Monroe Anderson

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.

Indy 500 and NASCAR 600: Blue-blooded candidates missing at blue-collar races

     I sit here watching the Indianapolis 500 when I really should be mowing the lawn in my pint-sized big city front yard. I don’t get. Watching racecars go around in circles for 500 miles is a little more interesting than watching grass grow—but just barely.
    For me, the only thing that makes it interesting--beyond putting off cutting the grass--is the possibility of a car crash pile-up or the occasional racer hitting the wall and turning a muscle machine into instant scrap metal.  I’m not that much of a morbid gawker. I’m a big football fan, Chicago Bears actually, but I don’t watch the game to see if some player is going to be taken off the field in a stretcher.
    I know there are millions of Americans who committed to this car culture. They find it exciting and interesting to see a Formula One or supped-up stock cars race at speeds in the 200 mph neighborhood. There were around 600,000 fans in the stand and inner-circle in Indy today.  The NASCAR races draw more fans week in and week out than the annual Super Bowl does.
    Those hundreds of thousands of fans are the reason companies pay to plaster their logos all over the drivers’ uniforms and racecars. Football, basketball and baseball have all resisted the temptation to sell out to corporate America that big—which takes me to politics.
    Too bad Barack Obama had to fill in for Ted Kennedy as the commencement speaker at the elite Connecticut college, Wesley University, instead of hanging out at the Indy 500, or later today in North Carolina at the Coca-Cola 600, where he could have tuned up his blue-collar cred. And where were those two bonafied lunch-bucket presidential candidates, John McCain and Hillary Clinton?  McCain was in Arizona, hosting a cookout for high flying Veep hopefuls in and Hillary was in Puerto Rico still dreaming the impossible dream .
    It was a missed photo opportunity. All three candidates may have been better served if they had made appearances in one of the towns where the burning rubber met the speed enthusiast's road. Of course, my lawn would be looking better if I had put the metal blades to the overgrown blades of grass.

Culture or Racism? The truth is out there

 

  I watched the TV coverage of the Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky primary races with a combination of frustration and fury. For reasons that are beyond me, politicians and pundits alike are holding Barack Obama responsible for his lack of appeal to the so-called lunch bucket Democrats.  Apparently, since Obama has been waging a non-racial campaign, it’s his fault that white folks whose parents were racist and who had  grandparents with parents who were racists—going all the way back to the glory days of slavery—can't quite manage to cast a ballot for a black man who is running for president.
    I’ve written about it but reading the Rude Pundit’s post yesterday, Nigger Haters for Clinton, I realized I hadn't said it plain enough. Here’s some of what he had to say:

You ever been to the mythical "rural communities" of Appalachia? The Rude Pundit has, hanging out with mule farm owners and miners and others. And they are xenophobic, suspicious, and poor - hell, these redneck fuckers hate white outsiders. Just about every Deliverance-style, Hatfield and McCoy, Ma and Pa Kettle inbred backwards ass country fuck stereotype you ever imagined exists there, complete with their trashed front yards and about a mouth of teeth for every three or four households. And they have every right to hate people who have ripped away the jobs and kept them in deep poverty and ignorance. There's been so many promises broken to the people of Appalachia that they may as well be Indians. Hell, the last time anyone in the federal government gave a happy rat fuck about the region was in the LBJ administration.

When you talk about how Democratic they are, you are talking about the post-Civil War Democrats, when the party fostered and relied on racism and division in order to maintain power. You're talking Dixiecrats and Reagan Democrats. "Rural whites" in places like Kentucky and West Virginia wear their racism as a badge of honor. Because it's the perpetual ignorance of racism that keeps them from rising up against the whites who are actually keeping them racist, ignorant and poor.

    So, is any thinking person really surprised when the Roswell Beacon runs a story about how white supremacist groups are so flummoxed by Obama’s successful campaign that they’re openly chatting on blogs about assassinating him and how they should prepare for the race war they're convinced his murder will trigger?
    The photo at the top of this blog is from the Georgia newspaper's cover story, White Fright. The image has sparked some controversy because, by illustrating that Obama may be in the crosshairs of white hate groups, it starkly presents the true nature of a small but vile part of America. It also highlights the undercurrent the Rude Pundit post explores. You can read that blog by clicking here.
    It's about time the msm stop downplaying the rabid racism that continues to fester. Do we really need to pretend that racial hatred is dead and that Obama’s main problem is simply a matter of bridging the cultural divide?

Terry McAuliffe mimics Baghdad Bob

    Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, Terry McAuliffe, is all over the boob tube explaining why his candidate should not be asked to drop out and why the super delegates should thrust his candidate into the party’s presidential nomination. Despite the virtually insurmountable mathematical odds, McAuliffe insists again and again that some how, some way, Clinton will be chosen as the Democratic standardbearer and will give John McCain a good whipping come November.
    He uses the new math to explain how her numbers are better than Barack Obama’s numbers. He handily and habitually helps to move the goal posts and reset the game clock. Along with hubby Bill, he helps enable Hillary in her fanciful search for the end of the rainbow.
    I’ve decided Terry McAuliffe is channeling Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf. If that Arabic name doesn’t register with you, then maybe this one will work: Baghdad Bob. al-Sahhaf earned that moniker because of his colorful daily press briefings in Baghdad in 2003 at the beginning of the Iraq War.  At the time American tanks were patrolling the streets of Baghdad, al-Sahhaf—who was Sadam Hussein’s Information Minister--claimed that there were no American troops in the city, and that the Americans were committing suicide by the hundreds at the city's gates. Shortly before he was vanished from the scene, he held a press conference announcing that our troops were "going to surrender or be burned in their tanks. They will surrender, it is they who will surrender."
    The Baghdad Bob alliterative alias was in the spirit of the propagandists who came before his—Seoul City Sue and Hanoi Hannah. In that light, I’m designating McAuliffe Tall Tale Terry. Like al-Sahhaf, McAuliffe spin is a gift to late-night comedians.
    Here’s Tall Tale Terry:

   

And here’s Baghdad Bob:

What do you think?

Right-wing mouths words of mass deception

 

    I have seen the enemy and heard it too. It's the right-wing smear and fear echo machine. Its politics of personal destruction are just getting started. You saw it in North Carolina and Mississippi too. You heard it right out of President Bush's mouth last week in Israel and at home as well with John McCain  "appeasement" echo. Here's my latest ebonyjet.com post.

Swiftboating the Presidency
The rabid right made mincemeat out of John Kerry’s war record. Expect more of the same dirty tricks during this election campaign.
05/19/2008
By Monroe Anderson

The number 527 may not mean much to you, but this should: Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. They were the rightwing group that, along with the help of the rest of the Republican echo chamber, turned John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War hero, into something akin to a national disgrace. It didn’t matter that Kerry was awarded two purple hearts and that his opponent, George W. Bush, was a frat boy who used his daddy’s political connections to get a safe and sound assignment in the National Guard and Vice President John Cheney was a draft dodger—the swift boaters were successful in turning a Big Lie into their Grand Truth.

Listen up and watch out. The Republican Party and its right-wing smear machine is about to play the dirty dozens on Barack Obama.

It has no choice. The Republican brand is ruined.  The party’s presumptive presidential nominee, John McCain, is fine for a stroll down memory lane but will be hard pressed to run a fair race on Bush’s shattered and tattered eight-year record. So the radical right will do what it does during good times and bad: A sleight of hand trick through word of mouth.

The GOP will attempt to divert us from the real issues that have real consequences by cracking on Obama, on matters that mean nothing, with charges that aren’t true.

It’s going to talk about his white momma. It’s going to rant about his former minister. It’s going to steadily signify that he’s either a Muslim or a cult Christian but definitely not a true red-blooded American.

It’s going to make way too much out of far too little. The right-wing echo chamber will label Barack as too liberal, too green, too lightweight, too lucky, too black, too white, too intelligent, too aloof, too soft, too young, too natty, too cool, too elite, too rock star and too good to be true. It’s all going to be too ugly for words.

The Bush legacy leaves the Republicans with one foot over a cliff and the other on an oil slick. America’s 43rd president, who will go down in history as the worst ever, has popularity ratings that reflect his two-term performance. We’re in a recession and world opinion of our nation is in a free fall.  Many Americans now find themselves forced to choose between gasoline and groceries. Many more want the Iraqi occupation, which has lasted longer than World War II, to end.

Painfully aware that this is not their year and that they are poised to lose the presidency and suffer greater loses on Capitol Hill, Republicans are scrounging around in their bag of dirty tricks, out to win ugly. Blogs, such as Rightwing Nuthouse, Ankle Biting Pundits and Red State, are furiously posting their conservative blather while the usual perpetrators, Fox Cable News and radical rightwing radio, are broadcasting ideological talking points for the party faithful.

Twenty years ago, when George H.W. Bush was running to become president number 41, the Republicans destroyed the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, Michael Dukakis, with the now infamous Willie Horton political ad. A convicted murderer who had been released on a 48-hour furlough from a Massachusetts prison while Dukakis was governor, Horton went on to pistol-whip and cut up Clifford Barnes. When Barnes' financee later arrived at his Maryland home, the escaped prisoner raped her twice.  His black face was plastered all over the attack ad sympathetic to daddy Bush, making him the poster child for why America needed a Republican returning to the White House.

Of course, the Horton ad was before talk radio, Cyberspace or the 24/7 news cycle. It was before YouTube or the 527 organizations.

This presidential election promises some sort of sequel. One of the early indicators was the Rev. Wright attack ad aired during the North Carolina primary. Floyd Brown, the creator of the Horton attack ad, also created the one that ran in North Carolina, featuring Wright’s “God damn America” soundbite. Brown has also formed a 527 organization called Citizens for a Safe and Prosperous America, to slime Obama any way it can.

There’s also the truth-challenged video entitled “A Viral Portrait of Barack Hussein Obama” now creeping through cyberspace.

“Let’s connect the dots. With the assistance of Dr. Cone, Rev. Wright and other divisive figures Barack Obama has been discipled in a racist, Marxist, quasi-Christian, anti-Semitic ideology for over 20 years,” says creator/narrator Lome Baxter in the video, as he begins his summation of why America shouldn’t even consider Obama as its leader.“ After that much indoctrination, is it surprising that he won’t wear an American flag?  Is it surprising that he won’t put his hand over his heart during the national anthem? Is it surprising that his wife has never been proud of America until it looked like her husband had a shot at beating Hillary?”

Hillary has been beaten. The radical right blog, stophernow.com has morphed into stophimnow.com. It’s Barack’s turn to take the incoming sludge slung by the slanderous radical right.

Remember to warn yo’ momma to hold her nose and cover her eyes.

Monroe Anderson is an award-winning journalist who penned op-ed columns for both the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Sun-Times. Check out his blog at monroeanderson.typepad.com

In Search of Intelligence in the Multiverse--Not on Hardball with right-wing talk show host Kevin James

   

    I have a friend who is white, very rich and obscenely conservative. Once or twice a year we meet for a holiday dinner at his sister’s house where he and I are an appreciable portion of the entertainment when our political debate inevitably kicks off.                 Although most of the dinner guests are liberal, in his mind, he almost always wins because his approach is to shout—fast and furious--right-wing platitudes.
    My friend is not uninformed, just doctrinaire. But his approach to discussing all things political are straight from the right's play book: Logic or real facts be damned. I say real facts because this generation’s crop of conservatives navigates within an arena of gerrymandered facts that they spit out mindlessly.
    One of the gears in the right-wing echo machine is “experts” that research, not to discover truth, but to find facts that support a predictably backwards world view.  One of those conservative experts, Kevin James, was exposed for the ignoramus he actually is by Chris Matthews on Hardball.  James is a talk show host on KRLA-AM, “Intelligent, Conservative Talk Radio.”  If James is representative of his Los Angeles station's stable of gab jocks, then KRLA's talk is about as intelligent as Fox Cable’s news is “fair and balanced.”
    James was screaming on Hardball in support of President Bush’s disingenuous, poorly disguised political charge that Barack Obama is an appeaser for the “evil-doers.” Attempting to elevate the debate above typical conservative code-wording and name-calling, Matthews asked James what did Neville Chamberlain, prime minister of Britain in the 1930s do. “It’s appeasement,” James said, parroting Bush’s words.
    Matthews repeatedly tries to get the blow hard James to provide some historical facts behind his right-wing jingoism. The radio talk show host couldn’t do it. As it turns out, James had no clue that Chamberlain had signed the Munich Agreement, conceding a portion of Czechoslovakia to Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime. He had no clue as to what appeasement meant in the historical context President Bush was misusing it in. Matthews had to turn to Mark Green of Air America for some historical perspective.
    And to think James gets paid to pollute the airways with his ignorance.
    Here’s the Hardball exchange. You’ll find it amusing if you’re progressive, depressing if you’re not.

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.

Mother's Day is everyday

    My mother, Norma Jean Anderson, was still alive when I wrote this Mother’s Day piece about her three years ago. At the time, I was editor of the briefly resurrected Savoy Magazine and also wrote a column, "Monroe’s Doctrine," for each issue.  This ran in the April/May 2005 issue.

MOTHER’S DAY MEMORIES
BY MONROE ANDERSON

    The first time I gave my mother one of those humorous Mother’s Day cards, I quickly got the message: Mother’s Day is not funny. She quietly laid the card aside, smelled the flowers I’d given her and thanked me for the pretty floral house robe she’d tried on and was admiring as she looked in the mirror.
    From that Mother’s Day on, I made it a practice of giving her one of those sweet and sentiment Hallmark cards. After opening it, she’d beam, “That’s so beautiful.” Then she’d show off the card and read the worlds aloud for everyone in the family.
    This past Mother’s Day was not the same. For my mother, it was just another day. Her days all slip one into the next with her not knowing if it’s Sunday or Wednesday or Friday. She’s not even sure if it is spring or fall.

MY MOTHER HAS ALZHEIMER’S
    Not that she is alone. By all accounts being reported in the media, so does Rosa Parks. Alzheimer’s has become a silent epidemic in the black community. A study released earlier this year estimates that the prevalence of the disease rangers from 14 percent to almost 100 percent higher among blacks than whites.
    For my mother, it’s hereditary. As a preschooler, I remember watching my grandmother caring for her “senile” mother, Nana, who was 89. A generation later, I watched my mother care for my “senile” grandmother, Elizabeth, who died at 96. For my mother, my sister Liz has been doing the caretaking.
    My mother’s Alzheimer’s has progressed to the point where the past and the present easily entangle. She sometimes confuses me with two other men who she’s loved and are important in her life. Sometimes I’m her brother, Scott, who’s been dead for more than a decade. Sometimes I’m my father, Monroe, who has been dead for nearly a quarter of a century. In those cases, I’m called on to remember an incident that occurred or relatives who died before I was born.
    When I visit with her, we still talk as we always have. But these days our talks no longer connect. A couple of months ago, she proudly told me, “I’m going to give the valedictorian speech at my high school graduation tomorrow.”
    Several of her teachers complimented her, she matter-of-factly reported, for being such a good student. I nodded in agreement, fully knowing that Norma Jean Anderson graduated from Roosevelt High School in 1943—six months after she secretly eloped and married my father, Monroe.
    Before I could say anything she was back in the moment. Back to being the loving, caring mother whose memory I cherish. She wanted to know if I was hungry. Should she cook something for me to eat?
    I told her I was fine as we sat in the cafeteria of the nursing home. She was eating mystery meant with mashed potatoes. It may have been nutritious but it was definitely not appetizing.
    There was a time when she knew that the nursing home was not the place she wanted to be. She begged my sister and me to never send her to one. We tried to honor her wishes. But after years of watching in horror as our mother descended into the valley of stripped memory and dense dementia, we could no longer keep her in the home she’d raised us in. She had begun to wander out of the house into the streets looking for great-grandchildren she imagined were crying out for help.
    So my sister put our mother in the same nursing home, in the same Alzheimer’s ward, where our mother’s sister was housed.
    I periodically tell myself that it may be a good thing that my mother’s memory is failing. There is so much tragedy that she’d rather not remember.
    Her father died when she was just 11 years old. Six of her eight brothers and sisters died, almost all from tuberculosis, before she was grown. After my father died, at age 61, from a sudden heart attack, she went into a depression. Then her mother died, followed shortly afterwards with the death of her only surviving brother. Her youngest child, my brother, was beaten senseless. After three months in a coma, he died at age 39. I watched as each of these losses took their toll on her.
    I think about Mother’s Days of many years past. When my father, brother and grandmother were all there at the dining room table, trying to get her to relax and let others serve her on her day. She had on interest in going out to some fancy restaurant to celebrate her day. Of course, she wouldn’t think of it. She was just happy to have all of us in her life and to be in all of our lives.
    I look back on those days with sweet memories and bitter regrets. There was so much I took for granted back then. There were so many things I should have said that I didn’t. And now, as I try to say those things to my mother, she usually does not hear nor understand them.
    So I come away from each visit depressed at seeing her in her illness and comforted in the realization that, for me, thanks to my loving memories, every day is Mother’s Day.