No Rest for the Wicked

It's a busy summer for me.

I'm teaching summer school.  I'm already working on the exhibition schedule for the college gallery this year.  I'm going to the occasional summer faculty meeting.   I'm spending my Fridays working for an old employer, and artist who I helped out for years as a studio assistant.  I definitely need the little extra cash. And somewhere in the midst of all that, I'm trying to cram some painting in.

So light posting for awhile.

Too bad, because there's lots going on.  I'm just too busy or too tired (or too hot sometimes) to reflect much on it.

National Parks

Two artists who played a major role in the creation of the National Park Service, Thomas Moran and Albert Bierstadt.

Thomas Moran, Rainbow Over the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone

Albert Bierstadt, Cathedral Rocks, Yosemite Valley, in Winter



I haven't seen very many National Parks and Monuments.  What have I seen in my lifetime?  The Big Bend in Texas about 3 or 4 times, Padre Island National Seashore a few times, Capulin National Monument many times (was always on our route on the annual family road trip to Colorado), Mesa Verde a couple of times, Hovenweep National Monument in Utah (near Mesa Verde), Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, Great Sand Dunes National Park,  Chaco Canyon National Historic Park, El Morro National Monument, Aztec Ruins National Park (nothing Aztec about it except the name of the nearby town in New Mexico), Carlsbad Caverns National Park, Haleakala National Park in Hawaii with Michael (it was 90F on the beach and 30F with the wind blowing on top of the volcano; we could see the mountains on the Big Island covered with snow in the distance), Rocky Mountain National Park (I was too small to remember any of it), and that's about it.

Not that much.  I've never even seen Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas.

Parks and Monuments I'd love to see someday:  Yellowstone, The Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Saint Helens, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Glacier,  Crater Lake,  Hawaii Volcanoes, Grand Teton, Arches, Sequoia, Denali, Craters of the Moon,  and maybe some others.


I've always been a big fan of the National Park Service, even when it's been nickeled and dimed into squalor by Congress and the tax payers.  Ours was the first such service in the world, and the inspiration for all the others around the globe.  It stands with the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence as one of our greatest legacies to the world, and will remain such long after our empire has gone the way of all empires.  I'm amazed that there are Libertarian and other right wing ideologues who want to get rid of it.

I've always imagined spending my retirement (assuming that I will have one) traveling and sight seeing.  I imagine myself traveling the world to see all these major works of art and monuments that I've taught, written about, and thought about all my life.  I also imagine loading up the Winnebago and hitting the road like all those elderly folks we met on our family road trips, traveling around from national park to national park.


So, which national parks and monuments have you seen and what would you recommend?

Celebrate Our Country ...

... by blowing up a small piece of it, as well as your eyes and fingers.

Illegal fireworks with names that suggest certain sex acts

"Pyro" and "punk," words that suggest a lot of our boyhoods (and girlhoods).


Play safe today and make sure there's an adult, or someone more emotionally mature than you, to supervise.

The NYPD is on double-down fireworks patrol this year.  So far, the neighborhood is quiet.  Last year, it sounded like Beirut in the 1970s.

Where fireworks are outlawed, only outlaws have fireworks. 

Photos courtesy of Padre Mickey.

And so what are YOU doing today?

Not So Well Known Sousa Marches

John Phillip Sousa with the Marine Corps Band in San Francisco, 1892

Very un-Left of me, but I've always loved military marches since I was a lil' kid.  I played baritone and French horn in the high school band, though I was never very talented musically.  John Phillip Sousa's marches were fun to listen to and fun to play.  Most of them follow a formula; first and second part, "dog fight," and "trio" always played three times with ever increasing volume and instrumentation.  Sousa got an amazing range out of that formula which seems never to have exhausted its possibilities.

I've heard some fine military marches from Britain, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, etc., but far and away the best of them all remain the marches written by Sousa.  I've heard the bands of the Household Regiment in Britain and of the Garde Republicaine in France play his marches, quite an international salute.

That's remarkable since Sousa's ambition in life was not to be known for his military music, but for his operettas.  He wanted to be an American version of Johann Strauss Jr.  His operettas are almost never performed these days while his marches remain as well known and popular as ever.  This son of immigrants, a Portuguese father and a Bavarian mother, wrote the music most identified with flag waving on the Fourth of July.

Here are some of his not quite so famous, but still really wonderful, marches.


The Bride Elect, a march written to advertize one of Sousa's operettas





National Fencibles, a march written for a cadet corps of the National Guard





Jack Tar, presumably a Navy march; "jack tar" is very old slang for a sailor





The Gallant Seventh, one of Sousa's late marches, written in 1922 in honor of the Seventh Regiment of the New York National Guard

July 4th

 Alabama, 1965

"Let America Be America Again"

by Langston Hughes

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

(America never was America to me.)

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

(It never was America to me.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The free?

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

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

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


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

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

Finally, Anderson Cooper Comes Out

One of CNN's best and most famous reporters, Anderson Cooper, came out of the closet as a gay man yesterday in an email to Andrew Sullivan. 
It's about time.  I don't think anyone, celebrity or not, is necessarily obliged to come out (though closeted gays who actively work against the community are fair game to be outed and to get the Roy Cohn Golden Rat Award as far as I'm concerned), but staying in the closet and letting one's private life be shaped by rumor and gossip is definitely not safe.  As a gay man, you are safest out in the open.  Openess forces one's enemies to take a public stand and to claim a status that is increasingly at odds with public morality.

Sullivan, as is to be expected, bangs on about how coming out is not such a big deal anymore.  When did anyone ever come out with rainbow flags and fireworks?  The High Priests of the Conventional Wisdom today are droning on and on about "gay role models," as if we never had them before.  What was Harvey Milk? or Dell Martin and Phyllis Lyon? or Frank Kameny? or Jack Nichols and Liege Clark? or Barbara Gittings? or James Baldwin?   Chopped liver?

Coming out always was and still is a big deal, for the rich and famous and for the poor and obscure.  It's a very big deal for the person coming out, and for their family and friends.  It is still very risky.  Sadly, some people live in places or are in situations where their physical safety requires them to remain in the closet (especially the very young).

Coming out is the most powerful weapon in the arsenal of gay liberation.  By publicly claiming a gay identity, rumor and gossip are neutralized.  Enemies are compelled to publicly identify themselves as such.  Coming out puts our own very real faces on an argument that our enemies would prefer to keep abstract.  Coming out means that we are showing the world that we are more than a sex act, or a locker room joke, or a religious anathema, or a sociological case study.  Coming out puts everyone else around us on the spot.  Coming out is a way to claim our full humanity in the faces of those who want to take it from us.  Coming out opens more space for others like us.  Coming out is an act of leadership.  It is still a big deal.

Congratulations Anderson Cooper for finally letting the hairpins drop. Thanks for your grace and courage, and thanks for passing on that courage to a lot of other people.

He's All We Got Now, But Maybe That's Not So Bad

Maybe it's pretty good.

Barack Obama is the most accomplished progressive President since Lyndon Johnson when you sit down and look at the record of his first term.

Sure it's not the social democracy I'd like to see.   I continue to have big problems with his expansion of the national security state and all the lawlessness that comes with it.  But the rest is real accomplishment.

The Affordable Care Act is a muddled compromise thought up by the Heritage Foundation, including the much reviled mandate.  It is various conservative initiatives strung together to somehow get close to universal coverage without going so far as providing actual national health insurance and becoming one of those awful European welfare states.
Robert Frank points out that this may have been a necessary compromise given that most Americans get their health insurance through their employers.  I would be delighted to see that system end.  Why should employers be obliged to insure workers?  A universal medicare system would do the same thing much better at far less expense to employers and employees.  Implementing such a change would be a major disruption that most Americans would not tolerate.  I would favor phasing it in as a fall-back option, as Obama originally did during the 2008 campaign, and as most progressives wanted.  But we Yanks are a selfish people.  If someone else gets something, it means we are losing something else, so we reason.  I doubt any politician, no matter how great, could get past that block.  The ACA may be the best we can get ... for the time being.
Conservative muddle that it is, it is the most significant and far reaching progressive legislation in almost 50 years, since the Medicare Act of 1965.

Obama brought a measure of law and order into the student loan business by taking the banks out of it.  It's way short of what I'd like to see, public education from pre-K to post-doc.  But, it is a tremendous step in the right direction that at least brings a measure of reliability to the whole business of student debt.

I think something else that goes unheralded is Obama's foreign policy.
It is a standing rebuke to the unilateralism of Bush/Cheney.  The invasion of Iraq was a unilateral action of the USA based on false (and maybe falsified) intelligence.  Throwing out Saddam Hussein led to years of bloody civil war and sectarian strife with the Iran-backed Shiites emerging as the winners.
Libya was a multilateral action involving Europe and other Arab states.  The Libyan people took the initiative.  The USA played only a partial role.  Muamar Gaddafi, a tyrant coddled by the oil industry for decades, fell.  Libya was hardly a perfect or even a model operation, but it was far more successful than the Iraq invasion.

We're still in Afghanistan, and the reliance on assassin drones raises a lot of legal and moral questions.  The intended targets of these hits do indeed have every intention of causing as much harm to the USA and its people as possible.  Neutralizing them would be a top security priority for any president.  Taking them out with a drone may be the most expedient way of doing things, but is it the right way?  Those choices of expediency over morality and legality have a historic habit of coming back to bite us.  The "collateral damage" of civilian deaths should be reason enough to rethink the policy.

It goes without saying that when it comes to gay rights, Obama is the best President we've ever had, taking the lead on these issues.

All of these things were done in the face of a hostile press, and later a hostile Congress.

The right wing may have the energy of frothing at the mouth spittle flecked rage, but Obama has some deeply loyal constituents in minority communities.  A lot of not so white people never thought they'd see a President of the United States who looked like them.

I think what is driving all the division is some people freaking out over the fact that the face of power and authority is no longer exclusively white, male, and elderly.

EXTRA:

I've always said that ultimately politics is not about ideology.  It's about doing concrete things for real people.  I can't think of anyone who embodies that better than Obama right now.  We all have our guiding principles.  Politics gives us a chance to act upon them and to realize them however imperfectly.

All the pundits bemoan the partisanship in Washington these days and pine for some lost golden age of civility and cooperation (tell it to Lyndon Johnson).  Washington is divided because the country is divided, and sharply so.  People are angry because the stakes are high.  We are split between two competing and incompatible visions of the USA:  America the white Christian republic versus America the cosmopolitan secular democracy.  My loyalty is definitely to the latter.