It was another day...

“On the whole human beings want to be good, 

but not too good, and not quite all the time.”

- George Orwell, 

All Art is Propaganda: 

Critical Essays

“You know, I just looked around and he’s gone.”

It was the sixties…the country was involved in two wars…one the jungles of Vietnam, the other - the streets of America.  Both with multiple fronts upon which fighting took place.  Vietnam was a complicated moral issue.  There is little doubt looking back, it was not a shining moment in our political or military history.  The expression “old men start wars…young men fight them” could not have been more appropriate.  The Chinese, the French and us – the U.S., all eventually succumbed to  this little spot of land almost no one in America even knew existed until the early 1960s.

While it was true, there was a kind of moral outrage on the part of the youth of this country…more relevant; however, was the fear of actually dying that fed much of that moral indignation.  One might argue almost anything – moral outrage included – informs the decision making process when confronted with the very real possibility of losing one’s life.  Even then, I understood the argument both ways. 

No conscious decision…

I went to Vietnam, but it was not a moral decision…I am uncertain that I had an honest point of view in those days.  It was, if I were to be totally honest, something in front of me that simply required taking the next step in a course put in motion by a bureaucratic machine with all the compassion and understanding of a telephone pole riding the slopes of the Appalachian Mountains in the great state of West Virginia, from which I was plucked like a lump of bituminous coal buried deep in the ground, broken free by one of those larger than life hydraulic mining machines.  As the day came, in truth it was just another day on the horizon of a life that so far had very seldom had any sense of what lay ahead.  Thirteen months later when I stepped off a charter flight in Fort Dix, New Jersey, while certainly not the young man that had earlier left these American shores, my sense of the day was not too terribly different.  Tomorrow?  I had no idea!    

Then there was this….

The other war in this country was the Civil Rights movement.  In fact, while active, I was as most white people more a bystander.  It was (still is), in fact, a long battle in this country…a nationally personal battle, for it was NOT fought within the borders of a small unknown country across the expanses of the Pacific Ocean and South China Sea, it was here…it was intimate…it was real, and if one lived a middle to lower middle class life with a sense of moral duty, as my family had, it was personal and a frequent topic of conversation.

I really cannot comment on the African American experience, because regardless of my involvement, when I looked in the mirror I saw a character with a moderately friction free life, and a future that I could construct in pretty much any way I wanted.   It is the rope climbing metaphor.  I could talk about climbing the rope for racial equality, but I was not then and never could actually be on that rope.

In fact, I was pretty involved in issues of race as a youngster…hard to avoid with a minister father who had a deep and resonant sense of justice and moral indignation; a man willing to step up to the plate and engage the system with a sense of fearlessness that to this day I find inspiring.  And yet, at the end of the day, I tucked myself into bed in the safety of ‘my’ community readying myself for the next day, whatever it might bring.

The topic is too big…

This piece is not one about moral justice, nor is it intended to comment on the struggle of those who find themselves on the front lines fighting for nothing more than equal rights whether they be gender, ethnic or sexual.  The battle between the status quo, comfortable within the life it has created or into which it was born, and those seeking nothing more than the freedom to live their lives on an equal playing field, is historically ancient, somewhat distracting and well beyond my capacity to articulate here. 

No, this piece is about an African American woman by the name of Loretta Mary Aiken, aka Jackie Mabley, and her convergence with a white man by the name of Dick Holler...it is uncertain if they ever met.  Yet an intersection of their talents converged in a way one might never have imagined nor predicted considering their personal journeys and the era into which they found ‘a place.’

Jackie Mabley, a brilliant iconoclastic humorist, created the character ‘Moms’ and gained popularity in the late 1920s in a part of American culture completely invisible to a youngster growing up in those West Virginia hills…that is until someone played records of her stand up comedy routines.  She played what was called the Chitlin' Circuit of African American Vaudeville for nearly forty years, before she was ‘discovered’ by the American mainstream.  Her humor was earthy, frank, often sexually explicit and just plain funny.  “Plain funny” to folk like me, but as I have come to appreciate, a deep and rich social commentary that, in those days, I simply didn’t get.

More similar than maybe we know…

Camelot!  Those of you, of a certain age, will recognize that word as meaning more than the Alan Lerner and Fredrick Lowe musical made popular in the day. 

“Camelot” came to represent a time of innocence in America that began to come apart with the assassinations of John Kennedy, his brother Bobby, and Martin Luther King leading Dick Holler to pen words to what became a ballad of social conscience, “Abraham, Martin and John” – a short song reflecting the abbreviated lives of Abraham Lincoln, John Kennedy, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy.

The song touched a large part of American Culture and was popularized by Dion DiMucci (Dion and the Belmonts) a pop singer in the fifties and sixties…it’s short and worth listening to (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZL81tPHp82g). 

The haunting refrain is repeated several times in this piece substituting each of these men’s names in the new stanza.

“Has anybody here seen my old friend Abraham (Martin, John, Bobby)?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a lot of people,
But it seems the good they die young.
You know, I just looked around and he's gone.”

These verses were followed by:

“Didn’t you love the things they stood for?

Didn’t they try to find some good for you and me?

And we’ll be free

Some day soon, it’s a gonna be one day…”

In subsequent years, it was recorded and performed by many artists including among others Marvin Gaye, Kenny Rogers, Ray Charles and Andy Williams.  This song touched me then, and this week after watching a documentary on the life of ‘Moms’ Mabley, reached through the decades and touched me again.

She recorded this song in 1969 some six years before her death.  By now the character that Loretta Mary Aiken had cultivated and honed over decades of work was in the right time…the right place to put her life’s work…her experience…the pain and richness of her journey into these words.  It made Billboard’s top 10 that year, making it probably the greatest commercial success of her life.  And yet for those of you who lived in that era her performance on a day time television show created a transcendent moment.  For those who never heard of this woman, nor have any sense of what those days were like, her raspy voice might just find a way to slip through your tympanic membranes, vibrate some little hairs of your inner ear, making their way into the soft folds of your grey matter drifting gently south along the neural pathways and settling softly somewhere mid chest – that would be your heart.

If you have a little time, you will enjoy this performance: (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mobZZRcrCHA)

- ted