Congenial-speak #6

A tweak of the title felt nice. The sub-title A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota became Growing up Democratic. This accomplishes two things. It broadens the reach to those out-of-state readers who have no idea what the DFL is, just that it is a progressive idea of the main Demagogue party, counterpart to the GOP which, for the purposes of my story and book, is all that matters in the end. “Growing up Democratic” also encompasses the liberalism that ensconced my early, EARLY years on this marble, on this chute, on this ladder to the next great compromise. That said, tweaked for any ambiguity, I continue my current thread of stories that ended up on the editing room floor:

Trump had never done much for me. He was just another one of the born-with-silver spoon-in-mouth club. I never followed him, never even knew he had stepped up to the political pate before 2016. His show The Apprentice made me sick, as most “reality” shows do. In the summer of 2015 I think I first hear of his candidacy in the largest pack of Republicans I had ever seen. Not many of them offered any sound opinions on or solutions to the ills of society. Kasich I thought was the only one who had America in mind. He was the one Republican with the rhetoric I grew up opposing. The rest, for the most part, were barely viable politicians. They seemed more than willing to abridge the constitution at will. Some were paranoid, had indomitable egos, put money at the end of their tunnel vision view of America, or lacked a respect and inking of qualification for the job.

MSNBC was my new best friend. I discovered it in my state room even before we left Lauderdale. I lay there as my wife was out meeting the rest of the ship. Room service came a few times. If my wife came back momentarily she said “You and your politics,” and headed for the sushi bar. It was like how most wives get annoyed with their husband's fixation on sports. I care not a wit about sports. Who wins or loses a game can not affect the future of the world. It can not result in installing a leader who believes climate change is a Chinese hoax, one who will surely roll back every arduous step made to even the 99 to 1 percent score, one who will undo (if only for ego sake) everything his predecessor did.

It was the beginning of the Iowa caucuses, February 1. I was fifty-one-years-old that day, looking down that hill of chronological age. The ship I was on cut its moorings at 44PM. Shortly thereafter I would have to find muster station “C” that was mapped on or door. Soon I left the room with my dark orange life-vest slung over my shoulder. A sea of passengers waited by the elevators, many carrying drinks, women in low-rise bikinis, lumpy women with sun-burned bossoms squeezed out of one-piece bathing suits. There were middle-age men, pie-eyed, with ray-ban sun glasses hanging from their necks. They were the southern spoken blue-collars, red, purple necks for whom an ego monolith like Trump would really appeal. They toed their penny saved vacation with flip-flops, with mesh baseball hats turned around, with the buckets of beer one could buy, they were the ones who knew Trump was their savior.

I was on a ship of fools. If they knew now what I knew then a woman would be calling the shots. I began supporting Bernie Sanders. My wife and I paid our 27$ to be part of his grass-roots campaign. We have our “feel the Bern” coffee mugs. He spoke his stump he was speaking in 1983—word for word. I thought he was Gene McCarthy, Paul Wellstone, maybe even a whiter MLK. He knew what it took to narrow the gap, to make the system work. He was the curmudgeonly Independent Vermont senator who came out of the chambers one day and sounded “Enough is enough.” Enough corruption, Wall Street, citizens united, haphazard gun sales, slush funds, shooting unarmed citizens, and ignoring the jobs that could be created by heeding climate change.

I came back to my state room. I passed the muster and felt confident I''d know what to do on a sinking ship. Sanders was ahead of Hillary. Trump was leading his pack. It is a human impulsion to draw comparisons. I saw something shaping up. In 2016 my look at the seminal Democratic contest in 1968 in my book Ten Years and Change: Growing up Democratic was back-shadowed. That tumult of Americana's worst modern fits of growing pains filtered through the crack in the ship. I saw Hillary Clinton as the Hubert Humphrey character, the potentially good guy—or gal—who stays too close to the fire to be productive, to be believable, to gain the trust of a class of economically challenged people who always got left behind. It was reported by Chris Mathews, the Hardball who is a sledgehammer, a steamroller, barely letting his subjects refute themselves, that Sanders early lead was reminiscent of the McCarthy upset in New Hampshire 48 years prior. The margin challenging numbers that had made LBJ check his watch, the Minnesota nice dark horse that put ideas in RFK's head. It wasn't—not by a long shot—exactly the same. The two races had their similarities, their lines of convergence, their lessons that get taught over and over while America fearlessly sails on like a Mayflower morning its loss.

Congenial-speak #5

Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

I began my following on a ship in its slip. We moored tenuously to a pier in Ft. Lauderdale, moments before embanking into the Gulf. We anticipated the currents that would nurture us into the turquoise waters of the Caribbean. Cruise folks itched fingers, flicking last cigarettes in closely monitored ash bins, fidgeting nervously and eating everything in sight, waiting anxiously for the casinos to open when we reached international bounds. Curvy European women in top naval positions walk astutely down decks in their tight white uniforms. Yellow and black epithets rise and fall in the hazy carbonized February Floridian sun. In the dims of the halls inside the ship walk the room stewards, pushing carts, pulling luggage, smiling at menial level jobs. They were loose satin pastels and look ready to jump to another trade at a different hour. There are women too, but many men doing housekeeping work. They hustled in and out of staterooms with tiny pads to be checked. Clean from the last cruise that expired less than four hours ago. People debark, dolefully walk down the gang plank to return to the real world by 2PM at the absolute latest. The next eager bunch, busting to leave the U.S. for a week, is allowed to embark as early as 4PM.

The readiness is watched, the number of lifeboats is noted, the call and chaos of the mandatory muster drill is awaited, and I, like a writer, one who wants to live to write about it, observes the efficiency of the drill. I note people's reaction, how they react to the preferential treatment accorded to those many pushing walkers or being pushed in wheelchairs. I am fascinated by the stories that unfold before me before the lines on cleats are even detached. They are the glimpses into family dynamics, how the young kids are making friends with the “kids club” for the week and mom and dad have peace of mind on two fronts. That their child is in good hands and that they are not a constant fount of entertainment for 7 days. I see grandma taken on the ship, women whose legs are swelled like hams and as red as beets. They have the veins of a forest of leaves and ride high in the wheelchair. Everyone, even the pre-cruise pie-eyed give her room in the elevator. I think of when I was 5 and my grandparents took my mom, sis and I on a Caribbean cruise. I was curious and remember hating the club-like nursery set aside for kids. I want to remember sis and I ditched it, left the bitchy lady with blood on her hands. She had to tell her superior two “lords-of-the-fly” from Minnesota flew the coop. That was in 1969.

In 2016 kids helped, everyone pitched in to move heavy-set people. Except for a few retirees set in their way, blowing it all before they die, half expecting the cruise mentality as far as classes to be more like that 1969 cruise, people shook the captain's hand as they held their heart at the top of the gang-way. They took one last look at the fork-ifted activity going on below, exhaled Ft. Lauderdae's congested spring-broken air, and crossed the ship's threshold into a world of opulence. At least we thought so. It was a word where little, if anything, was ever asked of you. It was a world that tears down whatever inhibitions not previously gated. Alcohol and the thought of anonymity unlocks doors. A cruise brings out what everyone wants to be but was afraid to be. I smiled at the prospects for the week. Trailing through a spotless, shinning marble floor, I wait in the carpeted area of the elevator. My wife and I ascend, chat with some good ole' folks from Texas and arrive at our floor. We note landmarks, pictures to clues us which way to turn when we begin drinking. Is our room on the starboard or leeward side of the vessel. I think nautical for the first few days.

Congenial-speak #4

Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

The living room is suffocating with sun trying to illumine things. I quickly round the corned to the kitchen, leaving it to drown until the house wakes. I pad across the blue linoleum clad in the deep green pair of “camping” shorts I got as a gift. They had a loop on the waist for a flashlight and a metal clip to attach things like a canteen? I felt big and ready to meet my first napless day in a while. Apple Jacks fell in a bowl, milk surrounds with liquid white sound, and I eat them in silence. I let them sit in my mouth and fill with milk before I bite down. Puffy Jacks float aimless in the bowl commanding the sink. I've opened the drape and shade of the window. It pours sun across the Formica table of a breakfast nook. Outside I watched birds swallow worms painfully of the dilapidated, aged birdhouse that was like a friendly ornithological spire in our backyard. Hung like a constant chore, a fruited falsie, a branched shedder of slim allowance money, a crab apple tree cast shadows on the house. I could not climb it. I had no interest in getting high. Unsecured elevation scared me. It was a fear I discovered on a trip to my grandparents Bronx apartment the Previous summer. Impulsive and one to test the limits of my leash on life, I scamper up the steps of the Statue of Liberty. Unsatisfied at the crown, I wanted to go up to the cat-walk in the torch. Ever since then I knew my limitations, my irrational fears, the open air gyroscopes that point away from earth, the dizzying hatches that wait 10 feet off the ground.

I stand on our back door steps to consider my options. My shorts are new and pleated with utility devices, or the capacity to hold them. To my right plumes the lilac bushes that grow behind a doghouse my dad built for our aged black lab, Bingo. Artwork hides within it wall like hieroglyphics. My sister and I crayoned our way to obscure interior design fame. It is also a clubhouse, more of a hideout, a shelter in which my friend and I chat with girls. A brown picket fence encompasses the yard with an only gate at the bottom off a slight slope to the garage. Dull noise ruminates from the house. I imagine its prompts. My mom preparing coffee and the tuning MPR on the radio. Or my dad saving the drowning living room and letting the sun have its way with our house, fetching the paper from the front step and snapping it in one movement as he falls back in a pea-green rocking chair. He puts his tan moccasin slippers on the white hassock. He waits for his eggs and toast. My mom dose not rush to do anything. It is not even close to Edith Bunker doing things Archie expects. My dad is lucky my mom gets him something Saturday morning. During the week he often eats “daddy cakes” before work. This is about the bottom of the nutrition scale of breakfasts. In the absence of time and/or inclination I watch him devour Hostess cakes, drink from the Polk-a-dot milk container and lick the dull side of a knife. I see the curtain ruffle behind me and the image of my mom followed by my sister. The time is wasting and I run down to the gate. Smells of pine and the resting pace of our maroon station wagon ferret out the dark garage.

“Morning Michael.”

“Morning Mr. Myer.”

Our jolly neighbor across the alley is portly. His door is up and he stick his head out from a silver trailer, an RV monstrosity the pull up north to a cabin somewhat close to ours.

“Going to your cabin much this summer, Michael?”

“I guess we might,” I ponder. I think of the long two-hour car rides with our dog drooling over the seat into a viscous puddle in the tiny wells of the indented pattern on the seat cover. I imagine the line my sister gets cross if I advance my hands or feet. I say the names of Albany and Yellowstone, Nashville and England that might be the pre or suffixes in geography games my Mom begins to pass time. I smile. “Yeah, definitely. We are going a lot more. You?”

“We still have to get up there to put in the dock. Our lake is very weedy.”

Decisions must be made. Underneath license plates from all over America, from the 60s, rusty half-visible numbered plates prisoners probably made, are my blue and white bike and a scooter. My dad constructed the scooter with two orange crates, a doul, a 2 x 4 and a single roller skate. The scooter offers the more interesting ride. Items to be carried need to find homes in one of the crates. No one knows that I have them. I conceal them on the go. I can also carry any necessary implements on the utility latches on my camping shorts. Batman has a utility belt. It prepares him for an eventuality life might throw at him, like climbing the side of a building at a 90 degree angle or using his net to drop on all the baddies in Gotham.

I select the scooter on a roller skate, half on the front and half in back. Nothing seems to need to go in my roomy compartments yet, so I hope I acquire things during the day, like ice cream bars our toads, flashlights for night riding or whistles for the evening games. I say goodbye to our neighbor and glance in the window of the girl next door. The small rocks of the alley are slow going and it's a measured mission to the end, to asphalt and pavement that lets my wheels turn freely, to the street I own.

Congenial-speak #3

       Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:       

       I slip in my bed expecting to dream, like a punchy child into starch-white sheets, and sleep until I am wakened by bird calls from the leaves of font lawn maples. I aspired on the sultry summer nights of my youth, the lilac scented breeze finding its niche in my window shade. It is the screen that has often been the background for the silhouette of my sister's giant sunflower. It is the window though which I peered with my toy plastic periscope. It is the escape hatch I eased myself through to elude punitive babysitters. It is the bed in which I lay ensconced in a fuzzy tan blanket with a thin white stripe, a hypnotic talisman that hinted at the succinct divide of the blanket, of security, of childhood, of the war-torn country existed somewhere beyond my door on Aldrich Avenue.

        My panda bear has his white pen-marked rubber nose tweaked. His shaking tiddly-winked eyes set the meter of the day. The toy box with the crayon scrawled map of the U.S. on the side receives a kick as I leave the room. Hardwood hall floor light dims, and my parents' room is closed. I must be quiet. I am the first one awake and hear the springs cringe on the trundle bed my sister occupies. She moves slightly, and I look back, wondering if she is going to rise a join me for breakfast. She does not. I have free reign of the house for a few hours, maybe, on the first day of summer vacation. It is Saturday, June 20, 1970. I am 5 years, 4 months and 19 days old. I am a dubiously honored graduate of the Betty's Nursery School.

Congenial-speak #2

Musing on the subtext of my political memoir Ten Years and Change: A DFL Boyhood in Minnesota I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

I had two childhoods, one adroit, one cerebral. A third was never meant to be. It molted, fermenting on the doorstep of an interracial couple. It lay in the vortexes that posture themselves down narrow streets, down the pebble-strewn alley-ways that leave American dreams out on the steps like milk bottles or pails of worms for fishing. But I digress from the maturation that did not happen, the one apt not to be as exciting, liberating, or character building. The one that likely would have given me fewer opportunities to be able to see the world as the liberal arbitrator I am.

In 1965 I imagine a world in which the color of a man's skin supersedes the true, or false, love he has for a woman. I think of a world wrapped tightly, shaking off the cocoon of Cold War paranoia, of attempts to rescue the damaged idea of America that lay among the ticker-tape in Times Square and lost in the policed hills of Korea. I consider the jilted puritan ruse that took root in Jamestown, led the revolution, enslaved decades, drove men to the moon, sent military advisors to Vietnam, fed the tea-party, made Trump and billionaire “Christians” in vogue and made sure that every blessed American with half a brain to sell has clear and present access to a gun. Life began for me when I slid screaming, with the closed eyes of a pekineses, through the gunnels of a ship-shaped vagina to the lap of a stranger who was soon to be detached and, eighteen years later, attached to me. It was an amniotic park slide, a harrowing ride not worth writing home about. I was hygienically cut hood-less and waited to be adopted. There we all were, waiting for our lives to begin, fresh in the opening weeks of February, just as our president was conceiving his unilateral chess move, his offensive air, land and sea strike whose allowances lay in the folds of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. He, for all intents and purposes, began the war in those fleeting weeks. He made it clear with Operation Rolling Thunder that America had a vested interested, that America's youth, regardless of its origins and parameters of hypothetical lines of longitude, were willing to fight for the freedom of faceless Asians. Johnson packaged the war, his perceived commitment from his predecessors, and tried like hell to sell it to kids as the honorable thing to do. Like it was noble and in some kerfluffled, misanthropic way they were fighting for America's freedom, that they would be lionized and canonized as the saviors of the way of life we all grew up knowing, the way of life the greatest generation saved in the “Big One.” No one blinked. For the next three years bombs whistled out of the dark shadows of Thunderchief's bay doors. Most congressmen ignored the resultant draft dodgers, maps for medics to MASH units and boys who might have been that older neighbor boy I'd look up to one day. They exploded in firestorms, making jungles lakes of napalm, burning through the yellowest most helpless, dislocated and impoverished skin they could find. LBJ showed North Vietnam U.S. muscle that first week of March. And we waited, like Charlie who had been trusted with a piece in the puzzle that is wont to be the bone picking of any baby of ethnicity.

The Amrams, Fred and Barbara, married in New York, were transplants to Minnesota in 1958. Ah, the world had a lot on its plate; France, Vietnam, the Soviet Union―America. It was about to erupt into what was initially dubbed the second Indo-China War (the first one hadn't ended well). Fate chose for the Amrams the land of the DFL (Democratic Farmer-Larbor) within the land of the guilty puritan conscience. Decisions are made on a need-to-know bases. The Amrams each had come from progressive backgrounds. Barbara Flowerman supported progressive nominee for president Henry Wallace in 1948. Wallace would not campaign among segregationists. In the borough of the Bronx, with buttons, with the philosophical sophistries of the Ethical Culture Society spinning her world until the colors blurred, with the songs of Woody Guthrie romancing the purpose and lives of the hobos and through-crack fallen, she made her first steps in the battle of evermore, the quest to build a better world. Fred, current owner of the Amram name, borrowed from the father of the one-man-staff who led the Israelites out of Egypt land, gained his moral and justice-driven character from his balcony in Hannover, Germany. On November 8, 1938 a five-year-old boy saw flames pour from the windows of his family's Bergstrasse Synagogue. It was one of over 1,000 burned in the course of the three nights the pogrom (ethnically inclined riot).

For their worth, for the suppressed societies worth, for the narrow streets that beg to be echoed with a megaphone, a fugue for chants of protest like the pied piper and his followers, Fred and Barbara met and eventually married, came to Minnesota, bore one child and decided to adopt another. But why a white baby. Why not shake things up in 1965 and jump-start America's—or their little slice of it—mindset.

Sun filtered through slits on our awning as residential life played outside on Aldrich Avenue. I would be out there soon enough, swinging my bat or pounding worms with a ball-peen hammer in the alley. In March, as Johnson did his best to obliterate only military personnel of northern Vietnam, I was safe in my play-pen, counting the shadow grids the awning slits made on the rusty shag carpet. I was an Amram. My mom, in between tending to me and my three-year-od sister, plotted how best to end the war. She was going to help end it, by political means, before it was popular to want it to end. In those days she was involved with the WILPF (Womens International League for Peace and Freedom). They met, Marv Davidov (future founder of Honeywell Project) met, she made food for WILPH sales and, in November 1963 traveled to Washington D.C. With the purpose of voicing her concern for the immediate end of the Vietnam War.

It all began that way, or some sorted, salted version of it, depending who's telling it. Life commenced biologically, succeeding its meiotic processes and embryonic and fetal phases science knows so well, ending with a slap on the ass to know if you're still born. I wasn't really born though. And the cruel irony was that, as I waited in that foster shelter—or wherever baby's in limbo wait—a war that would total 20 years—depending who's telling the stats—was about to be unmitigably aggravated by the country into which I was being born.

Congenial-speak #1

It' sequences of paradoxes.

It's blatant hypocrisy.

It's equilateral lies in spaces where truths out to be.

Never has the world been so sick, so damaged, so faulted by the statutory lines of politicians and their games. Money sits at the end of any rainbow coalition, and it's greed that makes the planet turn on its axis. Green is the culprit that put fourth—like fresh vomit—the cherubic face that cries out for a hood of Jeff Sessions. It is the green Elmer's paste that puked up like the Exorcist the Sarah Palin clone Betsy Devos.

This is not the Republican Party I know. The GOP I grew up watching weasel out of Watergate, the clan of elephants that at the very least loved peanuts enough to clean up after the show. Trump said a decade ago that if he ever ran for president he would run as a Republican. He said they have the collective stupidity to surrender to what lies they're told. Look no further than Mrs. Conway or Mr. Spicer for evidence that a rash of idiotic pandemic has beheld Washington from the start of President-elect tenure.

Please, alternative facts? Fake news? Roll over Nostradamus, tell Goebbels the real news. Does Spicer look in a fun-house mirror, only to be alarmed by the shape of his tongues that see to be forking, providing a path never taken, the one Robert Frost would never have imagined. When the round-faced hot-under-the-collar press secretary of lingular dysemmetry distorts fact and fiction both. When a red sea of truths divide like a walnut cracked inside the mouth that would trade its dignity for a job. And then there's Kelly Ann, the campaign manager everyone thought would go away, only to surface at Inauguration day dressed like the smurf too festively dressed for the cartoonist's animation budget. And she pleads and soothes Donald. Says she must be ready with child psychology trick that give the president choices.

Who let the mad dog out lately? Who listens to, or even consults the grow-up in the room given a tough guy name. Was he even at the last Yemen supper, the dinner that caused the death of a navy SEAL, Yemenese civies to include nine children, the hair-brained, trigger-fingered plot afoot with all the foresight of a hatchling of Lucy & Ethel, an incident of a transparency that never even made it to the over-head projector. Now, was Secretary of State Tillerson even there, in earshot of the gaffs, to see beyond what crude projects cloud his mind? No, not in the course of a hot, miscalculated, white-washed Pentagon minute could it happen. It is as unfathomable and nummerologically impossible as the crowds attending the inauguration, a phenomenon given to the occurring longevity of Haley's comet. NEVER will a minute be spent on grilling Rex on Yemen (or anyone) for those lives lost. NEVER should such a travesty begin to equate the hours and dollars spent grilling Secretary of State Clinton on Benghazi. NEVER! And who gets the blame, who is going to be the patsy for Donald's first fatal mistake, the repository for the excess waste of the billionaire boys club, the valiant prince who springs to mind as colored skin basks in his successors chagrin.

I give it two years.