Election Night at our Home

Still many to be decided.

Rebel Girl's Father Phones In

.....MODJESKA CANYON: It's 2:15 on Super Tuesday and Rebel Girl's father has already telephoned her to inform her that her vote for Obama (he knew, he said, that she voted for Obama without having to ask) was naive.
.....Ouch!
.....He has, he reminded her, lived longer than she has and has seen more things.
.....This is true. He was born in 1927, the youngest son of Juan and Teresa, two immigrants from Mexico, and grew up in Los Angeles. He served in WW II as a teenager, came home and went back to high school for his diploma (back then you had to sit in classes with the high school students in order to matriculate, no special classes or equivalency tests). He then applied for a job with LA City Fire Department and was denied on the basis of the physical given him by the department's doctor. His health was good enough to go to war but not to fight fires in his hometown. He had to fight the doctor and the department and, in the end, he prevailed. Rebel Girl's father doesn't use the word "racism" often, but he uses it when he recalls this incident. He became one of the first Mexican-American firefighters in the department and when he retired a few years back, he was the oldest active duty firefighter at age 74. His health, once judged so poor, had apparently held out. Yet among his defining experiences were the four decades he spent in firehouses and what he saw there among men (it was mostly men in his days) who were supposed to be brothers.

....."There is no way," Rebel Girl's father said this afternoon, "that this country will elect a black man president." It saddens him, he said. He worries that Americans won't elect a woman either, but he doesn't worry about that as much.
.....He liked his daughter's optimism but he doesn't share it. "I have lived," he said. "I have seen things. Change doesn't come as quickly as you'd like." Then suddenly his tone changed. Maybe he remembered he was talking to his daughter. "But, I don't want you to be discouraged," he said. "I don't want you to be disappointed. That's just the way it is."
.....He sounded tender, full of regret.
.....Rebel Girl's father, of course, like most parents perhaps, is unaware of the depths of his own child's experience, doesn't perhaps spend too much time measuring what she may or may not know about disappointment or defeat. There's a level of naivete there as well and hope, of course.

Rebel Girl's Poetry Corner: "no false patriotic wreath"

A little poetry for Super Tuesday. Oh yes, you can tell, it's getting to Rebel Girl. Don't worry, she is used to losing, even expects it -- but what she is unaccustomed to is all this damn hope that keeps following her around, hope from unexpected quarters. She prides herself on being resistant to such appeals. Something's happened. What?

Today's poem is long but Rebel Girl is confident that your attention span can carry you to the end.

You do want to get to the end, that final stanza. Really. Written by Langston Hughes in 1938:


Let America Be America Again

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!



(Jasper Johns on the paintbrush.)