More the Morning After

One of my hopes in the wake of yesterdays victories (and defeats such as Proposition 8), is that words such as wingnuts, freepers, moonbats and the general meanness on both sides might calm down if not go away.

Though I don't talk about it too much here, I have a number of Republican friends and grew up in Missouri and Oklahoma. I also believe that there are some sane Republicans out there, but most of them are even more appalled by the state of the Republican Party than Democrats are. When he was in office, I had no respect of former Oklahoma Congressman Mickey Edwards. I did meet and interview him a few times, and came to recognize that while I agreed with him on many issues, he was a thoughtful, educated and articulate person with respect of the Constitution.

Much of what he has written and said in interviews lately is incredibly insights. This interview today with Terry Gross on NPR is a reminder that yesterday's victory will be a failure if it is only about squashing the Republican Party. Edwards makes some great points about how the party has gotten so far off track, and though still deeply rooted in Republican values and that he could have lived with a President McCain, he voted for Obama without apology. Perhaps the best moment in the interview is about 2/3rds through when he says that any party that thinks Joe the Plumber is smarter than a Harvard graduate is clearly on the right source. I hope that the battered elephant listens to this Republican and takes some of what he takes to heart instead of thinking that they will rise only by embracing their darkest instincts. From Liddy Dole to Bible Spice Palin, that clearly didn't work, and we can hope they might get back to embracing the core principles of democracy.

The Speech

Putting Barney Smith before Smith-Barney was a great line that may be remembered more than Obama's speech itself which had challenges with the physical dynamics and what came before it. Rhetoric or not, it was uplifting to at least hear coherent sentences and the right rhetoric. Perhaps I expected it to have more heart or echo more of "I have a dream". But simply acknowledging that speech, daring to speak about abortion and gay marriage, and the journey of the messenger were enough for me.

What will most resonate in the morning will likely be Pamella Cash-Roper. Get rid of that dreadful Dr. Phil and give this woman a show. She's a good reminder of why we must march forward and the types of people this election is all about. Her humor in the face of adversity will stick with me for some time.

Wet in Denver

Am I the only one watching the DNC in Denver, albeit in and out? Nothing was off script, but I'm a sucker for thing such as the Ted Kennedy speech and even seeing a family values spouting Michelle Obama.

And the FOX News skybox being attacked by the sprinklers was the best off-script moment on day one.

They've Gone About As Fer As They Can Go

Who knew Code Pink and the Religious Right had so much in common?

This series of ads have been making the rounds on a lot of blogs this week, but it's worth glancing at all of them together.

I've spent a good number of years in Kansas City and would not equate it to "big city" extravagance, so the ad above debunking the city's former Mayor Kay Barnes' run for U.S. Representative is quite fascinating. Who knew there were such parties taking place in San Francisco? I was never invited. And is the trio we see dancing made up of the the types we'd expect to see at a Pacific Heights fundraiser? What is supposed to be so objectionable about them? Because they're not an all-white group? Because it's two girls and a guy? Or, most likely, that the blonde chick is strutting in her Fantastic Sam's 'do and 1986 Fashion Gal duds that folks in even St. Joseph would not be caught dead in?

I don't really know much about Kay Barnes, but she seems like a reasonable enough moderate and certainly more appealing than her opponent Sam Graves who looks like the fat, ugly spawn of John Ashcroft. Remember him? Though it's sad that in the above rebuttal, Kay felt she needed to pose in front of a fence in a hay field to prove she's a country gal not a city slicker.

All of which makes me wonder what both Kay and Mr. Graves would make of Shirley Golub. Actually, I think I saw her last summer at the crafters barn at the Lake of Ozark's Cornpone Festival.

Will, Grace & a Donkey

Like Jackie Broyles, I can't stand having bats or gay people getting in my face, so I've avoided talking about this whole gay marriage thang. So I thought I'd leave my thoughts to the always spot on Red State Update boys. And, remember, don't sue the Bible 'cause you don't want to take on a book full of Jews.

Scottish Women and Feline Showgirls

More than a century ago before we had the spectacle known as the Democratic primaries, there was real, tasteful entertainment right on the island of Manhattan. P.T. Barnum ran a glorious litle museum that educated and informed the public. It's back with the website called The Lost Museum that gives you a tour of its many treasures and an introduction to all of the glories of humanity and high-minded science. Barnum recognized that Scotland gave us more than cool bands, golf and fabulous weather. Besides being a nation of skirt-wearing men, it is appropriately the land of very tall women such as the statuesque Anna Swan on the left who stood at over seven feet and recreated important giantesses in history in elaborate tableaux. Sadly, tableaux, which Junk Thief still enacts at his famed candlelit suppers. His scenes of ancient Greece are always a hit while dinners enjoy burgers or lobster Newburg, have fallen on hard times like slide projectors and Word Perfect.

Barnum, of course, went on to start his famed circus which answered the call of stage hungry animals. This, sadly, was diminished later by the dreadful Cirque de Soleil that has put thousands of tigers, elephants and dancing bears on the unemployment line. Tatiana, the "murderess" tiger of San Francisco was a frustrated show girl who only longed to be back on the chorus line and not jailed in her lonely cell at the San Francisco Feline Jail.

Primary Eve

News Flash from Des Moines

Junk Thief is on his way back from Iowa (seen here at a student rally for Kucinich on the campus of Grinnell). It appears his candidate of choice is out of the equation in this state, so he'll be back in just the nick of time for the screening of The V.I.P.s at the Castro Theatre tonight.

If I Can Overlook Oprah, He May Have Just Won Me Over

Anything But Compromising

More than one of my blogger buds have made recent references to the 1970s sitcoms of Norman Lear, when nuclear family comedies gave way to far more reality based and political fare. Whenever I come across an episode of All in the Family, I get more than a little mushy. And there there's Maude. Indeed, Maude. And earlier this week I picked up the long overdue DVD of that series' inaugural 1972-73 season Much was as I remembered it, but there were many surprises looking back at me through the haze of a quarter of a century.

First is Beatrice Arthur herself. Recent TV and stage appearances and her much watered down character on the pleasant but banal Golden Girls make it a bit shocking to see the fire in her definitive role. Most recall the infamous abortion two-parter, but I was struck more by her cocktail fund raiser for an African American radical for which she had to scramble to find a token black person to attend. On one level it was satirizing the pretense of this check writing liberal, but in 2007 I can't help but think how we so desperately need more Walter and Maude Findlays able to write $1,000 checks at the drop of the hat for such causes.

Maude is remembered for her liberal, feminist stance, but we must remember that it was all taking place in the tree lined streets of the upper end of solidly middle class Long Island. In the premier episode, Maude emerges from her kitchen filled with orange drapes and copper-tone appliances with a hearty platter of meatloaf and mashed potatoes, albeit served to her fourth husband and divorced daughter.

What struck me even more was how very familiar this family was, not as the fictional Findlays but my own family, what I would call a mixed class family. My dad came from working class assimilated Jews who pulled parts in salvage yards and worked at Woolco or Jewel Osco. My uncle Chester would have defined Archie Bunker as a great guy who was straight shooter who had the good sense to vote for Nixon and bring a little bit of order back to the country.

Junk Thief and his grandmother, sometime in the Maude era.

My mother came from a long line of Quebec liberals that could have passed for the Findlays, a randy bunch of French Canadian Unitarians who could pass for Long Island Jewish liberals. Though by no means wealthy, they lived comfortably and were grounded in socially progressive politics. When these two sides of the family collided -- and for some insane reason it usually happened as a presidential election was looming on the horizon -- tensions flared and often exploded in tragi-comedic-operatic proportions.

One cousin, Bonna, almost exactly Bea Arthur's age on my mom's side could have passed for Maude's twin. I distinctly recall her holding an E.R.A. rally around 1975 in her suburban Kansas City home. I think she too mixed vodka zingers with tranquilizers and was launching into a South Pacific medley to drown out the voices of her dissenting Republican neighbors.

Or there was (frequently mentioned here) cousin Ginger's mother Louise who once held a fund-raiser during a speaking tour for Tom Hayden in his home town of Royal Oak. I can picture her in a caftan in her sunken living room with recessed lighting as she raised a martini glass and cackled, "You know, the S.D.S. is not communist at all but rooted in the true democratic ideals..."

Watching Maude, I could not help but think of these bright, grossly under appreciated women who also made their fair share of pot roasts and mashed potatoes, but refused to buy into the prescribed ideal of the suburban American mom. They may have gone through the motions of clipping recipes from Good Housekeeping and attending Weight Watchers, but their hearts were rooted in something just out of their reach hovering on the horizon.

Louise left this world more than a decade ago. I saw Bonna at a family reunion in Missouri in June, her hearing spotty, her arm wrapped around mine as she struggled to walk across the parking lot to the Olive Garden. In a weak but still persistent voice, she whispered "Sweetie, I just hope I make it to November 2008 to see us sweep those assholes out of D.C. I'm holding on for that. I will then know that my life had meaning."

Seeing Bea Arthur saunter forcefully across her sunken living room in a knee length vest as she welcomed a group of fellow liberals for an evening of cocktails at a fund raiser, I suddenly had to push pause as my eyes teared up and I thought the lump in my throat was going to choke me. It was so familiar yet so distant, those wonderful women on my mother's side of the family who guided and influenced me so many years ago also once had the same exact gait and audacity, still there but now moving along with a guarded, persistent pace driven only by the hope that they will be able to witness the end of eight years of perpetual, relentless night.

Unable to watch another second of Maude, I started sorting through old letters from that side of the family with such strong matriarchs and trying to remember the equally strong, progressive men. Were there any? My mother's father is a legend that merits another in depth post. But I was struck by a letter from my uncle (by marriage) Buddy, the fourth husband to my mother's sister (yes, that famous aunt).

At the time (1987), I dismissed him as a pretentious wannabe sauntering with glee over having scored a trophy bride. He came from a Philly working class background, but always tried to play it up as if he came from Grace Kelly's neighborhood as he spoke of his youth in, as he pronounced it, "Phill-Uh-DELPH-EE-YAH" He loved to entertain, and was actually a damned good cook, albeit in a house strewn with Mantovani albums and star burst clocks.

Sorting through cards and letters, I was struck by a letter he sent after a boyfriend and I came to have Thanksgiving dinner with him and my aunt for Thanksgiving dinner in 1987. At the time, we had a good chuckle over the note he sent and labeled him as "hopelessly provincial and pretentious. Today, it feels very different:

Dear Gregg and Brian,

Thank you for the wonderful fellowship we had this holiday. It is a gathering I know we both will always remember. Although your aunt and I have not chosen to live a lifestyle similar to yours, we want you to know that you two will always be very welcome in our home. I hope you will be willing to extend the same hospitality to us in your beautiful home some day.

We love you tremendously
Uncle Forest "Buddy" and Aunt Barbara

My aunt never spoke or wrote the word "love" in any communication to me during our five decades together on this earth, so I know every word was his. Putting it back in the envelope I'd not opened in two decades, I knew I had the strength to make it through the remaining episodes of Maude. However, I now hope there will be a way to tell Uncle Buddy everything he said to me and I wanted to say back to him before he left this world in 2003.

Uncle Buddy, respecting and supportive of
the lifestyle he did not chose to live.

JunkThief: Nixon Youth Organizer

Did anyone else catch last night's appearance by Hillary on Letterman? Junk Thief is so ancient that he can remember when Presidential candidates did radical things like give interviews with journalists instead of comics and people got their political information from Meet the Press not The Daily Show.

Granted, it's still more than a year away, but I am still pretty ambivalent on all Democrats and wish I were a little less cynical. But, as evidenced in this actually reasonable dialogue in the clip, I felt unusually comforted after watching it since it did feel like sitting and overhearing a sane conversation with a couple of friends, not an inarticulate madman. Sometimes I scold myself for wanting to vote for her just on principle, but then what's so wrong for voting for anyone on principle. I remember living in New York in 1992 when all the "Hillary for President" button were worn with irony without much hope of that ever being a viable reality. I wonder what those 1992 buttons fetch on eBay these days.

I've coached a number of women of Hillary's age and sensibilities on public appearances and media interviews, and I could smell plenty of technique as she tried to catch the right vibe of humor that obviously not her natural style but something she did extremely well and appropriately while ultimately steering things back for the appropriate amount of message.

Mid-way through when Letterman quizzed her on her youth as a Republican, I wondered if that question was her own plant (I suspect it was to show that anyone can jump the fence), it really started feeling familiar. She qualified that she came from a privileged white suburb in the Midwest and did not have her eyes open until making visits into inner city Chicago. Although from a long line of left leaning Democrats on my mother's side, guess who was a regional Youth for Nixon organizer in 1972 and made a tumultuous shift to the McGovern camp in the 11th hour? That's a whole different post at another time, but it certainly made the interview feel even more as if it were with some family member.

McCarthy/Eisenhower Era Rebels

One of the more encouraging aspects of going through the endless pile of items to sort from my family estate, is coming across little items like this one. It is evidence that although my mother's parents lived in the Midwest they were liberals bordering on leftists with an always mildly ribald sense of humor. Now I know which gene pool I got that from.