In my words, November 18 – 24

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I was in Mr. Holt’s 9th grade science class when the principal Mr. Grumbine came on the intercom and announced that the president and the governor of Texas had been shot in Dallas, but there was no further news. So there was a glimmer of hope at first, but shortly after that Mr. Grumbine came back on to tell us that Kennedy was dead. Mr. Holt, who was a gentle giant of a man, bowed his head and shook it; his shoulders sagged: “Kids,” he said, “we are in trouble.” Linda Knapp who sat next to me started crying.

When I went home after school, a friend of my mother stopped by. My mother I believe was at work, but the lady was dropping something off. She was a Christian lady with all the letters capitals: CHRISTIAN, stern with no fun in her. We were Methodists, she was another denomination, but she and my mother met for mid-week Bible study. “Do you know what Jackie brought home from Dallas?” she asked me. No, I didn’t. “A Jack in the Box,” she told me smiling. That joke must have been traveling like wild fire through Lebanon County because I can’t imagine this woman making it up.

Understand I come from a very Republican area of Pennsylvania, fundamental Pennsylvania Dutch so Democrats were verboten: Catholics, Jews, blacks (and my family) were Democrats. During the Kennedy-Nixon campaign in 1960, there had been such a great anti-Catholic fervor in the county that even some of my own relatives who always voted Democratic voted for Nixon. My mother voted for Kennedy, but kept her mouth shut.

After Kennedy, there was no longer any anti-Catholic sentiment in Lebanon County; that seemed to go away, but if you go there today you will still hear people talk about “Jewing people down” and “nigger fixing things.” The boogeyman Pope is no longer there trying to take over; now the boogeyman Barack Hussein Obama is.

This has been a historic week of anniversaries beginning with the 150th for the Gettysburg Address followed by the 50th for the assassination of John F. Kennedy, a president who would have lived had he gone to speak at the centennial in Gettysburg as many wanted him to do instead of going to Dallas where many advised him not to.

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If you don’t know the Gettysburg Address or would like to know it better, here is the Bliss copy, the most popular version:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain — that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom — and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Abraham Lincoln
November 19, 1863

The address begins with birth and ends with birth, a new nation. It is a short speech, we all know, that repeats certain words that keep us in the here and now. “Here” is repeated eight times. The great indicator “that” is said thirteen and “this” three. “Nation” is repeated five times. “New” and “conceived” are each mentioned twice; “created, now” and “birth” once. “Dedicated” is said four times; “dedicate” and “devotion” twice; and “consecrated, hallow,” and “honored” once. The first two shorter paragraphs I easily committed to memory, but the third was harder; perhaps it’s so dense it’s like a sculpture not perceived word by word but all at once, not by its parts but by the whole; perhaps it was the repetitions themselves that made it difficult to remember where similar words were to be placed in the task at hand, to honor the dead who died so the nation might live.

The world would be a different place had Lincoln and Kennedy lived although the good remains conjecture. The extreme right in Lincoln’s day wanted him dead, the extreme right in Kennedy’s day wanted him dead too although ironically it was a left winger who got him. The extreme right today want Obama dead as well; he has received more death threats than any other president, sometimes thirty a day. The Right is angry with him now because he recited the Gettysburg Address without mentioning God. You can read on their blogs how they plan to go to the White House and throw him out; and to hear them talk, they think they are entitled to do it.

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The director Ken Burns asked President Obama to recite an early draft of the address called the Nicolay that doesn’t have God in it. But the Christian conservatives seethe; this godless Gettysburg Address reinforces what they believe: Obama’s a Muslim who wants to destroy them. I worry that President Obama might be assassinated. His connections to both Kennedy and Lincoln are many. These right wing haters only believe what validates their hate like the WMD in Iraq that didn’t exist yet created innocent dead Iraqis.

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Through Facebook and Yahoo I have been in touch with people I’ve known all my life from first grade to the present. A few of my elementary and high school classmates, whom I haven’t seen in over forty years, perplex me. Although we grew up sharing the same weather, food and television, they didn’t turn out like I did; they became right wing racists. Shortly after the invasion of Iraq, I saw a forwarded e-mail with the picture of a dead Arab man in it, face bloodied among the rubble, the aftermath of an explosion. The caption read: The only good Iraqi is a dead Iraqi. I am sure that is exactly what the Germans said about the Poles when they invaded Poland. There was another e-mail entitled Customer Service! Speak English! Immigrants of course add to the economy starting more businesses and employing more people than the native born do. Fear of the other is at work here. As a satire, I made a video of Customer Service! Speak English! and put it on the Internet where some people thought I believed what I was saying and let me know that I was a bigot or they were bigots themselves who praised me for my bigotry as if I were one of them when what I thought I was doing was making fun of them.

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Sonnet 67

I used to clean cat vomit up but now
I don’t unless it’s in the path I walk.
Otherwise it can stay unlike broken
glass or garbage with day old fish in it.
In less than an hour or less than that
the cat comes back to lick and eat it up.
You have to have the patience to leave it
forgotten as you should an argument
on politics. To change your mind you must
change yourself and some people are afraid
to be someone else. Have you ever met
a racist who’s not stupid? I haven’t.
Sad but true, you can’t make a rock into
a jewel no matter how you want to.

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