What about (Socialist) Bob

Baltimore leftist
would have enjoyed
his last turnout

Baltimore’s best-known socialist attracted what may have been his largest crowd Wednesday afternoon, but wasn’t around to enjoy it.

A. Robert Kaufman, a far-leftist who had been tilting at societal windmills for more than half a century, died on Christmas Day after more than three years of declining health – a result of being stabbed by a deranged boarder in a building he owned in a rough westside neighborhood. He was 78.

More than 100 people from varied walks of life offered condolences to Bob’s elderly sister – his sole survivor – and heard tributes from former newspaper columnist Mike Olesker, from influential African-American minister Marion Bascom, from a printing company entrepreneur who for many years had Bob as frequent customer, and even from a young man who described himself as a revolutionary socialist inspired by Bob’s example.

I probably met Bob no more than twice, but talked to him regularly over the course of nearly four decades on the city desk of The Baltimore Sun. He called frequently, hoping to talk to editors. I was the guy usually answering the phone. It was a curious relationship. I’d hear what he had to say, and send a brief message off to whatever editor he wanted to reach (but who had no time or inclination to chat with Bob). Usually just a sentence, kind of a tweet, about this demonstration, that hearing, his latest filing for elective office.

There was hardly a public office that Bob didn’t run for – mayor, council, congress, president. The point was never about winning. It was about the forum that comes with candidacy, the chance to espouse his views that in the short run of a campaign or a decade were largely ignored or brought him mostly derision.

Crazy stuff, you know – starting in the late 1940s, as a white Jewish teen-ager joining in civil rights picketing outside a whites-only downtown theater. He opposed war, opposed the death penalty, favored legalizing drugs, spoke out for universal health care and affordable car insurance, and wanted big business to share the wealth.

Sometimes it was a chance to criticize the political system when, deemed a minor candidate, he would be barred from an election debate.

He was roughed up and stuffed in a trash can back around 1960 outside Baltimore City College, by a mob of students who also tore up his socialist leaflets. I missed the ruckus, but Olesker, who was in my 10th-grade homeroom, recalled seeing the mob that day. It might have been Bob’s biggest crowd before Wednesday’s memorial, we joked.

Bob was uncompromising in his beliefs. If there was movement on his issues, it was society that did the moving – as witness the election of a black president, debate on universal health care on Capitol Hill, growing disenchantment with the latest war, city council eyeing the high cost of car insurance for Baltimore residents.

But in his last two years, living in a nursing home, Bob was pretty much a spectator badly in need of a kidney – his own kidneys having failed as a complication from the knife attack and subsequent infections. He had nearly died after the attack. More recently, he had a stroke.

Olesker, in his remarks, said Bob “could really make people uncomfortable because we were not living up to our ideals” – and neither was America.

“He was bigger than most of the religions we practice,” said Reverend Bascom. “He was a consummate humanist. He walked where most of us feared to walk.”

After the brief program, horticulturist and retired veterinarian L. Bruce Hornstein, a friend of Bob since their childhood days, observed, “He was a pacifist, and he was fearless.”

For more on Kaufman, including his obituary and photos, check out these entries at The Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.kaufman28dec28,0,4426848.story
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/politics/bal-md.vozzella31dec30,0,4271671.story


Another passing

After the Kaufman remembrance, I drove across town to attend another memorial gathering – this one for longtime friend Mark Owings, who was among the handful of founding members of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society. He was the most gentle, soft-spoken human being I have ever known.

For those unfamiliar with the tale, I found myself at age 16 becoming close friends in high school with future novelist Jack Chalker and traveling by Trailways bus with him and a few other fans of the genre to attend meetings of the Washington Science Fiction Association. I suggested starting a club in Baltimore, and the first official meeting took place in the tiny basement of my parents’ Royce Avenue rowhouse.

We also started holding an annual regional science fiction conference, which initially attracted a few dozen people, but grew to major proportions over the years – 1,500 or more, and filling hotels. There’s even been a couple of larger world science fiction conventions here.

While I drifted away from active membership, Jack and Mark remained involved in BSFS and collaborated on a couple of book projects that drew on Mark’s strength as a bibliographer: The Index to the Science-Fantasy Publishers and The Revised H.P. Lovecraft Bibliography.

Jack died nearly five years ago. Now Mark, on Dec. 30, at 64 – mere weeks after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

The last time we had our picture taken together was in 2003, at BSFS’ 40th anniversary party – held in its spacious clubhouse, a former East Baltimore Street movie theater building.

I offered this comment at the party:

“I have proof that time travel exists. There’s just two drawbacks – it only goes in one direction, and it happens too fast.”

RIP, Mark. And tell Jack I said ‘hi’.

O’Malley rocks

Gov. Martin O'Malley (left) with fiddler Jim Eagan and accordion player Sean McComiskey, and, behind them, Ralph Reinoldi on electric guitar. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Governor jibes at Post reviews
as his Irish band plays on,
celebrating release of new CD

Two shows at Creative Alliance
raise money for the arts center

In a rare occasion for a politician, nary a word of complaint was heard Saturday night as Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley fronted his O’Malley’s March band in a pair of packed shows at Baltimore’s Creative Alliance.

At least no one in the audience seemed to have a complaint. O’Malley himself voiced a few, with jibes at Washington Post reviews and reporting on his band’s CD’s, including the just-issued fifth – Galway Races – for which the shows also served as a huge release party.

To speculation that the title had something to do with Maryland’s racetrack woes, or problems delaying the award of slot machine gambling licenses, O’Malley said, “I just happen to like the song.”

“Galway Races,” a traditional song, is the first of the CD’s 13 tracks – all covers of songs recorded by others, including Green Day’s “Good Riddance (Time of Your Life),” which effectively helped close Saturday night’s show.

Introducing another cut, the Saw Doctors’ “Wisdom of Youth,” O’Malley became briefly gubernatorial in offering up praise for the nation’s young people, and movingly spoke of his honor in being with the families of those who return from service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and “those who don’t.”

For the record, I haven’t heard any of O’Malley’s CD’s, and am waiting until after I finish this commentary to play Galway Races. Bonnie and I bought two copies (one for an eventual gift to some lucky friend, Irish or no) and stood in line to get them autographed by the governor and his six band partners.

I’d have to crank up the volume a lot higher than our equipment could handle to match the intensity of the band’s late show, which lasted two full hours without a break in the music. O’Malley had a couple of breaks, not only to duck backstage on a few numbers but when his guitar capo virtually exploded and again when one of the strings snapped in a dramatic musical moment. (The governor, not missing a lick, showed himself equally adept at five-string guitar while playfully whipping the dangling sixth at fiddler Jim Eagan.)

O’Malley’s March absolutely rocked the old Patterson movie theater, restored as home to the nonprofit Creative Alliance arts organization. From our front-row vantage, Bonnie had to deal with seat shake and what felt like floor shake from the music as she experimented with her new Nikon camera and took dozens of pictures of the show, whose proceeds at $25 a ticket benefited Creative Alliance.

What can you say about a band whose weakest link is, in fact, its leader. O’Malley has, at best, a very average singing voice (I confess to having the worst) and seems to be a good, but not necessarily great, guitarist. But he clearly knows how to surround himself with people more talented than himself. I view that as the mark of a smart politician. The seven of them together soared to musical heights in the performance. And how great a voice does anyone expect in a rock band, Irish or otherwise?

The other players are the multi-instrumental Jared Denhard (trombone, pipes, harp and whistle), Jamie Wilson (drums), Ralph Reinoldi (electric guitar), Pete Miller (bass guitar) and the great Billy’s son Sean McComiskey (button accordion).

Among those taking in the pre-St. Patrick’s Day show was a visiting (northern) Irish politician – Councillor Gerard Diver, or as he was introduced to draw the winning tickets in a raffle for a basket of shamrocks, “Mayor Gerry of Derry.”

He clapped and laughed throughout the show, and when asked afterward whether O’Malley could make a go of it musically in Ireland, Mayor Gerry in a broguish chuckle observed, “He’s got a lot of energy.” (According to the Derry Journal, Diver himself played in a well-known local band called Tie The Boy before entering politics. He was the guitarist. And the band practiced in the drummer’s basement… interesting, considering that the latest O’Malley CD was recorded in his drummer’s basement.)

At the show’s finale, I thought about exhorting an audience chant of “four more songs.” But artistically, it wasn’t the thing to do. The show started out strong, and ended even stronger. It was worth every farthing.

And what the hell, I’m not a newspaper journalist anymore. I may not agree with him or any politician on every issue, but I like O’Malley. He plays with passion.

Four more years, dammit.


O'Malley, in finale, bangs Irish drum while Jared Denhard plays trombone. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Election Day: Precinct Report

Early voting in Maryland

means getting up early

Turning into the long drive toward my precinct's polling place at Chesapeake Bay Middle School near dawn, you had to wonder if it was Election Day: Just two ground-level signs were in place, one of them opposing passage of a constitutional amendment on slot machine gambling, the other for costume sales at a local party store.

Halloween was over, but the election in fact was in full swing – minus the usual crush of signs and the bustle of electioneering. There were plenty of voters, more than 60 of them lined up by the time the polling place opened for business at 7 a.m., and a steady flow of more arriving.

“I’m one of the 33 percent of voters in this state whose vote doesn’t count,” said Jerry Zazzera, referring to Maryland's Republican minority and waiting with his wife, Angie, to cast ballots and get the election over with. Unlike most of the early-risers, they were not heading right off to work afterward, but to a vacation.

“We want to relax now,” Angie said after they had voted, a CD at the ready in their SUV, in place of the political talk shows for a while.

“Our intention is not to listen to any of this throughout the day,” Jerry said.

Not that he was ready to abandon political talk entirely – first sharing his conservative-leaning views including that the Republican Party “empowers people to get out there and be anything they want to be,” while the Democrats, with “this whole redistribution thing” on wealth, “you take the spirit out of people for wanting to succeed.”

“Freedom is so precious to me – I served 11 years in the service,” he continued. “I feel Obama will castrate the military.”

On the Iraq war? “My view on Iraq is we have planted a seed that people in surrounding countries can see.”

There were probably a few Democrat-leaning voters in the growing line, but finding them became impossible when my interviewing was halted by the polling place’s chief election judge as improper on the premises (not that I was telling people whom to vote for), and who wanted to know who I was – and when he found that I was a blogger, declared, “Then you have no status.”

Well, I was at least a voter. And I got the deed done by 7:10 a.m., and was out the door.

By the time I was leaving the first electioneers had arrived at the perimeter spot where the closest politicking and signs are permitted – one of them, Maryland State Teachers Association employee Maura Taylor, promoting a “yes” vote on slots gambling that would ostensibly support education funding, and for Democrat Frank Kratovil for the area’s First District congressional seat.

“I’ve never been to a polling place that didn’t have 20 people standing out front,” Taylor said of the dearth of electioneers, and holding a pile of slots and Kratovil brochures in her hand.

Next to her, the lone electioneer for Republican Andy Harris had arrived and set up her signs, which included one for McCain/Palin .

The neighborhood is part of an oddly-shaped district carved out after the 2000 Census to bundle up many of Maryland’s Republicans. In the primary, the conservative state senator Harris bumped off moderate longtime GOP incumbent Wayne Gilchrest, who late in the general election campaign gave his anticipated blessing to Democrat Kratovil.

That has made the district’s congressional race the most-watched among the eight in Maryland this year.

Demographically, it looked whiter than the southern Appalachian towns from my recent two-week road trip. Among the first hundred voters, I did not see one person of color turning up at my precinct -- although the judges on duty included one who was African American.

I have a feeling that, at least in this district, I'm in the minority, too.

Road Trip Wrap-Up (Voices of America)

Steve Riddle and his dog Rerun move sheep trio at Cumberland Gap demonstration. (Photos by Bonnie Schupp)

Five-state ramble comes to end,
but fortunately the nation hasn't

Our two-week road trip touching five states in southern Appalachia confirmed to us a confused and troubled nation.

We found people who are living in the past because they haven’t adapted to change, or grown beyond cultural prejudices, hatred and fear. Others we met re-enact the past – the parts that are heroic and demonstrate the great strengths on which this nation was built.

There are folks who embrace dialogue, others who hear only the voices they agree with.

And there are clearly folks who are facing harder times.

The American economy is so bad that even shepherd Steve Riddle is facing a layoff.

A shepherd. That’s right – the guy to whom “crook” takes on a whole new meaning is a victim of downsizing.

Riddle, 44, from Worden, Illinois, was running some sheep with his talented sheepdogs for a re-enactment of the pioneer era held at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in Kentucky. A little toot on Riddle’s cow-horn whistle, and his 9-year-old pooch partner Rerun was on the move turning the sheep toward a log pen.

An Illinois state employee for 19 years, and just a year before he might have been eligible for an early pension, Riddle said he’s been given notice that his job at Cahokia Mounds Historical Park is being eliminated at the end of November.

Except for anything related to Abraham Lincoln -- whose bicentennial is being celebrated in 2009 – the State of Illinois is cutting back on its parks and recreation staff to save money, lamented Riddle, who sadly doesn’t bear the slightest resemblance to the nation’s 16th president but makes a fantastic late 18th Century shepherd.

Riddle and his wife, who does spinning, have a small farm and three children, ages 21, 16 and 14, so he’ll be looking for work. Judging by his demonstrations at Cumberland Gap, he’s great with animals and kids, so give him a call.

The shepherd was among dozens of people we met across a road trip of nearly 2,000 miles. Stories about some of them made it into my two weeks of daily blogging, while those of others – like Steve Riddle – did not. So he and his picture, taken by Bonnie, lead the road trip wrap-up report as I turn through the pages of a couple of filled notebooks.

There were plenty of memorable words spoken by folks we talked with, some of which we recounted in earlier blog postings. Here’s a mix:

“You know the difference between a violin and a fiddle? A violin has strings; a fiddle has strangs.”

– Michael Delp of Elk Creek, Va., playing his fiddle at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park.

“If I breathe my last breath right now, I will be happy that I shared their story with you.”

– Kitty Wilson Evans, 69-year-old slave re-enactor and retired elementary school teacher who is the oldest of 14 living children in her family, telling an entirely white audience at Cumberland Gap of the hard lives endured by her ancestors who also were among the nation’s pioneers and how they dealt with adversity. No family’s story should ever be lost, she said, imploring the people around her to talk with parents and grandparents about their lives and experiences. “Know where you came from so you know how far you’ve come.”

“Right now, we are at least civil in our hated. We at least talk to each other.”

– “Deacon” Jones, a retired deputy police chief who portrayed a freed slave at the re-enactment and was expressing fear at the thin veneer separating racial harmony from violence in today’s America. It is a fear that tempers his joy at the possibility of Barack Obama becoming president.

“I just hope that this will be a healing process for the United States.”

– Richard Allison, white 72-year-old educator, sexologist and Florida-North Carolina Democrat, on the prospect of an African American president. He was out promoting the candidacies of several local Republicans in Bryson City, N.C. – clearly an involved citizen with friends on both sides of the aisle.

“Do you believe in Jesus Christ?”

– Breakfast hostess at a West Virginia motel, looking at my Annapolis Unitarian Universalist Church sweatshirt and trying to ascertain what it meant. My answer: “As the son of God, not really – but if there is a God, aren’t we all God’s children?” Her response: “You don’t believe in God?”

“I don’t know if Jesus could straighten this mess out.”

– Barry Strong, a 61-year-old retired juvenile prison educator, on the presidential debates.

Gasoline price conspiracy fails?

As we drove through Appalachia, we watched gasoline prices steadily decline. Our first fill-up, on the road in southwestern Virginia, cost $2.99.9 a gallon (you’d think we could dispense with that nine-tenths of a cent and just round it off!). Our last, on road back through middle-western Virginia, was $2.32.9.

A week before the Nov. 4 election, the price of gasoline had vanished as an issue – almost as if it were planned that way, to help the Republican cause.

Unfortunately for the John McCain cause, the economy plunged right along with it.

Say it ain't so, Joe

And after two weeks in the hinterlands, Joe the Plumber is still being invoked. Except he’s become Joe the Political Scientist, saying Barack Obama’s plans “sound like Socialism to me.”

But remember – he’s not even Joe the Plumber. He’s Joe the Plumber’s Helper. And his kind of thinking is taking people right down the political toilet.

Coming attractions: A visit to Great Falls of the Potomac, and comments from Real Muck readers.

Road Report, Part 13 (Meeting Mr. Lincoln)

Dennis Boggs, as President Abraham Lincoln, signs a copy of the Gettysburg Address for a young visitor to his field tent at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

Cumberland Gap reenactment

brings pioneers, president to life

Abraham Lincoln sat at his field tent writing desk and motioned to a young boy aiming a camera.

“If you’re going to shoot me,” the president said, “come sit over here.”

It was an odd juxtaposition in time, as Lincoln impersonator Dennis Boggs brought the slain president to life for an historical reenactment staged at Cumberland Gap National Historical Park in Middlesboro, Kentucky.

The occasion this weekend was the park’s first celebration of “Pioneer Roots of Our Nation’s destiny: The Lincoln Family Moves West.” While the trailblazing through the gap has been largely the story of Daniel Boone, Lincoln’s grandfather brought his family through as well – and so the former president was invited.

Lincoln was out of synch with time in two directions – from the vantage point of being surrounded by 21st Century tourists, and joining an encampment of re-enactors, some of them actual descendants of the early pioneers, depicting life in the late 1700s when Boone cut the trail westward through the mountains here.

Less than 100 yards away from Lincoln, Kitty Wilson Evans, a retired elementary school teacher, was portraying a slave and recounting the children’s games, folk tales and hard work of the older era, and exhorting her growing audience to make sure the stories of their own families are passed down across generations.

Nearing 70 and the oldest of 14 living children in her family, Evans stressed the importance of knowing “where you came from so you know how far you’ve come.”

It was no stretch to apply that mantra to the reality of here-and-now, with an African-American as the leading presidential candidate ( so the polls indicate) less than two weeks before the election.

That’s how far.

Leonard R. “Deacon” Jones, who told of his “memories” as a slave child being suspended over the plantation owner’s dinner table to fan away flies and later as a freed man helping in the westward passage through Cumberland Gap, was keenly aware of how far – and expressed both elation as an African-American and fear.

The elation was that an African-American could run for and have a real chance at winning the presidency.

The fear was of what might happen if that candidate should win, and the worst crime imaginable follow that victory.

Jones said he was shocked at the vile threats heard in national television news coverage from voices in the crowds at John McCain/Sarah Palin campaign appearances, expressions of the hatred that still hides beneath the veneer of American life.

“Here we are the most civil we’ve been as a nation, and people are talking like that on national television,” said Jones, a commercial photographer and retired police official who feared “the potential for violence, for upheaval.”

“‘Right now,” he added, “we are at least civil in our hatred – we at least talk to each other.”

But except for our conversation, the day was about history, about costumed people acting out roles like sheep herder, weaver, wheelwright, salt maker.

“Salt was more valuable than gold,” an authentically clad Charles S. Brown said of the migration years dating to the 1760s, because it was the only way to preserve food. It was brought out in 50-gallon pots from natural salt licks hollowed out by animal tongues – and the pioneers taking it had to fear attacks by Native Americans for whom the area would be a rich hunting ground.

“The most laborious task was keeping the fires going,” said Brown, standing over a bubbling pot of brine and noting that the salt cut out from the lick would be only about 7 percent pure and needed to be boiled down for use. It would take hundreds of gallons of brine to produce 50 pounds of pure, dry salt, he said.

A paint salesman in his 21st Century life, the 60-year-old Brown said he dresses in his frontiersman garb on long hunting weekends, even makes his own knives. “I carry green coffee beans and roast my own coffee.... I’m kind of hard core. I just believe if you’re going to do it, do it right.”

Michael Delp had an easier role – playing a fiddle, an instrument he took up just two years ago. “But I don’t know many songs,” he laughed.

In his reality life, Delp said, he produces the socks worn by re-enactors – so being there is both hobby and his living. “I’m really fortunate to do what I like to do, and make a business out of it.”

So, too, is Dennis Boggs, who says he loves portraying Abraham Lincoln, which has been his profession (Meet Mr. Lincoln) for nine years – ever since he was acting in a community theater and a director offered him the role. He just had to do a little studying, and memorize excerpts from a dozen speeches.

But it became much more for Boggs, who has studied book after book on the life of the nation’s 16th president and even puts an eerily familiar autograph on copies he hands out of the Gettysburg Address. He spins tales about his childhood pranks for youngsters in his audience, and just as quickly explains for an adult questioner his personal thoughts about emancipation for the slaves and the timing of his announcement.

For another adult, the ersatz Abe recalled how he was opposed in the 1864 presidential election by former Union Gen. George McClellan, whom “I fired.” McClellan, he noted, ran as the “peace candidate.”

Then he invites a young boy or girl to take the seat at his side, picks up his black top hat, and plops it onto the child’s head. It drops all the way over the youngster’s face, and then the president lifts it up slightly, and gives a broad smile.

Road Report, Part 12 (Confederate Encounter)

Commander James Young (left), with James “Hawk” Hawkins, at the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ flea market booth. (Photo by Bonnie Schupp)

In Tennessee,

Old Times Not Forgotten,
Particularly if it’s the Civil War

Call me crazy – and maybe inspired.

Why else would I walk up to the Sweetwater, Tenn., weekend flea market booth of The Sons of Confederate Veterans and ask: “Anybody here voting for Obama?”

“I’d just as soon slit my own throat,” replied James Young, commander of the Sons’ Gen. John C. Vaughn Camp # 2089 in nearby Tellico Plains.

Considering that introduction, and the Obama picture button pinned to my shirt pocket, Commander Young and I embarked on a very civil conversation in which we agreed on just one thing: We love our country.

Oh. Two things. George W. Bush has done a terrible job as president.
Oh. Three things. John McCain is too old to be the Republican nominee in this election – although Young and his companion manning flea market Booth No. 391, Sons’ camp Adjutant-Treasurer James “Hawk” Hawkins, said they will be voting for McCain.

“What choice do we have?” Young said.

They were selling a variety of merchandise at the booth – bumper stickers, replica Confederate currency and coins, and the item I bought for a dollar: a booklet explaining the flag associated with the South and the Civil War, which raises a ruckus anytime it is flown over a public building.
Proceeds from the flea market booth support the cause of resetting Confederate soldiers’ tombstones, Young said.

Speaking of the Civil War, Commander Young and I also agreed that Gen. Robert E. Lee was a great man and general – but he would not come around to my view that Lee chose the wrong side.

As far as Young was concerned, the conflict – still the deadliest in United States history – was “Lincoln’s war.”

And that harked to the 1960s for me, when folks thought that way about Vietnam and President Lyndon B. Johnson. As a young reporter then, I was assigned to write a story on Johnson’s son-in-law Charles Robb, then a Marine Corps officer, making a recruiting visit at the University of Baltimore.

“How do you feel about people calling this your father-in-law’s war?” I asked the future United States senator. He replied that it was America’s war.

Lincoln’s war? I don’t see the war between the states that way. (Although I see Iraq as Bush’s and Cheney’s war – a conflict that should never have become America’s quagmire.)

Young also took issue with another U.S. war – the one waged against Native Americans, who were slaughtered and forced from their lands. And that makes sense, since he claims ancestry that is mostly Cherokee with a mix of German-Irish. And on the matter of how America’s Indians were robbed and murdered, he and I also found agreement.

Amazing when you talk to people in a civil, respectful fashion, you can find common ground in the unlikeliest of places.

As for the flea market, where a purported 800 vendors seemed mostly to be selling knives and stuff that nobody really needs, we made one other purchase: a large U.S. flag for $3.

God Bless America.

There are Democrats in Tennessee

A little earlier in the afternoon, we stopped in the tiny town of Loudon in Bonnie’s quest of photographic subjects for a travel magazine. There wasn’t much – the depressed town only recently received a grant of $2 million to boost a renewal of its ghostly downtown that is just underway.

But it had a Democratic headquarters, up a tall wooden stairway around the corner from a closed ice cream parlor. The side wall of the building was decorated with an assortment of Obama posters facing passing traffic along Route 11 through town.

Presiding over the office was artist Tom Roberts, a Knoxville native who lived up north for awhile but has resettled in Loudon and invested in real estate. He owns that building where he is turning the Obama office space into a residence (with a beautiful century-old wooden-plank floor).

“It’s a pleasure to own this building and put up all these Obama signs – a beacon in a Sea of Red, said Roberts, who estimated area voter registration as 80 percent Republican.

I’d been wearing Bonnie’s Obama button since the beginning of our trip almost two weeks ago, so we bought three more buttons to update our political wardrobe.

Roberts led us on a walking tour of the town, including its oldest building – once owned by a Cherokee Indian who operated a general store until being forced out on the grounds that Native Americans were not allowed to own real estate.

As we headed back to the car, Roberts pointed out his favorite sign on his building. It reads:

Bluegrass Legend
Ralph Stanley
Endorses
Barack Obama
“A GOOD MAN”

Road Report, Part 8 (Presidential Visit)

The 17th president (left), and his bedroom with hat and chamber pot. (Photos by Bonnie Schupp)

Turns out that Andrew Johnson
wasn’t as bad as they say

The nation was in a deepening crisis, and the leading candidate for the presidency was an Illinois legislator with just a few years of experience on Capitol Hill.

Nope, his name wasn’t Barack. We’re talking about Abraham Lincoln, a former Whig who won the Republican Party nomination and went on to become, many say, the best president in history.

That’s the easy part. Now shout out the name of his running mate.

It took a three-hour visit on Tuesday to the Andrew Johnson home and historical site in Greeneville, Tennessee, to return to those thrilling days of nasty yester-year politics. And no, his running mate was not Andrew Johnson – not in 1860.

It was Lincoln’s run for reelection in 1864 when Vice President Hannibal Hamlin was dumped in favor of southern Democrat Johnson, a U.S. senator and appointed federal military governor of Tennessee who was one of the most admired men in the still-divided nation.

He was ill and nervous, and had a few too many drinks (ostensibly served to him by Hamlin) before taking the oath in the Senate chamber and giving a rambling, incoherent speech. Then Lincoln took his oath outside, delivered his famed “With malice toward none...” speech – and five weeks later, mere days after the Civil War had ended, was dead from an assassin’s bullet.

So the “drunken tailor” from Tennessee, as some called him, took another oath and became the nation’s 17th president.

History should have been that interesting back in junior high and high school – or maybe it was, and I just wasn’t paying attention.

Any similarities between then and now, well – history tends to be repetitious, and has its ironies.

Andrew Johnson grew up poorer than Barack Obama, and had a lot in common with slaves after his widowed mother apprenticed him to a tailor as a young teen-ager in his native Raleigh, N.C. Forget about child labor laws – Johnson was indentured for seven years, and became a fugitive when he ran away to Tennessee without completing his servitude.

Yet he became a slave-owner himself, even buying two half-sibling black children, after becoming a successful tailor in Greeneville. Self-educated with help from his wife, Johnson became deeply involved in local politics and won election to a succession of offices including the U.S. Senate.

After Lincoln sent him back to Tennessee as military governor following the union army’s capture of Nashville, Johnson decided to declare an end to slavery there – but first set an example by emancipating his own longtime household slaves.

He was a man of principle, and in the end that was what sullied his reputation because of unyielding defense of the U.S. Constitution in the face of post-war disputes with Congress and eventual impeachment for refusing to recognize a law enacted over his veto. He survived the Senate trial by a margin of a single vote of not guilty – and was the only president to be impeached until Bill Clinton “didn’t have sex with that woman.”

How complicated could a nation’s politics get? The strict-constructionist Johnson fought moves by the post-war Congress to help the freed slaves and deal harshly with those who had joined the Rebellion – not that he did not want to help the nation’s large black population, but he felt strongly about state rights and healing the wounds of war.

Unable or unwilling to seek compromise, Johnson became a failed president – likely in the lower 20 percent of all who have held the nation’s highest office.

During our memorable tour of Johnson’s two surviving homes and tailor shop in downtown Greeneville, our National Park Service guide Daniel Luther allowed as how Johnson would have been looked on with far greater admiration in history had he not become president. “But then, we wouldn’t be here on this tour,” he added. “People don’t generally visit the homes of the vice presidents.”

Our guide also noted that Johnson’s first speech after being succeeded as president by Ulysses S. Grant was made in Baltimore, where he declared: “My deliverance from office is the greatest case of emancipation since the Rebellion.”

Much of Johnson’s history and possessions in Greeneville are preserved. On the tour of his post-presidency home, you touch and hold the same banister as he did going up the stairs. The side-by-side portraits of Lincoln and himself that he treasured still hang above the mantel. His nightshirt lays across his bed. On the floor sits his empty chamber pot, and on the dresser rests his black top hat.

You can buy a replica of the hat in the Visitor Center gift shop for 12 bucks. The label says “Made in China.”

In the film there, the words of Andrew Johnson are spoken by an eerily familiar voice – that of Fred Thompson, the Tennessee actor-turned-U.S. senator and wannabe Republican president. Fortunately, playing stand-in for Andrew Johnson was as close as he would come.

King of the Wild Frontier

Driving north out of Greeneville along Route 11E, we are detoured by a roadside sign indicating that just 1.9 miles away is Davy Crockett Birthplace State Park.

Growing up as an adoring fan of the Disney-made Fess Parker-portrayed life of the early 1800s Tennessee frontiersman, congressman and eventual Alamo martyr, I just had to check it out.

I started whistling the theme song, ‘Born on a mountaintop in Tennessee, the greenest state in the land of the free, raised in the woods so’s he knew ev’ry tree, killt him a b’ar when he was only three, Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier.”

At the visitor center, a TV was showing a biographical video interspersed with scenes from Fess Parker’s series and John Wayne’s movie “Alamo.” You could buy a tacky Davy Crockett park T-shirt for $10, but the only coonskin cap (as worn by the Fess Parker version of Davy) was part of a display and not for sale.

For one thing, Crockett probably didn’t wear one himself.

And the park literature readily acknowledges the obvious when you look around the topography: He wasn’t born on no mountaintop.

So what did we gain by the little roadside diversion? We met a Georgia cracker – a crazed 81-year-old Republican veteran of World War II whose attitudes seemed straight out of the Ku Klux Klan.

Well, I didn’t know he was crazed right away. He seemed normal enough visiting the re-created Davy Crockett log cabin with his wife, daughter, and two sweet young grandchildren, and told me how he was from Georgia, he’d been there once before, 40 years ago, when the way in was a dirt road, the original cabin was still stood there, and the only amenity was a small refreshment stand.

I was curious about his politics, asking what he thought about the presidential election, and in an inspirational act to see how he’d react, opened up my Orioles jacket to reveal my Obama button.

Talk about an explosion of mouth. The short version is that he is less than happy about that black Muslim trying to become president. It got rougher, but I won’t go there. And he was gone a minute later, heading back to the car with his otherwise idyllic family.

There was an amused witness: A retired New York social worker and Vietnam vet, like us on a meandering drive in search of America. He winked and flashed his own Obama button.

Can’t help but wonder what Disney will make of Obama someday. Hope there’ll be a nice song to whistle, and a happier ending.

Tomorrow: A visit to the storytelling capital

Road Trip Report, Part 5 (The Poster Boys)

Reinventing wheels
in political postering

Who's on First?
Of course, it's America!

“Country First” – nothing new about John McCain’s slogan.

Warren Harding used a similar one in 1920: “America First.”

Who would have guessed? Well, if you’re keeping up with the work of Steve Seidman, you’d see the poster politics of 2008 in a whole new (or old) light. Seidman – Dr. Steven A. Seidman – is associate professor and chair of the Department of Strategic Communication at Ithaca College.

And in a bit of wonderful timing, his four years of research produced just a month ago his book: “Posters, Propaganda, and Persuasion in Election Campaigns Around the World and Through History.”

While the book doesn’t quite make it to 2008, Seidman looked at the current campaign in a presentation this weekend on the Virginia Tech campus in Blacksburg, Va., at the annual conference of the International Visual Literacy Association (http://www.ivla.org/).

There really isn’t much new when it comes to the art of political postering – for example, the use of “gazing into the future” poses by both the McCain and Barack Obama camps.

Seidman compared an Obama “gazing” pose, powerfully angled from below in front of a flag background of red, white and blue, to the pose of President Gerald Ford on a black/dark background for his (doomed) 1976 campaign. Ford’s face was the only color in his poster; Obama’s face, though not brought up by Seidman, was in shades of black and white against a U.S. flag background.

At the bottom of the poster was the colorful Obama campaign logo, built on circles with a blue ‘O’ for Obama and a rising ‘O’ sun at its center – suggestive, Seidman says, of “a better tomorrow” and a symbol similarly used in election posters in many nations.

There is also an array of “guerilla marketing” posters springing up, sometimes illegally plastered atop others’ posters, around the nation – and being marketed by their creators. Among them is the popular “Abraham Obama” design by painter Ron English, combining the features of Abe and Barack and easily found online.

“The last time artists became so enthusiastic for a candidate was 36 years ago for [George] McGovern,” Seidman observed.

Among the images Seidman displayed in his PowerPoint presentation was a side-by-side comparison of an Obama poster for his July appearance in Berlin and a 1933 poster supporting the Social Democratic Party of Holland – both in what the professor said was the Bauhaus style.

“These styles always reemerge,” he said.

Seidman noted a recent story in the New York Times on campaign typography, and showed the McCAIN/PALIN poster design you see on lawn signs, bumper stickers, T-shirts and buttons. Its font, he said, is Optima bold – and described in the NYT article as “classic, elite and old-fashioned.”

The font is also used in the national Vietnam Memorial in Washington, Seidman said, “a strong, tough typeface.” And he pointed out the “very military” presence in of a gold star and braiding in the campaign design.

As for “America First,” the Warren Harding poster showed the 55-year old Republican in front of a billowing Old Glory with his right hand in a powerfully tight fist, and his left hand with thumb and two forefingers outstretched in what has become a recognized peace symbol (this campaign coming soon after the Great War). The slogan appears to the lower left.

Harding won, but died of a heart attack two and a half years after taking office and was succeeded by another, to put it gently, lightly-regarded president, Calvin Coolidge.

I noticed in checking out Warren G. Harding online that he seems not to have made much use of his middle name – Gamaliel. That’s a tough one. Hussein is a lot easier on the tongue.

For more on the art and design of political posters and propaganda, check out Steve Seidman’s blog at: http://www.ithaca.edu/rhp/depts/stratcomm/blogs/posters_and_election_propaganda/

His book is available in paperback ($33.95) and hardcover ($109.95) from Peter Lang Publishing USA (phone 212-647-7706), or through Amazon where the paperback can be had a few bucks cheaper.

Tomorrow: Healing after campus tragedies

Road Trip Report, Part 3

"I don’t know

if Jesus

could straighten

this mess out."

--Barry Strong,

retired educator

Searching for the

reel America:

pay dirt at the drive-in

Not every day do you meet an educator who can laugh about slapping handcuffs on his students.

That’s Barry Strong, a retired teacher and principal we found Thursday in about the unlikeliest place – a drive-in movie theater, in broad daylight.

We’d been driving south on Interstate 81 from Harrisonburg, Va., and turned off on what you might call a blue highway in search of some real America. We found it a bit past noon along Route 11, on the outskirts of the town of Lexington.

The marquee said it was closed, the season ended, but there was a pickup truck parked inside the fence and no barricade at the entrance lane, so we rode in hoping for my wife Bonnie to get some pictures of the empty place that might be symbolic of a dying but of Americana.

The truck belonged to the 61-year-old Strong, who was methodically waving a fancy metal detector over the dirt and grass in a back parking row searching for stray coins. Not that he needed the money for gasoline or anything; it was just a little pastime that sometimes turns up an old silver dime or half-dollar, but more often worthless debris.

“It’s been metal-detected before, but nobody gets it all,” he noted. “The trouble with metal detecting in a place like this is there’s so much junk in the ground, like pop tops. But it’s like fishing – you never know what you’re going to catch.”

Strong said he’s a Hull’s Angel – a member of a group of supporters and helpers at the drive-in, which remains a popular place around Lexington on warm summer nights. “They bring their blankets and get out on the grass. It’s a family-oriented place.”

The conversation quickly turned to politics, as I asked his views on the campaign. He says he expects to vote for John McCain, despite -- not because of -- his selection of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. For Strong, the choice is because he sees McCain as the most experienced candidate for president.

“I watched most of the debate last night,” he said. “I think McCain did a little better.”

But he acknowledged that “I got tired of hearing Joe’s name,” a reference to now-politically ubiquitous Ohioan Joe the Plumber, and lamented of that profession that “they won’t come out to see you for less than a hundred.”

“I read the Roanoke Times – I read the editorials every morning. They said they ought to vote all the incumbents out and start over. They couldn’t do worse than that. I don’t know if Jesus could straighten this mess out.”

Now about those handcuffs:

Strong said he started his career in 1970 as a sixth-grade teacher at Hartman Elementary School in Clarksburg, W.Va., at a salary of $6,000 and a classroom of 46 children. (Bonnie noted she had started her career in Baltimore in 1967, at then-Ben Franklin Junior High, making all of $5,800.)

Strong had some wonderful tales of those early days, like teaching the twin brothers Neil and Don, and the hot day in the un-air-conditioned school when Neil fell asleep at his desk and was directed out into the hall for the then-customary punishment: a paddling.

“He was crying and said, ‘I’m sorry, Mr. Strong. It was hot, and we just ate....’ And he was right. So we went back in the classroom and I apologized to him in front of all the other children. And I handed him the paddle and told him to paddle me.”

Did he? You betcha.

“He reddened my ass,” Strong chuckled.

Later in his career, Strong said he became a teacher and administrator in juvenile detention facilities, including an assignment as assistant principal at the juvenile correctional prison in Beaumont, Va., where some of the students “were murderers.”

And that part of his career pretty much explains why “you could handcuff the students.”

Coming tomorrow: Outrageous roadside attractions

History Lesson

Old Republican playbooks
haunt American politics

Question: What do William R. Horton and Spiro T. Agnew have in common?

Answer: Their political ghosts are riding high in the 2008 presidential election campaign.

Horton was serving life without parole in Massachusetts for the 1974 robbery-murder of a 17-year-old gas station attendant when he was given a weekend furlough, and didn’t bother to return. Ten months later, in 1987, he was arrested after the rape of a Maryland woman and attack on her fiancé that got Horton a double-life term. (He’s still behind bars in Maryland, as far as I know.)

Horton’s prison release was possible because of an inmate furlough program being extended to killers by a court decision. The Massachusetts legislature then passed a bill to prohibit furloughs for killers, only to see it vetoed by Gov. Michael Dukakis.

Yup, that guy – Dukakis, who beat Al Gore and Jessie Jackson, among others, to win the 1988 Democratic presidential nomination. (Gary Hart was in that battle, too, until he was caught up in a sex scandal – belatedly prompting a Muckie nod of recognition at the 2008 mess of John Edwards.)

The Republicans and their 1988 nominee, George H.W. Bush, seized on the case, and the specter of “Willie” Horton dominated the campaign. And it didn’t help Dukakis’ chances when he offered a wimpy answer to the famous presidential debate question posed by moderator Bernard Shaw – that if wife Kitty “were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?”

These days, it’s easier to remember Willie Horton than the name of loser Michael Dukakis. Such is the power of a pounding negative campaign theme.

Agnew was the first-term Republican governor of Maryland whose criticism of black leaders during the 1968 King assassination rioting led to his unlikely selection as running mate in the successful presidential campaign of Richard M. Nixon.

As vice president, Agnew became Nixon’s attack dog, a specialist in delivering scripted negative rhetoric that included the famous description of the press as “nattering nabobs of negativism.” (He was also a crook – and avoided prison in 1973 by resigning the vice presidency and pleading no contest to evading income taxes on the bribes he got as governor. Agnew died in 1996.)

All this history brings us to 2008, and a first-term (Alaska) Republican governor and “hockey mom” unexpectedly named as the running mate of John McCain.

Attack dog? As she so famously (and unoriginally) put it, the difference between a hockey mom and a pitbull is lipstick.

So no surprise, it’s Gov. Sarah Palin hammering in speech after speech about the Willie Horton of 2008 – Barack Obama’s supposed “terrorist pal” William Ayers.

So far, she hasn’t renamed him Willie.

What does this teach us? The Republicans are digging deep into old playbooks, looking for tactics to distract voters from the very real and frightening issues of the day – including a divisive war and a collapsing economy.

No matter that William Ayers’ transgressions played out four decades ago, as a founder of the violent Weather Underground – likely the most dangerous of the many protest groups formed to oppose the Vietnam War – or that his relationship with Obama is relatively minimal. It includes their simultaneous service on the board of an anti-poverty organization in Chicago, where Ayers became a college professor and respected member of the community.

McCain, as noted in an earlier Real Muck blog posting, is still hung up about Vietnam and victory as America seems snared in another winless war.

Bill Ayers? He’s the fall guy.

Some will say that Ayers deserves it.

But Obama doesn’t.

Neither does America.

McCain-Obama II

John McCain: You need a friend,
but please stop calling on me

Let’s get this out of the way: John McCain is not my friend. I’ve never met the man, and he certainly does not know me.

Neither is Barack Obama my friend. He doesn’t know me, either – but at least does not pretend to be my friend.

I don’t trust people who use the word “friend” over and over again, and sound like a used car dealer trying to unload a clunker on a naive shopper. An old used car dealer, whose slick is wearing thin.

If I had to choose, I’d want Obama as a friend. But I’ll settle for giving him my vote – as the winner of Tuesday night’s debate and for president.

Obama could have done better. There were responses I wanted him to give to some of the questions, and mistakes that made me wince – especially pulling Delaware banking laws out of the political closet as an unfortunate metaphor in addressing a lack of requirements for health insurers in some states.

It might be true, but hey – the Republicans lately had not been going back to allegations of Joe Biden being cozy with Delaware-based bank/credit card companies. That’ll change as Election Day nears.

I enjoyed the spectacle of McCain dropping a line that many in the audience had probably used eBay – this from a candidate who has never even learned to email. So the work of his writers was transparent – it was just a line fed to McCain to make him sound current.

He’s not current. He’s the past. It was apparent from McCain’s repetitive answers that he’s still fighting the Vietnam war. He still thinks the only way out is victory, when there may be no such thing in Iraq any more than there was in Vietnam. Not for America, and not for Iraq after we went in and busted up the place so badly for the sake of regime change.

George W. Bush talked a few months ago about establishing a “time horizon” for getting out. One thing about the horizon – you never get there. And McCain doesn’t even have the horizon in sight.

The Real Weathermen

Stormy politics expected,
but a good chance for Obama

I asked the weathermen for their take on the presidential election – not the “domestic terrorists” that Cari-boo Barbie is trying to link to Barack Obama, but the guys who used to predict the weather at Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

The occasion Monday was the monthly breakfast gathering of a select group of federal retirees – the local National Weather Service forecast team and FAA air-traffic controllers.

They meet up the first Monday at the Glen Burnie IHOP, most ordering off the seniors menu, and discuss important issues of the day – as long as they pertain to sports. Politics and religion are usually not on the agenda.

Enter the invited guest – me. I don’t know the air-traffic guys beyond our meeting over pancakes, but I’d been talking to the weather guys for decades during my former life as a reporter at The Baltimore Sun assigned all too often to blather in print about heat, wind, rain and snow, not necessarily all at the same time.

So I’ll introduce them to you: Ken Shaver, a western Pennsylvania transplant whose perfectly modulated voice delivered weather radio broadcasts on WBAL and WNUV for years; Amet Figueroa, whose New York City accent might not fly for that kind of role here but was always loquacious and unintentionally funny when questioned about the steamy “good old Bermuda high;” and Fred Davis, a native Massachutan and level-headed meteorologist who was their boss as chief of the BWI forecast office.

These days, the weather forecasts come out of a centralized district office at Sterling, Va., and the trio’s been retired since the BWI operation was closed. Ken lives in Southern Maryland, Amet in Columbia and Fred in Pasadena, where he docks a boat named Bonnie Weather that honors both his vocation and his true love.

I polled the entire breakfast gang on who they’d likely vote for Nov 4, and the show of hands was about 7-5 in favor of Obama. (Yes, there are Republican sympathizers among the ranks these days, the FAA air-controllers’ 1981 strike and mass firing by Ronald Reagan notwithstanding.)

More importantly, I asked the weathermen their month-ahead predictions on who would win.

“Obama,” said Amet.

“Obama,” said Ken.

“Obama,” said Fred, with a cautionary look at one front that could put a wrinkle in such guesswork: Whether Americans, and clearly we’re talking about white Americans, will, in the privacy of the voting cubicle, accept the wind of change and choose a young African-American as their leader.

I hope so.

Odds and endings

Fred Davis and I have a little acting in common. Both of us appeared in Episode 6 during the final season of the HBO television drama “The Wire.” I have to unwrap my DVD boxed set and play it back, now that I know to look for Fred pouring tea for needy folks in a scene at the Baltimore soup kitchen Viva House where in real life he volunteers once a week. (In case you missed it, I was playing myself in the newsroom. And I don’t visit the newsroom nearly that often, since Sun retirees are made to feel less welcome than homeless men at a shelter these days.)

Spotted a lovely set of bumper stickers across the back of a Subaru Sunday, most of them with an anti-war sentiment. My favorite read: “What would Jesus bomb?” It was directly under a sticker calling for an end to bear hunting in Maryland. The peace sentiments went hand-in-hand with a ribbon-style sticker to “Support our Troops.” (Getting them out of Iraq would be a good start.)

Baseball news

It’s just as well the Chicago Cubs got swept out of the playoffs, since the team is owned by my former employer Tribune Co. and Sam Zell, whose ordered changes to The Baltimore Sun and other print properties are a journalistic nightmare. I would have loathed to see Zell holding the World Series trophy.

Speaking of baseball, I’ve never met Zell. But at a party honoring the huge Buyout Class of 2008 that shrunk the newsroom staff by about 20 percent, I whacked the celebratory Sam Zell Pinata with a baseball bat. A former colleague’s whack beheaded him like a bad scene at an Iraqi hanging. (Zell was full of it – molten chocolate coins and play money.)

About this blog

If you’re new to my blog, and that’s everyone since it’s just a week old, I’d like to introduce myself – David Ettlin, sunk to this opinion game after 40 objective years as a reporter and editor at The Sun. Since retiring in the Buyout Class of 2007, I’ve written half a dozen pre-season baseball stories for the competing Baltimore Examiner, filled in as an editor at the Baltimore Business Journal and Maryland Daily Record, written the cover story for the inaugural edition of the latter’s free monthly publication Exhibit A, and contemplated getting off my duff and writing a novel.

You can turn me up through a Google search doing a YouTube video about the first real tragedy I covered as a young reporter; telling tales at Stoop Storytelling (in June 2007 as Audience Storyteller No. 2, and as a featured speaker in that December’s annual “Holidays from Hell” spectacular); as a byline on a bunch but nowhere near all of the news stories I’ve written; and in tales of past lives by people who knew me back when.

I’m aiming to produce original material here, rather than (allowing for occasional exceptions) link after link to what others are writing on the Web. I’m hoping to post new material at least three days a week, after my daily-posting pace wears thin. And I hope, if you enjoy it, you message this link to your Internet pals: http://ettlin.blogspot.com/.

Special thanks to folks at sites including http://sideshow.me.uk/ and http://mybaltimore.ws/ who have pointed out the Cyberspace path to some of to my initial postings here.

And thanks for visiting!

Bawlamer, Hon!

Baltimore walk-don't walk sign
(slightly manipulated, at left) and Blogger Ettlin at festival. photos and manipulation by Bonnie J. Schupp


Taking in a festival
on a day as good as it gets

Saturday, on this first weekend of October, was about as perfect as it gets in Baltimore – mostly sunny, temperatures in the low 70s. It was one of the most perfect days ever for the annual Fells Point Fun Festival, which celebrates the city’s oldest surviving neighborhood. More often, it seems, the occasion can be brutally hot or miserably wet. And when you number the crowd in many thousands, you want low 70s. Maybe a little less sunshine, since I recently lost track of my favorite cheap sunglasses.

It was an easy choice among the day’s events. There was also the Michael Phelps parade north of town, and the Michael Phelps welcome-home ceremony and fireworks at Fort McHenry. The fact that Michael Phelps lives in a million-dollar-plus condo in the Fells Point area and wasn’t going to be home – well, we went to Fells Point.

I wouldn’t want to suggest that this town is suffering a bit too much from Phelpsomania, but it’s been hard to escape his domination of the local news media in the lead-up to the summer Olympics, during the Olympics, and now after the Olympics. It’s his rumored purchased of the swimming facility where he trains (and where I was too chicken to jump off the high board back around 1960), or it’s his mother’s return from Beijing to her job as a suburban middle school principal, or it's their endorsement deals (yup, even mom got an endorsement deal – because of the outfits she favored while watching her boy win eight gold medals), and it’s his reunion with his dog, it’s gossipmonger speculation on girlfriends. It just never ends.

Now I admit he’s a big deal, more famous right now than, maybe, Cal Ripken, who as far as I know never performed before a crowd in a skin-tight Speedo. So of course, young teen girls scream for Michael like they used to for Brit rock stars.

My brother was a swimmer in high school, and on the track team, and played JV basketball and football. By the time I got to high school, I had a note excusing me from gym – which was a good thing, since by then my brother was one of the gym teachers there.

But I digress, and return to the fun at Fells Point, where my wife Bonnie Schupp (her photos above) and I managed to find a free parking spot three blocks away and took in the sights, like half a dozen young couples dancing to swing music on an elevated stage in the middle of a street, old Polish ladies selling sausage and potato pancakes outside their even older church, little children squealing with delight on carnival rides like the spinning Dizzy Dragons, vendors selling all manner of clothing, jewelry and artwork, and the flow of legs and feet in the waves of people along the waterfront. (And some of the legs were attached to some very lovely young women, I might add.)

Couldn’t escape politics, of course. There were booths for Obama, Barr, and McCain – the latter scrunched up next to that of an international Buddhist organization whose chapter in a rural prefecture once invited us to speak during a trip across Japan. Republicans, bless their hearts, have never invited me to speak anywhere, and it’s just as well. The important thing to report is that Obama regalia outnumbered McCain regalia; in fact, the Obama booth ran out of buttons and yard signs, although there were plenty of stickers to hand out in lieu of buttons. Of course, Baltimore is about 90 percent Democrat in voter registration.

There was an old lady manning the McCain display, and she was very nice when I said I wished she had a McCain button so I could add it to my collection of losers’ buttons. “Nobody told me he was going to lose,” she retorted.

But McCain was already a loser – in 2000 when, in an inept bid for the Republican nomination, he failed to save the nation from George W. Bush. And that’s a fact. You can look it up.

Obama can’t lose in Maryland – not only because of its notable Democratic majority, but because if he goes down here, his campaign is doomed.

Oh, fudge!

On a lighter note, here’s to good fudge. There was a booth offering free samples, and it was excellent – but we didn’t want to carry chocolate fudge around for two hours, so we didn’t buy a larger quantity. But I found out it's a family business in the Pittsburgh area, which offers online sales. The link: http://fudgiewudgie.com/. If you’re in the market for some really good stuff, you can look that up, too.

Correction

Old friend Rosemary Armao, a journalism professor at Albany, N.Y., whose stops as an editor have included The Baltimore Sun, Sarasota Herald-Trib and South Florida Sun Sentinel, commented on my ‘Great Debate’ entry that my spelling of Hillary Clinton’s name was an L short. Oh L! So I fixed it. Nobody’s poifickt.

The Great Debate

They both screwed up, but
Biden came through at the end

Joe Biden muffed it. For more than half the time, he forgot to look into the camera and failed to talk directly to Middle America in straight and simple terms. Even so, he came closer to answering questions and – at the end – gave everyone a rare gift: A glimpse of his soul.

In the epic science fiction novel “Dune,” the desert-dwellers are stunned when the young exiled prince “gives water to the dead” by crying.

In American politics, tears don’t always play well in election campaigns. Hillary Clinton’s tears helped her, but only briefly, in this year’s Democratic presidential primary battle. In 1972, supposed tears in New Hampshire helped short-circuit Edmund Muskie’s quest.

Thursday night, near the end of his debate with Sarah Palin, Biden welled up emotionally, fighting back the tears as he recalled the tragic highway deaths decades ago of his first wife and their daughter and the ordeals of his injured sons. It was all there for America to see.

Palin was ice cold by comparison, after being sequestered and rehearsed for a week in mystical Sedona, Ariz.

She learned her lines very well: “Wall Street greed” was hammered on half a dozen times, although once she mixed up Main Street and Wall Street, and she looked like a pleased schoolgirl at her successful pronunciation of “Ahmadinejad” (learned so nice, she said it twice).

While Palin was short on substance and avoided answering questions as she returned to her repetitions and obviously concentrated on the talking points she had been taught, Biden spoke too often away from and above his audience.

Biden failed to challenge Palin’s qualifications for the vice presidency. Some observers had expressed the opinion that directly confronting her lack of knowledge and her inexperience beyond the borders of one of America’s least-populated states would backfire, but to my eyes, Palin’s embarrassing answer about “only being here five weeks” could have been repeated by Biden. He was far too deferential, instead giving toothy smile after toothy smile.

When Palin went on the attack, she did it with a smarmy smile, cloying winks, and folksy “aw, shucks” manner sure to distract many voters from any misinformation, mistakes and lack of knowledge. She was back to being good old Hockey Mom, and she’s carrying the Republicans’ big stick.

Who won? That's a matter of, well... debate.

Channeling Bristol

Today's little rant

I know it’s too easy, and probably unfair – but it’s also Sarah Palin’s fault. After all, she’s the one who brought up the “family values” stuff that makes her such a model mom to the religious right (as distinct from the right religious). It was all about teaching only abstinence, and putting up some sort of iron chastity curtain to block out many of the realities of life in 21st Century America.

Haven’t heard much about daughter Bristol lately. She’s off the front pages, not even evident in the inside pages, and her Hockey Mom hasn’t been saying much about the 17-year-old’s pregnancy situation since that storm blew over.

And whatever happened to the foul-minded goalie boyfriend who slipped a got-lucky shot past the family values defender and scored. Last I saw him, he was up there on the stage in St. Paul, Minn., sharing the climactic moment of the Republican National Convention with the McCain team, dressed up in his Sunday best and furiously chewing a wad of gum; then there was the little matter of his ugly but disappearing presence on the Internet.

The point is that Sarah Palin would like to see her spin on family values imposed across America, when they didn’t even work inside her own little igloo. And it’s about how big a lie you can spin to make teen sex OK in the eyes of do-no-wrong Republicans because, after all, her daughter’s going to keep the baby and marry her self-described “fu**in’ redneck” boyfriend, almost as if it were planned.

It’s just good old Republican retroactive hypocrisy. Paint it in the bold colors of “we’re doing it right, even when we did wrong, by golly.” Now everybody applaud.

But I can’t applaud. I feel sorry for Bristol, who at worst is an ordinary teenage girl with an all-too-common problem, revulsion for her caricature jock boyfriend, and scorn for the mother who shamelessly thrust them into the national spotlight.

Any bets out there on the long-term prospects for this teen romance? You can have two guesses – one predicated on a Republican win in November, the other on a loss that sends Sarah Palin home to carry her current job to term, assuming she’s even on the ticket come Election Day.


Now that I’ve gotten it out of my system, at least for today, we move along to a new feature of this almost-as-new blog:

Movie Reviews!

I’ve gotten into a serious movie habit lately, thanks to a membership benefit of Friends of the Maryland Film Festival, and a Web-based network called Gofobo: Free movies, usually before they’ve officially opened. There’s a row or three set aside for movie reviewers, not that the Baltimore area has actually got three rows worth of reviewers, and most of the other rows are filled with festival members and invited guests.

I confess I’m not a movie expert. My wife Bonnie and I attended a recent screening of “Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys,” and I had no clue about who is Tyler Perry. But I found out, because the African-American actor-producer-director personally showed up to introduce his film to the predominately black audience at what was said to be its first public screening.

It’s been open now a couple of weeks, and done fairly well at the box office. We enjoyed it – particularly the acting of stars Alfre Woodard and Kathy Bates, which largely made up for the film’s soapy plot.

Last week, I saw “The Lucky Ones,” courtesy of the Friends group, and was awed by the performances of co-stars Tim Robbins, Rachel McAdams and Michael Pena as three wounded soldiers returning from the Iraq war – the former presumably ending his service, the others on 30-day leaves. It’s a buddy movie, and they embark on a cross-country road trip that at times channels “The Wizard of Oz,” complete with a tornado and a dog. Not sure who the wizard was, but “Oz” was portrayed by Las Vegas. Great casting of that, too.

Eloquent in its empathy for the American soldier, the film did not fall at all into the trap of being antiwar. It was, if anything, pro-humanity and inspiring.

The next night, I lucked into gofobo tickets for an advance screening of “Eagle Eye,” being shown all of four hours before its midnight opening at a suburban IMAX-equipped theater. It relies on nonstop action and spectacle as two ordinary people (played by Shia LaBeouf and Michelle Monaghan) get snatched up as pawns in a runaway computer’s effort to bring down the American government for being what it viewed as unAmerican. Runaway computers, now there’s an original idea. (American government acting unAmerican, now there’s another original idea.)

Did I mention, it was shown in IMAX? Two hours of big, loud, explosive, car-crashing IMAX?

The IMAX was terrific.

Politically Impaled

Sheer Torture

Impaled: It was my favorite word in 40 years as a journalist.

It’s a word so evocative of horror, yet one that could rarely be used. There was the police department horse that fell down a hill onto a spiked fence, or that truly horrible motorcycle accident best left to the imagination. Impaled just didn’t happen very often.

But now, there’s a new word for what’s happening to Americans: Impal(in)ed.

Politically, it’s sheer torment.

For Democrats like me, it’s the fear that Sarah Palin could become vice president, and as for John McCain – well, that melanoma keeps coming back. Look at all the makeup hiding his face in TV appearances, his pained expression and the way he holds himself so stiffly.

For Republicans, there’s also some fear – that Sarah Palin will continue to be an embarrassment every time she opens her mouth.

I have a hard time imagining a Republican victory.

Eight years of Republican administration have produced one disaster after another – chief among then a failed war premised on false warnings and outright lies, and the collapse of the United States as a moral and economic compass for the world.

I wonder at what difference McCain might have made had he defeated George Bush in the Republican primary elections eight years ago, and gone on to claim the presidency. But he didn’t – and that failure at a crucial time in American history does not make him worthy of the presidency now.

McCain’s choice of running-mate belies his own campaign slogan of “America First,” proving that he will go to any length to appeal to the party’s right-wing even if it means putting America at risk of being Impal(in)ed.

Do Americans care?

We’ll find out Thursday night, when the TV ratings show how many people watched the Biden-Palin debate.

Pushing the Right Button


I wore my Obama button today – a big red, white and blue oval that some clever soul was marketing two months ago. It boldly reads: “I like Barack Obama but is America ready for a President with a brain?

And I noticed that people were looking at it, a few smiling, others with bland expressions that suggested they didn’t quite understand the message or didn’t like it. But while I was checking out bargains in a newly-opened Goodwill secondhand thrift store (yes, sometimes dead men’s clothes aren’t bad), an African-American employee walked up to me and said rather hopefully: “Do you think he really has a chance?”


Flag Hunt

The main goal of my shopping trip was finding a small American flag. Amazing how many stores don’t carry them. I tried a couple of “dollar” stores, places selling party goods, even the Goodwill store, figuring that a little American flag would be a popular item. The best I could find was a tiny 15-cent paper flag, poorly printed in faded ink.

At a party “super store,” a clerk said the flag is in stock only around Independence Day – and when the flag isn’t in demand at other times (even for the Veterans Day observance coming in about six weeks), it’s not available.

But the clerk suggested I try a nearby Kmart store.

Clerks there remembered seeing them.

One suggested the sporting goods section, where there was enough camouflage gear, bright orange hunter vestments, fishing rods and gun oils to supply three towns the size of Wasilla, Alaska, but no flag.

Another clerk recalled seeing them in the garden section a few months ago, and sure enough – there they were, on a high shelf, in several sizes. I picked out a wrapped pack of two small flags, about the size that adorn graves in veterans’ cemeteries, but with Old Glory stapled to cheap wooden sticks topped by plastic points.

They were labeled as made in America – an increasingly rare phenomenon in 21st Century retailing – and there was no sales tax on the $2.99 price.

Except for the wrinkles of the cheap thin polyester-and-cotton fabric that need a little ironing, the flags were just what my wife wanted as a backdrop for some planned stock photography images of Iraqi and Afghan currency.

When she’s done, maybe I can find a patriotic use for them.

I love my country, after all – and retain an optimism that its people are not going to be fooled again.