History – U.S. – 21st Century – Page 3 – education and deconstruction.com

Blinded By the Right

The Book of the Week is “Blinded By the Right, The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative” by David Brock, published in 2002.

Born in 1962 in Jersey City, New Jersey, the author was raised Catholic. His mother– who was embarrassed that he and his younger sister were adopted– forced them to behave dishonestly to keep that secret.

As is well known in the United States, people have been displaying childish fury at emotionally-charged political issues, it seems like, forever. In connection therewith, the author recounted an incident at his liberal arts college, the University of California at Berkeley in the autumn of 1982.

As a believer of Republican rhetoric, he attended an event featuring a speech by United Nations ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick. The United States was interfering with the politics of El Salvador. In protest, hecklers who had poor impulse control threw blood at the podium and their screaming drowned out the speaker. Security lifted nary a finger to dispel such rudeness. The takeaway was that the hecklers had more of a right to free speech than did the speaker whose views they opposed.

The author wrote that upon realizing his homosexuality, he channeled his self-loathing into writing petty, vengeful and mean-of-spirit articles that attacked his political enemies– liberal Democrats. Here is an illustration of how political influencers indoctrinate impressionable young people:

A man is walking past a mental institution and hears all the residents chanting, “Thirteen! Thirteen! Thirteen!” Being curious about all this, he finds a hole in the fence and looks in. Someone pokes him in the eyes. The residents start chanting, “Fourteen! Fourteen! Fourteen!”

Anyway, in 1986, the author completed a fellowship for the Heritage Foundation, a tax-exempt group that (illegally) fronted for conservative Republicans. By the 1990’s, writing for American Spectator magazine, he had gone off the deep end with his propaganda, viciously defaming liberals. He got really famous (a dubious distinction) after his book, The Real Anita Hill was published. As was becoming more and more common among political propagandists, he was highly compensated for his ability to spew hatred articulately, and rationalizing his hurting others by saying they were hurting him, or his party, or his country.

Long story short: for a long time, the author was living a lie, socializing with largely shallow, homophobic (ironically!), anti-feminist, anti-intellectual conservative social climbers like Arianna Huffington, Laura Ingraham and Ann Coulter.

About his tenure at American Spectator, the author remarked, “In twelve years of right-wing journalism, my work had never been fact-checked.” That’s comforting.

The 1990’s saw the start of a trend (which is only getting worse) in which people who call themselves journalists, cobble together some hearsay and tabloid articles and call it a book. Gary Aldrich was one such author, who used a third-hand quote from Brock in his salacious tell-all about then-president Bill Clinton.

Read the book to learn when, how and why Brock’s political views changed.

What’s the Matter…

“Where the destruction will end depends only on what a small scientific elite and a generally apathetic public will advocate and tolerate.”

The above was said by Dr. Everett Koop and the theologian Francis Schaeffer in 1983, with regard to the abortion issue.

The Book of the Week is “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America” by Thomas Frank, published in 2004.

American politics in the last forty or so years can be described in one word: HYPOCRISY.

The author spent his formative years in Mission Hills, Kansas. While there, he realized that wealth and various nefarious activities go together– such as dishonesty, white-collar crime, marital infidelity, mean-spiritedness and hubris syndrome.

The author explained how Kansans were converted to the Republican party beginning in the Clinton era. President Bill Clinton aligned the country economically with the conservative Republican congressman Newt Gingrich, a far-right capitalist. Clinton signed an agreement on free trade, making the Democrat and Republican platforms largely indistinguishable, save two emotionally charged, never-to-be resolved issues: abortion and gun control.

Thus began the political trend: the “culture war” and the “backlash” that opened the floodgates for propagandists to scream loudly and repeatedly in a hysterical manner about non-issues to distract voters and increase media ratings. Hardly anything has changed since then.

The author named the most prominent conservative Republican rabble rousers (in no particular order): Sean Hannity, G. Gordon Liddy, Ann Coulter, Gary Aldrich, Laura Ingraham, David Brooks, Bill O’Reilly (remember him?) and Rush Limbaugh.

But in Kansas, even prior to the Clinton era, president Reagan distracted the unwashed masses with abortion and gun control so they wouldn’t care about the economic damage he did with his union-bashing.

In the early 1990’s, the Republican party in Kansas split into moderate and far-right Christian factions. In the 1994 mid-term elections, the latter won the hearts and minds of blue-collar Christian Democrats in Wichita.

In the late 1990’s, Kansas saw three corporate scandals; these from the utility companies formerly known as Western Resources, Missouri Public Service, and United Telecommunications. Each wanted to be pre-scandal Enron, as unbridled greed was all the rage in that unregulated time.

But take heart! In 1890, radicalized farmers had a “… revelation, a moment when an entire generation of ‘Kansas fools’ figure out that they’d been lied to all their lives. Whether it was Republicans or Democrats in charge, they believed, mainstream politics were a sham battle distracting the nation from its real problem of corporate capitalism.” Those farmers voted their “masters” (who happened to be Republican at the time) out of office.

At this very time in American history, voters can do it again. However, there are a range of problems involving voting. The following video covers those problems, and suggests a way to mitigate them starting at 17:00.

Read the book to learn: the intimate details of the culture war; the backlash; about a Kansan who named himself Pope in 1990 because he refused to recognize the one in power when Vatican II began; and people passionate about pushing the conservative Republican agenda who obviously aren’t doing it for the money.

Inventing Al Gore – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Inventing Al Gore, A Biography” by Bill Turque, published in 2000.

Gore was born in 1948 in Washington, D.C. into a family of economic royalists originally from Tennessee. He had a decade-older sister, and built a political career like his senator-father. After graduating from Harvard in spring 1969 during a raging Vietnam War, he enlisted in the U.S. Army, where he was assigned to be a journalist. Stationed in Alabama, his job was to spread war propaganda on alleged war heroes.

There was a good chance he wouldn’t have seen combat, but there was anecdotal evidence that he had General William Westmoreland pull strings for him to stay safe anyway. Draft-dodging would have hurt his anti-war father’s chances for reelection to the U.S. Senate in 1970. His father lost, regardless.

In early 1971, finally having been granted his request to go to Vietnam to dispel vicious rumors, Gore served less than five months there in a non-combat capacity. He had post-traumatic stress disorder when he came back. He turned toward religion– traditional Baptism and New Age spiritualism, and environmentalism.

The author’s account was murky on exactly how Gore could possibly attend classes in a special one-year divinity school program, be a full-time reporter (working long hours) for the “Tennessean” newspaper, assist his father with a home-building business on the weekends, and socialize with family and friends– all simultaneously for a year and a half (!)

In mid-April 1987, Gore jumped into the race for president. It may be recalled that in the following month, candidate Gary Hart was forced out of the race after busybodies exposed his marital infidelity. That was the election season when the New York Times‘ nosiness reached new heights with all the presidential candidates.

From 1993 to 1994, Gore was an active participant in president Bill Clinton’s “… solid accomplishments like deficit reduction, NAFTA, FMLA, and the Earned Income Tax Credit…” However, other controversial issues reared their ugly heads, such as “… gays in the military, the leviathan health care package…” Of course, political enemies constantly needled Clinton with his every professional and personal misstep.

Nevertheless, during his presidency, Clinton attacked major issues. It appears that the U.S. government has yet to take major, major action in connection with decades-old, explosive issues– such as illegal immigration and illegal-gun control– for economic and/or political reasons. Yet it has taken major, major action on, say, abortion (with Roe. v. Wade), civil rights, women’s suffrage, and Prohibition– for ideological and/or religious reasons; it hasn’t been for the money. Healthcare and education are too broad, fragmented and complex to generalize about one way or the other.

Nonetheless, read the book to learn additional tabloidy details about Gore’s life and times.

The Opposite of Woe / Square Peg

The First Book of the Week is “The Opposite of Woe, My Life in Beer and Politics” by John Hickenlooper with Maximillian Potter, published in 2016.

Born in February 1952, the author is a colorful character, having had a few different careers as businessman and politician. He plays well with others, but he claimed that persistence has been a major factor that has led to his successes in life.

Starting in 2003, Hickenlooper was elected mayor of Denver, and then governor of Colorado. In the book, he briefly described his activities in connection with a range of political issues. One issue had to do with illegal-immigrants, education and driver’s licenses.

While Hickenlooper was governor (2011 through 2018; he didn’t specify the year) he conditionally granted a college-tuition discount in Colorado to undocumented residents (as he called them), to encourage them to become better educated, as he thought that would help his state. Additionally, he conditionally also granted driver’s licenses to them.

The license applicants were required to purchase insurance just like everyone else, and– Hickenlooper claimed that the stakeholders on this issue agreed with him to have the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) charge those undocumented residents three times the fees that U.S. citizens paid.

Of course, the governor was raising more revenue than otherwise for Colorado. But– another aspect of this subject is that driving is expensive, so the DMV would be able to track only those immigrants who could afford to drive, and who desired to do so enough to jump through all the hoops to do it. And he was giving them an opportunity to widen their horizons by traveling more and doing things they couldn’t do otherwise.

Presumably, the kinds of people who are granted that chance, though, likely risked their lives in leaving their homeland to come to this country to seek a better life. Fear of being sent back to that place of oppression keeps them from misbehaving, and must have motivated them to make a living that allows them to be able to afford to drive.

Anti-immigrant propagandists rail that those undocumented residents committed a crime by crossing into the United States illegally. Then the propagandists wave around anecdotal evidence of additional crimes that a few or some of the residents have committed, so why should all of them be rewarded with opportunities for a better life when they don’t pay income tax? Therein lies the decades-old political football.

Those residents’ presence must have far-reaching, presumably sufficiently beneficial economic and political effects on the whole country, or else why wouldn’t politicians have already (years ago!) thought that it was worth the huge expenses to deport them in large numbers or build an extensive wall to keep them out of the United States, and have already done so?

Anyway, read the book to learn of Hickenlooper’s business ventures and adventures in business, and political accomplishments for which he considered himself responsible, plus depressing, traumatic occurrences that happened in Colorado during his administrations.

The Second Book of the Week is “Square Peg, Confessions of a Citizen Senator” by Orrin Hatch, published in 2002.

Against all odds, the Republican Hatch from Utah won his U.S. Senate race in 1976. He actually wrote more about a few different political events (with a Republican slant– omitting inconvenient details) that occurred during his career, than events that directly, personally affected him as a senator.

Hatch recounted that in spring 1978, the Senate launched a filibuster to block a bill that might have made the Democratic party outrageously powerful because unions would have gained the upper hand on management nationwide. He and his fellow coalition members whipped up five hundred amendments to the bill. He filed them with the Senate reporting clerk. “I could force the Senate to vote on each amendment filed prior to cloture, which together would take almost seven consecutive twenty-four hour sessions to complete… weeks or even months.”

At the time of the book’s writing, both houses of Congress proposed approximately 7,600 bills per session, about 440 of which, on average, became law. Read the book to learn of Hatch’s take on several political events of the last half century, and a few of his experiences in politics.

…And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since / Citizen Lane

The first Book of the Week is “…And I Haven’t Had a Bad Day Since, From the Streets of Harlem to the Halls of Congress” by Charles B. Rangel with Leon Wynter, published in 2007.

This repetitive, stream-of-consciousness autobiography was a bragfest, but the author’s major point was that his near-death experience while serving in the Korean War led him to realize that surviving everything else in his life has been a cakewalk.

Born in June 1930 in West Harlem, New York City– Rangel, his older brother and younger sister were raised mostly by his mother, mother’s brother and mother’s father. His maternal grandparents– white father and black mother– were originally from Virginia. His mother raised him as a Catholic.

Rangel’s mother worked as an attendant in a hotel and in resorts in the Catskills in upstate New York, while the author stayed in West Harlem with his grandfather or uncle, both elevator operators. Starting when he was about nine years old and throughout his childhood, Rangel worked at a drugstore, as a paperboy, at a hardware store, as a shoe-store assistant, cargo loader, etc.

Rangel was deeply influenced by his grandfather’s reverence for attorneys, whom he saw all day at his job in the elevator of a courthouse. Nevertheless, Rangel’s social circles in Harlem did not expose him to anyone who particularly valued education. He therefore dropped out of high school after sophomore year. He was also deeply influenced by his older brother, who valued working and volunteering for the U.S. military.

So after Rangel’s four years in the military, during which he was unexpectedly sent to Korea, he was persuaded by his brother to choose work in civilian life instead of a military career.

Eventually, realizing that his life was directionless and his lack of education was holding him back, Rangel appealed to the Veterans Administration (VA) for help– aggressively, as he was an arrogant youth with a sense of entitlement as a war hero. A VA representative provided him with the kind of guidance he needed, pushing him to focus on the goal of becoming an attorney to please his grandfather.

Rangel expanded his worldview at St. John’s law school, meeting other blacks, plus Italian, Irish and Jewish students. Later, as a Congressman, his frequent international travel led him to change his views on Catholicism.

Rangel became less religious, as “When you find Washington saying it has no moral responsibility for social services, that it’s on local or state government or the private sector, you would expect the Church to be screaming with outrage. Not just about the unborn, but about the born… I had to remind Mayor Mike Bloomberg and the media that we spend $100,000 per year just to keep one kid locked up in the city’s [New York City’s] Rikers Island detention center… Imagine if we were investing even a fraction of that in the education of every kid in New York.”

Read the book to learn how Rangel came to have daily gratitude for life after his war experiences, and rose through the ranks to have an illustrious political career, and for all the great accomplishments he considered himself responsible.

The second Book of the Week is “Citizen Lane, Defending Our Rights in the Courts, the Capitol, and the Streets” by Mark Lane, published in 2012. This autobiography was a bragfest, too.

Born in the Bronx in 1927, Lane spent his childhood in Brooklyn. He spent his early career years practicing law as a solo practitioner in East Harlem. Even though his skin was white, he defended minority teen gang members accused of serious crimes. The juries were wealthy white males only. Lane also sued slumlords on behalf of tenants.

In the second half of the 1950’s, Lane helped reveal the scandalous conditions at the Wassaic State School in upstate New York; human nature, being what it is– in the early 1970’s, Geraldo Rivera told a largely similar story involving Willowbrook State School.

Teenagers accused of petty crimes who were deemed “mental defectives” determined by only one IQ test were placed in Wassaic State School. The IQ test was given in English only. Not coincidentally, many Puerto Ricans (Spanish speakers) were immediately placed in the school.

Despite the name of the institution, inmates received no academic instruction– only psychological, physical and sexual abuse, and solitary confinement for minor infractions, at the hands of sadistic guards.

Restraints were used willy-nilly. The food was inedible. The inmates had no recreation whatsoever, not even reading. In October 1955, Paul H. Hoch, commissioner of the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene called a hearing only after New York State governor Averell Harriman was prompted by political motives to do something. Hoch said it was a public hearing, but banned the press from attending. Big mistake.

The press gathered around the hearing-building and wouldn’t leave. Lane gave them the lowdown on the testimony he heard firsthand. The reader can guess where this is going. The only heads that rolled were the guards’. No one else’s. Dr. George Etling, director of the school, remained so for another eighteen years until he comfortably retired.

The next episode in Lane’s heroic career related to cofounding– with the reverend of the Mid-Harlem Community Parish– of a free-of-charge (unlicensed; read, illegal) heroin rehabilitation clinic in West Harlem. The patients kicked their addictions cold turkey through sedatives and therapy administered by doctors, nurses, social workers and psychologists. Lane allegedly got Jackie Robinson to hire all the recovered addicts (many of whom were ex-cons) by the Chock full o’Nuts restaurant chain.

Prior to election year 1960, judges and other office holders were able to vote for their cronies, even though they had moved out of the candidates’ East Harlem and Yorkville district years before. Lane’s young polling volunteers told the illegal voters they had to sign an affidavit swearing to their current addresses. Busted, the would-be voters slunk away instead.

In spring 1961, Lane and black attorney Percy Sutton went on a “Freedom Ride” (i.e., risked their lives) via buses and a plane through different southern cities, ending in Jackson, Mississippi. There, they were arrested for “…disorderly conduct by improperly ‘congregating’ and placed in separate segregated cells.” But they hadn’t been the least bit hostile. They were convicted without a trial and sentenced to four months’ imprisonment. In March 1962, the state of Mississippi changed its tune and the charges were dropped.

In 2004, Lane started co-hosting a weekly radio show from New Jersey, in which he wasn’t obnoxious to callers, and “…all ridicule would be reserved exclusively for the leaders of our nation who led us into a war in which they traded blood for oil… I read the names of those who died that week in Iraq, to remind us of what we are doing.”

Read the book to learn of other major historical events in which Lane was supposedly front and center, and the ways in which he did his best to investigate scandals (including JFK’s and MLK’s deaths) in a bygone era in which:

security in buildings was poor
forensics were primitive
racism was rampant, and
cover-ups were rife (thanks to aggressive, dishonest politicians and intelligence services who spied on and oppressed their own citizens).

Thank goodness cover-ups aren’t rife anymore, given the current mean, nasty divided political situation in the United States. Right.

Killers of the Flower Moon / Heist

The First Book of the Week is “Killers of the Flower Moon, The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI” by David Grann, published in 2017. This volume described in suspenseful anecdotes– a political, social and cultural system suffused with evil– and it highlighted what happened to just one of countless families whose members were victims of the conspiracy.

In 1870, the Osage Native Americans were forced by light-skinned Americans to flee from their homeland in Kansas, to wasteland in northeastern Oklahoma. In 1893, the United States government’s Indian Affairs Department ordered that all children on the Osage reservation attend school. One consequence was that the young people in the area adopted the ways of the “white man.”

On September 16, 1893, the U.S. government shot a gun to kick off a land-grab. The Cherokee Outlet, territory bordering on the Osage’s that was bought by the U.S. government, was handed over to the Cherokees on a first-claimed via physical presence, first-owned basis.

About 42,000 members of the Cherokee nation waited on the border for days until the appointed time of the free-for-all. The fight for land ended in a massacre galore. The government didn’t bother to repeat the above process with the Osage reservation.

Yet, by the very early 1900’s, oil was discovered on the Osage’s land; this opened a Pandora’s box. In 1912, the Department of the Interior auctioned off the then-super-valuable parcels, to which the Osage had mineral rights. The Osage became millionaires overnight, paid royalties by the oil barons.

The local (white) politicians of the oil-rich lands stuck like leeches to the Osage residents, under the guise of regulating commerce. They deemed that (white) guardians of the property be appointed for full-blooded Osage people, as the Native Americans weren’t sufficiently educated or competent to manage their own money. Unsurprisingly, the guardians were thieves and worse.

Read the book to learn about a statistics-defying (but not uncommon among the Osage) rash of deaths (by poisonings, shootings and explosives) that occurred in one Osage family due to the “system” and the growing-pains the Wild West experienced as it evolved into a civilized, law-abiding society with the help of a national law enforcement organization now known as the FBI.

A more recent example of exploitation of Native Americans was described in the Second Book of the Week, “Heist, Superlobbyist Jack Abramoff, His Republican Allies, and the Buying of Washington” by Peter H. Stone, published in 2006. Yet again, the hypothetical board game “Survival Roulette” could be applied to this scandal: Native American Exploitation Edition (See “Highly Confident” post).

There have been countless ultimate winners of this game through the centuries: all the people never caught for committing crimes against Native Americans. The vast majority have gone unpunished, including several people mentioned in the book, whose names have already faded from the public’s memory.

However, the most famous hypothetical losers of the game in this book were lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Michael Scanlon, and Congressman Tom DeLay. Instead of a Monopoly board, in keeping with the casino theme, the central structure of the game could be an actual roulette wheel, whose ball could land on spaces that describe the financial crimes of: bribery, money laundering, fraud, disclosure failures and influence peddling. Plus tax evasion. Just for good measure.

In short, with Abramoff as the ringleader, during the course of three years, the gang milked six Native American tribes for $82 million– that paid for political bribes, funding for a school, lavish gifts, and entertainment and recreation expenses– disguised as lobbying and public relations services on behalf of the tribes.

In this slim volume, the author dispensed with suspense by revealing up front that, when they got caught, Abramoff and his sidekick Scanlon accepted plea deals for their unethical opportunism, unconscionable greed and unmitigated hubris. The author then failed to explain why the Texas state government closed a casino run by the Tigua Indians in February 2002, but did explain later on.

Nevertheless, the story thereafter unfolded in more or less chronological order, starting with backstory from the 1990’s. The Tigua casino actually stayed closed, despite Abramoff’s fat fee, part of which he circuitously funneled through nonprofit organizations that ended up as political donations, and paid for a luxurious golf vacation in the United Kingdom for himself and his cronies.

Abramoff’s shamelessness knew no bounds. He had his friends, in order to service one of his tribal clients, marshal support from the likes of the Christian Coalition to convince the U.S. government that gambling was against their religion, and a reason to close the Tigua casino. At the same, he was lobbying on behalf of the Tiguas through illegal means, to reopen the casino (!) For that, he made megabucks from both sides.

Abramoff also helped to quash legislation that would have taxed his Choctaw client, and would have imposed tougher labor laws on his offshore client that manufactured clothing in the Marianas.

Kevin Sickey, who represented an Indian tribe that hired Abramoff, described the lobbyist’s propaganda thusly: “They exaggerated political threats and they exaggerated economic threats. Then they exaggerated their ability to deal with threats.”

Read the book to learn what led to the start of investigations by the Senate Indian Affairs Committee and the Justice Department; Abramoff’s and Scanlon’s early-career adventures; and details of their and others’ punishments, among other nothing-new-under-the-sun type political opportunism, greed and hubris.

As an aside, the dollar value of political wrongdoing has reached dizzying heights in the past few decades, and it has been the same kind of wrongdoing, over and over again– committed mostly by alpha males. People who have an insatiable need for power and money apparently never learn from others whose stories have been well-publicized!

No Excuses

The Book of the Week is “No Excuses– Concessions of A Serial Campaigner” by Robert Shrum, published in 2007. Shrum was a political consultant for various Democratic candidates for more than four decades.

Shrum perceived that the Washington Post was the sole newspaper that understood that the Watergate break-in wasn’t just an isolated incident. That is why it took so long for Americans to see how evil Nixon really was. Then again, political people are a vengeful lot.

Beginning in 1992, the Republicans launched a “… nonstop, eight-year campaign to destroy his [Bill Clinton’s] presidency. Everything was fair game in a witch hunt on a tireless search for an offense.” Ken Starr was coming up empty on the Whitewater investigation, so after three and a half years, he convinced the three-judge panel to “… widen his mandate to include possible perjury charges against the president related to his relationship with Monica Lewinsky.”

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Shrum was an advisor to candidate Al Gore, during which there was rigorous fact-checking of everything Gore said in debates. Even so, he got a few minor details wrong. The Bush camp jumped right on the errors, accusing Gore of “sighing and lying.”

Voters have no idea how much cooperation (if any) there is behind the scenes of a candidate’s campaign, as media reports are distorted or exaggerated in this regard. But in September 2003, voters who believed the news, were focused on the supposed conflicts plaguing John Kerry’s staff instead of on John Kerry.

One of Kerry’s top aides, Jim Jordan was the source of the trouble. The press reported that Jordan was campaign manager. Jordan didn’t disabuse them of that notion. Howard Dean became a formidable competitor because he effectively raised funds via the Internet. Jordan didn’t believe that that fundraising channel would work, so he discouraged Kerry from trying it.

Jordan ignored political donors and couldn’t “… explain a coherent strategy for winning and we’re [the Kerry campaign] headed in the wrong direction — politically and financially.” Once Jordan was dismissed in November 2003, conditions improved. But not before the media trumpeted the turmoil and published Jordan’s negative utterances about the Kerry campaign.

Interestingly, Kerry enjoyed a small, unexpected boost in voter approval in late October 2004, when an unguarded cache full of American weapons was emptied by the enemy in Iraq. But Kerry’s advisers felt it was more important for their candidate to stay on-message than jump on Bush for this terrorist win; it would have been a distraction. It is such an irony that Americans are killed with their own weapons by terrorists through alleged anti-terrorist actions by the U.S. government.

So the way America’s enemies have acquired American weaponry hasn’t always been secret arms deals. Sometimes it has been. Other times, it has been caused by a raw, evil, greedy power grab perpetrated by a president who stokes fear that his country’s people will be victims again. Might makes right is never a good thing. It is simply a vicious cycle of needless deaths and ruined lives.

Anyway, read the book to learn of numerous other details of the fun insiders have in dealing with difficult: people, issues and publicity while advising a political candidate during an election campaign. So much fun.

Harry Belafonte / Shirley Chisholm

The First Book of the Week is “Harry Belafonte, My Song, a Memoir” with Michael Shnayerson, published in 2011.

Born in March 1927 on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, the singer best known for the “Banana Boat Song” actually did a lot more in his lifetime than give concerts and act. He was instrumental in helping fund and organize the civil rights movement.

Belafonte’s older relatives were interracial; they hailed from Jamaica in the Caribbean; the light-skinned ones living there were Scottish. Growing up dirt poor, he lived alternately between upper Manhattan and Jamaica for years at a time, bounced among them.

For Belafonte, it was one psychological trauma after another. He had undiagnosed dyslexia, in addition to having accidentally with sewing scissors, as a toddler, blinded himself in one eye.

Fortunately, Belafonte’s mother, an illegal immigrant, had survival skills. But she practiced spousification with him in his early years. When he was five years old, he was tasked with taking care of his baby brother while she worked. She instilled in him a love of music, taking him to see the great singers of the 1930’s and 1940’s at the Apollo Theater in upper Manhattan.

The author’s mother hired someone to give him piano lessons. However, he played hooky from them because the teacher cruelly beat his fingers, just like the nuns at his parochial school. He ended up quitting school for good in the middle of ninth grade.

Belafonte’s father, an abusive, mean drunk, was frequently out of town– either acting as head chef on a banana boat in the Caribbean, or philandering. But there were a few occasions of quality time, playing marbles.

Belafonte was able to pay for drama school with the G.I. Bill, after his Navy service during World War II. He befriended the politically-active, drama and jazz crowds, many of whom, like him, would later became world famous.

By the early 1960’s, the nation was violently divided. Martin Luther King, Jr. reminded Belafonte that “… compromise was a crucial tenet of nonviolence. If compromise got you closer to your goal, then it was worth any loss of face.” As is well known, there was excessive bloodshed throughout the 1960’s– so there must have been a lot of men who couldn’t stand to swallow their pride for the good of the nation.

Anyway, read the book to learn why Belafonte, even after becoming fabulously famous and wealthy, never did lead a charmed life. He did, however, raise funds for Shirley Chisholm.

The Second Book of the Week is “Shirley Chisholm, Catalyst for Change” by Barbara Winslow, published in 2014.

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, Chisholm had a grandfather who worked on the Panama Canal, whose construction spurred the upward mobility of sugarcane slaves from Barbados. Her ancestors believed in education and home ownership.

Chisholm spent roughly three and a half years of her early childhood in Barbados; the rest, in New York City. She experienced culture shock moving from a rural, agricultural village to big, scary, crime-ridden neighborhoods– Brownsville, and then Bedford-Stuyvesant, both in Brooklyn.

Chisholm’s goal was to become an elementary school teacher but she couldn’t get hired because she was black. With her master’s degree in early childhood education, Chisholm eventually became a consultant to the day care department of New York City’s welfare agency, supervising tens of employees. She “… would always have to face men who tried to infantilize, patronize or demonize her.”

In 1964, Chisholm won an assembly seat in New York State. She worked with three other black politicians in New York: Charles Rangel, David Dinkins and Percy Sutton. She was very prolific; eight of the fifty bills she sponsored were passed.

In 1968, with the slogan, “Vote for Shirley Chisholm for Congress– unbought and unbossed” she became the first African American woman elected to Congress. When she expressed her intention to run for president in 1972, men bristled.

Chisholm had a particular reason for rescinding her plan to personally campaign in Wisconsin, involving public relations. She disappointed a bunch of dedicated grass-roots volunteers. But she would have visited the state for only two or three days anyway, and not have gotten significant support over and above her loyal followers’. So by not visiting, she could brag that she got, say, 5% of the vote without even campaigning there– that’s how much people loved her.

In May 1972, after racist presidential candidate George Wallace was shot, Chisholm behaved compassionately, visiting him in the hospital.

Read the book to learn more about Chisholm’s life and times, including why she was actually bossed, but not bought.

Yeager – BONUS POST

The Bonus Book of the Week is “Yeager, An Autobiography by General Chuck Yeager and Leo Janos” published in 1985.

Born in February 1923 in West Virginia, Yeager was the second oldest of five children. He was raised as a Methodist Republican.

When his older brother was six and Yeager was four and a half, the two accidentally killed their two-year old sister while playing with their father’s twelve-gauge shotgun. The family never spoke of the incident. But Yeager wrote, “By the time I was six, I knew how to shoot a .22 rifle and hunted squirrel and rabbit.” Which the family ate. Later, he went on trips with his father’s buddies, hunting deer, bear, quail and wild turkeys. Having field-independent vision gave him a great advantage at that, and at flying.

In spring 1943, Yeager signed up for a Flying Sergeant program in the Army Air Corps in California. He became a passionate fighter pilot. In March 1944, he was shot down by a Focke Wulf 20 millimeter cannon over southern France. His situation was rather uncertain for a while, but he survived, due to a long story of great good luck and one sympathetic individual who literally pointed him in the right direction.

Acting against the rules of the War Department, Yeager got special permission to continue flying combat missions. Theoretically, the American president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, had ultimate authority to decide that. However, if the president has sole control over the military and it obeys only him, is loyal only to him, including in connection with all top-secret foreign policy matters– THERE IS POTENTIAL FOR THE PRESIDENT TO BECOME A DICTATOR.

Anyway, of the thirty original fighters in the squadron who arrived in Leiston, England, four, including Yeager, were left by the end of the war.

Yeager became one of the best pilots in the Air Force, spending time as a maintenance officer, air-show performer and aircraft tester. His expertise allowed him to skirt other rules and weasel out of flight test school and other training classes.

Instead, he risked his life for hours every day in the air. When he was gearing up to break the sound barrier, his aircraft was “… carrying six hundred gallons of LOX and water alcohol on board that can blow up at the flick of an igniter switch and scatter your pieces over several counties.”

By the end of his career, he had spent some ten thousand hours in the air in 180 different military (including aerospace-related) aircraft built by various nations.

Read the book to learn how Yeager got out of WWII alive, and numerous other tough situations alive, his (almost non-existent) personal and family life, and his global adventures with other crazy characters.

Believer

The Book of the Week is “Believer, My Forty Years in Politics” by David Axelrod, published in 2015. This book is mostly about Axelrod’s role as a political campaign consultant and close aide to Barack Obama.

Born in February 1955 in New York City, the author became passionate about politics at the age of five, when his nanny took him to a political rally for JFK. At nine, he volunteered to assist with RFK’s New York State Senate run.

Axelrod began a career in journalism, covering politics for a number of years. His mother’s cousin introduced him to powerful political figures in Washington, D.C. This gave Axelrod a leg up in co-founding a political consulting firm located in major American cities, serving various mayoral candidates.

In addition to having friendly contacts of all stripes, the best and brightest consultants ought to be extremely well-read in history, politics, psychology, law and economics. Life-experience and cynicism, too, can help with opposition-intelligence and creative messaging.

During the last days of the presidential election in 2008, “[vice-presidential candidate– thought by many to be the presidential candidate– Sarah] Palin ramped up the ferocity of her attacks, to the delight of angry throngs who streamed to greet her… some chanted vile epithets about [presidential candidate Barack] Obama… resented taxes, reviled gun control and eagerly parroted right-wing tripe questioning whether Obama was even a citizen…”

In 2016, it was deja vu all over again, with Donald Trump’s copying Sarah Palin in his targeting and messaging. Trump copied the late president Ronald Reagan too, with his tax cut and also, with taking an active role in foreign policy, some of which for Reagan at least, did not end well. Axelrod commented that performing was Reagan’s forte. However, Obama was not as willing a performer. Trump is neither good at reading scripts nor good at speaking off the cuff.

Unlike Trump, Obama was principled and ideologically-oriented rather than reelection-oriented. He was his own man as much as he could be, given that he was forced into extremely difficult situations. He inherited a slew of problems from his predecessor George W. Bush, including a crashed economy and two wars. In 2009, then-Harvard law professor and bankruptcy specialist, Elizabeth Warren, helped Obama create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

Axelrod claimed that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., KY) started the obstructionist attitude in which the party ruling a house of Congress pettily blocks all legislation the opposing party is trying to pass. There have been previous periods of American history in which each side engaged in shenanigans to thwart the other– such as during the impeachment debate surrounding president Andrew Johnson in the 1860’s (!)

However, nowadays, angry and mean-spirited polarization becomes viral at the speed of light, as the easily brainwashed who have access to social media become easily outraged by the finger-pointing hypocrisy, hypocritical finger-pointing, and poison propaganda spewed by one side or the other.

Axelrod wrote, “Fear too often trumps reason.” Read the book to learn about the kinds of situations Trump has reason to fear, and Obama’s campaigns and administration.