Musical Wanderer

Eighty years.  Today.  The B-29 named by its pilot "Enola Gay" dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.  In seconds, thousands died. Over the ensuing days and decades, thousands more would die from the radiation the bomb produced.  Many in the world will pause and contemplate the anniversary of the first use of the atomic bomb and, with wars of varying intensity yet still killing thousands in Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza, Yemen, Congo, Cambodia, consider current events rather than the past.  The bomb and the plane which dropped the bomb, the "Enola Gay", will likely disappear from the news. Earlier this year the "Enola Gay" became the subject of news reports when moronic Republicans purged photographs of the plane from Department of Defense websites because it's name contained the word "gay" as part their efforts to eliminate all non-white, masculine, heterosexual images from American history.  Thus another chapter was added to the plane's sym...

A few weeks ago, I watched Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s series "The Black Church."  As with everything Gates creates, he stimulated my thinking about his subject matter.  The challenges the black churches and black community faced in the past and today, their travails and triumphs in American history, and their transformations accompanying changes in society were clearly described and made vivid in his series.  What I wasn't expecting was a realization while watching it was that Trump is more of a preacher than a politician. STEVE!  What does he have to do with the Black Church?  The man is a charlatan!  He is about as religious as a cat turd in my litter box! Well, let me explain.  Gates described how many black American churchgoers in the late twentieth century and early twentieth century have drifted away from traditional denominations to non-affiliated megachurches just as other Americans have left main line churches.  Images of the exteriors and i...

View from Amtrak's California Zephyr train.  America's Siberia? Fiona Hill became an unlikely celebrity during the course of the Trump impeachment hearings.  The expert on Russia rose to national prominence mostly because of her slaying testimony regarding President Trump's actions with the government of Ukraine but also because of the resonance of her biography, the child of a poor family rising through education and hard work to a position of respected authority.  That she came to the United States to escape the enduring class and regional biases of her native United Kingdom was another source of her appeal. Fiona Hill testifying before Congress One of her books is  The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold , about the enduring difficulties of Russia that date back to the state planning era of the USSR during which the nation essentially colonized Siberia.  First populated with the forced labor of the Gulag and then with subsidies ...

Michelle Obama’s renowned catchphrase, “When they go low, we go high” in not relevant merely as a response to negative rhetoric.  It also explains how the two American political parties have diverged over the past five decades in the basic process of elections.  The legislative history of the United States features a few landmark moments which dramatically changed the nation for the better. Among them are two related laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which clarified that people’s rights are universal, not based on race. Both laws were resisted by filibusters by southern Democrats in the Senate but eventually passed thanks to the vote wrangling skills of President Lyndon Johnson who pushed both parties for bipartisan support of the bills.  The votes by party are listed below. Reviewing the percentages today, 55 years later, may bring mixed feelings of surprise, dismay, and perhaps bitter irony.  Republican support for both laws ...

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has left most Democrats despondent for our future.  She will likely be remembered longer than most her colleagues (and far longer than Republican Senators rushing to replace her) for her never ending fight for rights of all Americans.  Fear is widespread of a deeply conservative court addressing voting rights, reproductive rights, and other social and economic issues in coming decades.   Republican nominees have been reliably conservative since the Reagan administration (yes, O’Connor and Kennedy were sometimes “swing” votes, but they were overwhelmingly conservative).    Since 1986 all Republican nominees have been Roman Catholic with the exception of David Souter.    Whether the nominations were to court the Catholic vote or to appear to choose an anti-abortion jurist is an interesting question.  If they were meant to appease anti-abortion activists, such efforts were rather superficial at best, as most juri...