Strange fruit

A kid growing up in the 1950s, in the northwestern part of the northern state of Wisconsin, heard a lot of cool music. But he seldom heard Billie Holiday. And he never heard "Strange Fruit."

Never mind that Holiday, a famous jazz singer, was near the top of her game (although on the way down, dying in 1959 in her mid-40s.). This is a black woman who grew up tough to an unmarried mom and a musician father who was never there. She apparently was a prostitute working at age 12 out of a Baltimore waterfront warehouse, and later sang for tips for a living.

She made it big, and is well known for many cool songs. But, in 1939, she sang her coolest song of all. It was called "Strange Fruit," written by a young high school teacher named Abel Meeropol, and it was about a taboo subject in the 1930s - lynching.

"Southern trees bear a strange fruit
Blood on the leaves and blood on the roots
Black bodies swinging in the Southern breezes
Strange fruit swinging in the Southern breeze."

A pastoral scene of the gallant South
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth
Scent of magnolias sweet and fresh
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh

Here is a fruit for the crows to pluck
For the rain to gather, the wind to suck
For the sun to rot, for the tree to drop
Here is a strange and bitter crop."

This in 1939. She sang this song, with much trepidation, and then no doubt had to take the service elevator down from the stage of the Lincoln Hotel in New York so as not to offend the white customers with her black presence.

As I said, I had to wait a long time to hear her song. When I finally did, I was not pleased with the wait.

A disc of snow

We've all had those moments when what we want to say is "on the tip of our tongue." The desired word - a name, a phone number, or nearly anything else - stubbornly escapes us. The only thing to do is to put the problem out of our mind and trust that the answer will pop into our heads before too long. And it generally does just that.

But what about times when the answer to a question - or at lease a possible answer - takes years (hell, decades) - to pop?

Such was the case with this poem, which blew my poor brain when I came across it as a very young man. It is a rather simple poem (by Emily Dickinson) that seems rather too simple ... just a lead-in to the final punch line. But what a line!

The poem, dated from 1861, the start of Dickinson's early prolific period during the Civil War, is a reflection on death. It goes like this:

Safe in their Alabaster Chambers -
Untouched by Morning -
And untouched by noon -
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection,
Rafter of Satin and Roof of Stone -

Grand go the Years,
In the Crescent above them -
Worlds scoop their Arcs -
And firmaments - row -
Diadems - drop -
And Doges - surrender -
Soundless as Dots,
On a Disc of Snow.

"Soundless as dots on a disc of snow?!" Holy shit! The rest of the poem is easy: The dead are untouched by the passage of time, the swirl of planets and stars, and the death or downfall of the great and powerful. But this dot-on-a-disc-of-snow stuff poleaxed me. What was that about?

Years later, I was remembering my youth, as old farts do. I recalled winters sledding down our inclined driveway, making ice, much to the displeasure of my Dad ... the sound of my Dad, in the middle of a minus-20 night, trudging down to the basement to shovel coal into the furnace ... the fact that eating snow - what fun! - became problematic when the soot from our coal furnace and everybody else's coal furnace in the neighborhood began coating the snow with dots of black.

Light bulb! Back in Dickinson's time, as in my youth (at least in my neighborhood), there were no gas lines. Coal was burned in the winter, and it sent little dots of soot out through the chimney to fall upon the snow. Ever so silently. Each dot marking, to the observant, the center of a little disc.

Is this the explanation of that enigmatic ending to the poem? Of course I don't know, but I'd bet on it. I think Dickinson got this image into her head, and wrote the poem so that she could put it to use.

And also, of course, to give a guy like me a lot of fun figuring it out, however belatedly.

Big smile, gravel voice

In my memory as a boy, Louis Armstrong was this big-smiling, gravel-voiced musician on the radio - that big console that sat in our living room, more often doing Bing or Sinatra - and (once our family finally got a television!) turning up on TV variety shows all the time. He obviously was loved and respected by all. I really didn't know why. He was cool, but not as cool as Elvis.

Of course, young boys, by definition, lack a certain historical perspective. I recently learned, for instance, that it was Armstrong who first used the word "chops" to admire a musicians' ability. He was the first to call anybody a "cat." And he spent essentially two years on the run after refusing to bow to the demand from New York night club owner and big-time gangster Dutch Shultz to show up at Shultz's establishment. A command performance, so to speak. At the time, a time of illegal liquor and machine guns transported in violin cases, that took some guts.

Of course, (and I have to take others' word for this), Armstrong is most famous for changing American singing. The early 20th Century world of ragtime and the Charleston suddenly had to deal with scat and other innovations that I can hear, but don't have the smarts to describe.

Still, for that youngster that was me, there was something life-changing about just seeing Armstrong, Lena Horn, and other black performers on the tube. They were better, I think I understood in my limited, childlike way, than any of their white contemporaries. Louis Armstrong, back in the 1950s, may not have been in my eyes as cool as Elvis (who of course was doing "Negro" music, which pissed off parents more than his pelvic movements), but Louis Armstrong and his fellow artists of that time (Duke Ellington, etc.) were cool enough. Cool enough to help initiate the changes soon to come.

A heated argument

I've just spent a rather masochistic hour reading stuff on the Internet that purports to be serious pieces on why we should withhold judgment on whether or not global warming is something we should quickly address with legislation that, admittedly, would have serious economic consequences. I'm no expert on economic consequences, and that pretty weather lady on the Weather Channel knows a lot more than I do about the science of studying climate change. But as a long-time journalist, I can spot empty blather from a mile away.

I'm not talking about the average Joes who can be counted on, every time a cold snap moves in, to smirkingly ask each other, "Where's the warming?" Instead, what about arguments that seem to have some substance?

For instance, some claim that warming over the past quarter century is just part of natural cycles, quite without understanding anything about such cycles. It is true, according to some theories, that a "snowball Earth" occurred perhaps two times a couple billion years ago, and it took millions of years for the planet's natural radiation of internal heat to break out of the monster ice age. (Think many, many years of volcanoes, etc, eventually ending the extreme cycles, with those persistent micro-organisms basically starting over.) (Thank you, micro-organisms.) Also, of course, there were the much more recent warming times that let many dinosaurs live at high latitudes some one or two hundred million years ago, even considering the movement of land masses. And don't forget all those still-more "recent" ices ages. But all those changes took place over geological time, certainly not over a single human generation. Today's climate models take account of recent small changes due to solar output, the El Nino sort of ocean circulation shifts, even the "heat island" effect of large cities. But current measures of warming blow away such influences. Over a tiny blink of geological time, during which energy use and carbon release has soared, the overall temperature change has overwhelmed any other possible causes.

Other arguments are just hand-waving, or worse. Do many scientists disagree? Nope. Peer-reviewed articles by dissenters are scarce, and not a one offers an alternative model to explain the data. Is more carbon dioxide good for plants? Sure, except that carbon dioxide's benefits would be far more than offset by killing temperatures and local droughts. What about those stolen emails from the British climate center? OK, some people wrote emails aimed at discouraging journals from printing anti-warming articles - who among us wouldn't regret some of our emails being made public? - but there's no evidence that anyone suppressed climate data. And even if someone did, that human failure would have no impact on the overwhelming data worldwide.

I'm not likely to be around to experience the most serious long-range impacts of warming. However, I care about our offspring and theirs, mostly a bunch of average Joes like me, who would suffer the consequences if remedial action isn't taken during a window of time in which such action still could do some good.

Whew. I think for a while, average Joe that I am, I'm just going to read stuff I agree with.

Eek - politics seeps into the blog

Reading a recent commentary on the recent U.S. Supreme Court 5-4 decision (five right wingers vs.. four moderates) overturning any law forbidding corporations or unions from buying unlimited TV ads backing or opposing a particular political candidate, I have to agree that such an "activist" ruling - one called "devastating" by the president - is a sorry legacy of the Reagan-Bush years. I'm old enough to remember when conservatives cared about their country, as opposed to their corporate handlers.

Much has been written about how the ruling will let foreign corporations "buy" U.S. elections, but the issue is rather bigger even than that. In overturning 100 years of precedents, for no apparent reason except the foam of radical spleen, the five horses of the tea party have given top corporate executives the self-serving ability to spend untold amounts (of their shareholders' money) to further befuddle an already befuddled political process.

The court's simplistic understanding of the First Amendment undermines the basic purpose of free speech - the protection of democracy via facts and legitimate debate versus self-serving corporate big-lie propaganda. Corporations, by their very nature, are not "real people" under the First Amendment. Corporate officers lead highly organized, well-funded special-interest legal fictions that have no possible justification under the First Amendment to blow our rights away with a tsunami of money rightfully belonging to pensioners and mutual-fund holders like you and me.

Reagan and the Bush folks spent much hot air over the past few decades bemoaning an activist judiciary. Welcome to their legacy.

Cranking it up

About two years ago, when I still was an editorial page editor, I received a letter from a fellow who had figured out why releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere not only doesn't cause global warming, but in fact cools the planet. He explained that carbon dioxide happens to be what dry ice is made of - and dry ice is COLD!

I later mentioned the claim, not using the guy's name, in an editorial suggesting the value of clear thinking about matters of importance. He quickly mailed me another letter offering to participate in a public debate in which I easily would be demolished. Displaying an appalling lack of professional courtesy, I failed to reply.

A couple of years earlier than that, I was on the phone with a woman trying to talk me into printing an op-ed offering proof that the world was only 10,000 years old (or 6,000, or whatever the number was.) She rattled off the familiar "evidence," but threw in one - "dust on the moon" - that was new to me. "Wait a minute," I said, "dust on the moon?"

The woman, who later visited the office and turned out to be a striking, well-dressed lady in her 30s, explained that prior to the first moon landing, scientists had worried that the moon lander might sink so far into the dust that had collected on the surface over four-plus billion years that the spacecraft wouldn't be able to take off again. But that didn't happen! Ergo ...

I have plenty of empathy for these people. Cranks always have totally convinced themselves of their ideas, and it isn't hard to understand the lengths most of us are willing to go to defend our most strongly held beliefs. And I get the frustration. My design for a lawn mower powered by the life energy of grass never sold, either. None are so blind ...

And the play goes on

I've started watching one of those Teaching Company DVD lecture series, this one consisting of 60 half-hour discussions on "The Great Ideas of Philosophy." Some of this stuff I'll know, but I expect that a lot of it I won't.

This morning the instructor, Daniel N. Robinson of Oxford University, detoured a bit to talk about the "sort-of" philosophy of the Greek tragedians - specifically Euripides' "Medea," and Sophocles' "Antigone." Medea, whose magic saved the life of her husband Jason (of golden fleece fame) but in return was dumped by the dude, became overcome by passion and killed Jason's sons to even the score. Antigone, on the other hand, buried her slain brother despite the king's order not to do so.

Medea represents a pre-civilization imperative to find a suitably serious revenge; Antigone represents a pre-civilization drive to do the right thing, whatever "modern" society says and whatever the consequences. Each is wrong in some sense, and yet each is compelled by the human nature within them. This human nature, it is suggested, is what philosophy is about.

Greek tragedies seem like ancient history - until you consider Dubya and that Alaskan pretender to the throne. Greek tragedy is old news; American tragedy remains on the stage. The curtain has yet to fall. And the wisdom of the chorus is too often overwhelmed by the cheers from the audience.