Monroe Anderson

For my father and sons, no time for lessons on life

 

  There is no good time to die.  But Tim Russert’s untimely death two days before Father’s Day was one of the worst.  The death of the beloved Meet the Press host also happened a day after he had returned from a family vacation in Italy, celebrating his son Luke’s graduation from Boston College.
    I only knew Russert from what I saw on television and read about him, but I have no doubt that he was a great father and son.  So I feel sorry for Big Russ, his father, who just recently was moved into a nursing facility. But my heart goes out to Luke,         Tim’s son, who will forever connect his graduation and Father’s Day with the loss of his caring and loving dad.
    Russert was only 58 years old when he died. That’s three years younger than I am now. That’s way too young. My father died way too young as well. He was the same age I am now when he, like Russert, died suddenly from a heart attack.
    I’ve never fully recovered from his death, which was 24 years ago. My older son, Scott, was just five months old. My younger son, Kyle, was not yet born.  Over the years, as I fumbled my way through fatherhood, I frequently wished my father was to teach my sons lessons on life.  I regularly wished he was around for my sons to know the joy they surely would have experienced had he lived to share with them a grandfather’s love.
    That was not to be. I am reminded as much this Father’s Day as I cherish my wonderful sons and miss my great father.

    (The photo above is of my father and my nephew, Chuck. It was shot in 1973. The one to the right is of Kyle, Scott and me. It was taken four years ago.)

 

    Here’s an op-ed page column I wrote commemorating my father’s life just days after he passed away.

 

 

A good man and great father
The Chicago Tribune
January 20, 1984

Life is a series of wishes for second chances.

For me, that impulse to backtrack has sometimes been sparked by insignificant little moments. Hasty motions leading to the spilling of milk or the breaking of treasured objects have prompted me to wish my actions had been more measured. Cutting words to close friends during heated arguments have left me wishing I had thought longer before speaking. Missed catches in the outfield have had me wishing I had kept my eyes on the ball.

At other times, rather than an instant replay, I’ve tried to guess what would have happened if I had had a chance to draw up an entirely different game plan during the pivotal periods in my life. When I was going through a divorce several years back, I felt that way. What if I had done this rather than that? Could the marriage have been saved? Should it have occurred in the first place?

Last week, I craved a second chance. I would have traded a year of my life for the ability to turn back the clock a mere 12 hours.

Monroe Anderson, my father and my friend, died, without warning, on the morning of Jan. 9 at his home in Gary. He suffered a heart attack at the age of 61.

As soon as I learned of his death, I began second-guessing what might have happened if I could have stopped the clock and turned it back 12 hours for a second chance. I would have been there at his side. Maybe I could have done something to save his life. If fate had to prevail, then at least I could have had final words with him. In reality, there was only the finality of it all. There were no second chances.

But while he was alive, my father had had a second chance. In a curious and vicarious way, I was it.

To explain how and why I came to be my father’s second chance. I’ll have to go back to the beginning. He was the son of yet another Monroe Anderson, a sharecropper in the Mississippi Delta. In 1923, my father’s family’s little tenant shack was uprooted by a tornado. The bodies of his father, mother and 6-year-old sister were found in a field a mile away. My father, one year old, was found there too. As his tiny body was being loaded on the horse drawn cart bearing the heap of corpses, someone noticed him shudder. He was raised by his grandmother and two young aunts.

As a teenager, he came to the North to improve his life. He moved to Gary where life and earning a living were easier for an unskilled young black man with an eighth grade education. In late 1942, he received his draft notice. He persuaded Norma, the 17-year-old love of his life, to elope with him so that if he went overseas, he’d have a family of his own back home.

After he received his honorable discharge, he returned to Gary to establish an instant family by inviting his widowed mother-in-law to share his home; she has been there since. I was born about a year later; my sister and brother followed. Although during his life he would labor as a coal truck deliveryman, a cab driver, a cabinetmaker and a steelworker, his true profession was that of a father and family man.

When he wasn’t working, he was at home. When he went out, he took us with him. What little money he managed to make, he spent on us. He wanted us to have the things he hadn’t had—an education was the most important of those things.

To send his first-born to college, he worked two full-time jobs at two steel mills so my tuition and room and board wouldn’t impose a financial hardship on the rest of the family. It was worth the price to him. My success was his reward.

I remember his telling me how he had taken a clipping of my first newspaper article to show people at the mill. “That’s funny,” his superintendent commented cruelly when shown the article. “Your son’s a writer but you can barely write your name.”

I also recall his reaction to an appearance I made on a Phil Donahue show in 1976 following an investigative series I had worked on for The Tribune. As I spoke, my name appeared on the screen. “Look. Look, that’s my name on television,” he said with unbridled excitement.

I was not only his namesake, I was an alter ego. He took pride in my accomplishments while I found comfort in my belief that had he been given the same support and opportunities, he would have achieved that much and more.

Over the years, my love and gratitude were spoken and unspoken time and time again. Still, there is this hollow feeling inside me that hungers for one more chance to tell him how good a man he had been and what a great father he’ll always be.

June is now Black History Month

   

    History happened last night. Or as Sen. Barack Obama described it, it was an eventful evening as he became the first African American to win the Democratic nomination for president. A year and a half ago, Obama’s journey this far with nothing but a notion. Hillary Clinton had the name recognition, a leg up in the money chase and her hand on the party’s political machinery.
    Back then, I was soberly skeptical while secretly hoping the improbable would become the reality. Obama is now five months away from being the winner who takes all. 
    Still, yesterday was good. Let’s hope that tomorrow will be even better.   
    Here’s a column I wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times a year and a half ago, right before Obama officially announced his candidacy for the party nomination.

Can Obama prove me wrong again?

Chicago Sun-Times

January 21, 2007
BY MONROE ANDERSON

Not long after Barack Obama lost his bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, I ran into him at a downtown restaurant. I stopped at his table for a quick hello before joining my lunch date. Before I could nod goodbye, Obama told me that he was going to run for the U.S. Senate. I was taken aback. ''From a state senator to a U.S. senator? That's too big a leap,'' I warned.

''It doesn't matter. It's all the same,'' Obama said, summarizing in the shorthand exchange of a chance restaurant encounter that either you're qualified and capable or you're not. Remembering that he'd expressed an interest in running for mayor during another lunch meeting years before, I think I shook my head in disbelief. Time, obviously, has proved Obama right and me wrong.

The short period it took him to go from a relatively unknown Illinois state senator to a relatively unknown political force with rock-star stature could have happened only in these modern times, where the currents of cable network news and the World Wide Web ebb and flow 24/7. In less than three weeks, we'll see if it's his time again as he launches his bid to become the next president of the United States. When Obama announces, he'll make history as the first black candidate whose presidential campaign goes well beyond symbolic protest or civil rights activism. As he announces, the time and place cannot be ignored: He'll do it in the midst of Black History Month, from Springfield, the center of the Land of Lincoln.

And this season we're in now may never be the same.

Almost as soon as the nation's holiday season ends, the black history season begins, starting with the Jan. 15 national holiday celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King's legacy of freedom and equality in modern American life. With the slain civil rights leader's ''I Have a Dream'' speech as its coda, the black history season lasts six weeks -- from King's birthday until the end of February. While that window of opportunity is open, African Americans of some note -- or those who have something to say -- become the perennial flavors of the month. It's a heyday. The chosen are sought out for speechmaking and interviews on network television. For those six weeks, the trials, tribulations and triumphs of great American blacks become our nation's wallpaper: always there but not always noticed. During the season, from morning to night, day in and day out, there are Black History Month exhibitions, concerts, programs, performances, galas and fund-raisers. The cable movie channels spotlight black film directors and black movies. Sponsored public service announcements are featured on network television. Public radio and television broadcast special features. Public school children are taught the heroism of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass and George Washington Carver.

Then it's all over. We have to wait until next year.

Shoehorning centuries of conflict and contributions into six short weeks once a year always struck me as a peculiar practice. As slaves and as freedmen, from Reconstruction to Jim Crow to the civil rights movement and now, African Americans are tightly woven into all aspects of the American fabric. Our heritage is the back story in all American history and often a main plot.

To be sure, Obama won't be running on the African-American platform but, seek it or not, he'll be the African-American presidential candidate. That's fine with me. Every time this brilliant, compassionate man speaks to American citizens will be at once, a lesson in current events now and a history lesson for generations to come. And should he win, believe it or not, black history will become America's history 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days of the year. So I, like millions of other Americans of all races, creeds and national origins, would like to see him become the Jackie Robinson of major league politics in this nation.

Only time will tell if, exactly two years from yesterday, Obama will be front and center at the swearing-in ceremony on Pennsylvania Avenue. I honestly doubt it, but I sincerely hope the Illinois senator will prove me wrong again.

Wright out or wimp out? Obama quits Trinity

    In the wake of the Father Michael Pfleger controversial sermon last Sunday at Trinity United Church of Christ, Barack Obama sent a letter yesterday resigning from his place of worship for the past 20 years.
    I sort of, kind of, understand why he did it. But I’m also sort of, kind of, concerned about what this might portend for an Obama presidency.
    Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Trinity are community building blocks that the right wing has turned into bricks to be thrown at presidential candidate Obama from now until the general election ends in November—and perhaps beyond.
    So in an attempt to turn manufactured right-wing ammo into blanks, Obama has completely separated himself from his minister and his church. What worries me is this: Can we expect a President Obama to cave in to the whims and will of the right on policies and issues he knows are important, if this nation is to move forward in a progressive and compassionate manner? Can we expect him to genuflect to negative reports by an uninformed, misinformed or ill-willed media?  Is the candidate of change willing to go-along in a willy-nilly get-along fashion?
    I hope not, but I’m not sure.
    Obama knows what Trinity is about. I’ve only set foot in the church twice in my life and I know what it’s about. It’s nothing like it’s being portrayed in the national media. Nor is Rev. Wright.
    Obama knows that Rev. Wright and his church and Father Pfleger have been forces for good on Chicago’s South Side for three decades. Both Trinity and Father Pfleger should have known the Catholic priest’s racially-tinged mocking Hillary Clinton performance would only be perceived as another weapon to use against Obama. They should know, as I know, that they ultimately left the Illinois senator with little political choice.
    I also know that perception can become reality in our media-defined world. But reality is not always perception.  And, the reality is that Obama cannot let the right-wing dictate his principles.
    Should this become his practice as president, then for those who have invested so much hope in him, his victory will only be a pyrrhic one.

There are no atheists in this Fox hole

   

    Fox News, a major engine in the right-wing smear and fear machine, is apparently on a Mission From God: To deliver John McCain to the White House.
    The propaganda practicing cable news operation featured Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s limited-edition sermon snippets all day and all night until even its small-minded, narrowly informed audience came to realize the Chicago minister was old news. I think that was around the point when Fox started doing breaking news every night on Rev. Wright’s travel schedule.
    The “Fair and Balanced” news network is now promoting Rev. Michael Pfleger as the latest albatross to be hung around Barack Obama’s neck. Fleer’s sin: having the audacity to mock Hillary Clinton’s sense of white entitlement.
    It doesn’t matter that Father Pfleger, the pastor of Chicago’s St. Sabina Catholic Church, is white. It doesn’t matter that Rev. Pfleger said, “I regret the words I chose on Sunday," he said. "These words are inconsistent with Senator Obama's life and message, and I am deeply sorry if they offended Senator Clinton or anyone else who saw them." 
    And it doesn’t matter that Obama was forced to issue this statement: "As I have traveled this country, I've been impressed not by what divides us, but by all that unites us. That is why I am deeply disappointed in Father Pfleger's divisive, backward-looking rhetoric."
    All that matters, for Fox, is that an activist Catholic priest in Rev. Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, said something they could label as Obama’s new “preacher problem” with a "hateful speech."
    As a matter of comparison, this is a glimpse into Father Pfleger’s performance as he referenced Clinton’s teary performance the right before the New Hampshire primary. "I really don't believe it was a put-on. I always thought she felt 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white. And this is mine. I just got to get up and step into the plate,'" he said. "And then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama.' And she said, 'Oh damn, where did you come from? I'm white. I'm entitled. There's a black man stealing my show.'"
    At that point, Pfleger, whose Catholic parish is all black, pretended to cry, using a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. "She wasn't the only one crying. There was a whole lot of white people crying," he said.
    Hate filled stuff. Huh?
    Now let’s look at what Rev. John Hagee, one of the fundamentalist preachers John McCain sought out for a political endorsement had to say. According to Hagee, Adolph Hitler was a "hunter," sent by God, to create the holocaust to make it possible for the Jews re-establish a state of Israel.
    When Hagee’s latest nut-laced pronouncement broke a week ago, Fox couldn’t imagine that it was breaking news: The story ran about 10 minutes into the cable news network’s Special Report with anchor Brit Hume chucking through his summary of the story. Unlike its ad nauseam airing of the Wright and Pfleger videos, Humes didn’t bother to show Hagee’s snippet at all.
    As it turns out, Fox is pretty much done with Rev. Hagee. As for Wright and Pfleger, they’ve only just begun.
    Here are some of Father Pfleger’s recorded antics from last Sunday’s sermon.

    And here’s what Dan Abrams of MSNBC’s The Verdict thought about it.

We already know which West Virginians are McCain bound

   

    Jim McComb is an artist, a friend and a political activist. A decade or so ago, he and his wife, Alene Valkanas, bought a weekend place in New Buffalo, Michigan, which for many well-off Chicagoans is an area that's home away from home. About a year ago, Jim and Alene put their Northside Chicago condo on the market and made Michigan turned their vacation home into their retirement home.
    When not spending time in his studio painting watercolor landscapes (the painting, "Apple Boat," above is one), Jim has been out and about trying to change the nation’s political picture. He’s been involved in the Obama campaign there and been over some peaks and down some valleys. He sends me his observations periodically. The one he sent yesterday, I thought I’d share with you. This is much of what Jim wrote:

This Friday Senator McCain having arranged to make his medical records available for scrutiny to a small audience of selected reporters, failed at the same time to conceal his biggest medical liability, his very thin skin. Stung by a charge from Senator Barack Obama that his failure to endorse Senator Jim Webb's Updated G.I. Bill was a failure to support the troops, McCain lashed out at Senator Obama's service record.

Never mind that when Obama was at the eligible service age America was in no imminent danger and that young Barack Obama had enlisted for the domestic battlefield, fighting poverty on the south side of Chicago.

With this petty assault on Obama, Senator McCain has quickly sidestepped his promise to keep this campaign for the Presidency elevated. And he has exposed his least Presidential quality, the ability to keep his word.

Sara Bode a colleague here mused that she hoped for an elevated instead of an "attack/counter attack" campaign to which I replied:

    "It would seem that the main lesson of the Kerry Experience is that you never let an attack stand unresponded to. My guess is that McCain is really a mean son-of-a-bitch not the "Mister Charm" of the David Letterman Show or the Daily Show. He is probably a generational racist and seriously resents being challenged by this "upstart young black leader." Eventually he will let something really ugly drop in public or private and we will see the real John McCain not the war hero Barack honors."

    Most sadly the stuff from West Virginia confirms how ugly this will get:

I still believe we can win but it will depend on being able to re-marshall that army of "YES WE CAN" young believers from the primary and move them again for the general election. There seems to be a lot of skepticism among the pundits that this is possible. What do you think?

    My thinking, Jim, is that the jury’s still out. The optimist in me wants to believe that the good old USA has enough adults to negate the ignoramus-types represented in that West Virginia video. The realist in me keeps whispering, “We’re not there yet.”
    We’ll all know how much racial progress this nation has undergone by mid-November. My fingers are crossed. My hopes are high.

Grand nanny governance: The CTA offs GTA

    Chicago may be the nanny-government capitol of the nation. Its mayor, Richard M. Daley, has pledged to have high-tech surveillance cameras on every corner in the city within the next eight years. Its 50-member city council passed legislation forbidding restaurants to sell foie gras because a majority of its aldermen doesn’t like the way ducks are force-fed to fatten up their livers.
    The latest nanny-notion the Windy City has acted on is gaming. I’m not referring to the gaming Republican spin-meister Frank Luntz came up with when he pimped the word to change the image of Las Vegas gambling. No, I’m talking about computer and Internet gaming.
    As it turns out, the Chicago Transit Authority recently removed a series of Grand Theft Auto IV ads from the city’s bus shelters. The city didn’t want to be promoting a game that features simulated sex, car theft and drive-by shootings—especially after a news report by the local Fox station speculated that an ugly rash of violence in Chicago maybe somehow related to the game’s release—or not.

    " ...the CTA can do what they want, the game has enough publicity without the CTA ads. I've seen real violence, sexuality and drug use while riding the CTA. Maybe they shouldn't worry about protecting their riders from virtual violence and worry more about reality.”

    Grand Theft Auto IV may be good, but I can’t imagine it’s that good. I just can’t imagine a video game being so compelling that it would drive hordes of young people away from their computers and out on the streets to car jack and shoot up the toddling town.
    But first, a disclaimer: I’ve never played the game. In fact, I don’t play computer games at all because I’m fearful that I’ll become addicted to them and waste all my time with the Sims instead of investing it in real life. So who am I to say what evil lurks in computer games.
    Fortunately for me, I have an expert in the family. My 24-year-old son, Scott Anderson, is a game developer. Before he moved to Arizona last year to work on “Stargate Worlds,” an upcoming massively multiplayer online role playing game, he was a devoted and regular CTA customer. And, if memory serves me right, the Grand Theft Auto series is one of his favs.
    Who better to call on than someone who is well acquainted with both the CTA and the GTA? I emailed doubly knowledgeable son to ask what he thought.
    Scott, who is working overtime to help Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment finish the game by its year’s-end deadline, didn’t waste a lot of words sharing his opinion on the wisdom of the CTA offing the GTA IV ads from its bus shelters.
    “It's an odd choice, but the CTA can do what they want, the game has enough publicity without the CTA ads. I've seen real violence, sexuality and drug use while riding the CTA,” Scott wrote back about the game which made $310 million in its first week of release. “Maybe they shouldn't worry about protecting their riders from virtual violence and worry more about reality.”
    In the meantime, Take-Two Interactive, the creators of GTA 4, is suing the Chicago Transit Authority for violating a $300,000 deal they’d struck with the city.
    The Chicago mob is alive and well and living in the suburbs. Maybe, instead of spending a lot time in the court, Take-Two Interactive ought to have their people have a sit-down with a couple of real-life hit men.
    After kneecapping a Chicago pol or two, they might be able to get the city leaders to understand the difference between what’s pretend and what’s the real deal.

Dr. King's Death: My personal memory

   

    I was a j student about to leave Indiana University’s Ernie Pyle Hall when the news came over the wire service. Dr. Martin Luther King was dead. His life cut short in Memphis by an assassin’s bullet.
    I remember being struck by more emotions than one all at one time. I found the irony that the pied piper of peace would meet a violent end.  I felt justified in my anger and the Black Power philosophy I had adopted a year and a half earlier.  And I felt smug.
    In the wire service story, a young minister, Jesse Jackson, was mentioned.
    “Who’s Jesse Jackson?” My student editor asked.
    As one of only two black students in the entire journalism department, I knew who Jesse was. My white student editor did not.  It was expected that I know all things important to them while they knew almost nothing that was important to me.
    Dr. King’s death would serve as the fulcrum in shifting that equation. Urban riots were already breaking out across the nation as news of the slaying spread.  All this was popping at the beginning of my spring break and on the eve of my first professional job interview.
    As I drove into Chicago that Friday, it was the day after Dr. King’s death and the day before my 21st birthday.  I was running late for my interview with Bureau Chief Don Holt for a possible summer internship at Newsweek Magazine’s Midwest office. Traffic was crawling. It was bumper-to-bumper into the city and bumper-to-bumper out. Smoke billowed from the West Side.
    Chicago was burning.
    I had landed my shot at the internship after one of my professors told me Newsweek was looking for a black journalist for its Chicago bureau because it was going to be a long hot summer. Summer had come early.
    My job interview was not so much about my interests in becoming a journalist as it was about what young blacks my age were thinking and feeling. Why did I think the riots were happening? How much support did I think Robert Kennedy would have among black Americans? Had Dr. King maintained his relevancy among young blacks like me?
    I held nothing back. It turned out to be the easiest job interview I’ve ever have. I was told I had the job before I left Newsweek’s office.
    That was the beginning of what has now been a four decades long adventure in American media.
    Those prophetic words in Dr. King's final speech have punctuated my journey. For me,  and most African Americans, it’s not over yet.

Swiftboating Barack

    This email has been sent out by the Dallas South blog to members of the NABJforum and others. It addresses the Minister Louis Farrakhan interview in Trumpet, the formerly-owned magazine by the Trinity United Church of Christ, whose former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was Barack Obama’s spiritual leader.
    Trinity is THE church for 7,000 members of Chicago’s black middle class. Obama has been a parishioner there for 20 years. Trinity United Church of Christ has a pro-African American missionary statement that became controversial once Obama became a political candidate. Although Trinity no longer publishes Trumpet–the magazine is now published outside the confines of the church–the publication has also become controversial thanks to NBC’s Tim Russert and linked to both the candidate and his place of worship.

Here’s the email sent out by the Dallas South Blog:

February 29th, 2008

We all know that Tim Russert attempted to “swift boat” Senator
Barack Obama (and Clinton for that matter) in last Tuesday’s debate.
Russert decided to take the debate off the issues and turn it into a
muckraking session. Russert asked Obama about comments made by Minister Louis Farrakhan as well as comments about Min. Farrakhan that he attributed to Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.

I received an email this morning with information from the Managing
Editor of Trumpet Newsmagazine. Her message clarifies the bad information that’s been out there as well as the bad information Russert gave during the debate.
----------------

To whom it may concern:

I write to bring some journalistic clarity to what has become a
widespread inaccuracy. My name is Rhoda McKinney Jones, managing editor of the Trumpet Newsmagazine, and the author of the Minister Louis Farrakhan article in our November/December issue. Over the last few weeks, I have watched in disbelief as seasoned journalists and
not-so-well-intentioned bloggers have attributed to Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ, the last three words of my first person, introductory piece on Minister Farrakhan. Those words are now familiar to you, especially after Tuesday night’s debate and Tim
Russert’s use of them — “truly epitomized greatness.” Dr. Wright, never said, wrote or uttered those words. Those words are mine and mine alone.

Whether one agrees with my assessment is not the issue or the reason I
was prompted to correct the record. As a well-trained journalist, I
know the most basic fact checking would have revealed the truth. Next
time, when attempting to sully a presidential candidate by discrediting his
church and its renowned, religious leader, let’s get the facts straight.

Rhoda McKinney Jones
Managing Editor
Trumpet Newsmagazine
Graduate of Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and
Spelman College

    I made my own comments on Trinity and an earlier mindless attack on it about a year ago.
    Erik Rush, a right-wing religion blogger, who happens to be black, criticized Trinity’s mission statement and made a feeble attempt to turn the church into a cult. The equally light-weight commentators on Fox Cable News took up Rush’s confusion. This is the op-ed page column in the Chicago Sun-Times I wrote about it on March 25, 2007. Excepts from the column are quoted in Snopes.com to combat the urban legend that Obama is a Muslim as well as on the candidate’s website, Barackobama.com.
    Speaking of urban legends, the United States denomination, The United Church of Christ, is being investigated by the IRS--not Trinity, Obama's Chicago church.

Ethnic identity isn’t black and white

March 25, 2007

BY MONROE ANDERSON

   

For the past two decades, Barack Obama has been a faithful member of the congregation at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity is no run-of-the-mill black church. It’s social activism and political awareness on pure, natural holy water. Trinity’s progressive pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, preaches the black theology of liberation. And he practices what he preaches. Back when apartheid was the law of the land in South Africa, when Nelson Mandela was a political prisoner and when American corporations, institutions and the U.S. government all gave their blessings to those evil doings, the dashiki-wearing minister planted a “Free South Africa” sign on the church’s lawn. Obama’s spiritual mentor has routinely been on the right side of morality, championing liberal causes from gay rights to opposition of the war in Iraq.

Shortly after Sen. Obama launched his run for the presidency last month, Erik Rush, a right-wing Christian blogger who happens to be African American, discovered what had been hiding in plain sight: The motto for Trinity United is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.”

Trinity’s motto, as well as its mission to eradicate what W.E.B. DuBois called “the problem of the color line” and “the strange meaning of being black here,” so incensed Rush that he wrote a blistering blog about it. It was unnerving for him to learn that the South Side church had adopted a “Black Value System” and that its 8,000 black members are committed to the “Black Community,” the “Black Family” and “the Black Work Ethic.” In his blog, Rush ignores -- or is just ignorant about -- the nearly 200-year-long tradition of the black church’s struggle to free and elevate its people while slyly substituting the words white for black and then disingenuously concluding that “like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church.”

No doubt that concept came as news to the thousands of well-heeled, professional and middle-class black Chicagoans who are members of the church. And no doubt media mogul Oprah Winfrey and rap star Common, who have both attended Trinity, were surprised to discover they were cultists. But quicker than you could say “holy fit,” the cable conservatives were clucking and complaining to the high heavens. Tucker Carlson, MSNBC’s very own Fox News-type right-wing host, opined that, “This stuff sounds separatist to me.”

Sean Hannity, the conservative half of Fox News’ lightweight talk show, “Hannity and Colmes,” sounded as if this country was going to hypocritical hell. If a white presidential candidate’s church had a similar statement and “you substitute the word white for black, there would be an outrage in this country,” Hannity preached. “There would be cries of racism in this country.”

True and Catch-22. If a white church plainly and proudly pronounced its whiteness, Hannity, Carlson and company would be right. But if it was the Holy Trinity Polish Church on Chicago’s North Side, proclaiming its Polishness, who’d care? This is how African Americans find ourselves in a trick bag. We’re defined racially even when we’re acting like any other of this nation’s ethnic groups. Issues knee-jerkily become black and white when in reality they may be African American and Irish American. Or Serbian American and African American. Remove black and substitute another American ethnic group so that Trinity’s Concept No. 6 reads: “Adherence to the Mexican Work Ethic.” Does that still sound separatist? Or racist? Of course not. But, if you’re insincerely espousing color blindness, while holding the race card up your sleeve, you know you can easily trump African-American ethnic pride every time.

Obama’s political advisers know this as well. That’s why, at the last minute, Obama disinvited Wright to speak last month when he officially announced his presidential candidacy. Wright says that Obama now realizes that his political handlers gave him bad advice and that all is well between him and the senator.

I say this is just one more sad example of how ethnic identity gets color-coded for African Americans. And I believe it’s just one more sign that there are those who would place Obama in political purgatory -- painting him not good enough to be black and not right enough to be white.

Illinois pols did favorite son Obama no favor

    Put this in the “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is” category. In their zeal to help the favorite son, Barack Obama, when he was still considering making his bid for his party’s presidential nomination, the state’s Dems-with-clout started a drive to move the primary date up from March 18 to February 5.
    Mike Madigan, the Illinois Speaker of the House, figured moving up the date would help fundraising for Obama and kick-start his momentum into later state primaries. Knowing that Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina would all be up earlier in the presidential derby, Madigan reasoned that none of those states are “as representative of America as Illinois would be.”
    When Speaker Madigan first came up with the idea 13 months ago, it was greeted with an amen chorus. Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich pledged to sign any such legislation that landed on his desk. Emil Jones, Obama’s political mentor and the Illinois senate president, welcomed the idea because "it would be nice if the rest of the nation could see him come out strong.”
    As it turns out, Obama came out strong from Day One, unexpectedly winning the Iowa caucus. By the time Illinois got to vote in its strategically placed primary, every state and its mother had moved its primary or caucus up as well.
    The result: Superduper Tuesday with 22 states holding Democratic presidential nomination elections.
    While Obama won Illinois 65-33 percent over Sen. Clinton, it played nationally as a mere home state victory. All eyes were on California. Other eyes were on New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Missouri.
    If the state’s power brokers hadn’t come up with such a good idea, Illinois could have well been the closer in the too-close-to-call race six weeks from now.
    That lesson might be put in the “leave well enough alone” category.

Bush, Clinton, Bush, Clinton: Meritocracy or Aristocracy?

   

    At 24 and 21, both my sons are old enough--and well-trained enough--to have already voted in an election. Kyle, my younger son, has voted in Chicago's mayoral election but this Super Tuesday election was his first presidential one.
    We went to the polling booth together, but I resisted advising him who to vote for. Since he is young, intelligent and open-minded, with a reasonable amount of ethnic pride, I'm assuming he voted for Barack Obama; that if anyone might want change, it would be Kyle and his generation.
    This thought crossed my mind after we'd cast our ballots: that for all Kyle's life, there has been a Bush or a Clinton in the White House. Five years before Kyle was born, George H.W. Bush was Ronald Reagan's vice president. Kyle was a toddler when Bush became the 41st president of the United States. He was six years old when Bill Clinton became number 42 and he 14 years old when George W. Bush became number 43.
    This has occurred in a nation that pretends to value meritocracy and disdain aristocracy. It has been discussed by a writer in a British publication, The Guardian.
    It was well-written, well-reasoned piece. Here's the beginning:

In this great meritocracy,

only one thing matters: who

is your daddy?

To change the political sclerosis gripping their country, Americans need a president distinguished by his lack of pedigree

Gary Younge
Monday February 4, 2008
The Guardian

While running for Congress in West Texas in 1978, a young George W Bush attended a training school for Republican candidates. In a class on fundraising he was struck by inspiration. "I've got the greatest idea of how to raise money for the campaign," he told David Dreier, now a California congressman. "Have your mother send a letter to your family's Christmas card list! I just did, and I got $350,000."

The web of wealth and family connections that has levered Bush to power and has since characterised his administration is an indictment of America's political culture. "George W Bush was named [after] a father who excelled at everything," argued Bush Jr's former speechwriter David Frum. "He tried everything his father tried - and well into his 40s, succeeded at almost nothing."

Therapy could have dealt with this quite effectively. Instead we have been afflicted with one of the most ostentatious and wrong-headed affirmative action programmes known to the western world, in which a man unburdened by imagination inherited - almost literally - a cabinet unburdened by merit.

His father's secretary of state (James Baker) oversaw the Florida recount in 2000 as chief legal adviser and was instrumental in taking the case to the supreme court. Once installed, Bush took his father's joint chief of staff (Colin Powell) and made him secretary of state; his father's defence secretary (Dick Cheney) became vice-president; his father's special assistant on national security affairs (Condoleezza Rice) became national security adviser; and in a fit of oedipal petulance, he took one of his dad's enemies (Donald Rumsfeld) and made him defence secretary.

Not only did such appointments set new lows for cronyism, sleaze, dysfunction and incompetence. But by drawing leadership from such a tiny gene puddle they reflected an aberration of the very democratic impulses and meritocratic culture with which most Americans identify and apparently cherish.

If you'd like to read the rest, click here.