Bitter Is As Bitter Does

Well, this is it, Philadelphia. The seemingly endless weeks of television and radio ads, glad handing, baby kissing and mud slinging have finally come to a merciful end. Come Tuesday, we and our fellow residents of the Commonwealth will decide which primary candidates are worthy of our support – and which have earned our disgust.

It’s hard not to be disgusted by the fact that instead of using this opportunity as a final push for critical swing state votes, we get the same negative politics as usual. In the last week of this long and bitter campaign, we Pennsylvanians have been treated to some of the most pitiful displays of political opportunism and bogus grandstanding ever.

Some of the Democrats running seem perfectly happy to run as Republicans in the primary – trashing their opponents beyond redemption in the fall, and essentially writing the GOP game plan. Chief among the villains is at the top of the ticket, where Hillary Clinton is bleating that somehow Barack Obama is an “elitist”, who is out of touch with the average American.

This because last weekend Obama said that folks in small towns in Pennsylvania are “bitter” about losing their jobs, health care, and pensions. The comment would barely rate a small blip on the media’s radar screen if not for the Clinton and McCain camps constant screeching about how Obama is an “elitist”, or “arrogant”, which we all knew would be the first label they’d stick on a Black man who’s smarter than they are.

Leave aside for a moment the fact that Obama was right. Most people in small town Pennsylvania, places that were once thriving mill towns, or steel towns, or textile towns, are hurting badly. The factories are gone, and the only available jobs involve a paper hat and a spatula, but no health insurance. They can’t afford to get sick, can’t afford the medicine if they do get sick, and can’t afford to keep their houses out of foreclosure. They’re angry, they’re frustrated, and yes, they’re a little bitter. Same goes for Pennsylvania’s big cities, by the way.

Actually, it makes you wonder how Clinton and McCain could have spent as much time as they have in our state over the past six weeks and not seen the same thing. But we’re leaving that aside a moment for this:

The most incredible, piteously laughable part of the whole stupid mess is watching Clinton and McCain sing in unison that someone, anyone, could be an elitist –let alone someone like Barack Obama.

Clinton, who has racked up some $100 million by rubbing elbows with society’s upper crust, lifts her pursed lips from her crystal champagne flute long enough to call some brother from the South Side an elitist? Are you kidding me?

McCain, who won his first election a couple of years after marrying into his wife Cindy’s vast fortune, said not one peep when his hero and fellow warmonger Dick Cheney grunted a dismissive, “So?” in reaction to the overwhelming number of Americans against the Iraq war. But Barack Obama, who turned down a whopping salary out of Harvard Law School to go back and work in Chicago’s poorest communities for peanuts, is arrogant? Who comes up with this stuff?

I shudder to think that there really might be people out there clueless enough to fall for this idiocy, but for the rest of us, it’s an insult to our intelligence. This whole campaign was supposed to be about getting away from the politics of personality. We were all supposed to focus on the issues, remember? No trash talking, no dirty pool, no cheap shots – that’s the line they fed us a couple of months ago.

Yet here we are, at the eve of one of the most important elections of our lifetime, mired in the same old irrelevancies. They had the chance to raise the level of this debate, in fact they all promised it, and they blew it anyway. They went for the lowest common denominator, choosing fear and suspicion over a command of the issues and a vision for the future.

As hosts of this six-week charade, and on behalf of my fellow Pennsylvanians, may I be the first to say that we’re just plain tired of hearing it. Take your traveling caravans, your freshly scrubbed volunteers, and your scorched earth politics with you, and good riddance.

Don’t let the door hit you on the way out, and try a little harder not to make fools of us all in the general election, will you?

"They Killed Us All"

Thursday, April 4, 1968 started out as a routine day. It was a couple of days before my ninth birthday, and I was already looking forward to getting presents. I went to my fourth grade class at W.C. Bryant Elementary School, then after school walked my younger sister over to our grandparents’ house, a few blocks away at 61^st & Larchwood.

Mom Mom, as we called my grandmother, had the usual after-school snacks and homework demands, and my afternoon progressed along the usual schedule: homework, cartoons on TV, the call from Mom Mom to come down for dinner, then settling on the couch with my grandfather to watch the evening news.

That’s when a routine day turned into one of the darkest nights in U.S. history.

While I was having dinner, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was stepping onto the balcony outside room 306 of Memphis’ Lorraine Motel. He, along the several aides, was on his way to dinner as well, at the home of a local minister. King was in town to lend support to striking sanitation workers, and was just finishing work on his sermon for Sunday, titled, “Why America May Go To Hell.” (A little factoid you may want to remind the Rev. Wright bashers this week.)

King was calling out to his driver that they were ready to go, when a .30-06 rifle slug ripped through his neck, slamming him against the wall and severing his spinal cord. By the time the civil rights leader slumped to the floor, aides were pointing in the direction of the shot – an image captured, and burned into our consciousness for all time. A sobbing Rev. Ralph Abernathy cradled King in his arms, while Andrew Young felt for a pulse.

“Ralph, it’s all over,” Young said quietly.

Toward the end of the news broadcast, Walter Cronkite announced that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been shot by an assassin in Memphis. My grandfather hesitated on the couch a second, and then went ballistic. Never one to mince words, Pop Pop leapt to his feet and launched into a profanity-laced tirade that was a classic, even for him.

It was the government, he screamed, specifically blaming J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI. Hoover has had it in for blacks for years, and would kill King himself if he had the chance, he said. Even years after James Earl Ray had been tried and convicted as the lone gunman, Pop Pop stuck to his Hoover / government conspiracy theory until the day he died. I am still not convinced he was wrong.

For the rest of the evening, news reports and special bulletins filled the airwaves. Solemn-faced anchormen read the copy as images flashed across the screen: riots in more than 100 cities and towns, Black folks wailing in anguish, and a visibly shaken Bobby Kennedy delivering the sad news to a mostly Black crowd in Indianapolis.

There was no rioting, looting or fires here in Philadelphia – the appeal for calm attributed to several courageous citizens including Father Paul Washington and radio personality Georgie Woods. As Washington took to the streets of North Philadelphia to spread King’s message of non-violence in the face of injustice, The Guy With The Goods took to the airwaves in a marathon radio session on WDAS that featured gospel hymns from Louise Williams and many phone-in guests talking about what King’s legacy would mean to American history.

I listened to the radio that night for as long as I could stay awake. The next day at school, my teacher, Mr. Maginn, addressed the nearly all-Black class. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. One of those young, white, liberal dreamers of the 60’s, Mr. Maginn’s tie-dyed world of peace, love, and flower power had been shattered.

He said that while he could never understand the pain we may feel as Black people, he shared our pain that morning. He was hurt, he said, by the accusatory stares he had gotten from Blacks while on his way to work. Dr. King was one of his heroes, and he wanted to feel free to share his grief with his Black friends, neighbors, and students.

“They didn’t just kill one man,” Mr. Maginn told us, “they killed us all.”

School let out early that day, but there was none of the usual jubilation that accompanied early dismissal announcements. Even as elementary school students, we knew that this was not an occasion for celebration. They had killed a dreamer, a visionary, a spiritual leader, a saint, a prophet, and the moral compass of a generation.

They had killed us all.