My son’s piece today on Politico
It reminded me, reminds me of all this, and more but this is enough just now.
I remember, at age 6, two things about being at the 1948 Progressive Party Convention.
The next convention I attended was as an AP reporter. It nominated ill-fated George McGovern in 1972. Then for me came Kansas City and Ford and NYC and Carter in 1976, and a ticket to the Clinton nomination in 1992. The latter came courtesy of the same son, a page then with the New Jersey Jim Florio folks and Democratic Convention Delegation, courtesy of a contact made for him by someone he knew, and then making his own big impression there.
In 1948, I remember traveling to Philadelphia with my mother on the old Pennsylvania Railroad, recall the plush sort of red/maroon and green colored seats with the with the snow-white headrest cloths. I remember the conductors with the real caps and cap badges, the red caps, and the man who came around with sandwiches and drinks, like orangeade in a cardboard cylinder, which I had and thought probably the best drink in the world.
I remember also being on the floor near the stage at Shibe Park and seeing my father on the stage in what seemed serious talk with Paul Robeson, who I met that summer near the swimming hole on the property of Yip Harburg at Peekskill, N.Y.
Yarburg earlier wrote “Buddy Can You Spare A Dime?” and was in the midst of his great success with “Finian’s Rainbow” for which he wrote the lyrics. I recall someone, don’t know who, fetched my mother and 2-year-old sister, and me from the rail station at Peeskill in a green Chevrolet Woody. No, it wasn’t Harburg. I never met him, just stayed at his cottage for a week and swam in his swimming pond.
Yip Harburg also wrote the lyrics for “It’s Only a Paper Moon” and, guess what? “Over the Rainbow”. In fact, he wrote all the lyrics for all the songs of the iconic Judy Garland movie “Wizard of Oz” including “Ding Dong…” and “If I Only Had a Brain…” and “We’re Off to See…”
But, notwithstanding all of those gifts to America, for writing so much of what is now so indelibly American – for being left he got blacklisted anyway later by the same people as we see today, the political progeny, the ones who so witlessly grovel for and celebrate the absolute abyss that is Trump.
The emerging name then was McCarthy, Joe not Kevin, and like today’s henchmen named Cruz, Johnson, Hawley, and Scott (Fla.) he had henchmen named Knowland, Jenner, Mundt, Bridges and, lest we forget and we should remember now and then, Joe Kennedy.
One of Joe’s sons, Robert worked for Joe McCarthy, was among those who accompanied his body back to Wisconsin for burial and made him godfather to his first kid, Kathleen. The older son, Jack, courting the Catholic hard right vote then and in the future, purposefully missed the 1956 U. S.Senate vote to censure McCathy (67 for censure to 22 against, with four not voting, Jack Kennedy and three others).
But even he, Tailgunner Joe (defender of the SS troops who mowed down our guys at Malmedy) was even far less dangerous than this one.
You know the old saw, hindsight is perfect vision? Well it is and it applies now to the Broadway bully. Bad as he was, and he was – a snorting drunk used by Roy Cohn to try to keep his boyfriend, G. David Shine out of the Army – McCarthy was not even close to the one now, the one whose third wife lives at golf country clubs.
Our danger today could be the same slow-walked but then frenzied headlong rush to national suicide as Germany’s in 1932 – and we know what happened there from January 30, 1933 onward. Onward there to near total, entirely deserved destruction.
Risen from those ashes are Germany today, never to be wholly trusted, and, it seems, us, the U.S. today in our might and yet lingering domination. Their Fuhrer sought world domination. He caused it to happen. Only he didn’t get it. We did.
Those Germans had their man, the deranged, mutilated Fuhrer . We have ours. The deranged, mutilated Trump. Der Fuhrer ist Trump is the fuhrer.
I remember the week during our stay at Yip Harburg’s cottage, being at the swim hole coming out of the pond and seeing Paul Robeson, propped against a tree, reading a book he put down to say hello when my mother wrapped me in a striped towel and told me there was someone I should meet. He said to me in yes that big, rich warm voice, “I know your daddy and he’s a fine man.”
But what do I know? I was wet, shivering, and 6.
I know he said thatl. I have never forgotten hearing him say it.
Now, nearly 76 years later, it is as Yogi said, “deja vu all over again”.
Everything changes. Nothing changes. In 1933 it was the Germans. Today it’s us. Maybe. We’ll find out in November – possibly.You’ll see, I’ll see. We’ll all see.
I wonder what my six year-old grandkid will see in the next 76 years, will it be worth recalling? Where will her world have been, what will it be? Will Trump, Zuckerberg and Musk win? Will we be a nation of zombies? Or will we be so many of the people I remember well across a lifetime?
It could be the best thing about mine, my life, is that I will not be here to find out.
For me very much most of the next 75 years will have no reminiscence.
Or is this, now, the end of reminiscence?
Still, I wish my grandkids could taste that that orangeade and drink it from a cone shaped paper container. It was the best.
Peeling the Onion 