GaraLog

Am I the only one who thinks it is a little strange

that all the analyses of Barack Obama's problems with some white voters who won't vote for a black man -- as seemed to be the case with 1 in 5 of Clinton's voters last night in West Virginia -- seem, as Maureen Dowd's ostensibly sympathetic column did this morning, to assume that it is OBAMA'S problem?  What can/should he do to reach them?  Thus, as has been the case for the last few centuries with African-Americans in this country -- and it is also the case for women who suffer daily sexism -- that they must bear the responsibility for their own exclusion.

Mildred Loving

I was moved by the Times obituary today for Mildred Loving, an African-American woman who lent her last name to the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down state miscegenation laws -- laws that made it a crime to marry a person of another race.  Among other things, she was very young -- 68 -- for someone who made constitutional history over 40 years ago.  In fact, she was 18 and just married in 1958 when a Virginia county sheriff and his deputies burst into the home she shared with her husband Richard, who was white, and arrested them, despite the fact that their marriage license was hung on the wall.  (As a precaution against such outrages?)  They spent some time in jail and got a suspended prison sentence on the condition that they leave the state and not come back together for 25 years.  I learned a lot from the Times obituary -- that she wrote to Robert F. Kennedy in 1963, when he was Attorney General, and he referred her to the ACLU, which took her case and won it.

No one thinks much about or talks much about miscegenation laws any more, but I heard Barack Obama do so at a small fundraiser in New York a month or so ago.  He noted, with respect to the gay marriage issue, that at the time of his birth, not long after the Lovings' arrest and six years before the Supreme Court struck down the laws in 1967, his parents' marriage was a crime in a number of states.  Despite the race talk roiling the campaign, which demonstrates in so many ways how much we still have to overcome, that the son of a union like that of the so-appropriately-named Lovings can a generation later be the leading candidate for President is evidence of something.

By the way, Mildred Loving's last public statement, last year, urged an end to the laws barring gay men and lesbians from marrying.

Among the arguments Hillary Clinton made in mailers and last-minute commercials in the closing hours of the Pennsylvania campaign

1.  Barack Obama will take away your guns
2.  Osama bin Laden will come and get you if Barack Obama is elected
3.  I am the only candidate tough enough to incinerate the entire country of Iran if they launch a nuclear strike against Israel

Forget for a moment the lack of scruples that a desperate instinct for political survival has laid bare  -- maybe some people want that in a President, and maybe it's perversely part of her appeal, as opposed to Obama, who some people think, and the Clintons explicitly argue, isn't tough enough, to sit in the Oval Office, burdened as he is by some sense of restraint, some qualities of character -- assuming she really did get the nomination, and we take all this on its merits, is this the kind of progressive we have been waiting for?  More of that, and many voters will conclude, if we want a Republican, we might as well vote for a real one.

As a diversion from the Presidential campaign that wouldn't die

I would like to say a few words about the pros and cons of boutique hotels.  I was put up in one, The Standard, by my hosts for the talk I gave here yesterday.  It seems to be a converted office building in downtown L.A., which is emerging in recent years from a ghost town after work hours to a fairly vibrant place -- people living in downtown "lofts," which you also find in Des Moines, Durham, Austin and other non-New York places -- and hotels like The Standard, which cater to young hipsters.  The lighting is generally low, and there are quirky touches like a barbershop in the lobby next to the reception desk, an organ and a pool table.  There is a rooftop bar with a pool, though I do not know who would swim there for exercise, since it is right next to a dance floor, adjacent to some plastic gazebo-like structures with red mattresses that look like they belong in a Playboy club, and when it gets dark the place is jammed.  And then there are the guest rooms.

I don't expect much of a hotel room, since when I am traveling, whether for work or pleasure, I rarely spend much time in one.  Clean sheets are the bar for me -- and one I appreciate, since in the early days of my business travel, making the rounds of the New York Civil Liberties Union's upstate chapters, I generally stayed with the local director, on a foldout couch in a rec room where I would be awakened at 5:30 a.m. by a salivating golden retriever, rambunctious toddlers eager to get to the television set, or both.  Eventually I graduated to Motel Six-type establishments.  So I'm in a whole different travel universe now.

I generally stay in Kimpton Hotels, which feature essential amenities like rubber duckies for the bathtub and yoga mats.  The Standard has many Kimpton-like features, but I was surprised to find, upon checking in, that the room looked like this:

The bed is in the foreground, on a raised carpeted platform that, take my word for it, is hard to see and allow for when you get up in the middle of the night. (On the bed is my copy of Jean Baker's biography of James Buchanan, America's worst president.)  Just beyond is a glass-walled shower.  Now, I am not unalert to the intriguing possibilities of a glass-walled shower bigger than most New Yorker's closets -- or perhaps, their bedrooms -- but for the solo business traveler its charms are few.  It is possible to pull a curtain across the glass to shield the shower -- and, as you can see just beyond, the toilet -- from the view of anyone else who happens to be in the room, but it is not possible to shield BOTH the shower and the toilet at the same time, as the curtain doesn't go around to the other wall.  Not a big deal when you are alone, but strange.

Very few of the traditional toiletries in the bathroom, as that would disturb the hotel's design ethic.  Taking a shower this morning before going to the airport, I ran up against some of the practical limits of hipness.  First, the complimentary shampoo and conditioner. The older I get, and the more difficulty I have reading without glasses, the more I am annoyed by these little bottles, where the typeface is so small it might as well be the instructions on an aspirin bottle.  The stuff that The Standard provides makes your life even more difficult by the use of a YELLOW font against a white background that you probably need some kind of ultraviolet light to read. 

Then there is the fact that the only place in the giant shower to rest the two small bottles is the metal soap dish which is barely big enough for the soap itself.  Trying to figure out which is the shampoo and which is the conditioner, apply the right one to your hair and close the cap on the bottle with the hand you are not using to lather (or condition) your hair requires the skills of Rosemary Woods (a dated Nixonian reference that older less hip people like myself will readily get), so you can imagine why I am wearing a bandaid this morning (NOT provided by the hotel, I travel prepared) to cover the gash on my left arm from being slashed by the sharp edge of the metal soap dish.

On the other hand, I have never before encountered a shower in which it is possible to do full sun salutations.

The Los Angeles Public Library

Is a very lovely place.  I love the camera built into my new Blackberry:

Another primary day

I've been quiet about the election of late partly for the life-craziness reasons mentioned in a few posts below, but partly because I have found the recent weeks of the campaign quite dispiriting in many ways, and I find myself avoiding, not eagerly consuming, the round-the-clock coverage that is available.  Mostly it's the awful sense that I've seen this movie before -- the transformation of a good public servant, to use the most generic term I can think of, into an aloof, elite, vaguely exotic figure with dangerous ideas and associations.  That is, Obama as Kerry as Gore as Dukakis.  In this case, the Republican attack machine can sit back and watch as Hillary Clinton, morphed into a cookie-baking, whiskey-swilling, gun-toting Friday night bowler, does the dirty work.

Not that I think the election is destined to play this scenario out, but it brings up many bad memories for those of us whose hopes were raised in the past.  Obama, I think, is in a different class than the other Democratic candidates mentioned -- someone with a real base, who genuinely excites many people, not only traditional non-voters but very strange bedfellows, from Bruce Springsteen to Julie Nixon, from Robert Reich to Sam Nunn, and all those endorsements AFTER the string of attacks on Wright, Bill Ayers, "bitter" voters, and so on.  Someone who is running a virtually flawless campaign.  Someone running in a year that strongly favors Democrats against a candidate who, while the strongest in many ways that the Republicans could put up, has virtually nothing to offer in response to the economic anxieties that seem likely to dominate the election season.

But also someone who has particular challenges to overcome.  The aloofness is part of the package, as indeed it has been with some other successful and charismatic candidates, like JFK, but magnified in the 24-hour media circus.  The associations that are causing him trouble ARE a lot for many Americans to swallow -- Wright takes a lot of explaining, and the fact that Obama even served on a board with Bill Ayers (who I know, and who has morphed over the years from a callow, self-regarding radical firebrand doing his best to upset his corporate father and sleep with as many movement women as possible to a respectable education professor) will be a lot for people to take.  Add to that the Hussein factor, the continuing urban legend that Obama is Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that, mind you, but still, a big stretch for many Americans in the current climate), and, oh yes, that he's black in a country that, whatever its multicultural tendencies, is still fairly segregated, and where many Americans have almost no social or professional contact with those of other races.  Add all that up and it is remarkable that Obama is very likely to win the Democratic nomination and has a better than even chance of becoming President.

As for today, who knows?   I get the feeling that Hillary Clinton does worst when, as in recent days, she is in steady attack mode, as opposed to the softer side she has let out at times (and that worked for her in New Hampshire).  I have no idea, all these long months of the campaign later, who Hillary Clinton really is. I started out, as archivists of this blog can confirm, with essentially positive feelings, while preferring Obama.  At this point, like many around me (including a number of former Hillary supporters), I can barely stand to listen to her, and would vote for her in November, should the occasion arise, with little enthusiasm.  She's tried out so many different personas in her miserably managed campaign (she certainly wasn't ready to RUN for President on Day One) that I don't know which one would occupy the White House.  I hope I don't have to find out.

European friends have asked what will happen today in Pennsylvania, as if I was an electoral sage.  I think she'll beat him by six points or so.  Enough to give her a justification to keep going, though well enough under her initial lead, or what she needs, that superdelegates will continue to flock to Obama, and the voices for her to get out will increase.  If she wins by a very slight margin, that will be more intense.  If she beats him big, she'll keep going, though it is not likely to alter the final outcome, however much Obama may be wounded in the process.

If he beats her, it's over, and that is a result devoutly to be wished for, but unlikely to happen.  At this point, both sides share an interest in underplaying expectations.

In the Heights

Moved back to Brooklyn a few weeks ago, though with a fair amount of travel since, so it's been hard to know what time zone I'm in, and locate my neckties among the boxes, much less post a lot.  I love Brooklyn Heights, which was the first place in New York I visited almost forty years ago.  Strangely -- but nicely -- it hasn't changed much in all the years, despite the transformation of neighborhoods around it, like Smith Street, Red Hook and Dumbo.  Still block after block of  landmarked row houses (more wood frame and Federal period houses than anywhere else in the city), still hardly any decent restaurants, and local businesses seemingly unchanged since the 1950's.  And still a steady low roar from the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway.  (I fantasize that pre-BQE we would have been able to stroll a few hundred feet to take a swim, since our apartment,  is toward the top of a cobblestoned street that slopes down to the harbor, though more likely we would have run into sailors drinking and fighting after hitting land for the first time after months at sea.)

Anyway, some pictures from a walk last Sunday, a slightly chilly early spring day, first with a flowering tree emphasis:

Then with a look at the rare colonnade houses, one of them like a fading antebellum mansion that has seen much better days:

 

A few final shots, the last on a block leading up to the promenade, with a view of lower Manhattan at the end of the street:

1968

I've gone postless, except for the new one below, which I couldn't resist, for a few weeks now, the casualty of moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn and being (a) overwhelmed with boxes (I couldn't find my ties all week and finally had to pull one out of my "archival" collection, which for some reason turned up before the current ties did -- a choice polyester one I bought in the Texas Legislature gift shop twenty years ago, emblazoned with the San Jacinto Monument) , and (b) without home internet access until Time-Warner comes Tuesday.  So I've fallen behind in all things.

I had wanted to post Friday just to say that the Martin Luther King assassination anniversary is a strange one for me, because it ushers in a series of anniversaries where, for virtually the first time in my life, I have strong contemporary memories of things that happened forty years ago.  Of course the JFK assassination stands out -- I was in fourth grade -- but I didn't develop any political consciousness until I became a teenager, probably a bit earlier than most people.  I was wrapped up in the 1968 campaign, hated Johnson and the war, loved Gene McCarthy and thought Bobby Kennedy an opportunistic interloper (I've since revised my judgments of both men).    I remember watching television when the bulletin came on about the MLK killing, and remember my father coming into our bedroom the morning after Bobby was shot.  I remember predicting that LBJ would pull out of the Presidential race at the end of his March 31 speech about the bombing halt, remarkable first because I was right, quite serendipitously, and second because I don't think I've ever been correct in a political prediction since.

It all seems strangely vivid to me.  For a man born in 1915, who would be 93 or dead today, it would be like sitting in 1968 and remembering Al Smith's campaign, and that the distance in time from that amazing year is equal on either side of the time continuum feels a bit bizarre.

Now back to my rocking chair.  Except I can't find it among the packing boxes.

Charlton Heston, R.I.P.

From his New York Times obituary:

In Mr. Heston, the N.R.A. found its embodiment of pioneer values — pride, independence and valor. In a speech at the N.R.A.’s annual convention in 2000, he brought the audience to its feet with a ringing attack on gun-control advocates. Paraphrasing an N.R.A. bumper sticker ("I’ll give you my gun when you take it from my cold, dead hands") he waved a replica of a colonial musket above his head and shouted defiantly, "From my cold, dead hands!"

Well, now would be the time, wouldn't it?

The upside of the controversy over Obama's pastor

At least now everybody knows he's a Christian...