WITH THE INFLUX OF THE TEA PARTY...
THE AMERICAN CAPACITY FOR ANIMOSITY has rapidly begun to escalate, due to the accident of the race of our new President.  Need I recite the sad statistics?  Here they came, with their steel faces and inflamed eyes, fearful visions and apocalyptic solutions, desperate for a new enemy.   The unavoidable presence of a man of color in the White House had lit a fire in their bellies.  Now they began to allow White men to claim to be the victims of Black kids, authorizing them to slaughter Trevor  Martin and Jordan Davis, two unarmed  young black men, sanctioned under the protection of the 2005 the Stand Your Ground Law down in Florida, a law brought about at the urging of the National Rifle Association, and  with grim insistence by both the Republican legislature and  the Tea Party of Florida.  After all the work done by blacks and whites to destroy the stereotype of the shiftless, irresponsible black man, here come these self-styled clowns.  

  The following is about our failure - mine and yours.

  We must begin with a look at the kids in the slums of the Black Underclass, who are now living below the federal poverty line,  today's roll models remain much the same as they always were, nothing has changed: pimps, prostitutes, crack dealers and stick up men still roam their streets.  But if the yahoos of the Tea Party have taught us anything, it is that they are not very good at repairing holes in the spirit, particularly when those holes belong to those who are of another color.    

  The black underclass has been a long time forming, since about the time the great migration to the north began during and after World War Two.  This was caused by the mechanization that changed the economy of the South; where once a hundred black men and women toiled in a cotton field, now there was one machine and many began heading north. When they arrived in places like New York and Chicago and Detroit, they soon discovered that there might be jobs, but not any were for men and women who had spent their lives chopping cotton in the Southern heat. By the late 1950's the jobs which had supported many other immigrants began to vanish too, jobs in small factories, that did not require much formal education.  Welfare became the dismal alternative to all those glittering visions of renewal. Hopelessness became the norm and Whites had now joined the Black Underclass.

  In every major city, in those places where the Underclass reside, there are hundreds of abandoned buildings, structurally sound, but gutted by fire; they could be reclaimed through the use of sweat equity, converted into condominiums for a resurgent black and white and Hispanic working class.  The Tea Party, of course, nix  that idea.  You could intelligently teach teenagers about birth control - clearly, graphically - then supply birth-control devices to everyone.  Once again, the Tea Party did not warm-up to that one, either. 

  The Tea Party needs to stop the nonsense about "dead-end" jobs.  There are no "dead-end" jobs for people who want to make something of their lives.  When I was a kid I worked as a newspaper thrower, a messenger, a janitor, and a lowly assistant to the Woolworth's candy girl.  I didn't make a career out of any of those jobs, but they taught me how to work.  They taught me how to get up in the morning when I wanted to sleep-in for a few more hours.  They taught me how to perform tasks that did not personally interest me. They taught me how to understand the needs and wants of other people and their expectations of me.  Where will the jobs come from?  Obviously, once again, the Tea Party seems not to care, or they would vote in favor of raising the minimum-wage.  There is an extraordinary amount of work to be done in the United States, repairing the collapsing physical infrastructure of streets, bridges, highways.  This work does not require a high school education.  It requires a living wage.  In the best of all possible worlds, of course, the federal government could help fund this immense project or any other project they wished to finance, including the building of day-care centers so the parents can go to work without worry.

  To say that the richest nation in the history of the world cannot afford this is ludicrous.  We must guarantee full employment for all, even at the risk of fueling inflation.  Jobs are everything.  A job for one man could take four people off the dole, jobs would take more pistols out of the hands of young men than another hundred thousand police.  Any sensible citizen knows that the Underclass is a greater threat to our national security than the terrorists or any other foreign threat.  They aren't presiding over the starvation of American infants whose families can no long afford feed or house them.

  There is very little now that whites alone can do in a direct way for the maimed and hurting citizens of the Underclass. They need black leaders more than they need white pity.  Or only white social workers.  Or only white cops.  Or white Tea Party lunatics who do absolutely nothing in the defense of the Underclass, white or black. They need someone to love them.  Soon.  If blacks and whites in powerful positions do not go to the defense of the penniless, do not go after the loathsome bigots of the Tea Party and drive them out of office, neither will anyone else. And they will surely be doomed.  

  So, in a different way, will all of us. 

I LOVE THE WORD...

NOSTALGIA, even though the word itself is seems to be an imperfect one to describe the emotion.  It is hopelessly vague. Sometimes happy.  Sometimes sad. At my age, it evokes an almost fatalistic acceptance of the permanent present of loss. Nothing will ever stay the same. Wednesday turns into Thursday and something valuable is gone forever.  An "is" has become a "was."  Whatever you have lost, you will never get it back: not that much beloved father and mother, not those baseball teams you once played on when you were young, not those splendid New York bars you once sat in with good friends, not Elitch Gardens in Denver where you once went dancing with the girl who you thought was the most beautiful female in the entire world. Irreversible change happens so often and that experience affects character itself. Living life toughens people against being schmaltzy by allowing the truer emotion of nostalgia. Schmaltzy is always about a lie. Nostalgia is about real things gone.  Nobody truly mourns a lie.

  Which is why in a million ways, Americans behaved so well on September 12, 2001.  Millions of us wept over the abomination of the day before.  Many mourned their own dead.  More millions grieved for the world that had existed on September 10th, knowing it was forever behind us.  For a while, at least, all felt various degrees of rage. But nobody ran.  We knew that at least we lived in a world before the archfiends attack changed it forever.  With all its blemished, horrors, disappointments, cruelties, we would remember that lost world all our days and most of our nights. And now we would get up in the morning and go to work. Our only solace would be nostalgia.  That hardy nostalgia helps explain America.  Its built into our codes, like DNA, and beyond the explanation of constant change, there is another common thread in deepest emotion.  I believe that American nostalgia also comes from that extraordinary process that created this country: immigration.

  Many paid an emotional price for their decisions to leave the country of their origin.  Those nineteenth-century immigrants would carry with them what their American children could not fully comprehend: the things they left behind.  Those things were at once objects, people, and emotions, and they were part of what almost all immigrants came to call the Old Country.  The place where they once were children.  The place where they once ran with friends on summer mornings.  The place where all spoke a common language.  That rupture with the immediate past would mark all of them and did not go away as the young immigrants grew old.  Many of their nostalgia's would be expressed in music. Songs were sung in tenements and dance halls and while walking on the street.  Songs of the Old Country.  Most saw their children grow tall and healthy and educated.  And yet...and yet, for all who prospered and those who did not, the music was still there.  

  On the deepest level, it didn't matter whether they had that past taken from them, or whether they had decided personally to leave it behind; at a certain hour of the night, the vanished past could be vividly alive in memory with its own special sense of hope, anguish, or loss.  And if they can afford airline tickets, they can carrying their children with them, can show their children the places where they were young on a visit to the Old Country, and can show off photographs of where they now live to those who remained behind.  This, they can say in the Old Country, is their America.  Their nostalgia's are familiar.  In one form or another, they are the nostalgia's of everyone who has ever lived...

  ...And that is why I love the word. 

AS A YOUNG MAN, I PLAYED PRO BASEBALL...

AND AS A NEW YORKER, I came to  the city too late to see the heros of my youth.  I missed Roy Campanella coming to the plate, a bat in his hand with men on base.  I never saw Jack Roosevelt Robinson rounding third, heading for home.  I never set eyes on Willie Mays going after a fly ball out in center field. To this day, I wonder what it must have been like to have been in the company of roaring human beings, glad people in a glad place in a glad time.  Nobody can ever tell me that such moments were trivial. 

  Some may have seemed trivial to a few, but not to me. There remain a few New Yorkers who still tell tales of reading W.C Heinz in the Sun, or Red Smith and Jimmy Breslin in the Herald Tribune, or Dan Parker in the Daily Mirror; or Frank Graham in the Journal-American; who once ate the ice-cream cone called a Mello Roll, or candies called Houtons, Kits, Sky Bars, or B-B Bats; or once played stickball, held a spaldeen in their hand on a Saturday morning in a street empty of cars and full of hours.   They knew what game Was being played at the Polo Grounds.  They went to the El Morocco and the Copa, the Latin Quarter and Chateau Madrid, with the gangsters at the rear tables, all wearing pinkie rings, and the Wall Street big shots down front, and the tall women in feathers and frills on stage, with the highest cheekbones and creamiest skin in the universe.

  As a former New Yorker, I ache for certain times and places and people.  The gifts of New York are endless.  Where else can you find so many free schools and libraries, those places where you could invent your own life?  They were free because the children the poor Irish and the poor Jews never forgot when all such doors were closed.  The poor of New York made the rich better.  They voted for politicians who, in spite of their own weaknesses, made the city more prosperous, more just.  The politicians were too often corrupt, but in the end the poor got water, the poor got hospitals, the poor got sanitation, the poor got schools and libraries.  The poor of the nineteenth century physically built the city of New York.  They dug subways and laid tracks.  They paved the streets and erected the bridges and the skyscrapers.  There was a sense among those working people, almost from the beginning, that you could do all right in New York if you followed the rules.  The rules were simple.  Work.  Put food on the table.  Always pay your debts  Make sure that the old and the weak are never in danger or in need.  For a long time, these were the rules all over the city. 

  The deepest trouble to the city came in the 1960s, when  some of these rules were disregarded, and the glitter of the city slowly began to dim and then to fall into a  sustained version of purgatory.  If we had died in 1990, we'd have ended our days in a city plagued  by drugs, guns, and despair. Somehow our luck held.  The city gathered its will and energy and rose again, its people playing by the old rules. And every day we saw its thrilling results, sometimes in subtle changes.  I once saw shopping-bag ladies, their rusting supermarket carts lumpy with debris wrapped in plastic bags. They slept in doorways, they babbled on corners, they multiplied and were everywhere, and then, abruptly, they were gone; as were the streetwalkers by the meat market below Fourteenth street, who had offered themselves for a price to cruising suburbanites, who were now free of smack and pimps and disease. The reason was simple.  These people were abandoned and weak and forlorn, and the city of New York came to their rescue.  

  That openness is essential to any city.  

  But as we inch into the year of 2014, I'm not sure where it went.  

  Over the years, we have become somewhat dangerous when it comes to the care of others, a country that is now brash and vulgar and selfish.  We are divided by political hustlers who tell us who is to blame for our problems.  The poor are to blame. Women are the real problem.  They all want too much. Thus, the wealthy have become bloated beyond their wildest dreams and the poor are now moneyless and no longer can afford food on the table. We have slowly evolved into a country of hate and discrimination. The problem is not our fault, it's theirs.  And what we have lost along the way is the honor of working for all, of being just and fair to each man and woman and child.  We have returned to the habit of complaint and blame instead of creating enduring solutions for each and every one of us.  

  If it turns out that the past truly was the end of The Good Old Days, that would be a disgrace for all of us!  

I LEARNED EARLY ON THAT...

AT THE HEART OF EVERY STORY there is a candid fact or two. A body lies on a street.  It can be measured and weighed and checked for scars, the purse or wallet can provide the facts of identity: a name, an address, an age, the bank, the number of the driver's license.  Wives and husbands and lovers will speak about the dead and add a few more small facts about the person's life and death.  But the best detectives also know that the facts don't always reveal the truth, certainly about an entity as complicated as we human beings.  The facts don't reveal the record of the dead person's final thoughts, dreams, desires, confusions or ambiguities.  They  are unable to reveal or explain the meaning of that life.  Things, as the philosopher said, ain't always what they seem to be.  Nor are people.  

 A writer can prepare well, listen carefully, and, thanks to modern technology, record what they hear with absolute fidelity.  But human beings lie.  Cops lie.  Lawyers lie.  Actors lie.  Victims lie. That is why many writers turn to writing fiction; to get at the truth beyond the facts, about themselves and others.  If a writer sticks around long enough, if they see enough human beings in trouble, they learn that the guilty are sometimes innocent and the innocent probably have an angle.  

 In fiction as well as non-fiction, the trick is to see the world as a skeptic, not a cynic, while allowing for the feeble possibility of human decency to somehow seep in; and every writer learns quickly that for one kind of story, simple declarative sentences, as blunt as axes, are best; for others, it is necessary to use longer lines, more complicated rhythms and that the style itself is a form of comment or explanation.

 By now, you may be asking yourself, "Why is he writing this?" And the answer is quite simple: "To attempt to understand why I keep on hearing the music of the written word."  In a way, everything I have ever put down on paper make up a kind of public diary, a record of where I was and what I saw and who I met along the way.  

 In a meandering and sometimes unplanned way, they're about one man grappling with the meaning of the public events of his time: humorous events and betrayals, large triumphs and small stupidities; along with the Civil Rights marches of youth and baseball of even younger days, of being informed by the writings of Faulkner and Twain and the music of jazz and of the blues and gaining knowledge of the history of ancient Egypt and of the Mongols along the way; all done in order to gain and embrace those general qualities that Ernest Hemingway once said should be present in all good writing: "the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was."