Monday, November 21, 2016

PLAY ON...

A couple of years ago, I celebrated my birthday by sending family and friends a YouTube link to a performance that had given me very great pleasure during the year.

Now, at 95, I’d like to do it again. This time I couldn’t decide between two choices, so you have them both:

Mozart’s 24thpiano concerto, performed by Murray Perahia

Bach’s Golberg Variations, performed by András Schiff.

You may or may not share my musical likes. These selections may not bring tears of wonder and joy to your eyes, as they do for me. But whatever lifts you up in communion with the marvels and beauty of human potential, this is the time to keep the faith, to rise to the challenge of our times with solidarity and love.

I'd love it if you would send back to me a favorite of yours, whatever the musical genre!

Wednesday, November 9, 2016

MY DAY AFTER

Responding to setbacks and defeat, one should always take the long view. But that’s pretty hard on the eve of a 95th birthday. The last US President I may set eyes on is Donald Trump.

America took a very sharp turn on November 8th, 2016. No platitudes about coming together and healing the nation can soften the impact.  Aside from whatever Trump may do as President, the Republican right —which appeared to be in shambles only weeks ago— will dominate government at every level of institutional political power. Trump and his cohort are determined to erase the legacy of the first African-American family to occupy the White House. They made sure that a first woman president is not Obama's successor..

Yes, it’s important not to direct liberal and progressive anger at the millions of fellow Americans who see Trump as the possible “fixer” despite his appalling personal and political character. Fundamentally, blame rests with the growing ills of a corrupt economic system that creates extremes of unfairness and inequality, and turns its victims against each other.

The travesty is that the election outcome will be taken as a mandate to further empower the very system of oligarchy that produces the alienation tearing the nation apart. It’s not the first time that the deep dissatisfaction of masses of people has been exploited to promote a demagogue as “savior” and open the pathway to dictatorship. With Rudy Giuliani as prospective Attorney General and Newt Gingrich as anther likely cabinet member, the scent of racism and incipient fascism hovers over a Trump administration.

The battle to protect and restore our damaged democracy will dominate the coming years. We recall Martin Luther King’s admonition that "the arch of the moral universe is long". That "it bends toward justice" is proven, but there are times when it twists and turns the other way.  And perhaps there never is an end, a final outcome. As some philosophers have observed, ‘nothing is permanent but change’, and struggle is as inevitable as change.

Within every new generation, there is renewed devotion to freedom and humane values, to joining hands with the oppressed, to ending war and violence. It’s never over, but it makes many lives worthwhile.

If this sounds like a valedictory, perhaps it is.

Monday, November 7, 2016

"WHAT DO WE HAVE TO LOSE? EVERYTHING"

Harry Belafonte sums things up better than any "closing speech" could (NY Times, 11/7/2016):


 “O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath —
America will be!”
— Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again”
What old men know is that everything can change. Langston Hughes wrote these lines when I was 8 years old, in the very different America of 1935.
It was an America where the life of a black person didn’t count for much. Where women were still second-class citizens, where Jews and other ethnic whites were looked on with suspicion, and immigrants were kept out almost completely unless they came from certain approved countries in Northern Europe. Where gay people dared not speak the name of their love, and where “passing” — as white, as a WASP, as heterosexual, as something, anything else that fit in with what America was supposed to be was a commonplace, with all of the self-abasement and the shame that entailed.
It was an America still ruled, at its base, by violence. Where lynchings, and especially the threat of lynchings, were used to keep minorities away from the ballot box and in their place. Where companies amassed arsenals of weapons for goons to use against their own employees and recruited the police and National Guardsmen to help them if these private corporate armies proved insufficient. Where destitute veterans of World War I were driven from the streets of Washington with tear gas and bayonets, after they went to our nation’s capital to ask for the money they were owed.
Much of that was how America had always been. We changed it, many of us, through some of the proudest struggles of our history. It wasn’t easy, and sometimes it wasn’t pretty, but we did it, together. We won voting rights for all. We ended Jim Crow, and we pushed open the Golden Door again to welcome immigrants. We achieved full rights for women, and fought to let people of all genders and sexual orientations stand in the light. And if we have not yet created the America that Langston Hughes swore will be — “The land that never has been yet” — if there is still much to be done, at least we have advanced our standards of humanity, hope and decency to places where many people never thought we could reach.
What old men know, too, is that all that is gained can be lost. Lost just as the liberation that the Civil War and Emancipation brought was squandered in Reconstruction, by a white America grown morally weary, or bent on revenge. Lost as the gains of our labor unions have been for decades now, pushed back until so many of us stand alone in the workplace, before unfettered corporate power. Lost as the vote is being lost by legislative chicanery. Lost as so many powerful interests would have us lose the benefits of the social welfare state, privatize Social Security, and annihilate Obamacare altogether.
If he wins this Tuesday, Donald J. Trump would be, at 70, the oldest president ever elected. But there is much about Mr. Trump that is always young, and not in a good way. There is something permanently feckless and immature in the man. It can be seen in how he mangles virtually the same words that Langston Hughes used.
When Hughes writes, in the first two lines of his poem, “Let America be America again/ Let it be the dream it used to be,” he acknowledges that America is primarily a dream, a hope, an aspiration, that may never be fully attainable, but that spurs us to be better, to be larger. He follows this with the repeated counterpoint, “America never was America to me,” and through the rest of this remarkable poem he alternates between the oppressed and the wronged of America, and the great dreams that they have for their country, that can never be extinguished.
Mr. Trump, who is not a poet, either in his late-night tweets or on the speaker’s stump, sees American greatness as some heavy, dead thing that we must reacquire. Like a bar of gold, perhaps, or a bank vault, or one of the lifeless, anonymous buildings he loves to put up. It is a simplistic notion, reducing all the complexity of the American experience to a vague greatness, and his prescription for the future is just as undefined, a promise that we will return to “winning” without ever spelling out what we will win — save for the exclusion of “others,” the reduction of women to sexual tally points, the re-closeting of so many of us.
With his simple, mean, boy’s heart, Mr. Trump wants us to follow him blind into a restoration that is not possible and could not be endured if it were. Many of his followers acknowledge that (“He may get us all killed”) but want to have someone in the White House who will really “blow things up.”
What old men know is that things blown up — customs, folkways, social compacts, human bodies — cannot so easily be put right. What Langston Hughes so yearned for when he asked that America be America again was the realization of an age-old people’s struggle, not the murky fantasies of a petty tyrant. Mr. Trump asks us what we have to lose, and we must answer, only the dream, only everything.

-->
Harry Belafonte is an artist and activist.