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40 Years Ago: My 1st Presidential Vote, for George McGovern

I got to see George McGovern at a rally at my college, SUNY New Paltz in the autumn of 1972.

There were a LOT of people running for the Democratic nomination for President against Richard Nixon in 1972. The general consensus early on, though, was that Senator Edmund Muskie of Maine would be the selection. He had been the Vice-Presidential nominee in 1968 and had been a credible candidate in a close race. But he was sunk early on by the crying incident, which, to this day, I find utterly bewildering, and dropped out of the race early on.

This seemed to give segregationist Governor George Wallace of Alabama some momentum, much to the chagrin of all right-minded people. An assassination attempt in May paralyzed him and effectively ended his campaign.

Many of the leading candidates – Muskie, and other 1968 candidates Hubert Humphrey and Eugene McCarthy – would have been OK to me. I was suspicious of the hawkish Scoop Jackson, though, especially after he later led an “Anybody but McGovern” coalition “that raised what would be known as the ‘Acid, Amnesty and Abortion’ questions” about the South Dakotan. My preferred candidate, though, was Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm of New York, the first black woman to win a primary (New Jersey), though, by the time of the June primary in New York, the race was all but over.

Still, I liked McGovern. He was one of the early opponents to the war in Vietnam and having flown nearly three dozen missions over Nazi-occupied Europe, he had a lot more credibility than today’s chicken hawks, who haven’t seen a war they don’t want to fight, or rather, would send our young men and women to fight.

Unfortunately, his Vice-Presidential pick of Thomas Eagleton proved to be a disaster, when it was revealed the junior senator from Missouri had received psychiatric care, which was bad enough in those days but also had twice been given electroshock treatments, which brought up unfair comparisons to Frankenstein’s monster. This incident reflected poorly on McGovern’s decision-making, and eventually, he forced Eagleton off the ticket, to be replaced by Kennedy in-law and former Peace Corps head Sargent Shriver.

As you can see from these not-too-great pictures, taken by me with a point-and-shoot camera, I got to see McGovern at a rally at my college, State University College at New Paltz in the autumn. That was one of the first of many times I saw Pete Seeger perform, too.

Of course, McGovern lost that election badly, carrying only one state, plus the District of Columbia. Many folks, in 1973 and 1974, during the Watergate scandal that McGovern had complained about during the campaign, had bumper stickers that read, “Don’t blame me, I’m from Massachusetts,” referring to the one-state the senator carried, whether they were or not.

George McGovern died this week at the age of 90. It seems, though, that he saw vindication of his positions in his lifetime, and never sold his soul.

For instance, from his acceptance speech for the party’s nomination:
“The tax system today does not reward hard work: it penalizes it. Inherited or invested wealth frequently multiplies itself while paying no taxes at all. But wages on the assembly line or in farming the land, these hard-earned dollars are taxed to the very last penny. There is a depletion allowance for oil wells, but no depletion for the farmer who feeds us, or the worker who serves us all.”

Sounds – unfortunately – VERY Current.
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A much wiser Arthur@AmeriNZ re: his feeling about McGovern, then and now.

O is for Olympic Observations

I’m still crushed by Jim McKay’s “they’re all gone.”

I’ve watched a lot of Olympic Games over the years. Somehow, though, they are starting to run together in my mind. What year was it that Sarah Hughes won the women’s figure skating finals, after being in fourth place after the short program? It was 2002, but I couldn’t have told you this without looking it up.

So here are my now fading recollections, without checking sources except to verify that my memory was in fact correct.

1896 Summer: Athens, Greece – obviously, I don’t remember the specific event – how old do you think I am? – but I do recall that this was the beginning of the modern Games
1904 Summer: St. Louis, MO, United States – the debacle that Shooting Parrots mentioned
1936 Summer: Berlin, Germany – this will always be the Jesse Owens (pictured) Olympics for me, with Hitler’s assertion of a master race being shattered
1948 Summer: London, United Kingdom – I must admit that I learned much about the still bombed-out city holding the first summer Games since the end of World War II from NBC’s coverage of the 2012 Games

1960 Winter: Squaw Valley, CA, United States – I don’t specifically remember these games, but I do recall the disastrous plane crash in Belgium the following February that wiped out the entire 1961 U.S. World Figure Skating Team
1960 Summer: Rome, Italy – I remember Cassius Clay losing or throwing away his heavyweight championship gold medal after these Games when returning to a still segregated US
1968 Winter: Grenoble, France – ski racer Jean-Claude Killy
1968 Summer: Mexico City, Mexico – the black power salute of Carlos and Smith; also, Bob Beamon’s record long jump
1972 Summer: Munich, West Germany – of course, the killing of Israeli athletes; to this day, I’m still crushed by Jim McKay’s “they’re all gone.” Plus, Mark Spitz’s seven gold medals in swimming
1976 Summer: Montreal, Canada – Bruce Jenner won the decathalon. Beyond that, a number of African countries boycotted the Games because of the participation of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia.

1980 Winter: Lake Placid, NY, United States – the US beat the USSR in the men’s hockey semifinals, then Finland in the finals.
1980 Summer: Moscow, Soviet Union – 65 nations boycotted because of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
1984 Summer: Los Angeles, CA, United States – The Soviet Union and 14 of its Eastern Bloc partners boycotted in response to actions four years earlier
1988 Winter: Calgary, AB, Canada – (pictured) Katerina Witt’s second straight Olympic title in figure skating “matching the same feat performed by Norway’s Sonja Henie”
1992 Summer: Barcelona, Spain – the US basketball “Dream Team” of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and other NBA stars
1994 Winter: Lillehammer, Norway – that soap opera involving Tonya Harding’s ex-husband Jeff Gillooly hiring a goon to kneecap female figure skater Nancy Kerrigan; Ukraine’s Oksana Baiul beat Kerrigan, with Harding finishing eighth.
1996 Summer: Atlanta, GA, United States – I less remember the Games than the bomb detonated at the Centennial Olympic Park, which killed two and injured over 100 others. Some poor security guard named Richard Jewell came under suspicion. The bomb was actually set by Eric Rudolph, who is currently serving a life sentence for the bombing. One of the local (Albany, NY area) reporters covering the Olympics, Chris Kapostasy (later Jansing, when she moved to NBC/MSNBC in 1998), won a New York Emmy Award in 1997 for her coverage of the bombing.
1998 Winter: Nagano, Japan – Michelle Kwan had been winning World Championships in women’s figure skating, yet lost to [I had to look it up] Tara Lipinski in the Olympic finals

2008 Summer: Beijing, China – this was Michael Phelps’s eight gold medals in the swimming events. The great concern beforehand was the air quality, which, thanks to good weather, wasn’t as bad as feared.

I’m sure there are other bits that you will remind me of…

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

Image of Witt was originally posted to Flickr by zipckr at http://flickr.com/photos/7363465@N08/3439530032. It was reviewed on 03:15, 26 August 2011 (UTC) by FlickreviewR, who found it to be licensed under the terms of the cc-by-2.0, which is compatible with the Commons. It is, however, not the same license as given above, and it is unknown whether that license ever was valid.

A political false equivalence

Romney has apparently followed the law. But to those have been given much, much is expected.

There’s this blogger I came across who I like. But I was puzzled by a comparison made between President Obama’s birth certificate and Gov. Romney’s tax returns, as being similarly not newsworthy.

In the case of the birth certificate, it was authenticated to a degree acceptable to anyone who isn’t a conspiracy theorist.

Whereas the tax returns are interesting because they were not released, save for the last two years, though a self-provided “summary” was made available. Truth is, I don’t care whether Romney releases the documents or not. It DOES, though, speak to his transparency, or lack of same, for his father George set the bar when he ran for President back in the 1960s and put out a dozen years of returns.

The Gospel lesson a couple of weeks back was Mark 10:17-27, about the rich young man who followed the law. In verse 21: “And Jesus, looking at him, loved him, and said to him, ‘You lack one thing: go, sell all that you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.’ Disheartened by the saying, he went away sorrowful, for he had great possessions.”

Further, “And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, ‘How difficult it will be for those who have wealth to enter the kingdom of God!’ And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, ‘Children, how difficult it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.”

Romney has seemingly followed the law, doing the absolute minimum of what is required. But to those who have been given much, much is expected. I believe it is reasonable that he makes a good-faith, and precedented, attempt to show us whether he is a tax dodger, since it might give us some insight into the fiscal policies he would initiate, were he become President.

Not incidentally, the sermon addressed this 9th-century explanation/rationalization of this Scripture, suggesting that it was referring to a place called The Eye of the Needle, where a camel could get through, but not if it were overburdened by lots of stuff. But as my pastor indicated, and this article agrees: “There is no evidence for such a gate, nor record of the reprimand of the architect who may have forgotten to make a gate big enough for the camel and rider to pass through unhindered.”

Past/future

If Hitler never lived, then does Stalin take over Europe?

Film critic Roger Ebert had a blog post Did you choose your religion? But the original title, as one can see in the URL, was “Would you kill Baby Hitler?”

The original entry began: Of course, you would have needed to know on April 20, 1889, that the little boy would grow up to become Adolf Hitler, and would commit all of the crimes we now know he committed. The only way you could know that, apart from precognition, would be to have traveled backward in time from a point when Hitler had committed all his crimes and you knew about them.

This was in context with a discussion of, among other things, the new film Looper, for which a big-time spoiler alert should have been stamped.

But this is a popular theme. There’s some current CBS show called Person of Interest about a computer that foretells crime. There was a previous CBS show(what was that called?) about a guy who would get tomorrow’s newspaper today and had the day to stop some heinous event from happening; a cat was somehow involved. I have actually never seen either show nor read Stephen King’s The Dead Zone. The piece generated very interesting and enlightening points, unlike most comment threads these days.

The problem, if one COULD go back in time, would be the unintended consequences. If Hitler never lived, then does Stalin take over Europe? These are obviously unanswerable questions, but they fascinate me.

Dustbury points to a variation on the theme:

>Steve Sailer…has imagined two different scenarios in which we’d already had a black President:

Walter Mondale picks Tom Bradley for the Veep slot in 1984, manages to beat a rattled-in-the-debates Ronald Reagan, and is killed when Air Force One crashes;
Colin Powell, urged on by Mrs. Powell, defeats Bob Dole, then Bill Clinton, in 1996.

Given either one of these scenarios, Sailer asks:

In either alternative history, does Barack Obama become the second black President? If there had already been a first black president, would anyone have ever even considered Obama to be Presidential Timber? Would you have ever even heard of Obama?

It’s been my contention that a President who is black (or Hispanic, or a woman) may be held to a different standard, higher by at least some so that the viability of a second black as President would be inextricably linked to the success or failure of the first. That said, if there HAD been a previous black President, would Obama have played such a huge role in the 2004 Democratic convention? Possibly not.

What thinkest thou?
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Making the case for future voter fraud.

Me and Donna George

DONNA L. GEORGE, Staff Member Albany United Methodist Society
Born: 27 Oct 1949; Died: 20 Sep 2002

I had this friend named Donna George. I knew her from work with the socially active Albany United Methodist Society. I don’t know why, but certain people, including a particular pastor, treated her quite badly, taking advantage of her goodwill. I think that, at some level, I felt a lot of sympathy for her. Ultimately, she saw our relationship one way, and I another, yet we managed to maintain a friendship in spite of that.

In 2002, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Knowing she would be incapable of making decisions very soon, she got three or four of her friends to come to St. Peter’s hospice to explain her wishes that we divvy up her music, books, and art and give them to various buddies before she died, lest her family, from whom she was mostly estranged, could get their hands on them.

I was one of the folks in charge of the music, giving this person some Sinatra, and that person some classical albums, et al. I held onto a Beach Boys box set, which I had given her, and I also kept the Roberta Flack album Quiet Fire, for it contained a cover of the BeeGees’ To Love Somebody, which represented in song what she wished our relationship would be. I requested it on Coverville back in February (Roberta’s 75th birthday), and Brian Ibbott played it at the 18:50 mark.

The minister who gave her such grief was at the funeral, as was another adversary. I was so miffed.

There was an article in the local newspaper about her contributions to social justice, but I haven’t been able to find it. All I could retrieve was this letter to the editor, which is, remarkably, still relevant, unfortunately.

POPULAR ATTITUDES ABOUT POVERTY DEEPLY FLAWED
Albany Times Union (Albany, NY). (July 28, 2000): News: pA14.

A recent letter to the editor pointedly noted that, in a Times Union photo, a customer in a food pantry line was talking on a cell phone. The writer sarcastically asserted how nice it was that this allegedly poor person could have this convenience while waiting for free food.

This strikes me as an instance where what is “fashionable” allows certain groups to be “fair game.” We look at a photo, assume the worst, and crow about it, knowing that many will buy in, based on very limited evidence.

Yes, this person might be the owner of the cell phone. But here are some other possibilities. The person could need to make an important call for a prospective job at the exact time of his/her appointment at the pantry, and someone lent the phone to solve the dilemma. I know a mom who is among the working poor (the fastest-growing pantry population) who makes other sacrifices so she can have a cell phone to be in close touch with her children while she is performing her job duties — which often require her to be on the go. A relative might provide the gift of a cell phone so that a working parent can stay in ready touch with the children.

The possibilities are nearly endless. But popular views of people in poverty tend to allow for none of these. They are poor and they should have nothing — certainly no “frills!” If they do, they are “getting one over” on the system. All of this is part of a false “them” and “us” way of thinking, and being that it is rampant today, is certainly at odds with both secular compassion and the habits of the heart of any faith community I can think of. We can all do better than this.

DONNA L. GEORGE, Staff Member Albany United Methodist Society
Born: 27 Oct 1949; Died: 20 Sep 2002