As a long-time fan of the gypsy jazz made popular by theHot Club de France, I am always pleased to find new (and not-so-new) groups playing in the swing jazz style of 1930s and 1940s Paris. One such group is the Avalon Jazz Band. If you don’t know their work let’s use this Saturday Soundtrack as an introduction.
The Avalon Jazz Band is fronted by Tatiana Eva-Marie, a Swiss-born and Brooklyn-based singer who grew up in an eclectic musical family and used the variety of musical styles she heard as a child to move toward swing jazz. She has a wonderful voice and captures the spirit of the Zazous, the “swing kids” of Paris, albeit with an American twist. An interviewer for the New School said she is “what many people would call a ‘triple threat.’ She’s brilliant, beautiful, and talented. She’s basically a Swiss fairy princess, with soul.”
To whet your appetite, let’s begin with Fit as a Fiddle followed by Ah, dis! Ah, bonjour!, written by French poet and songwriter Charles Trenet in 1939.
Besides the vocals of Eva-Marie, another key element of the Avalon Jazz Band sound is the violin, played in most of these recordings by co-founder Adrien Chevalier.
“The musical style presented by Avalon Jazz Band is inspired by the sort of jazz played in Paris in the 1930s and 40s, especially by the Hot Club de France (founded by guitarist Django Reinhardt and violinistStéphane Grappelli) whose repertoire consisted of original music and jazz standards. This French style of hot jazz then became what we now know as “Gypsy jazz” or “Jazz Manouche”, with its technical bravadoes and virtuoso skills, embodied by the quick fingers of violinist Adrien Chevalier. The delicate voice and swing phrasing of Tatiana Eva-Marie bring the zazou element to the mix: an ingenuous and mischievous joie-de-vivre, which she incarnates to perfection.“
Avalon Jazz Band official website
To give you a sense of the antecedents, here are Reinhardt and Grappelli playing The Sheik of Araby.
I became especially interested in jazz played on acoustic stringed instruments in the 1970s when David Grisman, introducing his new style of bluegrass and jazz-infused Dawg Music, credited the Hot Club as one of his major influences. A remarkable album from this period is 1981’s Stephane Grappelli/David Grisman Live, from which I’ve posted the twin-violin version of Tiger Rag — the first song played by the Hot Club of France — with Grappelli and a young Mark O’Connor.
We are in a period of time where we can use some happiness. As Eva-Marie explains in this delightful interview, that’s why this music was created in the first place and why it has such resonance today.
Runnin’ Wild is an especially good example of the uplifting spirit the band’s music inspires. Make sure you check out the break by the guy on the washboard rhythm section at the 1:35 mark.
Many listeners will also enjoy the band’s take on the Cole Porter classic I Love Paris.
“Ménilmontant” was written by Trenet in 1938 as a tribute to the famous Parisian neighborhood. Eva-Marie’s band mates playing the hot solos are Kate Dunphy on the accordion, violinist Adrien Chevalier, Koran Agan on the guitar, and Eduardo Belo on the bass.
And to send you off, enjoy some Sunshine and get those cobwebs out of your head!
This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
I considered the special nature of bifocals — seeing things up close and as part of a pattern — as I was reading historian Ed Ayers most recent essay in Medium. In the tale of his life’s scholarship, I began to see similar relationships between being grounded in place and yet being global in scope beyond the study of history. As we look and work locally, it is easy to get caught up in the minutia and forget the larger picture. There is also the temptation to see patterns in data and global actions and lose sight of the connections to the intimate, the local. We can, however, be guided by the saying, “Think globally, act locally.” As Ed suggests, we have to use our bifocals and try to see — and work within — both. Let’s take a look at how this plays out in this week’s articles.
“I’ve come to the inconvenient conclusion that we need to see history with bifocals — up close and as part of a pattern.
Just as all history is local, so is all history regional, national, and international. Every county is unique, but every county is part of a pattern. It’s the interplay between those two truths that make the most use of local research, archives, and passion. And it’s the interplay among those patterns that we can now see in new and exciting ways.
Local history, then, serves us best when it is woven into the larger patterns of history.
Ed takes the reader through his evolution as a historian and speaks eloquently about how history is grounded in place. “I was quite interested in cultural history,” he writes, “but couldn’t abandon the idea that history is best explained in the lives of people confronting challenges in real time and real place.”
And the essential tools for this work? Empathy and imagination.
When the founder of the iconic San Francisco book store City Lights Books died recently at age 101, it reminds us that there was a real person, grounded in place, who had impacts across the world. Gabe Meline of station KQED, curated a series of photos from the impromptu vigil that was held in honor of beat poet, book store owner, and defender of the First Amendment Lawrence Ferlinghetti. As if to prove the point about connecting local people with large patterns and effects, I came across PHOTOS: Lawrence Ferlinghetti Sidewalk Memorial at City Lights Books while reading the Chapter 16 newsletter from the Tennessee Humanities Foundation. The editor wrote that she included this story because as “a young bookish person growing up in Tennessee, City Lights was a sort of mythical place to me — in my mind, an extraordinary place where the bookish, the radical, and the weird were welcome.”
These next articles show both the local detail and the national pattern in the fight over voting rights, and why Republicans — in places where they are beginning to lose statewide elections to Democrats — are working overtime to suppress votes from citizens they don’t want to vote in local, state, and national elections.
First the local. Steve Inskeep from National Public Radio examines cases in Georgia and Arizona, among others, in the story Why Republicans Are Moving To Fix Elections That Weren’t Broken. The short answer is, they don’t like the outcome. Rather than change their policies to fall in line with what’s popular with the majority of their citizens, they work to keep those who don’t look and think like them from voting.
In Why We Should Rethink Voting Rights from the Ground Up, Amel Ahmed argues in the Washington Monthly that we should push to think of voting as an affirmative right. Taking the great work of Stacey Abrams in Georgia (there’s that local again) as an example, Ahmed asserts that “it is time to shift the frame. While the prevention of discrimination is worthy and noble, it cannot limit our political imagination, especially with so many increasing challenges to voting access by those claiming irregularities and fraud. Right now, our best defense is a more robust offense.”
And if you want to go down a very deep rabbit hole on this question, check out the Brennan Center for Justice‘s Annotated Guide to the For the People Act of 2021 which is the Democratic majority’s national response to these local and statewide challenges to voting rights.
“Cynicism is, among other things, a habit of disordered vision: It looks at friends and sees foes. It looks at truth and sees deceit. Cynicism, at scale, makes democracy’s most basic demand—seeing one another as we are—impossible. And America, at the moment, is saturated with it. Cynicism makes daily appearances on Fox (and on Newsmax, and on One America News Network). It was the molten core of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the only real message Rush Limbaugh had to give. It lurks in the language of QAnon. It lives in the Big Lie. It seethed in the violence of the Capitol insurrection. It has made suspicion an easy sell. “From falsehood, anything follows,” posits a law of classical logic. It is called the principle of explosion.“
Cynicism is easy. Hope is hard. Yet as Teri Kanefield recently wrote on her blog, everyone has to Hold on to Your Ideals to save democracy. Think globally. Work very hard locally.
And to end on the brightest of notes about someone who is very much grounded in a local place but who is loved worldwide, here is a story of our national treasure getting her COVID vaccine in Dolly Parton gets Moderna coronavirus vaccine.
“On Tuesday, it was Parton’s turn, and she had a message for others.
“I just want to say to all of you cowards out there, don’t be such a chicken squat. Get out there and get your shot,” the 75-year-old said in the video.“
How can you not love this woman? She acts local yet thinks global.
As the harshness of winter is moving into the rearview mirror, we look ahead not only to spring but with newfound optimism toward the end of a pandemic.
It strikes me as a good time to revisit the bucket list.
At its core, a bucket list is an inventory of things to do before you die (or “kick the bucket”). The key is that your list should be things that you want to accomplish and would love to do. Basically that’s all there is to it.*
Sometime in the 1990s when I was in my late 30s I put together my first bucket list. The approach of “big” birthdays tend to have that effect on people. At the time our family didn’t have a lot of money, but we did have access each summer to a wonderful house on Island Creek off the Pawtuxet River in Southern Maryland. During those two weeks each year, the four of us would read, trap crabs, spend time roaming the yard with the dog, ride our bikes, catch up on sleep, play games of croquet, and — most importantly for this topic — talk about our goals for the year ahead.
That last item became a staple of our dinner conversations while at the river. Each year, as one example, we listed all the things we wanted to do to make our home more comfortable. Some ten years later we looked back at that list and we’d checked off every single item. These two weeks were like a mini-sabbatical for our family, where we stepped off the treadmill to rest and think. We each treasure those times in our memories.
One year I started a personal bucket list while at the river house.
Like many of these creations it was heavy on travel: visit the United Kingdom, travel to Italy, make it to Asia (check, check, and check.)
There were experiential items: try my hand at fly fishing in a western mountain stream (check).
Bucket lists are a work in progress. Don’t try and capture everything all at once. Some begin with very personal items that you are giving yourself permission to pursue. Some morph into lists of ways to help others and make a difference. The point is that expectations and situations will change. Take 2020, for instance.
We’re coming out of a year when it may have been hard to think about the future, much less items on a bucket list. We’ve found ourselves in lockdown with the heavy weight of the impacts of a pandemic. We have faced challenges — personal and as a community — with health concerns, political unrest, and social justice issues. While I was able to complete one bucket list project in writing thank you notes to the people who have shaped my life, overall I found it hard to focus on a life list in the midst of so much turmoil and tragedy. Perhaps you share a similar experience of the year we’ve just navigated.
It was a recent conversation with a friend and former colleague that inspired me to think that the time was right to reinvigorate my list. We were discussing visits to baseball ballparks (one of my longtime goals) and he mentioned friends that had visited every presidential home, every congressional district in the U.S. (he is a lobbyist), and even presidential gravesites. I know someone who has visited every state capitol. As we finished, I was invigorated with the idea of jumping back into my personal list.
Bucket lists give us permission and are optimistic, by nature. I like the idea of turning from cynicism to optimism this year as we’ve got way too much of the former in the world right now. Cynicism is easy, while hope is risky and hard. A bucket list says, “I’m going to be out in the world, I’m going to make a difference, and I’m going to love what I’m doing.” A bucket list should include things you can do in an afternoon and things that will take the rest of your life.
So yes, I’m going to start planning to make trips to knock off the two remaining states I need to visit to get to all 50 — Nevada and Alaska, here I come! — and to finish out the last eight baseball stadiums I need to get through that list (anyone want to catch a game?). I’m going to look through my list to see what I might be able to do in a day, what is going to take time, and what’s missing that I want to add.
I love hearing about items on a bucket list, so feel free to write about yours in the comments or send me an email. Perhaps we can support each other in doing the risky, hard, and ultimately oh-so-satisfying work of hope.
More to come…
DJB
*Some people hate the term “bucket list” because it has the element of rushing to beat death. Sebastian Terry is one of those people. He talks about doing things for purpose, growth, and connection. That’s fine. You can check out his Tedx talk entitled 100 Things – What’s on Your List? to get his point of view. It is your list…do with it what you wish.
Time for a little classic bluegrass on the Saturday Soundtrack, brought to you today by the Earls of Leicester.* This wonderful tribute band, formed by Jerry Douglas in 2013 with five of his friends who love the music of Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, plays the classic music of the Foggy Mountain Boys pretty much straight up and with a real affection for these pioneers of bluegrass.
I used to listen to Flatt and Scruggs in the mornings on WSM radio as we were getting ready to go to school. So to kick off this Soundtrack, let’s go back to my younger days and listen to the song that was written for their sponsor of those shows, the Martha White Theme.
When the Earls of Leicester formed in 2013, their mission was ambitious but exact: to preserve and promote the legacy of bluegrass legends Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs, in hopes of reviving the duo’s music for longtime admirers and introducing a new generation to their genre-defining sound. Within a year of releasing their self-titled debut, the Nashville-based six-piece far surpassed their own expectations, winning a Grammy Award for Best Bluegrass Album and earning six awards from the International Bluegrass Music Association. Now, with their first live album, Earls of Leicester offer up a selection of songs that fully capture the pure joy and supreme musicianship that propel their every performance.
Earls of Leicester | Official Site
A classic Flatt and Scruggs tune is Roll in my Sweet Baby’s Arms. Even singing in a cave, the Earls of Leicester do a great job.
This next song, as Douglas explains in the intro, was famously banned by the Grand Ole Opry after Flatt and Scruggs played it one Saturday evening.
The Train that Carried My Girl From Town and Dim Lights, Thick Smoke are classics of the bluegrass canon.
Several of these videos are from the Earls of Leicester Live album from 2019.
Recorded over two nights at Nashville’s CMA Theater, The Earls of Leicester Live at The CMA Theater in The Country Music Hall of Fame bears a boundless vitality that makes songs from over a half-century ago feel irresistibly fresh. Despite the band’s painstaking precision in recreating the catalog of Flatt and Scruggs’s Foggy Mountain Boys, the album unfolds with an easy warmth that honors the essence of traditional bluegrass, which Douglas describes as “music that was meant to be played on back porches.” Earls of Leicester Live is also accompanied by a DVD that shows the complete splendor of their live set: the throwback attire, the off-the-cuff but illuminating between-song banter, the relentless hotfooting required of their stage setup. “Our goal is to go out and reacquaint everybody with the music of Flatt and Scruggs just the way they did it, which means fewer microphones and a good amount of choreography,” says Douglas. “We’re trying to put as much as we can into the music before it even reaches the speakers.”
Earls of Leicester | Official Site
We’ll end up with a sizzling version of White House Blues. Let’s hear McKinley holler one more time!
Enjoy!
More to come… DJB
*Check out the comments if you are puzzled by the name.
This Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
Americans need to rethink taxes and the public good if we are to reverse our income inequality and overcome the lack of fairness that games our system for those with money. Writing in The Ink,Anand Giridharadas has a conversation with Danish businessman and founder of Human Act Djaffar Shalchi about why he wants to make rich people like himself pay more in taxes. In The American dream is now in Denmark, Giridharadas and Shalchi make the case that people in Denmark are doing better by being fairer.
“If we millionaires are going to be “for humanity,” we have got to go beyond philanthropy and recognize that we need to be taxed. No matter how generous and smart we think we are in our private giving, unless we shift from trying to minimize our taxes to advocating to be taxed more, we are not living up to being “for humanity.” Are most millionaires there yet? No. I do feel a shift is starting, though. Please keep encouraging us — and keep pressuring us, too.“
Of course, most rich people in America believe that if we adopted policies like those in Denmark, then capitalism would die. The unquestioned goodness of capitalism is just another false American myth.
“In real life, contrary to the Hollywood tale, kids are more likely to achieve the American dream in Denmark than in America. America is not a beacon to the world on how to run an economy. Scandinavia has a much more impressive economic record than the US and is much more innovative. Sorry, my American friends — we’re not just fairer than you. We’re doing better by being so.“
“Many people living in the U.S. don’t realize how truly undemocratic our current system of government is. By my calculation, 5.6% of the people can hold the entire government hostage, preventing any substantive legislation from passing.
This isn’t my opinion: it’s simply math. What’s more, it’s completely legal, made possible by the U.S. Senate–and made worse by its ridiculous filibuster rule.“
When monied interest can control our government by controlling such a small percentage of the population, then they have no incentive to pay more taxes or treat people more fairly.
Committee assignments are normally a blessing for new House members. But some of today’s newer members, like freshmen Republican representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison Cawthorn, seem to be more interested in punditry than policy.
Governing isn’t the point. “Owning the libs” is what they live for (and getting rich in the process). Is there any surprise that we have one party that simply isn’t interested in governing or representative government? Speaking of which…
John Stoehr in The Editorial Board says it is time to Stop calling the GOP ‘conservative.’ Even the the late Rush Limbaugh said that if conservatism animated the Republican Party, there would be no President Donald Trump.
“Fascism is all-American. It’s native-born. And it describes the politics of the Republican Party more accurately than “conservatism” does. Sure, there are conservatives in the GOP (Mitt Romney comes to mind). There are conservative think-tanks, conservative policies, conservative legal theorists. But none of that captures the character of today’s Republican Party, which combines, in its never-ending search for enemies to punish, the elements of sadism and masochism.“
As I’ve noted before, Chief Justice John Roberts has long had it in for the protection of the expansion of voting rights that helped end the Jim Crow era. In Vox, senior correspondent Ian Millhiser writes Supreme Court: Two cases could destroy the Voting Rights Act. It may happen, but Congress has the power to approve an updated act and ensure the safety of our elections no matter what John Roberts and his ilk on the Supreme Court do. Fighting for democracy is hard, never ending, and worth the effort.
We will end with two music-theme pieces. The New York Times featured an article by Jennifer Moore entitled In the Ozarks, the Pandemic Threatens a Fragile Musical Tradition. “The older fiddlers and rhythm guitar players don’t rely on sheet music, so their weekly jam sessions — now on hiatus — are critical to passing their technique to the next generation.”
Gaps and distance. Two words with various meanings, but both can point to breaks, differences, and separation. A divide between places on a map, yes; but also the gulf we find between people.
It was the unfolding disaster we watched in horror last week that took my mind from the wide physical distances in Texas to the emotional and political distances that led to, and ultimately compounded, the state’s devastation.
Emotional and political gaps are easier to manage if we maintain a safe psychological and physical distance from those we dislike or who are in pain. Safe, I should say, for the one doing the distancing, but not for the individuals being left behind.
Several years ago I attended a Sunday service in London at St. Martin in the Fields. It was September, and the Vicar, the Rev. Dr. Sam Wells, had written a short meditation for the bulletin entitled From a Distance.
In Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” set during the Spanish Civil War, a republican guerilla spots a nationalist cavalryman from a distance and kills him. He raids the man’s purse, and inside finds a photograph of the soldier’s wife, intimate letters, and items of intense personal faith. Suddenly the cold act of war is revealed for what it was, and a feeling of revulsion creeps over the reader. This is no longer an ideological struggle; it is the ghastly abrupt shattering of a beautiful set of relationships and loves.
I’m writing this on 11 September: a momentous day. Rowan Williams described a suicide bomber as someone who can only see from a distance. All violence requires distance; it depends on not seeing, not hearing, not sensing certain things.
When we build emotional and psychological gaps between ourselves and others we make decisions that run the gamut from tone deaf and stupid (e.g., Cruz, Ted) to unspeakable tragedies such as September 11th that destroy the lives of our fellow travelers on earth. When we operate from an emotional distance, all those who don’t think like us are seen as fair game for everything from mockery to scorn. And when we turn over our brains and our principles to those in the media who are paid big money to divide us, their mockery and scorn becomes ours.
Sam Wells ended his meditation with thoughts on the life of his parish. He called it “life close up,” and in his religious worldview he suggests that keeping the needs of others close imitates the life of God, “close up and giving full attention to the world’s intimate detail.”
So much of the suffering we have seen in Texas is a result of political decisions to build a gap between those in power and those who do not share the same ideological beliefs and are perceived as outside the tribe. Those decisions don’t allow for a “life close up.” As Ryan Cooper wrote in The Week, the Republican party that has controlled all three branches of government in Texas for two decades is a reflection of the national party, one “in which catering to the welfare of one’s constituents, or indeed any kind of substantive political agenda, has been supplanted by propaganda, culture war grievance, and media theatrics.” Speaking specifically of Ted Cruz, he notes that leaving his freezing constituents to fend for themselves in Texas while he fled for the warmth of Cancun was emblematic of the party’s mode of governance. “Neither he nor anybody else in a leadership position in the party knows or cares about how to build a reliable power grid. They just want to get rich owning the libs.”
As one travels the Tube and other forms of transportation in the United Kingdom, “mind the gap” signs and announcements are everywhere. They serve as a reminder to be careful in crossing the space between the edge of the train and the platform. But they can also serve as a metaphorical reminder to carefully tend to the distances we find — and sometimes erect — between ourselves and others, working to keep them as small as possible. Working to maintain a human touch. Sam Wells, in closing his meditation, called on his community to:
“…renew our commitment in loving attention to details that matter. And so let us defy those who harden their hearts to bring about savage destruction through seeing merely from a distance.
One of this generation’s most accomplished and yet under-recognized acoustic guitarists is Christie Lenée. But the recognition part is changing. Last year, Guitar Player magazine featured her work, and they opened the article with the following observation: “Watching Christie Lenée perform her solo acoustic act is like seeing a firecracker execute a high-wire circus routine while doing flips and juggling flaming bowling pins.” Pretty impressive! Lenée was also recognized as the Acoustic Guitarist of the Year in 2019 by Music Radar Magazine in the UK, so her international reputation is growing as well.
I first heard Lenée in an abbreviated set in 2014, and her combination of technique, passion, and musicianship blew me away. Now some six years later, I continue to be amazed, and feature her music this week in Saturday Soundtrack.
Her website notes that she is “often described as ‘Michael Hedges meets Joni Mitchell and Dave Matthews,’ integrating melodic pop lyricism with catchy hooks and percussive, harmonic textures.” That’s a pretty good description, but it doesn’t really give one a sense of the range and symphonic nature of the sound coming from her guitar. To jump into that sound, here she is in a live 2016 show from Nashville playing Breath of Spring.
In this next musical collaboration, Lenée joins up with the incomparable Tommy Emmanuel to play Landslide, the Stevie Nicks song made famous by Fleetwood Mac. This 2017 version is live from the Songbirds Guitar Museum, in Chattanooga. By the fall of 2019, Lenée was opening for Emmanuel on a European tour. Landslide is followed by another 2017 video of Lenée performing the tune Dance of the Wolves.
Lenée mentioned in the Guitar Player interview that she played the same instrumental tune, Song for Michael Pukac, for her international guitar championship wins in 2017 and 2019. She called it her most versatile piece, as it tells a story through different themes and variations. Here’s a beautiful version of the tune.
Lenée’s guitar work is often compared to Michael Hedges, the trailblazing acoustic guitarist who pioneered percussive finger style guitar. If you want to go deep down this path, then I recommend this hour-long WoodSongs concert from 2020 where Lenée joins Andy McKee in a celebration of Hedges’ work. McKee’s solo work begins at the 8:45 mark and Lenée’s begins around the 19:00 mark. They trade off throughout the hour. At the 45 minute mark, Lenée picks up a “baby 12-string” and a hammer…and, well you should just watch!
Her website notes that during the pandemic, “Christie is currently working on a solo album in addition to collaborative tracks with artists such as Tommy Emmanuel, Phil Keaggy and Laurence Juber.” Pretty good company there! In July 2020 she was also featured on the Grammy Museum’s virtual program streaming from Los Angeles, along with the 4-page article in Guitar Player Magazine referenced above.
Possibilities is a new piece for 2020. I find it filled with joy and happiness, which we can all use in the middle of our global pandemic.
There is so much here to admire. Sit back and enjoy!
More to come… DJB
Image of Christie Lenée (credit: Christie Lenée | Official Website)
President Kennedy’s famous challenge to go to the moon and return safely within the decade has always been seen as the type of dream that Americans dreamed: big, but also focused on the common good. We should do these things, Kennedy said, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard…and because they are worth winning.” It strikes me that as we consider major obstacles facing an America that seems to have lost its way in the 21st century — like anti-democratic forces in one of our major political parties, systemic racism, and anti-science deniers around climate change and pandemics — we should again dream big as Americans do, and tackle those challenges with renewed vigor because they are hard and because they are worth winning.
This Weekly Readerfeatures links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.
The forces that use extreme gerrymandering, voter suppression, racism, and misinformation to keep the majority from exercising power have fought a decades-long battle to silence democracy. As a result, many had given up on the work to change our politics. But the founder and the CEO of Fair Fight Action, Stacey Abrams and Lauren Groh-Wargo respectively, provide the details in the New York Times of how they turned Georgia into a competitive state based on democratic principles, dreams, and good, old-fashioned hard work. In How to Turn Your Red State Blue, they make the case that Georgia, Virginia, and Arizona are leaders in what can happen across the Sun Belt.
Our mission was clear: organize people, help realize gains in their lives, win local races to build statewide competitiveness and hold power accountable.
But the challenge was how to do that in a state where many allies had retreated into glum predictions of defeat, where our opponents reveled in shellacking Democrats at the polls and in the Statehouse.…
Georgians deserved better, so we devised and began executing a 10-year plan to transform Georgia into a battleground state….Years of planning, testing, innovating, sustained investment and organizing yielded the record-breaking results we knew they could and should.“
They did it because it was hard and because it was worth winning.
The task ahead, then, is to unwind this idea of a fixed quantity of prosperity and replace it with what I’ve come to call Solidarity Dividends: gains available to everyone when they unite across racial lines, in the form of higher wages, cleaner air and better-funded schools.
Hard work worth doing because it is worth winning this battle.
“What has sent Texas reeling is not an engineering problem, nor is it the frozen wind turbines blamed by prominent Republicans. It is a financial structure for power generation that offers no incentives to power plant operators to prepare for winter. In the name of deregulation and free markets, critics say, Texas has created an electric grid that puts an emphasis on cheap prices over reliable service.
It’s a “Wild West market design based only on short-run prices,” said Matt Breidert, a portfolio manager at a firm called TortoiseEcofin.“
Will Englund, The Washington Post
The power grid in Texas is working exactly as the utilities planned: to maximize profits. I know you are shocked. Telling the truth in the midst of an avalanche of lies is hard work, but it is worth doing because it is worth winning.
Abby Lee Hood of Nashville has a similar take as Abrams, Groh-Wargo, and McGhee on the fights to bring together the communities that the forces on the right have worked so hard to drive apart. You may be surprised to learn The Real Meaning of Hillbilly from Hood’s article in the New York Times but I wasn’t. I once worked on a project to make sure that Blair Mountain’s labor history was protected, so I was glad to see Hood speak of that history to a national audience.
“I wish I had realized that my redneck roots didn’t contradict the other parts of myself as much as I was raised to believe. The conservative community I felt alienated from had forgotten its progressive roots. The fact is, in the early 1900s rednecks and hillbillies weren’t backward; they were ahead of the times….
When I interviewed Mr. Keeney, author of “The Road to Blair Mountain,” he told me rednecks need “identity reclamation.” He’s right. Leftists owe it to ourselves to pick up a history book and counter the propaganda against unionization and organizing.
“Redneck” meant something very different to those miners than what we think of today. They were part of the resistance. Reclaiming forgotten histories is work worth doing because it is really hard.
Speaking of cultural movements and histories that may surprise you…I’m guessing that you didn’t know that there was a Bluegrass Pride group. Well, I’m here to tell you that it not only exists, but that their members play great music and they vote! Here’s Molly Tuttle who has been featured on Saturday Soundtrack, singing a bluegrass (sort of) version of the Rolling Stones song She’s A Rainbow which was included in the BGP 2020 Favorites. Getting all parts of the bluegrass world to support rights for the LGBTQ community may be the definition of hard work, but it is work worth doing.
“My father was the general director of the Washington Opera for 16 years. Every year, on opening night, the orchestra, under his instructions, would play the national anthem before the opera began. There was no fanfare, no color guard, no one directing people to “stand and honor America.” The conductor would walk into the orchestra pit, raise his baton and the orchestra would play.
My memories of those nights are vivid because it always seemed to me that the entire audience leaped to its feet. The feeling was, “This is a special, once-a-year occasion.”
And it was.“
Let’s keep up the fight against false patriotism. Because it is work worth doing.
(NOTE: Charles Ray wrote a blog post about Congressman Jamie Raskin’s father that led me to repost the life lessons here on More to Come. I encourage you to read Ray’s post, as well as Jamie Raskin’s eulogy for his father, Marcus Raskin, which is the source for these lessons.)
We generally see our Congressman, Jamie Raskin, each year at the Takoma Park July 4th parade. We love that parade as one of the best expressions of American values one can find in a region where too many in power have forgotten what the country stands for. Somewhere during the parade, Raskin and a crowd of young supporters will show up, and it is like a windstorm sweeps through the street. Raskin works the crowd like no one else can, shaking every hand he can reach and waving to the ones he cannot touch. In my post about 2019’s parade, I likened him to James Brown when I used the “hardest working man in politics” sobriquet.
Raskin is in the news these days because of his stellar work to speak truth to power in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump. Many people wonder why he was quoting his father in the opening remarks. If you are like me and didn’t know very much about the life and work of Marcus Raskin, I encourage you to read his son’s eulogy, given at Sixth and I Synagogue in Washington when his father passed away at age 83 in 2017.
The eulogy is entitled Lessons I Learned from My Father, and I’ll quote those lessons in the hope that you’ll read the entire eulogy and understand a little bit more about father and son, and the remarkable moral compass that is at the heart of their work.
Lesson One: My father taught us that, when a situation seems hopeless, then you are the hope. When everything looks dark, you must be the light.
Lesson Two: Spoil children with love and wisdom, not with things.
Lesson Three: Whatever the background noise, follow the music in your head and the dreams in your heart.
Lesson Four: Go to school to teach as well as to learn and never let your schooling interfere with your education.
Lesson Five: Bring your full intelligence and ethics to work every day and if you can’t, you may need to find a new job.
Lesson Six: Hate war and work as citizens for peace and justice.
Lesson Seven: Act pragmatically, not in the degraded sense of doing what powerful people want you to do, but in the Deweyean sense of promoting experiments to advance the ideals of freedom and the common good.
Lesson Eight: Never give up on anyone, never hate anyone, and act with love whenever you can.
Lesson Nine: No good act in life is ever wasted.
Wonderful lessons for living a meaningful and purpose-filled life.
Presidents Day is a good time to reflect on the office of the presidency and our expectations for the people who have been elected to lead our nation. There is much to consider on this day, coming as it does less than 48 hours after a strong bipartisan majority in the Senate voted to convict Donald Trump during his second impeachment trial but fell ten votes short of the required two-thirds threshold.
Taking the long view, more than 1,000 historians and constitutional scholars had urged conviction so that “No future president should be tempted by the example of his defiance going unpunished.” In considering the flawed individuals who will always hold this position, presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky writes this weekend on the “incredible power we entrust to imperfect hands.”
From a preservation viewpoint, I have thought about the places that shaped our presidents. Places that, as presidential historian Michael Beschloss has said, give us the opportunity to “walk through autobiography.” * What do they suggest about the characteristics needed to faithfully execute the Office of President, and to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States?
My visits to presidential homes began as a young child on family vacations. It was one of those trips — a car ride through the heartland, working our way north from Tennessee to Chicago — that made the longest-lasting impression.
I saw things on that trip I’d never seen before. Lush, impenetrable fields of corn planted right up to the roadside of those pre-interstate highways convinced me that we were caught in a maze where I had to count on my parents’ map-reading skills to escape. Two places from that trip shaped me forever: Wrigley Field, where I saw my first major league baseball game and became a fan for life; and the Lincoln Home in Springfield, a historic site that intrigued my young nine-year-old mind in ways I didn’t fully understand for years.
Abraham Lincoln’s home — the only one he ever owned — was a place of autobiography. What I remember most about that house was how very ordinary it was.
Oh, it was well decorated for the period, exuding a prosperous, middle-class aura. The National Park Service operation spoke to its importance in shaping the president who would save the nation. But I had seen much grander homes when visiting my grandparents in Franklin and Nashville. Two-story Greek Revival-style townhomes were a dime a dozen in communities throughout the mid-South in the 1960s.
We were there during the centennial celebration of the Civil War and the place was packed. More than fifty years later it remains a site that attracts visitors who very much go out of their way to see how such an extraordinary individual arose from such ordinary surroundings. Springfield is where we see Lincoln as a man of the West, who came up through self-education and hard work to rise to the pinnacle of power at a time of extraordinary crisis. And it was something from this place — for Lincoln was definitely of Springfield — that gave him the strength and character to lead a nation.
It took another president from Illinois to drive home the point about the connections between ordinary places and extraordinary people.
President Barack Obama was speaking in Chicago at the dedication of Pullman as a National Monument. After some background on the site’s role in helping build an African American middle class, President Obama spoke to the large number of students in attendance about why this place in the heart of their community was being designated a national monument:
“It’s also understanding that places that look ordinary are nothing but extraordinary. The places where you live are extraordinary, which means you can be extraordinary.”
Speaking directly to the school children, the president continued.
“You can make something happen, the same way these workers here at Pullman made something happen….no matter who you are, you stand on the shoulders of giants. You stand on the site of great historic movements. And that means you can initiate great historic movements by your own actions.”
Not all our great presidents came from humble surroundings, but all were shaped by place. Of the three who consistently rank at the top of historians’ lists of greatest U.S. presidents, Franklin Roosevelt quickly comes to mind as a scion of wealth who was profoundly shaped during his time of treatment for polio at Warm Springs, Georgia.
George Washington’s family had land and held slaves, but were not necessarily wealthy by 18th century standards. Yet as historian Andrea Wulf has shown, at Mount Vernon Washington connected to that land and developed a garden that spoke to the vibrancy of the American landscape and experiment in self-government.
Gardens at Mount Vernon (Image by Nayuta from Pixabay)
Lincoln, in sharp contrast to those two, was born into poverty and was raised in very ordinary circumstances, but he was shaped by communities in Kentucky, Indiana, and then in Illinois, first in New Salem and ultimately in Springfield.
Washington’s place in the firmament of American presidents will always be secure. A singular figure in the American revolution, he was the “indispensable man” as described by historian James Thomas Flexner. More than any other, he helped shape some of the norms of our national government.
Following the winning of independence, Lincoln and Roosevelt faced the two greatest crises in our nation’s history. They came from very different worlds, but they shared the trait of empathythat grew out of place; a trait that put them in touch with the needs of the ordinary people and gave them the extraordinary strength and courage to address whatever life threw at them. Roosevelt, after being stricken with polio, came to understand hardship in a visceral way. Lincoln’s empathy is well documented, as in his response to an issue that contrasts starkly with the Republican response to the recent insurrection:
“Must I shoot a simple-minded soldier boy who deserts, while I must not touch a hair of a wily agitator who induces him to desert? I think in such a case to silence the agitator and save the boy is not only constitutional, but withal, a great mercy.”
President Joe Biden comes from ordinary places — Scranton and Wilmington — and grew up around ordinary people. He did not attend elite colleges. While in the Senate, he rode an Amtrak train home each night from Washington to Delaware to be able to see his children. He suffered horrible personal losses when his first wife and 13-month-old daughter were killed in a tragic car wreck in 1972, and again much later when his son died at the age of 46 of brain cancer. A stutterer when he was young, Biden learned how to deal with bullies and how to be empathetic to others who struggled.
Now as president, Biden faces cascading crises the likes of which we haven’t seen since FDR’s time: a badly managed national response to a worldwide pandemic, the resulting economic fallout, the rise of home-grown white supremacist terrorism, economic and racial inequality, the hollowing out of government for private gain, and an opposing political party that has just demonstrated that a majority of its national leaders are willing to sacrifice our democracy for personal power. Any one of these crises would test the mettle of normal presidents.
We don’t know how Biden will respond, but there are early indications that we have a chance, once again, to see what extraordinary things can come from ordinary places and ordinary people. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris — the daughter of immigrants and the first woman and first person of color to serve as Vice President — cannot do this alone. But as history has shown again and again, we have the chance to count on ordinary citizens in all walks of life — not just our leaders — to step forward to do the extraordinary work necessary to build a more perfect union.
* I did a quick count, and I have visited the homes of 16 of the nation’s 46 presidents, and the number goes over 25 when you toss in other sites related to our nation’s chief executives. Not exactly a bucket list item (like my MLB stadiums quest) but a decent number for an American citizen.
MORE TO COME... 