Breaking it down for Steven King

Steven King has an interesting question.

King, R-Iowa, was part of an MSNBC panel discussion on Monday afternoon, hosted by Chris Hayes, along with Charles Pierce, a writer for Esquire; and reporter April Ryan. Discussion turned to the predominantly white makeup of the Republican Party, and King objected. The problem? He's tired of this whole “old white people business.”

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people that you are talking about?” King asked. “Where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization?”

“Than white people?” Hayes asked.

“Than Western civilization itself that’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America, and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world,” King said. “That’s all of Western civilization.”

Hayes cut off the discussion immediately, undoubtedly hoping to stop an ugly discussion before it grew even uglier. (He since has conceded that he might have made the wrong decision.) But let's give King some credit. He has tried to initiate an important discussion on race in our country. What noteworthy contributions have non-whites made to the United States, to the West and to human civilization in general? It's only fair to ask.

For starters – and this is an easy one – black labor powered the engine of the North American economy for about two centuries. Black slavery began in 1619 when colonials brought African slaves to Virginia to work the plantation fields, but it was really in the 1660s that slavery grew and hardened into a hereditary institution in which blacks would work, and whites would reap the benefits of that labor.

For the next two centuries, blacks would receive only the barest compensation for labor that consumed their every waking hour for six days a week, while their stolen wages fattened the wealth of the white families that owned the labor camps where they toiled. (In our genteel way, we call these “plantations.”) It's safe to say that without stolen labor artificially suppressing the price of cotton, the American economy never would have been as powerful as it was by the time of the Civil War.

But I'm sure that King is tired of hearing about slavery, so let's not dwell on that. We'll also overlook the cultural contributions of black performers such as Sidney Poitier, Paul Robeson, Diana Ross and Louis Armstrong; the very existence of jazz music and spirituals that have been mainstays in church or around campfires for generations, such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “Michael, Row the Boat Ashore”; and cultural icons like Bugs Bunny, largely derived from Gullah stories of Brer Rabbit.

We also should discount the contribution of the black and Chinese laborers who built the railways out West. I'm sure King wouldn't count that as significant, since anybody could have built railroads or paved roads. The real movers and shakers were the tycoons who owned the businesses and who received millions of dollars from the efforts of these laborers. God's eyes are on the workers, but it's the wealthy who matter to us.

Should we focus on people like Daniel Hale Williams, the first person to successfully complete open heart surgery? Williams was black, but perhaps he won't count for King, because Williams only pioneered a new lifesaving procedure in medicine and didn't actually discover a new field of medicine.

Other such inventions and innovations include blood banks, the refrigerator, the electric trolley, the dust pan, the comb, the mop, the brush, the clothes dryer, the lawn mower, traffic signals, the pen and the pencil sharpener.

Still, these are mere inventions, King might object. That Kenmore refrigerator is important, and you miss it when it stops working in the heat of the summer, but that's not as foundational to civilization as the very notion of democracy.

Alas, it is not. So let's look at the foundations, and see where they lie.

Agriculture began around 9,000 BCE far from Europe, in the fertile crescent, where farmers started to raise wheat and barley; and around 8,000 BCE in South America, with the first potato farmers. Cultivating crops may mark the start of human civilization, since agriculture allows formerly nomadic people to settle down and begin to see one spot of land as home.

As agriculture improves, the land begins to support more people in smaller areas. Cities are about as foundational to civilization as we can get, and the first known cities were nowhere in Western Europe, Eastern Europe or the United States. The oldest cities arose in ancient Sumer, around 7500 BCE. Writing first appeared around 3200 BCE, in Sumeria and in Egypt. China developed its first writing around 1200 BCE.

There was approximately nothing going on in Europe at this time. Greece was in decline and had entered a period called the Greek Dark Ages, and everything else we've learned of the rest of Europe we've had to deduce from graves.

Back to those ancient cities. Living in close proximity to one another often gives rise to other innovations. With space at a premium, there is a need to stack people atop one another more efficiently.  So architecture also may be said to have originated in Sumer, along with government and means of records-keeping.

That also means that economies (and economics) began in Sumer, although money wouldn't come along for several centuries. Lydia, a city-state located in present-day Turkey, generally is credited with minting the first coins in the seventh century BCE, but it was the Tang Dynasty of China that gets credit for inventing paper currency in 740 BCE.

King also claims credit on behalf of Christianity, for its contributions to Western civilization. It's worth remembering that Christianity isn't actually a European or Western religion. It began in the East, and embraces many Eastern ideals such as the union of body and spirit, and judging a man on his actions rather than on his words. The gospel was preached in Africa before it reached Europe, and the biggest churches today are in Asia, not the United States. How anyone could link this to white people is beyond me.

So, there you have it, Mr. King. I'm no historian, but while I'll agree that European and American societies have gifted the world with tremendous literature, music, art, philosophy, science and God knows what else, I'm not sure there is any basis to your claim that we've done more than any other race, color or ethnicity. Discount the black contribution to America, and you erase America. Discount Africa and Asia, and you've just erased human history.

Tired of this whole “old white people business?” Then come on out and join the rest of the human race, Mr. King. There's a whole lot going on out here, and you don't want to miss out.


Copyright © 2016 by David Learn. Used with permission.

Pete Seeger: 'My Name is Liza Kalvelage'

I've spent a lot of the last two days listening to "A Link in the Chain," a two-CD collection of Pete Seeger songs. It's an amazing collection, sometimes hilarious, sometimes inspiring, sometimes innocent fun, and often challenging.

One of the songs that's been haunting me is "My Name is Liza Kavelage." The song -- and it's really more of a singsong delivery, rather than a song proper -- is a true first-person account of a woman who grew up in Nazi Germany and immigrated to the United States after the war.

Here in the United States, she was repeatedly asked, "Where were you when the Nazis were doing all those horrible things? Why didn't you stop them?" She found that saying, "I was only a child, no more than a teenager" wasn't enough; her questioners wanted to know where her parents had been.

And so, Kavelage was burdened with national guilt, a phenomenon that is unfamiliar to many Americans. She came to realize that there was no explanation for her parents' presumed silence, nor for anyone else's, and in 1966, she decided that once in her life was enough to bear the guilt of a nation's silence in the face of its government's actions.

She and three other housewives went to a factory that was manufacturing napalm bombs for use in the Vietnam War, and protested. More than protested, actually; they got in the way of the workers, and ended up being arrested.

To that point, peace protesters largely had been teenagers and hippies. The arrest of four housewives changed the picture dramatically, and made them an instant media sensation.

In the statement that become the basis for Seeger's song, Kavelage essentially said, "I want my children to have an answer when they are asked what their mother did when she saw her government committing an injustice." She made the news again six years ago, when she protested the Iraq War, despite her age. (She was 80 at the time.)

It makes me think, mostly because it makes me uncomfortable.

My parents were both born in 1940, which means they grew up during McCarthyism and saw the 1960s in all its glory and shame. Mom and Dad have never really talked about duck-and-cover drills, loyalty oaths, Freedom Riders, draft dodgers, nor any of the other hallmarks of two very interesting decades.

Perhaps I shouldn't make rash presumptions about what they did in the 1960s, but the truth is, I don't know what they were doing while the Civil Rights was transforming America, nor how they felt about U.S. intervention in Vietnam. (Since my father was stationed in Panama after college because of his ROTC commitment, I would speculate that they at least tacitly supported it.)

But I don't know. My mother has said previously that she had heard of neither Seeger nor the song "We Shall Overcome," which I have to admit doesn't bode well for their social consciousness during the 1960s. Where were my folks when a lot of their peers were trying to make the world a better place? I don't know. (I am certain that they weren't involved with the destructive outlets of the 1960s, though.)

More to the point, though, what will my children be able to say 20 or 30 years from now, when their children ask them where I was while the United States was torturing prisoners, holding people without a trial, denying gays the right to marry, and kicking people out of their homes when the economy had gone sour while bailing out the businesses and people who had made it go sour?

What will they say when asked where I was when anti-immigrant sentiment surged, and we saw the bitter flower "English only" begin to bloom, or when Muslims and Arabs were viewed with suspicion as likely terrorists?

Where was I?

Guilty as charged.

I like Seeger's music quite a lot. It is simple and easy on the ear, but its folksy sound should never be mistaken for easy listening. In his music I hear the ironic voice of God speaking prophetically about the state of our country, our attitudes and our values. I look at the life I have lived so far, and find that the world has changed me more than I have changed it, and find that it changes me more every year. As revelations go, this is not a pleasant one.

I am running for re-election to the school board this year. I have determined that when I give my speech, I will give it in both English and Spanish, without the aid of a translator, even if I make a fool of myself. I don't think it's necessary to speak English to be a good American, and I hope that even if I mangle their language in the process, our Hispanic parents will understand that I want to connect with them where they have the home advantage.

I am fishing for a suitable way to be heard concerning the other issues mentioned. Particularly in matters of economic injustice, like the rescue of multibillion-dollar businesses and their CEOs while homeowners are left to eat the rotten fruit  of a predatory economy, I believe we can no longer play by the rules that we inherited. There are deeper truths set down to guide us, and we must find them.



Copyright © 2009 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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Remember when music shaped the world?

Music used to be something that inspired us. It drew us together, made it possible to get through hard times together, and even made drudgery bearable.

When I was a kid we sang together in the car on long car trips. People sang together in church, not just choirs or worship teams but the entire congregation. We sang along with the radio. At Christmas time people went around caroling in groups from one house to another. There was music to educate, music to protest having to attend school, and songs like "This Land is Your Land" that everyone just knew. We didn't sing all the time, but it did happen.

Nowadays it seems like music is an empty exercise in narcissism, either of the singers who write only about themselves, or in the listeners who use their iPods as a shield against the world. I

t's hard to believe that only 40 years ago, people were using music to bring an oppressive establishment to its knees here in America, speaking up for Civil Rights, protesting war, and not only imagining a better world, but believing that it was within our power to create it.

Where are the Pete Seegers of today? Does no one perform powerful music this beautifully anymore? I was in tears listening to this song, and I hope that you were too.

the legacy of Pete Seeger

For much of this afternoon, Evangeline has been singing an adjusted protest song from the 1960s:

If you love your Uncle Sam,
Support your troops in Iraq.
Bring 'em home --
Bring 'em home.

The song has its origins with Pete Seeger, who popularized it during the Vietnam War, but it came to us via Bruce Springsteen in "The Seeger Sessions." Evangeline is finding that she favors the music of the 1960s, so naturally she loves this song.

She also has decided that one of her goals this trimester -- students at the charter school get to individualize their course of study -- is to write and perform a song of her own composition.

I got ten bucks says it's a protest song about something at the school, in the footsteps of Arlo Guthrie, who wrote his first protest song in fifth grade, about a math test.

Deconstructing CCR on the road

This past Sunday night my oldest daughter began to take possession of the folk rock song"Who'll Stop the Rain."

We were in the car, returning from a trip to visit relatives, and — as is our practice on long car trips — we were making the time pass by singing as a family. It was raining, and as one might expect, one of the songs selected was that old standby of Credence Clearwater Revival. The girls both know it well.

The song had ended, when Evangeline, who is entering fifth grade a little more than a month from now, spoke up.

"He's not talking about the rain, he's really talking about ..." And with those words, Evangeline began to deconstruct the song.

Her analysis: Rather than a weather report, Fogerty's song is a social commentary about all the things that are wrong with society, and how we all cry out for someone to set things to rights. She even rattled off the names of some people through the ages who have been "trying to find the sun": Jesus Christ, Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy and Barack Obama.

I felt for a moment like I was sitting astride a flying horse that had been Mrs. Whatsit, and talking with Charles Wallace as we looked down upon a shadowed world. She didn't deconstruct the entire song, but what she got still was impressive.

I didn't entirely realize that she had reached this level of abstract thinking. The educational psychologist Jean Piaget said people generally don't until they're 18 or so, and many don't reach it even then. Listeners naturally will associate the song with rainfall, but its social implications won't occur to them unless someone points them out.

And even they do realize that the song is about the pursuit of social justice, many listeners probably won't catch the cynicism about governmental five-year plans and New Deals, nor the barren view of Woodstock in the third verse. The verses, instead of being filled with hunger for the redemption of society, instead become a maze of disjointed images, pointing nowhere and meaning nothing.

I said that Evangeline began to take possession of the song. That's because songs exist in three distinct forms.

The first form is the essence of the song itself, whatever it may be in isolation, if in fact it is anything. Usually we come closest to that when we look at the intent behind its composition.

Second is the song as the singer performs it, with his own interpretation of its meanings, import and motivation. Note that this can change over time, as the singer's own associations with the lyrics may shift, and the "crowds of people" in the third stanza may refer specifically to the youth at Woodstock at one point, and years later to the idealistic youth of another generation, or to the bitter and angry adults trying to force society to their will.

The third is the song the listener hears and understands herself to be listening to. The five-year plans to one listener may refer to an effort in the war on drugs, for instance; while someone else may see it as a comment on the war on terror; or to something else entirely. There is a lot of divergence on this end.

This happens to every song or story. The song exists as an entity to itself; the performer imbues it with a meaning and direction of her choice, driven by the context of her own life experiences; and audience members receive the song in themselves, coloring it according to their own prejudices and experiences.

In many cases the gulf between the song as the performer delivers it and as the audience receives it is so vast that it's unclear what shared experience they have had, if any. That's particularly true with shallow readings of a song or a story, such as the woman who hears Elton John's "Daniel" and associates it with her grandson, who is not leaving tonight on a plane and whose eyes are just fine, simply because his name is Daniel.

But that disparity persists even with more mature readings of songs. Earlier in this post, I shared my own understanding of "Who'll Stop the Rain": that it views Woodstock, the cultural flower of the 1960s counterculture, as an effete exercise in changing the world.

That's based on my own understanding of the first two lines of the third verse of the song -- I have no idea what Fogerty intended, nor to be honest, have I given it much thought what happened in Virginia that he would have sought shelter from the storm there, or what tower burned. (Maybe someone will tell me, and it'll be so obvious in hindsight that I'll feel a need to drool.)

But even if I did have specific interpretations of those lines, they would be informed by the context of my own life, and the weight I give each line or word would reflect those biases.

That's apparent from all the readings of Don McLean's "American Pie." McLean wisely has never said what the song is about, with the result that "definitive" readings have it as a chronicle of the 1960s, as seen through the changes in America's music scene; as a response to the assassination of President Kennedy (and, one presumes, to the assassinations of his brother and Dr. King); and to the Vietnam War.

I've even come across interpretations that tie it to the Crucifixion, because of the references to the king with his "thorny crown," and to satanic figures like the jester and the devil himself.

In the end, as I told Evangeline, songs belong not just to the performer, but to listeners as well. She's free to impart her own meaning to symbols of rain, towers, golden chains, and clouds whenever she sings "Who'll Stop the Rain," and even to change words to suit her fancy and preference more.

I learned the song by listening to a CD, and Evangeline has learned it by singing with me, words misheard and words misremembered, in true folksong style. The song no longer belongs to CCR or to the label the band recorded it for. Through that chain of passage, it has come into her possession as freely as any song sung on the bayou. She already rearranges it for her own vocal range, just as I did for mine,  and one day, she may even play it on the piano, choose her own chords, and compose a whole new bridge between verses.

It's her song. The arrangement, the lyrics and the notes are all her own to choose.

And so is the meaning.


Copyright © 2008 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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the artist: out of her time

Today on the way to the pharmacy, I was amused to hear Evangeline singing, without prompting:

All day, all night, Cary Grant.
That's all I hear from my wife: Cary Grant.
What can he do that I can't?
Big star, big deal, Cary Grant.

and:

I know a man named Mr. Lang,
And he has a neon sign.
And Mr. Lang is very old,
So we call it "Old Lang's Sign."

These are some of the lyrics to Allan Sherman's "Schticks of One, a Half-Dozen of the Other," a medley of mangled folk songs. Sherman was a variety singer who did send-ups of popular and well-known songs, such as Petula Clark's "Downtown." He also did the voice of the Cat in the Hat in the CBS TV special, but he is most famous for his "Hello Mudda, Hello Fadda" song, in which an unwilling camper pleads for the chance to come home.

In any event, as someone who appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, he made his splash when my parents were my age. I have (somewhere) a CD of "My Son, the Greatest: The Best of Allan Sherman," which is fairly unusual for someone my age. That Evangeline enjoys his music is nothing short of astonishing.

In other words, congratulations, Mr. Sherman. You've achieved a form of immortality that most artists only dream of.

My child, the folk musician

I was singing some folk songs today while I was making lunch this afternoon, in the presence of Evangeline. As I fumbled around, trying to remember if there is a third verse to Dylan's "Blowing in the Wind," she generated her own lyrics:

How many octopuses can fit in a room
Before they fall through the floor?
Could it be one, or maybe two?
I think it's probably four.

I think from here on that will be my favorite verse.