The Moral Cannibal

I am reminded of the story about the cannibal who was appalled at the carnage that World War II had brought to his island. "What a shameful waste!" he lamented, "Don't those ignorant savages know that you should never kill any more than you can eat?" While most of us believe that cannibalism is immoral, this guy was conditioned by his culture to believe that it was immoral not to eat his slain enemies. The cannibal was not immoral, he just subscribed to a different moral code than we do.

A couple of posts ago, my esteemed colleague asserted that liberals were more moral than conservatives. I countered that neither side was necessarily more moral than the other, they just subscribed to different moral codes. I cited abortion and homosexuality as examples. Each faction accuses the other of immorality when, truth be known, they are both being perfectly consistent with their own moral codes. While Uncle Ken sort of agreed with me about the abortion thing, he asserts that homosexuality is not a moral issue because the only moral code that condemns the practice comes from the Bible. Although a typical Christian or Jew might say that the fact it comes from the Bible is precisely what makes it a moral issue, I would like to try a different tack. There are lots of things in the Bible that have not been taken seriously in Euro-American culture for a long time, but this is not one of them. While homosexuality has been around since forever, it is only recently that public approval of the practice has become fashionable. I remember when it used to be illegal, then it became a sickness, and now we are expected to believe that there's nothing wrong with it. The conservatives did not abandon the moral code, the moral code abandoned the conservatives.

If you think about it, there is no logical reason to prohibit cannibalism. Well, you wouldn't want to allow people to murder other people just so they could eat them but, if the guy is already dead, what's the harm in it? I don't think cannibalism is even mentioned in the Bible, probably because it wasn't a common problem in Biblical times, and still isn't. Cannibalism just seems to go against human nature in most, although not all, cultures. A logical argument to legalize cannibalism in this country wouldn't attract many converts because, for most people, it's not a logical subject. If cannibalism was to somehow gain popular approval, either spontaneously or because of a deliberate propaganda campaign, there would still be many people opposed to cannibalism. If you asked them to justify their position, they would probably cite common sense and common decency, in spite of the apparent lack of both in their contemporary culture. They may not be able to stop cannibalism, but that wouldn't mean that they had to like it.

 "Very broadly I think the left wants to have the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, which is still pretty vague, but an equal amount of goods for everybody and equal rights for everybody is probably a good approximation." - Uncle Ken
I can agree to "equal rights", but not to "an equal amount of goods". That has been tried and has never been successful on a national scale, although it has succeeded in voluntary associations, which were usually formed around religious beliefs. The only way to enforce this principle on an unwilling population is to confiscate goods from some people and redistribute them to others. A certain amount of that is already being done but, if it's pushed all the way, some people are going to push back, and with good reason. Why should anybody work hard and save his money if he's going to end up no better off than anybody else? There is no guarantee that excessive wealth will "trickle down", but I'm pretty sure that equal wealth will never trickle up. You know, the old lowest common denominator effect.

I have been told by a number of people that smoking around computers shortens their lifespan. It has something to do with the ionic charge that the smoke imparts to the internal parts, which causes them to accumulate dust particles faster. My last computer lasted eight years with me smoking around it. This one has lasted seven years so far with me not smoking around it. I have been smoking around myself for about 50 years and I'm still here, so maybe computers aren't tough enough to take over the world after all.

that pesky paragraph

Well readers, all of you, the teeming horde who wait breathlessly for the late night posting by Beagles, or the early bird post of Uncle Ken, I regretfully inform you that there was no posting by Beagles last night.  He informs me that they had company last night which I take to mean some wild party because up there, up there at the end of America, so far from the civilizing influence of the stately capital of the midwest, who who knows what sort of thing those savages get up to.

But there had been a paragraph a couple posts back that i had wanted to get to, so I will take this opportunity to do that.  Let me reintroduce that paragraph:

One point brought out in the book was that segregation is justified by its proponents because Blacks are so different than Whites. The other side of the coin is that segregation is a big reason why Blacks are so different. Being shut out of the White culture for so long has caused them to develop a culture of their own. So how do we fix this? The civil rights people believed that, if you could get Blacks and Whites to live side by side, it would draw them closer together. What they discovered was that, the more you try to force them together, the more they hate each other. Like you said, it's all about hearts and minds. It seems, though, that with all the propaganda tools at the Establishment's disposal, they could easily condition Blacks and Whites to accept each other. They certainly did it with the Gays! Any culture that can make homosexuality seem normal should be able to make anything seem norm

Oh I do think that if you can get people rubbing elbows together, they will eventually get along better.  When you get to know people it is harder to hate them.  I think that is a lot of what happened with gays.  As the animus faded they began to come out, and people began to realize that some people they really liked were gay so it seemed kind of stupid to hate that category.  A little tougher with blacks because they can't pass for white the way gays can pass for straight.

I think our Gage Park experiences with race were different, but the way I remember it growing up was that almost everybody hated blacks, and there were no blacks living closer than a mile or two from us, and they certainly never came into our neighborhood, nor we into theirs.

But anymore things are more mixed, and black and white get along a lot better than they did in the time of the book.  I don't think the book ever indicates that the more you forced white and black together the more they hated each other and I don't think that is true.  What happened in the time of the book was that the blacks pushed for equal schooling and the whites pushed back and they fought over that issue, but they didn't hate each other anymore than they did before the whole ruckus took place.

I don't know where you get that the establishment got straights to accept gays.  Apparently, after all my arguments to the contrary you still believe that there is some shadowy establishment pulling strings.  What could be more establishment than the guys who program tv?  Some people claim that Will and Grace was a big moment in gay rights, and maybe it was, people saw likeable funny people who were very gay, but you notice that they didn't bring out this series in the fifties, they didn't bring it out until their polling showed it would be successful.

good and bad and right and left

I think that is one of the beliefs of the stoics, that actions are right in and of themselves, regardless of what effect they have.  The left generally believes in utilitarianism where the good or bad is determined by what the effects of the actions are.  There are a couple weaknesses in that, one is that you have to define what kind of effects  you want to have, what kind of world do you want?  Very broadly I think the left wants to have the greatest good for the greatest amount of people, which is still pretty vague, but an equal amount of goods for everybody and equal rights for everybody is probably a good approximation.

The other weakness is how can you know what effects your actions will have, especially in the longer run?  I think that is gotten around by just being concerned with the immediate results, and maybe a little beyond that.

Let's consider your two sins, abortion and homosexuality.  Well abortion is killing something.  We can argue about whether or not it is a human being at the time it is killed, but it is killing something, so that looks pretty wrong.  The left would argue that the more important issue is a woman having control over her body, and that trumps the killing.  Of course that killing is minimized by not thinking of it as a human being, which we can argue all day on, but not today.  But here's an example of the right believing that an act is always wrong, and the right believing that a little wrong is trumped by the greater good. 

Homosexuality is only considered a sin because the bible is against it.  But correct me if I am wrong, but it is no big deal in the bible, it only mentions it a few times, and those in the Old Testament where it is also against eating shellfish, and equally against divorce, which is still a little iffy, but nobody is saying divorced people shouldn't get married again.  Well the Catholic church, but it is not one of their most favored doctrines, and especially in the states, widely ignored. 

So if you take out those bible references how is homosexuality a moral issue?  See here are people doing something that does not effect you at all, so why is it an issue with you?

There's a dos and don'ts element of this bible morality.  Mostly people believe in not doing the don'ts (sins) no cheating, no stealing, no getting drunk, no playing cards, as long as you don't do these things, you are probably going to heaven or at least you will be able to hold your head high and look down at the sinners.  But there are the dos too, mostly love everybody and help the poor, and a lot of people don't want to love the sinners and their idea of helping the poor is putting bibles into the chest of drawers in the poor house.

Let me take a stab at those terms.  Liberals are people who have kind of an open mind about doing things, but they are always questioning things, so sometimes they seem weak, radicals want to do something out of the mainstream and they want to do it fast, and conservatives want to keep everything as it is, except that modern day hard shell conservatives (tea partiers) want to change everything from the way it is now.  In actual effect, though they might have dictionary definitions, they are just terms thrown around to make you look good and your opponent look bad.

You're right about race being more of an urban problem than a rural one in that the poor (who are disproportionately black) flock to the cities and there are no big streets to march down in the country.  I just feel that city people get the short end of the stick in the media where the country folk are assumed to be the real Americans while the city people are considered a bunch of bad guys and how did they get here anyway?  Maybe I am being too thin-skinned.

Absolutely us writer guys had a better image in the fifties when we could smoke our asses off till the room was one big cloud, and those old typewriters, you could really bang on the keys, and at the end of the line you could slap that carriage back with that satisfying ring, and best of all, when you didn't like what you wrote you could rip the paper out of the machine and crush it and toss it at that wire wastebasket, which you mostly missed, but that too was cool.  And you had a bottle of cheap whiskey on the desk and a fedora on your head.

Smoking is bad for a computer?

Moral Comparisons

I can see why you would say that the left is more moral than the right, but I always thought it was the other way around. Maybe it's just the illusion of central position. I suppose there's more than one way to look at it, though. You could define morality as an extension of altruism, but you could also define it as doing the right thing. The next question is, how do you know what's the right thing? At our age we should have developed an internalized moral code, but a newborn baby has no such thing. As the baby grows up, it will pick up it's moral code from other people, so it depends on what kind of people it grows up with. At first the primary influence comes from family and friends of the family. Later, the kid is likely to transfer it's allegiance to other kids, so it depends on what kinds of kids it associates with. It is always possible for a kid to read something in a book that introduces yet another moral influence, but I doubt that most people pay much attention to that. Maybe it's just that the left and the right have different moral codes. Abortion and homosexuality are certainly moral issues, but the left and the right generally come down on opposite sides of both of them. Altruism is cool, but somebody from my ilk might say that not everybody deserves to be the recipient of altruism. Your ilk might counter that everybody deserves our kindness, well, everybody except those nasty conservatives. And so it goes.

The authors of our book refer to the civil rights people as "liberals", the Black power people as "radicals", and the White power people as "conservatives". Silly me, I thought they were all radicals. It just goes to show that you are never too old to learn something.

I didn't know there was such a thing a urban music, although I do remember when Black music was called "soul music", and I even remember when it was called "rhythm and blues". Maybe they call it urban music to distinguish it from country music, although most of that comes from Nashville. I have never been  to Nashville, but I think it's pretty urban. The reason I said that racial conflict is an urban problem was because that's where most of it seems to happen. Maybe it also happens in the country, but you never hear about it. Sherlock Holmes once said something about evil lurking in the moors and heather because there are few witnesses and fewer policemen out there, but of course he lived in London. As you once pointed out, though,  Northern Michigan is mostly White, so how could we have racial problems? We do seem to have our share of drug addicts and child molesters, though, so maybe rural people are not more virtuous than urban people after all.

It takes me at least an hour to write one of these blogs, but that includes the time spent in the garage smoking cigarettes and thinking about what I'm going to write next. I used to be able to write faster when I smoked in the house, but it turns out that's no good for the computer. Too bad, the journalists in those old movies smoked like chimneys and it seemed to enhance their productivity. They didn't need no fancy computers either, they had those old clackety clack typewriters, and it didn't slow them down a bit.

urban problems

Geez you finished the book and here I am about halfway through, and frankly I am treading water.  The CCCO is disintegrating and the more hotheaded organizations, are doing more demonstrations, they just shut down Lake Shore Drive on a march to city hall, but when they got there the mayor was gone.  It seems like they are giving up on trying to get anything from Willis and so are going to the mayor.  But the mayor put Willis in, he's not going to give them anything Willis didn't. 

I think we can agree these guys are warriors.  It seems to me that there is an odd thing about some warriors.  They don't seem that interested in whether their efforts bear any fruit.  Even if they knew in advance that their efforts would be fruitless they would do them anyway.  This is the sort of thing the stoics believed, the world is a bad place and maybe there is nothing to be done about it, but you are still okay as long as you do the right thing.  It is kind of like those early render onto Caesar Christians, and stoicism is one of the things Christianity embraced, or rather many of their early converts were stoics and they took their stoicism with them into the church.

And these guys are pretty religious.  There is a lot of praying going on.  As an atheist, I think of this as kind of showboating for the masses, but I am probably wrong, these people really believe.

Joan Baez, she was pretty strident in 1968, and even though I would agree with her politics I don't like overly political songs.  They seem kind of shallow, like all that matters is if we pass Bill 1708.  She does have a nice voice though.  Can you enjoy a song just for the music even if you don't like the music? 

She caught a lot of flack back then.  I remember Al Capp had her in Lil Abner as Joanie Phoanie.  I guess she was easy to make fun of.

I remember at one time in the sixties the thought passed through my mind that maybe these pro-war guys really believed in what they were doing, and that was an uncomfortable thought.  It didn't jibe with the prevalent thought among my people which was that these were all bad men, and I never went into the thought too deeply.  I don't think much in terms of good vs evil anymore, but I guess I did then.

And there is a certain thing where the right seems less moral than the left.  If you consider morality as an extension of altruism, where for instance a guy who treats his family well is morally better than a guy who is all for himself, and a guy who treats his family and neighbors well is better than a guy who just treats his family well, and so on until you are including the human race.  It always seems like the group a right winger wants to treat nice is smaller than the group a left winger wants to treat nice.  Well this is a theory, we could discuss it.

Interesting that when you are talking about race problems you call them urban problems.  When Walgreens used to sell cheap cds the black music was always in a bin labeled urban music, and everybody knew what that meant.  There are blacks in the country too and in the small towns.  Maybe I am being too sensitive, but as a city slicker and an urban dweller I find that there is a lot of city bashing, like the problems of the cities arise because they are cities, like there is something inherently wrong with cities and maybe we would be better off without them.  Again maybe I am being too sensitive but whereas country people are seen as maybe a little slow but with essentially good hearts, city people are seen as smart only in a cunning way, and essentially black hearted.  Well had to get that off my chest.

There is a lot of stuff in that last paragraph of yours and I'll get to that tomorrow because the hour is getting late.  Out of curiosity, how long does it take you on average to do a post on our blog.  I think my time is between an hour and an hour and a half.

The Dream Deferred

I finished the book a couple days ago. It wasn't nearly as hard to read as I thought it would be, but it's certainly not for everyone. It brought out some good points, but it leaves you hanging at the end. I suppose that's because it was written some 30 years ago and doesn't cover anything that happened after the 60s. On page 341 there is as good a summary of the 60s as I have ever heard. Although the significance of that decade has been passionately debated ever since, one thing on which both sides agree is that "something important went wrong". I remember the 60s as an exciting time to be alive, but I suppose that was because it was my coming of age decade. I think it was Dickens who said, "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times", but of course he wasn't talking about the 1960s. Maybe any time is like that when you're that age.

I recently sent away for a CD of Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival of 1968. I knew I wouldn't like it because I stopped buying her albums in 1967 when I found out that she was on the "wrong" side of the Vietnam issue. I have since learned that she had always been a pacifist but, at the time, I felt betrayed, like when Bob Dylan went electric. Anyway, I was ordering something else from a catalogue, and threw this in because they charge the same for shipping no mater how much stuff you order. Also, I thought it would do me good to hear it, since we were studying the decade, and 50 years is a long time to stay mad at somebody.

Looking back on it now, I think that all those people were sincere in their beliefs and were only doing what they thought needed to be done. The authors of our book were disappointed that the civil rights thing didn't turn out the way they wanted, but they were writing in the 1980s, and a lot of things have happened since then. I don't know if they would feel any better writing about it today. Living in God's Country, all I know about urban problems is what I read and see on TV. In some ways, it seems like nothing much has changed and, in other ways, it seems like everything has changed way too much. What do you think about that?

One point brought out in the book was that segregation is justified by its proponents because Blacks are so different than Whites. The other side of the coin is that segregation is a big reason why Blacks are so different. Being shut out of the White culture for so long has caused them to develop a culture of their own. So how do we fix this? The civil rights people believed that, if you could get Blacks and Whites to live side by side, it would draw them closer together. What they discovered was that, the more you try to force them together, the more they hate each other. Like you said, it's all about hearts and minds. It seems, though, that with all the propaganda tools at the Establishment's disposal, they could easily condition Blacks and Whites to accept each other. They certainly did it with the Gays! Any culture that can make homosexuality seem normal should be able to make anything seem normal.

hearts and minds

 don't see why those CCCO guys thought they were ever going to get something out of the city government.  I think they thought something like people were basically decent and democratic and when it was pointed out to them that segregation existed and wasn't decent or democratic they would see the errors in their ways and would move to correct them. 

They should have gotten a clue when the city said, segregation, what segregation, I don't see no segregation going on.  The city guys were not negotiating in good faith and it's no surprise, if they started integrating the schools there would be hell to pay with their constituents, so their was nothing in it for them, and it wasn't like the CCCO had anything to intimidate them with.

Well in the south the local government didn't even have to worry about pesky liberals so they just hosed the blacks down when they marched, but that got the feds pissed off and they brought in troops and wily LBJ pushed through all those civil rights laws, and that took care of that.  More or less.  They got rid of Jim Crow, and those nasty polling judges had to stop giving them those absurd quizzes, but still the blacks were poor, because of all that slavery and years of Jim Crow, and there was a lot of subtle bigotry going on, so it wasn't like they had equal opportunity with white people.

Much like things were in the north.  So what are you gonna do?  The laws had been changed but the people haven't.  How do you change hearts and minds? 

I think the guys writing the book were from the faction that thought that you could change hearts and minds, that if you showed people the moral and logical path they would follow it.  Somewhere down the line this will lead to more forceful activities marches and violence, which these guys are not going to like because they think that violence never accomplishes anything, and I rather agree, all those riots, they never helped the area where people are rioting. 

But I'm getting ahead of the book, I keep looking forward to when Martin Luther comes to town.  I was down in Champaign then but I came up for like summers and Christmas and I remember it looked a little like people had their backs up.  It seems like all the businesses had these American flag decals in their windows and there on 63rd street just east of Kedzie was the headquarters of the American Nazi Party.


I know you don't follow politics like I do, like it is one of my favorite sports.  Donald Trump will never win the nomination, but he'll be standing up there in the debates, and everybody will be looking at him, and he will probably be insulting all the other candidates and their dilemma will be do they dare stand up and denounce him  and risk alienating that 20 percent of republicans who like the guy, which will help them with the moderates in the general election, if they get the nomination, but it will hurt them in the primary which they need to win to get the nomination.  The modern day republican presidential dilemma.

And if Trump holds on to around ten percent when he loses the nomination will he run as a third party?  Frankly I don't think he is willing to work that hard, but if he does, the republicans are doomed.  Probably.  Because you never know what is going to happen in politics.

Laws, Damn Laws, and Policies

I used to think that, if something was the law, you had to do it or go to jail but, over the years, I found out that it's more complicated than that. A lot of the laws that have been passed in our lifetimes are civil laws, not criminal laws. A civil case is easier to win than a criminal case because you only need to prove it by preponderance of evidence instead of beyond a reasonable doubt. I believe that civil laws were originally intended for one civilian to sue another civilian, but nowadays the government frequently initiates a lawsuit against a citizen or corporation. Generally, you can't go to jail for violating a civil law, but you can be served with a court order and, if you refuse to comply, you can go to jail for that.

Then, there are policies, which are none of the above. A policy is a statement of an organization's operating principles, and it is frequently written with enough wiggle room that the organization's leadership can weasel out of actually doing anything while piously proclaiming that "we have a policy in place......", which is intended to give you the impression that they really are going to do something even though they are not. What they are hoping is that, by the time you realize that they aren't really going to do anything, you will have calmed down to the point that you won't pursue the matter any further. The full text of the agreement reached between the civil rights people and the Chicago Establishment in 1966 is printed in Appendix II in the back of the book. The agreement promises that this policy and that policy will be put in place, but it doesn't guarantee that anybody will actually do anything. So much for affirmative action!

I think that most of Alaska has permafrost, but it's not all at the same depth. In the Matanuska Valley, where I worked briefly on a pig farm, we could dig down two or three feet before we hit the permafrost. At his depth, it doesn't interfere with most agricultural activities but, farther north in the Fairbanks area, the permafrost was frequently only a few inches below the surface. Before they could plant crops, they had to plow up the surface layer to expose the permafrost to the sun so that it would thaw out in a year or two. I can see where burning off the duff would have the same effect, although you would lose most of the organic soil in the process, making it harder for new plants to gain a foothold, which would make the land more vulnerable to erosion.

I don't know a lot about Donald Trump, but I've never heard anything good about him. I can understand why you would want to see him get the Republican nomination because it would make almost any Democrat look good by comparison. If he does get nominated, it won't be with my vote.  

red lining, permafrost, and the donald

There was an article on red lining in the Tribune yesterday.  I remembered that term being thrown around during the troubles in Gage Park, but I wasn't sure exactly what it was.  It was something banks would do where they would draw a red line around the black neighborhoods and not give out any mortgages in that area, and of course that area expanded as the ghetto grew.  I'm not sure if they did that because they were prudent, or because they were prejudiced.  Probably both, I can't imagine there were any black people in the banking industry back then.

So the real estate agencies would set these people up with contracts which were like mortgages except that if you missed one payment they could take back your house.  Strangely that was what I believed mortgages were like when I bought my condo, that if I had one late payment I would lose my condo.  When I found out that wasn't true I breathed a sigh of relief, though I never did miss a payment.  Actually I often made double payments because Bohunks should collect interest, not pay it.

Anyway what happened with the red lining was the contract victims got together and had sort of a rent strike, and I don't know if that resulted in them getting mortgages or better contracts.  It seems like the banks were in trouble for this, because it wasn't quite legal.  It seems like it was the feds that were pushing for these changes while the locals were dragging their heels and pretending to obey, but always finding some sort of obstruction or way to do nothing.

Just beginning chapter six, and it still seems like a lot of paper skirmishing.


As I was typing this NPR was talking about Alaska.  You probably already know this, but there is something called duff(?) which is the dead organic matter which apparently decomposes slowly because it is so cold, and underneath it is the permafrost which the duff acts like a blanket over and insulates it.  But now that we are having all these fires the duff is burning and once it is burned off then the permafrost is exposed and then it begins to decompose and all its carbon evaporates into the atmosphere.  These days it seems like everything leads to disaster.

It seems like I have time for one more paragraph, so how about that Donald Trump?  I thought when he criticized McCain for getting captured that would be the end of him, but the latest polls show that it didn't hurt him much.  It used to be in the republican party you had the establishment and the tea party, but now you have the establishment, the tea party, and Donald Trump.  If he is disciplined enough to stay on his anti immigration message, he could be big trouble, especially if he goes third party.  This could be a chance for some of the establishment guys to soften their stands on immigration and save the republicans from that ticking time bomb, but nobody wants to stick their neck out that far, yet.

Well I have to admit the republicans are a lot more exciting than my dems.  That Hillary, ugh.  Do we dare hope for Bernie?  But do we dare risk him losing to some tea party guy? 

A lot of people moan and groan when election time rolls around, but it's what I call entertainment.

Knights and Peasants

You're right that the officer class evolved from the knights of the Middle Ages. Originally, the knights were the only people who were allowed to bear arms, and it was their job to protect the peasants. As warfare became more organized, they started recruiting peasants and yeomen to back up the knights. These guys were usually foot soldiers, and were enlisted for the duration of a particular campaign, after which they returned to their farms, while the mounted knights were career soldiers. Occasionally a peasant or yeoman would be promoted to knighthood as a reward for service above and beyond the call of duty, which is the origin of the battlefield commissions that are still awarded today. The yeoman class evolved into the NCOs of today, and I think the navy still calls some of their people "yeoman seamen". As late as World War I, the British military still drew their officers exclusively from the aristocracy, but I think that was the last major war in which that was done.

The officer academy at West Point was the first officer training school in the U.S. but, during World War II, they couldn't turn out officers as fast as they were needed, so they started OCS, which was a crash course whose graduates were called "90 day wonders". OCS can be chosen as an enlistment option, but I didn't choose it. Many of those who did ended up washing out and reverted to the enlisted ranks. I understand that it's pretty intense, and you've got to really want it to make it through to graduation. At any time during your enlistment you can apply for OCS, but the selection process is quite rigorous and, again, you've got to really want it. ROTC would have been the easiest route, if I had went to college but, by then, I didn't want to be an officer any more than I wanted to be a business executive. Like you said, I just wanted to be a regular guy. I considered that I might make a career out of the military but, by the end of basic training, I knew that wasn't going to happen. As Ann Landers used to say, "The sample was ample."

Everybody in the U.S. Army is trained to move up at last one notch in the totem pole and, if  something happens to your immediate superior, you are expected to step right into his shoes. You may or may not get the pay grade right away but, if you are in the job for any length of time, you will eventually get the promotion that goes with it. The job I held for the last year or so of my enlistment was rated as a Specialist-E5 position, but I was a PFC-E3 when my boss went home and I took his place. When the new section sergeant I told you about took over, he promised to get me promoted, but I told him not to bother since I only had about six months to go on my enlistment. He did it anyway, and I jumped two pay grades in less than a month.

I found another reference to busing in the book. This was a court ordered thing, but it was for some other Northern City, not Chicago. the Supreme Court eventually threw that one out, and it remains to be seen if the book mentions any other busing plans. They did mention that they had a tough time enforcing the court ordered integration of Southern schools. Years after it was mandated, only about 5% of them had been integrated. I'm beginning to wonder if all the special considerations that I have always begrudged the Blacks and other minorities were ever actually implemented, or lasted very long if they were. You know how it is, you read something in the paper about the House or the Senate passing some law, and you assume that the law was enacted, but maybe it wasn't. It still had to pass the other chamber and the president, and then maybe survive a court challenge. It might take several years for all this to play out and, there might be something else that commands your attention by then.

getting ahead of the book

I believe originally it was the nobility that went for Huss while the peasants remained Catholic, but when the empire crushed them they had to become Catholic while the peasants carried on some Hussite teachings.  I believe they remained in the country.  The Hapsburgs tolerated little pockets of protestantism as long as they didn't raise no ruckus. 

I think the free thinkers were around the turn of the century.  The Czechs have always seemed to me to be a skeptical people.  I remember how my mother would give salesman what I thought of as the Bohunk fish eye.  She was the Bohunk, my father was a German and some other stuff.  I always liked to think of myself as German because of my last name, and except that little unpleasantness during the world wars they seemed like smart people.  But in College I took a couple years of German and boy were they schmaltzy.  I decided to call myself Czech at that point.

Today is the hundredth anniversary of the Eastland disaster.  It was a summer excursion to some lake resort in Michigan I believe.  The ship was being boarded in the river, just a block west of where I live.  It was taking on more people than it should have and it was top heavy.  The people ran to the railing to wave and the ship tipped so they ran the other way and that just made things worse and then the ship tipped over.  844 people drowned just feet from dry land. 

A little more information than I needed about the army ranking system.  Mainly I was wondering about the difference between enlisted and commissioned men, like the way they have officer's clubs and enlisted men's clubs, which I think goes back well maybe to the days of knights when you had the nobility and the rabble.  And I am still wondering why you didn't go to officer's training school.  Weren't you planning a career in the army?

I don't know about the busing plans in Chicago.  Is that in the book?  I'm still at the point where they are having meeting after meeting and being stonewalled and there are all these alphabet organizations, and it's kind of slow.  I guess this is the history those guys lived so it seems important to them.  Well they are so philosophical like if we think this then we must think that, and I can see where some of the hotheads are beginning to think, well let's do something.

But then doing something is not necessarily helpful.  They had those school boycotts which were very successful but once they were over things were the same as they were before.  Well I'm sitting here thinking maybe they should have done this or they should have done that, but then when I think of the enormity of what they were trying to do I think how could anything have worked?

Maybe I am getting ahead of the book but I think what they were aiming at was a country were black and white were completely intermixed in housing and schooling and everybody had an equal opportunity to succeed, and what they got was well, not much.  There have been gradual things, brought on more by cultural changes then by any legislation where for instance mixed marriage is no big deal anymore, and that racist language is not tolerated. 

Well it's a big subject.

I Told You Wrong

In thinking about it later, I realized that I told you wrong last night. I understand that a certain amount of memory loss is normal at our age. John Huss was burned at the stake in 1415. Not long after that, his followers, the Hussites, launched a rebellion against the Holy Roman Empire that lasted about 30 years. The Hussites disbanded after their leader, General Ziska, was killed in battle, but others took up the cause, and Bohemia fought a defensive war against the Empire for two centuries. The Empire finally prevailed at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. After that, the Czechs were forced to either convert to Catholicism or leave the country. The Czech and Moravian United Brethren was a religious sect that pioneered the concept of the separation of church and state. They went into exile after White Mountain, and some of them ended up in Pennsylvania. It is believed that our founding fathers got the idea of a constitutional freedom of religion from those guys. I'm not familiar with the Free Thinkers, but I'll take your word on it. I'm not familiar with the wreck of the Eastland, unless that was the one that sank off Milwaukee, or maybe the name of the ship was "The Milwaukee", I forget.

There are three classifications of rank in the army: enlisted, commissioned officers, and non commissioned officers (sergeants). Each rank has a pay grade associated with it, the officers are O1, O2, O3, etc. For this purpose, the NCOs are grouped with the enlisted, so it goes from E1 to E10. You start out as a Private-E1 and you are promoted to Private-E2 after a couple of months. Private First Class-E3 comes after that and you wear one stripe, actually a chevron, on your sleeve. Corporal-E4 with two stripes used to come after that but, sometime before I enlisted, it was changed to Specialist-E4, with a picture of an eagle instead of the two stripes. A specialist is an NCO for all practical purposes but, technically, it's different. The next step up is Sergeant-E5, with three stripes. The parallel specialist grade is Specialist-5, commonly called "Spec-5", a bird with one rocker underneath. Then comes Staff Sergeant- E6, three stripes with one rocker, then Sergeant First Class-E7, three stripes with two rockers, then Master Sergeant-E8, with three rockers. Then there is First Sergeant-E-9, three stripes, three rockers, and a diamond in the space between the stripes and the rockers. There is only one of those in a company. Last but not least is Sergeant Major-E10, with a star instead of a diamond. There is only one of those in a battalion.

There are four ways to become a commissioned officer: ROTC, officer's candidate school (OCS), West Point, and battlefield commission. The ROTC we had at Gage Park was actually a junior ROTC, which gets you a PFC grade in the National Guard. It takes four years of college ROTC to get you an officer's commission in the regular army. OCS is a six month crash course that used to be 90 days when they needed officers in a hurry. Hence the term "90 day wonder". West Point is a four year military college. All officers start out as 2nd Lieutenants-O1, but a West point officer has way more prestige than any of the others, and will likely get promoted sooner rather than later.

There must have been more than one busing plan in Chicago over the years because the book mentions a plan they had in '67 that was intended to spread the Black students over all the schools, with no school having more than 25%. The civil rights people were not pleased with this one, and I don't know how long it was in place. This one was not court ordered, the Board came up with it on their own, which is probably why the civil rights people didn't like it. If they wanted true integration, this would have been it, but they said it just reinforced segregation.

our man, John Huss

I'm a little confused about C O.  I assume that means commanding officer, but I don't know what rank that would be,  I always thought that there would be a sergeant, one of those big-time sergeants with the upside down chevrons under his regular chevrons, master sergeants I think they called them.  And a sergeant was not an officer.

There is some kind of line between officers and sergeants and corporals and privates, and isn't there something below privates, for like the new guys.  I think you can work your way up from a new guy to one of those sergeants with all the chevrons, but you can never become an officer unless you do something more (officers training school?). 

So why didn't you go to OTC (I think I am getting the hang of this)?  You had that perfectly good Gage Park education.  Did you just want to be one of the guys, and maybe you would go into it later?

The busing is not for racial reasons.  There is a system where if you don't like your neighborhood school you can apply to have your kid go to a different school and maybe they will let him and maybe not.  These kids are bussed in.  In my experience these kids were often black because the schools in black areas were generally worse than the schools in hispanic areas where I taught,  They were a bit of a disciplinary problem because the normal behavior in their neighborhoods was rougher then the one where they were going to.  And I think the other kids goaded them into being bad, they wanted them to be like the black guys they saw on tv.

I said Western but what I really meant was the area east of a viaduct that was a block or two east of western.  The maps in the book show the color line to be further east than that and maybe they were right, we didn't really go into those areas, we just knew what we heard.

You know it wasn't until I was maybe thirty when I first heard of John Huss.  I would go on about being a Bohunk because I thought it was cool (never got me any babes though, I don't know why not), and then one day one of my more academically inclined buddies asked me how about that John Huss, and I was like Who?

Since then of course I have done a lot of reading on the subject.  The English had that empire the sun never set on and the French had Napoleon, and we Bohunks have John Huss.  I think you are wrong about all the Czechs becoming Catholic after that, there was the Moravian Brethren who are still around and had some influence on our own John Wesley.  And then there were the Bohemian Freethinkers, not really atheists, more like agnostics, maybe even like unitarians, but certainly not Catholics.

Do you remember hearing about the Eastland?  The boat was chartered for the employees of Western Electric which was located in Cicero by Berwyn and when it tipped over a lot of Czechs lost their lives.  There is a whole section for them in the Bohemian National, all these tombstones with different birthdates but they all have the same death date, right down to the day.

They Know Who They Are

People were not usually chewed out during our army meetings. If somebody thought you had an ass chewing coming, they would call you into the office and do it privately. The closest they ever came to public humiliation was when they would say something like, "There are certain individuals in this company, we won't mention their names, they know who they are....." Everybody else usually knew who they were too, but they got that information from the grapevine, not from the commanding officer.

Before anybody could be promoted, there first had to be an allocation. Allocations came from God or somebody, and were passed down through the chain of command to the platoon level. Some months there were many allocations, some months there were few, and some months there were none. Nobody knew why. The platoon sergeant would call a meeting of his squad and section leaders, announce how many allocations he had been given, and solicit recommendations. The recommendations would be passed back up the chain of command and God or somebody would make the final decisions. Orders would be "cut", which means "printed", and passed back down through the chain of command. The promotee would get a copy, and another copy would be posted on the company bulleting board. There was one time when our C.O. was mad at us, so he turned his allocations back in, which was like saying there was nobody in his company worthy of promotion. Such a thing was unheard of, and that C.O. was never able to regain the loyalty of his men. The more he tried, the worse it got, until we were on the verge of mutiny. Then he got shipped to Vietnam where, rumor had it, he was shot in the back by one of his own men. Of course it was just a rumor, but none of us grieved over his alleged demise.

I thought you told me that the busing in Chicago was discontinued a long time ago, and that all the White kids now go to private schools. Are they still busing for racial reasons, or is it just kids who are in special programs?

My parents went out of their way to not transmit any racial prejudice, if they even had any, to my sister and me. They spoke of a neighborhood as either being "good", "bad", or "questionable". A questionable neighborhood was one that, if you talked about going there, you would be questioned as to why you wanted to go there. If you had no good reason, you didn't go. I remember you saying that you got nervous anytime you were east of Western Avenue.  The way I remember it, Western to Halsted was "questionable", and anything east of Halsted was "bad". I don't think it was totally about race, although that might have been part of it. At any rate, Sherman Park turned out to be okay, but I never went anyplace else in that questionable neighborhood because there was no reason to.

I remember going to Bohemian National for my grandfather's burial service. The only thing I remember about it is that it was way on the North Side, and it seemed like it took forever to get there. None of my family ever lived on the North Side, so maybe you're right about the religious reason. The Czechs had a Protestant revolution, led by John Huss, about a hundred years before Martin Luther came along. Huss was burned at the stake, but his followers kept the cause going for another 50 years or so, before being defeated at the Battle of White Mountain in 1620. After that, all the Czechs became Catholics if they knew what was good for them, but many of their descendants are not happy about it even unto this day.

heading into chapter five

When I worked for the state we had meetings, the worst of these were something called process meetings in which we would go over in exhausting detail step by step of every operation we did.  Well the underlings had to do that, the boss just sat with his arms folded and mostly looked on disapprovingly.  Worst was the middle manager who used the opportunity to beat up on the underlings in front of the boss to look good in his eyes. 

I guess if you have a large enough operation you have to have middle managers, maybe our fault was we were so small, about five people, that the middle manager just stuck out, but the worst middle manager, when she became top boss, was not so bad at all, and another temporary boss, demoted to middle manager, went from being a good guy to being a bad guy. 

I'm surprised that I can still be a big government democrat after my experience working for the government.  I'm surprised the lot of us didn't all just end up in jail, but then there is a high bar to pass before you go from the government to jail in the state of Illinois.

I'm surprised that your meetings went so well in the army.  Maybe it was because nobody could be fired.  What was the process for promotion?  Did your superior appoint you or was there a committee?

At that meeting with the parents maybe they expected you to give up something, even if just to say, well maybe I was too hasty kicking Bobby off the bus, something.  Usually both sides are expected to bend a little, even if it's just to throw the losing side a fig, just to be polite.  B ut you don't seem like much of a fig thrower when you think you are right.

Of course those segregation meetings were a farce, the white guys never intended to do anything.  I'm surprised that the black people thought they would.  Strange how they were trying to use the law to work for them when the enforcers of the law were dead set against them.  I have just finished Chapter Four, and now some of the hotheads are breaking with the established black leaders and doing things like holding demonstrations which don't seem that hotheaded today.

I guess the shit will really hit the fan when Martin Luther King comes to town.  You know I am a bit of an LBJ scholar and I remember when he wanted to do the war on poverty in Chicago he wanted his people to distribute the money.  Daley didn't mind the idea of poor people getting money, but he wanted to be the guy handing it out, and of course handing it out to his favorite poor people.  I think there is some connection to MLK in this.

There's still a lot of busing going on today.  When it came time to dismiss the kids
I always had to dismiss the bus kids early, and there were maybe five of them in a class of thirty.  And each school has special ed kids and generally a school will specialize in autistic or hard of hearing or whatever so those kids are all bussed in.  The busses take over the neighborhood during these times, but they are before the rush hours, and the schools are usually not on busy streets so it's not much of a traffic problem.

Tilden was just east of 47th and Halsted, the surrounding neighborhood was all white (still is), and didn't seem too bad, but just being close to the ghetto made us a little nervous.

One odd thing about Tilden was that it was an all boys school, so going from Tonti to there it was like they took all the girls out and replaced them with black boys. 

The cemeteries are a little segregated.  Walking through them and reading the names you can see where all the Irish are here and the Germans over there.  Some people like the Asians, had to fight to get in.  I don't know if you ever got to Bohemian National Cemetery, but that was formed when the Catholic cemetery refused to bury a Czech woman who committed suicide.  I think that was the story, though I have read one or two different ones, some kind of dust up between the Catholics and the vaunted Czech Freethinkers, that nobody wants to talk about anymore now that everybody is dead and all peaceful like.

A Successful Meeting

I have had considerable experience with meetings in my life and, as far as I'm concerned, if I never attend another one, it will be too soon. I worked with a guy at the paper mill who used to work for P.&G. until he quit and formed his own consulting company,  and made more money as an independent contractor doing the same work for the same company. He told me that P.& G. defines a successful meeting as one in which everybody walks away feeling good afterwards. I don't think that P.&G. has a monopoly on that concept because I've seen it elsewhere, and now I'm reading about it in this book. They must teach this in management school or something.

The only exception I can think of is when I was in the army. When we had a meeting there, the purpose was to plan something and, if the operation didn't go according to plan, we heard about it afterwards. This after the fact meeting was called a "critique". We would be congratulated on the things we had done right, and criticized for the things we had done wrong. It wasn't about placing blame, it was about determining why something hadn't worked and how we might do better next time. I suppose they did try to make us feel good coming out of most meetings, but that was secondary to the accomplishment of the activity for which the meeting had been called in the first place. I think that's a better way to judge the success of a meeting.

I remember one meeting I had with one of the kids on my school bus, his father, his school principal, and my boss. At the end, the principal made the comment that it had been a good meeting. I said, "The only way we will know whether or not this was a good meeting is if Anthony's behavior on the bus improves. If it doesn't, then this meeting will have been a waste of time." Nobody said anything, but they all looked at me funny, as if they had never heard anything like this before in their lives.

I don't know when the Chicago schools were integrated, but I remember my mother telling me about the busing some time after I had moved to Cheboygan. She said that there was a big traffic jam when the busses pulled up to the school, which I can believe because those schools were not designed for buses, or even cars for that matter. Gage Park had a small parking lot out back, but Sawyer didn't even have that. The teachers had to park in the street, but not right in front of the school because that's where the parents dropped off and picked up their kids. This must have made them popular with the neighbors who subsequently couldn't park in front of their own homes. Any school that's designed for cars and buses has two large lots or circle drives, one in front and one in back. One approach is reserved for the buses, the other is designated for the parents' cars and the parking lot is located so as not to interfere with either one.

I used to fish in Marquette Park, but I never did any good there. At some point my buddy Jack talked me into trying Sherman Park, which is not far from Tilden High School. I was nervous about going into such a "questionable" neighborhood, but Jack said that he used to live around there, and it wasn't that bad. We always went fishing early in the morning anyway, and seldom encountered any other people. I remember seeing a bum sleeping on a park bench once, all covered up with newspaper, but he didn't bother us and we didn't bother him. Sherman Park was smaller than Marquette Park, but the fishing was much better. When you went to Tilden, did you find the neighborhood "questionable"?

I know that Tilden was integrated, but that's because it was a specialized school that drew kids from several different neighborhoods. The book mentions that some of the Chicago schools were integrated, but not on purpose, they just reflected the composition  of the neighborhoods in which they were located. I always thought that the concept of neighborhood schools made sense, but that was before I found out that some schools were over crowded while others were under utilized. That doesn't make any sense at all, unless the intent was to maintain racial segregation. I can see Mayor Daley's dilemma though. No matter what he did, he was going to have half the city pissed off at him. Maybe that's why he depended so much on the cemetery vote to keep him in office. Were the cemeteries also segregated?

just before the shit hit the fan

I read a little past Chapter Three.  What seems to be happening mostly is the blacks and their white sympathizers are forming committees which meet with the white establishment who generally agree with them but then do nothing.  The black schools were overcrowded and the white schools had empty room, but the, what does the guy call it, the civic credo, just sat there and said no, everything was perfectly normal, there was no segregation going on.  Apparently if there were no laws specifically for segregation, then it was not happening.  I remember that phrase, de facto segregation being thrown around.  Boy was that guy Willis a bastard or what?

But I don't remember much of this happening while I was in high school.  Well it was happening east of Western which might as well have been the far side of the moon.  It was an area we passed through on the 55th street bus on the way to downtown.  At some point going east on 55th we would enter the colored neighborhood and suddenly black people would be getting on the bus, mentally we would be rolling up our windows.  What if the bus broke down right here in the middle of the ghetto?  Would the neighborhood people rush in and kill us all?  Well probably not, still we squinched up a little in our seats.

But Gage Park High School remained lily white (I wonder when it got its first black students), and further south in Marquette Park the locals were vowing THEY will never get this park, because as soon as a black person dipped his fishing pole into the lagoon it would no longer be fit for white people. 

Anyway that whole storm seemed far away in June of 1963 when you flew off to Alaska and I had a summer of ushering at the State Lake showing Cleopatra before being driven down to my dorm in Champaign.  I was only dimly aware of it and don't remember even having an opinion.

Those first couple years at College were years of isolation for me.  In Chicago my parents got the Tribune and sometimes I would buy the Daily News or the Sun-Times, I guess just to get a little more news.  I have always loved newspapers.  But I wasn't reading any of them in Champaign. 

I came back to Chicago in the summer of 64 and took some courses at a junior college in Bogan High School.  I remember the Gulf of Tonkin took place then and my attitude was let's get those rotten commies.  In the summer of 1965 I came back to a job packing bibles by Archer and Canal, ate my lunch of olive loaf sandwiches on Wonder Bread wrapped in that tangy wax paper singing Dylan songs to myself, on the cusp of hippiedom.

The summer of 1966 I stayed in Champaign, ostensibly to take a course I had flunked the semester before, but actually to hang out with my new beer drinking dope smoking hippie buddies, but I did make a couple trips up to Chicago that summer, and as you say, the shit had hit the fan.

When the Shit Hit the Fan

You'll never catch up to me, I'm at least half way through the book already. I thought it was going to be boring but, once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. I remember most of the events described, but not in this much detail. I probably viewed the whole scene with detachment at the time, seeing as how I didn't like the city in the first place and didn't plan on living in it after I got out of the army. Now it's like playing an old movie on DVD and catching all the subtleties that you missed the first time around. I am reminded of the punch line of an old joke: "There you sit all spick and span. Where were you when the shit hit the fan?"

Although the crisis had been building for years, it was in the summer of 1966 that the shit really hit the fan. I came home on leave in June, and the real trouble didn't start until July, so I just missed it. I probably wouldn't have been directly affected anyway because my parents had recently moved to Palos Park. I remember going to see their old house on 51st Street just before it was demolished to make a parking lot for Central Steel and Wire. The house was locked up, but I was able to see inside through the windows, and it looked kind of spooky without any furniture or anything in the rooms. The yard had been torn up, partly by my father when he dug up some of the plants to take with him to Palos, and partly by the neighbors, who my dad had told were welcome to any plants he had left behind. A kid I used to know happened by while I was there, and he told me that every house on the block had something from my dad's garden.

Back in Berlin, I didn't pay much attention to the news, being preoccupied with my own personal issues. I noticed that the Blacks in our outfit had gotten more arrogant while I was gone, several of them who I had counted as friends didn't seem to be as friendly as before. I attributed that to the fact that their numbers were increasing every day, and they would probably rather hang out with their own people. We always had Blacks in our outfit, but not very many of them until about the time I came back from leave. We had been understaffed for some time, and when replacements finally started to arrive, a lot of them were Black. I seem to remember there had been some kind of racial incident in Berlin while I was gone, something about a Black soldier allegedly raping a White girl. Then again, it might have been after I left for good, I don't remember.

We had a new section sergeant when I came back, that's more than a squad leader but less than a platoon sergeant. He was my direct superior, and he happened to be Black, but that was never an issue with either of us. There had been one other guy between me and the section sergeant, but he went home, and I was now him. The new sergeant had little experience with the mortars, having spent most of his career in rifle platoons, so I took him under my wing and helped him learn the ropes. I had a more cordial relationship with this guy than with any other sergeant in my three years of military service, and he confided, just before I left, that he considered me to be his friend.

When I got out in March of 1967, I heard that there had been some kind of racial ruckus in Marquette Park while I had been gone, but I had no idea of the extent of it until I read it in this book. I had a few friends in the old neighborhood who I visited with, and they didn't seem overly concerned about the incident but, I suppose tempers had cooled by then. The 60s was a turbulent time in our nation's history, but my own life was also pretty turbulent in those days, and I didn't have time to watch a lot of television. Now, half a century later, I am finally finding out what went down while my attention was directed elsewhere.

school daze

I remember the same thing at Tonti.  Most everybody walked home at lunchtime.  One time our mother had to go somewhere so we packed up lunch and ate in this small tucked away room.  It was kind of exciting, the way any break in routine can be exciting for a kid.  You know I always liked that little bit of taste that waxed paper lent to a Wonder Bread sandwich.  Anymore lunches in grade schools are only twenty minutes long so nobody has time to go home and eat and catch a little bit of Little Rascals movie. 

Everybody eats in the lunchroom, well some kids wolf down their meals and some kids let it sit there while they goof off.  The all have to take some vegetable from the line but most of them never eat it, and it gets dumped in the trashcan because you can lead a kid to vegetables, but you can't make them eat them.  Myself I always liked broccoli when I was a kid.

Sight Savers. what a peculiar term.  I tried to google it but all I got was those little papers to clean your glasses with.  I remember that they used to check our eyes every year or two, and I wasn't all that displeased to learn that I would have to wear glasses, I kind of wanted to look smart, and when I discovered how good I could see with them it knocked my socks off.

Andy was our janitor.  When we were little we sort of admired him, but when we got older we made fun of him.  During recess balls would end up on the roof and every now and then Andy would collect them, and when we were older we would shout at him, "Andy, do you have any balls?" and then we would giggle our seventh grade giggles because how could any adult know what that really meant?

Interesting what they told you at Sawyer about young couples with kids moving out to the burbs.  A lot of that area west of Western had been owned by some batty New York woman, Hattie Green, The Witch of Wall Street, and then sold in the twenties and they had put up those block after block of bungalows.  But then the people that moved in when they were built were kind of old when we moved in.  We were surrounded by this older generation.  It's all Mexican now and they can[t build new schools fast enough.

I'm just beginning on Chapter Three.  I'll put a rush on it to catch up with you.

Chapter 3

I finished Chapter 3 today, and you probably will have by the time you read this. I have said previously that the racial troubles in Chicago didn't start till after I was long gone, but that's obviously not the case. I remember all that stuff in Chapter 3, well not all of it, but the general scenario and the names of some of the players. I don't remember talking about it in school or church or around the dinner table at home, so I must have read about it in the newspapers. I remember hearing about some schools being over crowded and the kids attending by shifts, and I remember that we had empty classrooms in Sawyer Elementary, but I didn't know it had anything to do with race. Our principal told us that it was because many of the young couples with kids were moving to the suburbs, leaving mostly older people behind in our neighborhood.

At the time, I took neighborhood schools for granted, not knowing any other way. Sawyer didn't even have a cafeteria because almost all of us lived so close that we could easily walk home for lunch. There were a dozen or so kids who lived "across the tracks" or were "sight savers" who commuted from far away, and they had a couple tables set up for them in the basement where they ate the lunches they brought from home. I suppose those sight savers would be called "special needs" kids today. They had vision problems and had to sit in the front seats of the classroom, and I think some of them had mental issues as well. That basement was actually pretty nice, and I once heard our principal lamenting that he couldn't make more use of it. The school nurse had her office down there, and there was a loading dock where the milk was delivered. Other than that, we only used it for air raid drills and P.T.A. hot dog or bake sales. The furnace room, where the janitors hung out, was also in the basement, but the only times we allowed to go there was to ask one of the janitors to come clean up the mess when some kid threw up.

Although I now remember reading about the integration controversy, I don't remember anybody in our neighborhood getting very excited about it. The "color line" was still two or three miles away, which is a long distance in the city when you don't have your driver's license yet. I find it strange that the people in the book were so concerned about integrating the schools instead of integrating the whole neighborhoods. It seems like, if they had integrated the neighborhoods, the schools would have  taken care of themselves, but maybe they thought that was too tough a nut to crack at the time. I was surprised to learn that the segregation of neighborhoods, far from being a mere social custom, was the result of a deliberate plan formulated in 1917 by realtors hoping to maximize their profits. And you wonder where all those conspiracy theories come from!

Then there were all those committees, boards, panels, and councils, whose main function seems to have been to play dumb and stonewall the issue. Maybe some of those guys were sincerely trying to solve the problem but, from what the book says, I doubt it. It's like that old saying: "Anybody can make a mistake but, to really screw things up royally, you need a committee."

page 49

You're right, I do have Booker T Washington and George Washington Carver mixed up.  George Washington Carver invented peanut butter, a boon to mankind.  Though you have to wonder what was so hard about that, just grind up a bunch of peanuts, but maybe you have to mix it just right or maybe it is one of those things where nobody just happened to think of it before him.

I did a little wiki on DuBois, and he was at least a comsymp in his later days, but it was mostly because he thought they would be more on his side than the US Government.  I wonder about that too, what comes first, the attitude or the philosopher.  The way history is written, generally by scholarly types, you get the impression that at some point some philosopher came up with an idea and everybody follows, but I think it is more that the idea was around and the philosopher put it into fancy words, well probably the two things work together.

But these guys are clearly scholarly types.  They want to fit all these things into philosophical categories, and sometimes the reader is just saying come on, get with it. 

And I'm with you, once they start getting into the real world things begin picking up.  I'm at, lessee, page 49, just a bit into chapter three.  I guess what is surprising me here is how long ago blockbusting was used.  I had thought it was an invention of the fifties.

The writing is still a little tough though, but like you said, you kind of get used to it.  A lot of that old timey language gets on my nerves.  Especially the way people wrote around the time of the civil war, so flowery.  I hated listening to those letters that were always being read in the Ken Burns thing on the civil war.  You wonder how they ever got anything done, talking that way.

I wonder if it had something to do with literacy not being so universal in those days and the people who were literate being proud of it and wanting to show off.

I have heard from a lot of people who were once grad students about being taken advantage of by their professors and the impression I get is that it happens all the time and it is just something you have to live with.  I don't know if that's the case in this because Anderson is way past grad student age, but I have to admit that I know nothing about this Pickering guy.  That letter I sent to the publisher never got a response, so maybe a little more research is called for over the weekend.

Wading Into It

I think you have George Washington Carver and Booker T. Washington mixed up. As I remember it, George Washington Carver was a botanist who specialized in peanuts. Booker T. Washington was the guy mentioned in the book. I remember him as being some kind of Black leader, but this book makes him out to be an Uncle Tom. I have head of Tocqueville, but I have never read any of his stuff. He was a French guy who wrote a book about democracy in America, and right wing nuts still like to quote him out of context. I thought that W.E.B. Dubois was some kind of Communist, and maybe he was, but the book doesn't mention that. I didn't even know he was Black until now. I have never heard of this Myrdal character before, but he sounds like a  nice guy, if a bit idealistic. The book seems to say that all these guys contributed to the past and current attitudes about race relations, but I'm not so sure about that. It has been my experience that most people get their ideas from their friends and family, not from experts like these.

I found the introduction and Chapter 1 to be a tough read. I wouldn't say it was boring, exactly, but I found myself reading the same sentence over and over again and not getting it. Then I just went ahead and read it without worrying about it, and I think I got it in by the end, well as much as I need to anyway. I am almost finished with Chapter 2, and I find it to be way more interesting, or maybe I'm just getting used to the writing style of the book. I was like that with "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". It was written in 18th Century England, and people talked a little funny in those days. The dialect is not as strange as Shakespeare or the King James Bible, but it takes some getting used to. I won't spoil it for you but, suffice it to say, Richard J. Daley did not invent crooked politics in Chicago.

Apparently, Martin Luther King did not invent racial conflict either. That stuff seems to have been around since forever, and the events that happened in our lifetime were just another chapter in the continuing saga. Reading about it and seeing it on TV back in the 50s, I got the impression that it was exclusively a Southern problem, and I didn't understand what the fuss was all about in Northern cities like Chicago. I think I first got an inkling of it when I looked up that stuff for you about Detroit, and this book promises to expand upon that base.

I had a teacher in Gage Park who said, whenever you see a book with more than one author, the last one listed is usually the one who did all the work. I don't know if that's true or if that teacher was just being a smart aleck. I think it was my sister who told me that it's common for post graduate students to have their work plagiarized by their professors. Of course we don't know if that's what happened here. I remember Rev. Al as being a really nice guy, and I would be surprised to find out that he took advantage of somebody like that, even after all these years.

going to school

I'm maybe ten pages past the introduction now.  He is talking about different views of racial equality, Tocqueville racial realism which said it will never happen, then there is Washington Carver who thought it was up to blacks to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and then there was this guy Dubois from around 1910 who thought whites should give blacks a helping hand, and that blacks should fight to get what that they want.

I remember Dubois Clubs from around the fifties.  I am not sure of what they were exactly but I recall them being thought of as radical.  I remember Nixon once saying that they called themselves Dubois Clubs so that people would confuse them with Boys Clubs and wouldn't realize how radical they were.

You're right it is very academic and tough reading.  It takes a lot of concentration, and seems to be making a lot of points that seem overly abstract.  I would advise skipping the introduction.  The history of racial relations is an interesting subject, so that will be something to learn, but the authors are taking their maddeningly slow ponderous way getting through it.  It reads like only one of them did the actual writing, I wonder which one?  Did you ever hear of the other guy?

I've been to school a lot since I graduated U of I in 1969.  From 1979 to 1981 I went to Parkland,=- the community college in Champaign.  I took a two year certificate program in data processing which eventually led to me getting a computer job in Austin Texas in 1985, and then my fat state of Illinois job in 1987.  It was my climb out of minimum wage jobs.

While in Austin I took four programming courses at their community college.  I was hoping that they would advance my career but they never had any effect.  But programming is nerd fun so I rather enjoyed them.

In 2002 I paid an arm and a leg to go to a private college, National Louis, to get a masters degree and a certificate in education.  When I was in regular college we used to snicker at education students, and now I understand why.  I used to have this theory of college where it was four years of bullshit and if you finished it that was proof that you could put up with a lot of bullshit, and since most jobs were a bunch of bullshit, it would help you get a job.  That was a little extreme for regular college but it is pretty close to being on the beam for education school.

Since then I have taken a lot of continuing ed courses and credit courses.  The problem with credit courses is that they waste a lot of time making you take tests, and sometimes they seem to get in the way of actually learning things.  Most of the stuff I know about art, science, and history I have gotten from reading books.  The bad thing about books is sometimes i drift in and out of them, and afterwards I don't remember as much as I think I should.  Seems like if I was forced to take tests or write papers I would remember more, not that I want to do either of those.

I took a trip to Prague around 2000, and that was way cool, but I haven't been out of the country since then.  Every summer I take five or so trips to visit friends.  While I'm there I like to visit places in the city where they live.  I have a couple friends who I almost never get out of their house when I visit them and that bugs me.  Taking these trips to visit the banks has been a lot of fun because of stuff we run into along the way.  Half the fun of the trip is the things you run into along the way. 

You ought to get out more, just for the hell of it, just for a four or five day trip, but then I guess it is your life.

Hitting the Books

My two books from amazon came today. I read the introduction to Rev. Al's book. It is not fun to read, but I'm sure there's some interesting stuff in there. I think it's a college text book and I haven't read one of those in a long time. If I start bogging down, I'll just scan over the boring parts and glean what I can out of it. I mean, it's not like there's going to be a test on it afterwards. I leafed through the other book, and it looks to be more interesting, but we should probably start with The Color Line. I was disappointed that there was not more biographical information on the authors. Maybe I should have gotten the hard cover version, but it's too late now.  It did say that Alan B. Anderson was teaching at Western Kentucky University about the same time that our Rev. Al was, so there's a good chance it's the same guy.

It's a strange feeling to cross trails with somebody you haven't seen in half a century, but of course we already know about that. Talking to you about the old days makes me feel like it all happened yesterday instead of in the dim distant past. If Rev. Al is still alive, he must be about 80 years old by now but, when I think of him, all I see is that nice young preacher who went back to school to learn  more stuff after taking a stab at the real world. He must have felt more at home in the academic world, because it looks like he spent most of his life there. More power to him but, as you already know, it was not my cup of tea. I did take one college level class back in the 80s, Human Growth and Development. It was interesting but, if I had it to do over again, I would just read the book on my own time. If you could turn back the clock, would you go back to school or someplace else?

I never did take another long road trip like the one from Alaska to Chicago. I have flown a few places, but that's not the same. When you look out the plane window, if you can even see the ground, it's like watching it on television or Google Earth. The first few years in Cheboygan, I explored around Michigan some, but then I settled down to a few trips a year down below to see my parents. Since my mom died in 2002, I hardly go anywhere. I don't miss it, everything I like and need is right around here. That's why I wanted to live in Michigan when I grew up, so I wouldn't have to spend half of every weekend driving back and forth.

no time of heroes

Wow, you went to graduation with a non-stop ticket for Anchorage for the very next day, sitting on your dresser drawer I assume.  I guess nobody ever accused you of not acting on what you believed in.  I still remember the shock of your classmates, and especially of the muckety mucks of the faculty, at your decision to not go to college and tossing that perfectly good Gage Park education aside without ever setting foot in the ivied halls.  Just curious, have you ever along the way took a course in a community college or anything else?  Have you ever set foot in a classroom again, anything like it?

I traced your route on Google maps.  Most of us mainlanders, or whatever you guys up there called us, know you were very far north, but we don't realize how far west you were.  Quite a drive.  I don't expect you stopped along the way anywhere to buy souvenirs?  Have you ever made any trips since landing on the tip of the top of Michigan?

I think I have read To Kill a Mockingbird.  I don't think I have ever seen the movie the whole way through, but I have seen it enough here and there to be pretty familiar with.  And the story is so ingrained in our culture that it is hard to not know approximately what it is about. 

Or maybe I don't.  I had always rather assumed that Atticus got the guy off, he was a noble lawyer wasn't he?  But a visit to wiki revealed that he was convicted, though never hanged because he was lynched first.

Well the whole thing is kind of irrelevant because the book was whitewashed a bit to make a hero out of lawyer, and what people like is well, the Hollywood good guys.  You know if you have a real person for a hero, and you read about him or her, you always discover that they maybe cheated on their spouse or maybe they backstabbed and kissed ass on their trip to the top.

I make an exception here of course for that deer in heat urine guy with the tv show, everybody knows he was good and honest through and through.  I don't know why Hollywood hasn't made a movie about him.  I would have him be his own lawyer, and I'd throw in a little lame kid who is bullied in school, and one of those dogs with a ring around his eye.

Anyway I think we are best off without heroes, and certainly best off without heroes who are totally made up.

I've read the introduction to the book.  It appears that it will be quite academic with a lot of definitions of terms, but I'll read on.

No Midnight Sun

To see the midnight sun you have to be above the Arctic Circle, and I never got anywhere near it. I flew non stop from Chicago to Anchorage the day after graduation, which was near the time of the Summer Solstice. I went through four time zones, so I had a little jet lag to deal with my first day there. One night I stayed up late just to see if it was ever going to get dark. I was standing under a street light talking to this guy, and the light only came on for about half an hour and then went back off again. It didn't get fully dark out, but almost. My road trip back was in October, so the days and nights seemed about normal.

The Alaska Highway, formerly called the "Alcan Highway", was the only road in and out of the state. I had to drive over a hundred miles north to pick it up in Fairbanks before I could go south. Most of the Alaskan population lived in the southern part of the state, but the route of all the roads in Alaska and Western Canada was dictated by the mountains, where there is no such thing as a straight line. I ran into some snow just out of Fairbanks, which was the cause of my little auto accident. We had to go back to Fairbanks to file a police report since nobody was injured and the cops said it was to dangerous for them to come to us for a little fender bender. By the time I got back to where the wreck had happened, it was getting late, so I stopped at the next campsite I came to. That was the last night I spent in Alaska. I had surprisingly good weather for the rest of the trip. I only remember one other snow event, and that happened while I was sleeping.

After Alaska came the Yukon Territory of Canada, which was all mountains. Then I cut a little corner of British Columbia before I got into Alberta, which started out mountainous and then broke into flat prairie. As soon as I crossed into Montana I was back in the mountains again for a few hours, and then it was prairie all the way through Montana and North Dakota. Minnesota was gently rolling farms and woodlands. Wisconsin went from woodlands to farms to the cities and towns along the Lake Michigan shore from Green Bay to Chicago. I had more adventure and saw more country on the ten day trip back than the whole four months I spent in Alaska.

I have never read "To Kill a Mockingbird" or saw the whole movie, but I think I saw part of the courtroom scene on TV once. It was all "Nigger this and Nigger that", which I found kind of depressing, so I either turned it off or changed channels. I read something about it once, and I seem to remember that the poor colored guy is convicted and hung in spite of the heroic efforts of his defense lawyer, which is even more depressing. I see enough depressing stories about race relations in the news media, I'm certainly not going to seek out more of the same in my recreational reading.

My books didn't arrive yet, but I think I ordered them a day or two after you ordered yours.

ah wilderness

Well there we have it, you liked cars because they could take you out to the wilderness.  As you know I am not a big fan of the wilderness, oh a nice vista from the highway sometimes takes my breath away, but that is from a distance.  I know, from as much experience as I chose to have, that up close it is full of mud and bugs and sharp twigs sticking up everywhere. 

Way back when I was a boy scout I went door to door selling first aid kits like the be-prepared kid my uniform purported to represent.  When I and my fellow scouts had earned enough money the American way, selling stuff door to door, we bought a mess of pup tents, which were a royal pain in the ass to put up, but worse than that was waking up in one on a cold and rainy morning, with no tv showing cartoons, just a grumpy scoutmaster trying to cook some goop on the campfire and expecting us scouts to clean his grubby cooking utensils afterwards.

Ah wilderness, leave it to the Beagles of this fair land, Uncle Ken has no use for it.

Ah the wildness of youth though, looking back on it in our sunset years we are sometimes appalled at the things we did because it appears that only benevolent fate allowed us an old age.  But still we take a little pride in it, puff ourselves up a little bit in our Lazy Boys, and think boy though, wasn't I something, wasn't I something?

Dinty Moore beef stew.  I believe you mentioned something in an earlier post about buying a case to see you through the long drive through the land of the midnight sun (I assume this trip was in the summer).  I know you have done it before, but could you tell me your route again, my vague memory is that it was smack dab in the middle of the state.

But Dinty Moore, the king of the cans, spaghetti O's, Chef Boy-Ar-De, and corned beef hash.  These were the foods of my hippie days.  The trick was you could open the top of the can, put it in a pot of water and boil the water and presto, a meal in a handsome container and no dirty dishes.  They were all good, but Dinty Moore Beef Stew was the king. 


Oh I feel compelled to say something on this To Kill a Mocking Bird sequel because it is a media blitz.  I won't recount the story because I know that even you in your wilderness must have caught it channel hopping to find stock prices on the tube or wrapping your fish in the local paper.

Anyway the main thing I want to say is, it is just a book for Chrissake.  He is a fictional character.  I hear people talk about how inspiring blah, blah, blah, he was, and all I have to say is if Harper Lee was of a mood she could have made him an axe murderer with the twist of a pen because she happened to be in a bad mood that morning.


Alright then, I have the Rev Al book.  I've read maybe the first couple pages of the introduction.  Sounds like it is going to be a little scholarly, a little philosophical, a little slanted, but I think it will provide some meat for our discussion.

The Road to Independence

I always liked cars, but not the same way you did. To me a car was transportation, pure and simple. I didn't care what it looked like, as long as it ran good and had plenty of room for my hunting and fishing gear, including a couple of beagle hounds. My dad had a station wagon, which was fine for anything I wanted to do. It had a luggage rack on the roof, which carried my canoe, once we learned how to strap it down properly. You have to use straps, not ropes, and you have to snug them down really tight, otherwise the canoe goes sliding around as soon as you get up to highway speed. Station wagons are great for camping too, provided that you're still young and agile enough to change clothes and wriggle in and out of  your sleeping bag in the prone position.

The first car I ever owned wasn't a station wagon, it was a 1952 Ford sedan. I don't remember if it was a 2 door or a four door. I bought it in Alaska, and I'm sure I paid too much for it, but everything was expensive in Alaska. At first I thought I wouldn't need a car in Alaska because there weren't very many roads, but I soon learned that anyplace I needed to go was on a road, and there wasn't enough traffic to make hitch hiking practical. I didn't think I could sell the car for the price of plane ticket back to Chicago, so I decided to drive it there, 5,000 miles in ten days and nine nights. I slept in the car for the first five nights, on a plank platform that I rigged on the passenger side from the dashboard, across the seat backs, to the rear window. It was a tight fit, if I rolled over my shoulder rubbed the ceiling, but I slept well. The only reason I didn't sleep in it all the way home was that there were no free campsites along the road once I got down into Alberta. That, and I was tired of eating Dinty Moore beef stew out of the can. When I walked into a truck stop restaurant, and saw myself in the mirror behind the lunch counter, I decided that maybe a hot shower and a change of clothes wouldn't be a bad idea either.

The first day out I got into a slight wreck just outside of Fairbanks. The car was dinged up a little, and the instrument panel went dead but, the car still ran, so I ran it. I got a flat tire in the Yukon and forgot to snug up the lug nuts after I set the car down off the jack, so the wheel fell of a little further down the road. The driver's side door never did close right after that, so I stuffed some newspaper in the gap and used the passenger side door.

When I got back to Chicago, my dad said that he had bought an auto insurance policy for me after I had written to my parents about buying the car, and that we had to go sign some papers. When we got there the agent couldn't believe that I had been able to register the car in my own name when I bought it. I had wondered about that too at the time. The age of majority was 19 in Alaska, except for drinking, but I bought the car on my 18th birthday. Big Red had to know my age because she had registered me for the draft earlier that same day. There was nothing on the car registration form about age, and Big Red didn't mention it, so I certainly wasn't going to bring it up. Anyway, you had to be 21 to own a car in Illinois, so I had to put it in my dad's name. I had decided on the way back to Chicago that I didn't really want to live in Alaska but, just for a moment, I considered turning around and driving my Ford right back there, just so I could keep it in my own name. If I had done that, I might still be driving the same car around Alaska. As it was, the Ford didn't last long in Chicago. It must have been the air pollution that killed it.

cars

I hate cars.  I used to love them.  My family got their first car in 1953, a lime green Ford Customline.  A couple years later we got a tv.  We were doing alright.

I, along with much of America, was excited every fall when the new car models came out.  Sometimes an enterprising reporter would discover the new cars without sheets over them and publish the photos.  What a scoop.  What exciting times.

I knew every make and model and year.  On my nightly walk from 55th and Homan, to Kedzie, to 59th, back to Homan, and then back again, as many times as my restless early teenage legs demanded, I stopped in the drugstores at 55th and 59th and Kedzie.  Of course I scanned the lurid paperbacks but I also went through the car magazines.  A lot of them were about the engines, and I read that but it didn't interest me much.  What did was the customizing where they would make these dream cars out of ordinary 56 Mercs.  What a world.

My later teen years I spent my evenings on the corner of 55th and Kedzie in front of Talmans, smoking cigarettes and trying to look tough and cool, and watching all the cars go by, muttering the make and model as they passed.

I hung unto that a little bit in college.  I remember the shock and awe of the Mustang, but gradually the pressure of not flunking out, and later the indifference to square materialistic matters of hippiedom, left my fondness of cars behind.

And the cars got crappy.  I don't remember when it was, the late 70s maybe, they all began to look alike.  At first they looked like refrigerators and now they look like pumpkin seeds.  They try to hide the headlights and those proud gleaming bumpers of yore are anymore just a bump of fiberglass.

And they are all Japanese or something anymore, and the models are meaningless strings of vowels, and half the makes of my youth are gone, and I don't know which ones, and I don't care anymore because they all look like shit.

Once in my life I had a car.  When I went down to Herrin for my CO of course I needed a car to get back to Champaign on the weekends to hang with my beer drinking buddies.  First I had a Corvair which was pretty cool, but I got a flat and it rolled over like Ralph Nader said they would.  The repairman said it would cost as much to replace the windshield as the whole car was worth and I let it go.  I shouldn't have, it was a cool car.  The next car was a 1962 Ford Fairlane, it was always breaking down, it was always a problem.  I kept it going until I moved back to Champaign when it was barely running and I sold it for maybe five bucks to a guy who wanted to put it in a demo derby.

I rode a bike in Champaign, and here in Chicago I walk and ride the el trains, I don't miss a car at all.  Have you noticed that in the two Ten Cat paintings that show Ashland Avenue, the streets are empty?


Pretty sure that the Rev Al's book has arrived, I got a note in my mailbox but the package room won't be open until noon today.