, we come before Thee now,

At Thy feet we humbly bow;

Oh do not our suit disdain;

Shall we seek Thee, Lord, in vain?

Lord, on Thee our souls depend;

In compassion now descend;

Fill our hearts with Thy rich grace,

Tune our lips to sing Thy praise.

Comfort those who weep and mourn;

Let the time of joy return;

Those who are cast down lift up,

Strong in faith, in love and hope.

Grant that all may seek and find

Thee a God supremely kind;

Heal the sick, the captive free,

Let us all rejoice in Thee.

- William Hammond

Way Down Yonder on the Li'l Tallapoosa

I've been struggling for weeks now to compose a post that adequately encompasses the long weekend I spent with my wife and friends recently in rural Alabama.  Now, when I say "rural," I don't mean "rural" in the Maryland sense, where McMansions are swiftly eroding the farmland, and where one is never more than a 20-min. drive from the multiplex and the Panera.  No, when I say we were in rural Alabama, I mean that the place where we stayed was a miles down a dirt road, with little but vast, creeping fields of kudzu between us and the nearest gas station a couple of zip codes away.

After racking my brain trying to come up with a way to adequately summarize my experience in one of the deeper parts of the Deep South, I've come to the conclusion that I'm not up to the task.  Either I write the Cliff's Notes or I write 'War and Peace;' there's no middle ground.  So here are some of the things I've been telling friends, family, and coworkers, when they ask "what in the world were you doing in rural Alabama this summer?"

Among other things, I: visited a chicken farm, went four-wheelin' in the mud in a Dodge Caravan, saw a dead armadillo, drove past Booger Hollow Road, tried my first crawdad, listened to my friends outsing a lightning storm, shared a smoke with a guy in a rebel flag doo-rag, drank muscadine wine, ate at a roadside barbecue stand, did yoga on the front porch at sunrise, discussed the decline of the African-American Sacred Harp tradition, made several trips to and from Lower Cane Creek Primitive Baptist Church, listened to impromptu mini-lectures on astrology and homeopathic remedies, talked about pockets of Yankee sympathizers in Alabama during the height of the Civil War (or "the Late Unpleasantness," depending on your perspective), learned about the now-defunct custom of dropping live turkeys from the second floor of the courthouse in LaFayette (pronounced "luh-FEHT"), and heard all sorts of startling things about Nathan Bedford Forrest and the organization he founded, the one that's abbreviated by repeating the eleventh letter of the Roman alphabet three times.

I also attended the funeral home visitation for a singer who died unexpectedly the day of our arrival.  She wasn't someone I knew in any way well; I had sung across the hollow square from her a couple of times, is all.  But the singing we conjured for her and her family, about 50 of us packed in a little anteroom next to the room where she was laid out for viewing, was just about the richest, most reverent, most powerful singing of my experience.  As we sang for our departed fellow singer, I looked around the room at the people around me.  I saw young people and old people, Northerners and Southerners, black folks and white folks, liberals and conservatives, atheists and Pentecostals, their voices all raised in hymns of praise and lamentation.  Beyond them I saw the family members of the deceased, many of whom had never heard this music before.  Some of them hugged me afterward, astonished that folks would drive all the way from Maryland and sing for someone they barely knew.  And I thought: this is how I want it to be when I die.  This is what we do for each other.  This is, to quote Raymond Carver, what we talk about when we talk about love.

One afternoon, my friend with whom we were staying took the group of us down to the Little Tallapoosa River, its waters depleted from the drought that has scorched the southeast for months.  After chasing off the cows that, like us, were trying to beat the 100-plus degree heat and stifling humidity with a dip in the river, we waded into the muddy water and lay ourselves down.  Our host's cousin drove up on a John Deere ATV, bearing locally grown, orange-colored watermelons.  As I spit the seeds out into the drowsy current, I found myself thinking of my father, how he had spent most of his young adulthood trying to find a way out of the South, its poverty, its religion, its culture.  I wondered what he would think of myperiodic excursions to Georgia and Alabama, of the bonds I have developed with the sort of people he fought so hard for get away from.  I skipped a chunk of watermelon rind across the suface of the water and figured that wherever he is, he's probably getting a kick out of the irony of the whole thing.

I rose and toweled myself off.  The sun was just beginning its slow, red decline, the air shimmering with heat and moisture.  In a few hours, we would be kicked out of a seafood restaurant by armed Randolph County sherriff's deputies.  The South was beginning to grow on me.