Still Don't Have a Good Reason to Go to the Polls This November?

Well, I can think of plenty of reasons for voting-age Americans to get out there on 11-4-2014 and cast ballots at neighborhood polling places (or by mail or online if you want to vote prior to November's first Tuesday).

According to an article that appeared online at www.dailykos.com on 9-1-2014, people who aren't interested in getting heard during the upcoming midterm election have roughly 55 billion reasons to get their voices heard.

In this case, I'm talking (and so was the article's author, nicknamed "Echochamberlain") about the $25.308 billion this country's Republicans have spent to undermine Barack Obama's presidency since officially regaining control of the US House on 1-5-2011 and the $30 billion twenty states have walked away from because their governors and legislatures rejected Medicaid expansion rather than getting involved with the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010. 

55.308 billion reasons to go vote on 11-4-2014. 

The $25 billion wasted by John Boehner's House of Representatives could've gone to fund (partially at least) a jobs bill or an infrastructure bill. [After all, all through 2010, Republican candidates and incumbents loudly proclaimed that they wanted to go to (or stay in) Washington, DC to bring jobs back to America. Remember?]

The only jobs today's Washington Republicans are concerned about are THEIR OWN gigs.  

Instead, the $25.308 billion were spent to fight the 2011 increase in the nation's debt ceiling ($1.3 billion), facilitate the 2013 government shutdown (the October shutdown removed about $24 billion from the US economy), and fund periodic hearings on the 9-11-2012 attack on the American consulate in Benghazi, Libya ($7 million spent)...to say nothing of the $350,000 to be spent on the 2014 lawsuit against Obama. [At least, that's the estimate US Rep. Candice S. Miller (R-MI) gave reporters after stating that the law firm Baker Hostetler would represent the House Republicans.] 

As for the $30 billion left behind by those 20 states (Alabama, Alaska, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Mississippi, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wisconsin, and Wyoming): The money was supposed to expand health coverage to low-income citizens through the Medicaid program. 

Instead, the governors and/or state legislators decided they didn't mind seeing increased spending on uninsured citizens' unpaid medical bills. 

The excuse most often given by those states' lawmakers and by their spokespeople is: "It'll ruin our state's budget to expand Medicaid." 

Bull droppings! Expanding Medicaid takes up about 1% of a state's budget, and that's what a December 2013 report by the Commonwealth Fund said.

Texas alone walked away from $9.2 billion because Gov. Rick Perry wouldn't expand Medicaid. Florida's out $5 billion on account of Gov. Rick Scott making the same decision. 

And when Gov. Pat McCrory said "NO!" to expanding Medicaid, he pushed aside the $2.6 billion North Carolina would've received from the US government.

Here in Nebraska, Gov. Dave Heinemann thought having a new airplane for the Cornhusker State was a better deal than expanding Medicaid for just 41,000 Nebraskans. 

Result: Nebraska can't get $738 million in Federal money.

How much longer do we have to PUT UP with this?

When answering opinion polls, millions of Americans- majorities, at that- proudly talk about how they're for adding jobs, repairing America's infrastructure, making our schools more effective, tightening this country's immigration laws, making its gun-control laws more effective, and making the Affordable Care Act stronger instead of repealing it. 

Yet those millions either vote against their own best interests or refuse to go to their neighborhood polling places at all...and can't understand that a midterm election is just as important as any other kind of election.  

Some people even use gerrymandering as an excuse for deciding to watch the election results on TV rather than being a part of those results. 

You still feel you don't have a good reason to vote on 11-4-2014?

Try this on for size: Millions of Americans throughout our history have put their lives on the line- and many have DIED- to not only keep this country on the map, but also to protect and even expand the right to vote.

They've done it not only at places like Bunker Hill and Chateau-Thierry and Iwo Jima and Pork Chop Hill and Hamburger Hill and Baghdad; they've done it at places such as Seneca Falls and Birmingham and Selma.

When we refuse to vote ("I don't like either candidate!"), we thumb our noses at all the people who fought to protect and expand the right to vote. And when we give in to Republican efforts to make it harder for people to cast a ballot, we thumb our noses at the people who fought to make sure everybody eligible to vote can do so.

We've got absolutely NO excuses...especially with this Republican-controlled House, a House whose contempt for America's rank-and-file citizens is some kind of legendary.

You say you don't like where America's going?

Want to make it better?

LET'S GET UP OFF OUR HIND ENDS AND VOTE ON 11-4-2014!!

  

Is This What You Want, America?

Funny...I remember being told that the United States entered World War 2, sent troops to Korea, and put soldiers in Vietnam- to say nothing of deploying fighting men and fighting women in Iraq and Afghanistan- to stop totalitarianism.

I didn't think totalitarianism (in one degree or another) would get a foothold, let alone thrive in too many places, on these shores.

It's been 22 days now since 18-year-old high-school graduate Michael Brown was shot and killed in his home town of Ferguson, MO, by one of that city's police officers, Darren Wilson.

Several nights of tense protests ensued after Wilson and his fellow Ferguson Police officers gave conflicting reports about the events that led to Brown's killing; the protests came about, too, because of mounting frustration over the lack of detailed information made available to the general public about just what took place to cause Wilson to fire those six bullets.

Within a couple of days of the death of Brown, armored trucks and other military hardware were seen in the streets of Ferguson.

Not Kiev, Ukraine. Ferguson, MO, USA. 

To top it all off, that same police department fired tear gas (8-13-2014) at an Al Jazeera America TV crew to prevent that crew from taping coverage of the protests taking place in this St. Louis suburb. 

And two other reporters- The Huffington Post's Ryan Reilly and The Washington Post's Wesley Lowery- were detained by another FPD officer at a local McDonald's the very night the Al Jazeera America crew faced tear gas. 

It didn't make one bit of difference that Lowery, Reilly, and the crew from Al Jazeera America were just doing their jobs. 

Things would've been much worse if Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon hadn't called on Capt. Ron Johnson of the Missouri State Patrol to take over the policing of Ferguson from the St. Louis County forces and the Ferguson Police. (Johnson- a man from the St. Louis area- even walked with the protesters the night he took over.)

Yes, at the core of it all was the robbery of a convenience store in Ferguson. And yes, the FPD named Brown as a suspect. 

It's also true that Brown was unarmed and had no criminal record coming into 8-9-2014...and that the initial contact between the 28-year-old Wilson (a six-year FPD veteran) and the 18-year-old Brown had nothing to do with the robbery...a theft that took place ten minutes before the killing.  

Wasn't it enough for Darren Wilson to just take Michael Brown to the police station?

Since when did being suspected of robbery warrant death to the suspect...an unarmed suspect at that?   

I mean, James Holmes got treated better by police. 

Me, I don't know about how the same Aurora, CO police responsible for catching Holmes would've treated the Ferguson protesters.

But I do know I've read where, in the past, Ferguson's Finest (?) have harassed school children...including one who was just going to the mailbox of the child's own home. 

And if you're walking down one of Ferguson's thoroughfares, even if it's the one you live on, chances are one of Ferguson's Finest (?) will stop you...just for the hell of it.

I've been thinking that that city of 21,135 (2012 estimate) doesn't have a police department.

It's got a Gestapo.  

And this country's got too many cities where, depending on what you look like, you'd just better not be caught walking down this or that street- even if it's the street where you live and you're trying to get home.  

I recently read online about a man from St. Paul, MN, who was waiting at a shelter over by the First National Bank Building there. He was waiting on his children...but that didn't stop a bank employee from calling the police on him and getting him arrested. (Supposedly, it was his dreadlocks...and, oh, yes, his skin color.)  

If you're an American and you happen to stumble onto this post, you might want to ask yourself if the city you live in, if it isn't Ferguson itself, is a Ferguson-to-be...or has already had a Fergusonlike incident in recent years.

There's just no reason for a SWAT team to invade a rather peaceful protest. And there's no excuse for a police officer to let his dog desecrate that makeshift memorial (flowers and candles) at the spot where Brown died- the spot where Brown lay for four hours without medical attention.

48 of Ferguson's 53 officers are White...in a city where two out of every three residents are Black.

Are you adding this all up? 

Despite US Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) calling for an end to the militarization of America's police departments, many of Paul's fellow Republicans keep saying we shouldn't continue to shine the Big Light on Ferguson. They're also angry over efforts to get more Fergusonites to get out to their neighborhood polling places...especially on 11-4-2014.  

You know what, Republicans? That's YOUR tough luck!

If you're going to continue to talk glowingly and eloquently about freedom, then you've got absolutely no business calling for the transformation of "the country whose very name means freedom" into a police state.

I applaud those Fergusonites who now are calling for an end to their city's record as an Information-Age East Berlin.  

How about you? 

(By the way...sources for information for this post included Wikipedia and www.washingtonpost.com.)

Legends

Yesterday afternoon, I made it out to the Rose Blumkin Performing Arts Center (20th and Farnam Sts., Omaha, NE 68102) to check out the River City Theatre Organ Society's (a club I joined in 1984, the year it celebrated its first birthday) annual extravaganza.

Darn right it was a humdinger!

The featured artist was Portland, OR native- and theatre organ legend- Jonas Nordwall. 

Right from the start of the concert, Jonas showed the style that's enabled him to perform on four continents (North America, Asia, Australia, and Europe). It's a style where he's equally adept at both classical playing and pop music.

The outing was titled "A Sentimental Musical Journey," and Jonas started out with (what else?) "Sentimental Journey."

Right after that, he told the Rose Theater's audience (the place was 90% full) that a sentimental musical journey doesn't always have to be confined to the songs of the 1930s and 1940s...then he went out and proved his point by going back to the venue's three-manual, 21-rank Wurlitzer pipe organ (built in 1927) to fire up three tunes that were popular in the 1960s: "Spanish Flea," by Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass; "Unchained Melody," which was popularized in the 1950s by Roy Hamilton, Al Hibbler, and bandleader Les Baxter (in separate recordings) before the Righteous Brothers got hold of it a decade later; and Frankie Valli's first smash as a solo artist, "Can't Take My Eyes Off You." 

Jonas didn't leave the 1950s behind, covering that decade with Erroll Garner's most famous tune, "Misty." And the man with thirty highly-acclaimed recordings to his credit jumped into the 1980s by stringing together four numbers from "Les Miserables," including "Bring Him Home" and the one that made a name out of Susan Boyle, "I Dreamed a Dream."  

Just YOU try to tell someone it's impossible to feel sentimental about the Carter-Reagan-Bush the Elder years.  

Jonas showed his classical side by playing Manuel de Falla's "Ritual Fire Dance," and to top off the first half of the extravaganza, our featured artist cued a 1929 silent movie, "Big Business." (In it, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy tried to sell James Finlayson a Christmas tree. And no, Stan and Ollie weren't successful.)

Jonas Nordwall's got the kind of music you can close your eyes and really visualize. 

Well, I like to think so!

The organist for Rip City's First United Methodist Church came back out for the second half of the show by knocking out "Pietro's Return," a 1913 march by accordion legend Pietro Deiro. Jonas- who took up the squeezebox at the age of four- then shared an anecdote about Pietro's brother Guido...who happened to be married for a time to Mae West. (That's right...THAT Mae West!)  

Then Jonas turned the show over to another accordion legend...Omaha's very own Johnny Ray Gomez.

Jonas actually turned it over to a two-man band, for it was Johnny Ray and his namesake son, keyboardist Johnny Ray Gomez IV.

Johnny Ray- actually Johnny Ray III- teamed up with Johnny Ray the Younger to deliver a lighthearted, freewheeling, rollicking set that started out with a mashup of "12th Street Rag" and "The Glow Worm." The Two Gomezes then fused together "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and "Only You (and You Alone)," two of the biggest hits recorded by the Platters...the singing group Johnny Ray IV served as music director/pianist during the second half of the 1980s before he came back to Nebraska to start his own music production company, OnTrack, Inc.

Johnny Ray the Elder then stated: "We haven't done a polka."

And that was all the more reason for the Two Johnny Rays to switch the music to the durable "Just Because."

JRG IV got the spotlight next as he and his dad eased on into Floyd Cramer's "Last Date," followed by JRG III musically paying tribute to those veterans (and veterans' spouses) who'd made it to the Rose.

Their last tune together was Vangelis' "Chariots of Fire," featuring the keyboard work of IV.

After that, I was hoping that the three men would take the next tune(s).

Didn't happen yet...for Jonas went back to the Wurlitzer and covered the next two numbers by himself: "My Way" and "The Stars and Stripes Forever," the former a tribute to Joyce Markworth, the RCTOS member (and club president Bob's wife) who unexpectedly passed away this past March. 

The two numbers proved to be enough to merit Jonas a well-deserved standing ovation...and that ovation proved to be enough to lead Jonas and the Two Johnny Rays to, at last, team up...for "Sweet Georgia Brown."  

Well, that did it...RCTOS really nailed it. Made those hundred of people at the Rose happy...happy to be witness to three legends.

It All Started with These...

You're looking at the first two records I ever owned in my life. 

The bad news is: I don't have the original 45-RPM singles anymore.

But the good news is this: I went on to find the Four Tops' "Baby I Need Your Loving" and Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" on albums.

It was fifty years ago this month that I started collecting records (with Dad's and Mom's financial help, of course...heck, I was eight-going-on-nine years of age!). 

The real impetus for launching a personal record collection was still going some kind of strong in August 1964...six months after that impetus originally took hold here in America.

That's right...just as Elvis Presley's entry onto the Billboard pop chart in March 1956 ended up causing a boom in the record industry (and transforming everything else), so the Beatles' arrival on that same chart in January 1964 (and- the absolute clincher- their live appearance on TV's The Ed Sullivan Show on 2-9-1964) caused an even longer-lasting boom in the record business (and transformed everything else).

Started collecting records at a time when, to tell the truth, I was actually away from home...and not of my own choosing.

Where I was forced to stay, I heard the records that some of the other children at that same facility had bought and were playing. (Once a week or so, we'd go into the rec room down in the basement and stack that portable record player with 45s; once in a while, an album would get heard...and, more often than not, the LP was "Meet the Beatles!")

At that time, music was on many Americans' minds...especially the minds of the youngest citizens. If it wasn't the Fab Four, it was the Dave Clark Five or the Searchers or Gerry and the Pacemakers or Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas or Manfred Mann or Herman's Hermits or the Animals...to say nothing of the Rolling Stones.

Or it was some of the acts those British bands learned from...like the Miracles and the Contours and the Supremes and the Temptations and Martha and the Vandellas and the Four Tops (to say nothing of Chuck Berry, who'd found his way back on Billboard's charts at that very moment). 

Besides those rec-room moments, the radio was always playing (when the TV wasn't on), and it was always tuned to a Top 40 station...in this case, KWWL in Waterloo, IA. (I lived in Eastern Iowa from January 1964 to June 1967.)

And starting my own record collection helped make that three-and-a-half year period easier to take. 

Me, I didn't want to stop at Motown...or at any one genre of music.

And so, the next three singles I happened upon are now the oldest surviving 45-RPM releases I own: "Come a Little Bit Closer" by Jay and the Americans, "Selfish One" by Jackie Ross, and "Michael," Trini Lopez' remake of the Highwaymen's 1961 Number One smash.  

Anyway, I started buying albums in mid-1967 while continuing to purchase 45s (by then, I was receiving an allowance); over the next fifteen years, my collection grew, slowly-but-steadily.

By 1982, the cache exploded.

It was all because I found out about Kanesville Kollectibles (530 S. 4th St., Council Bluffs, IA), the biggest used record-tape-CD store in the Hawkeye State.

I got to the point where I'd go shop at Kanesville once a month. (Now I'm lucky to stop in twice or three times a year.)

Thanks to Kanesville Kollectibles and the chance to go to record shows every year since 1984, I now own roughly 2,000 records, tapes, and CDs. 

And since 2007, I've been working on digitizing these records and tapes, burning them onto a hard drive and converting the vinyl to compact discs. What's more, thanks to online music services like Rhapsody and eMusic, the computer I'm using to type this post now has about 5,000 items...and the items have been saved to a flash drive.  

One thing about this fifty-year (and counting) journey: This is one addiction I'm proud to have.

I'm Jim Boston, and thanks for reading this blog!

Dear Speaker Boehner:

I'm furious with you. I'm just going to come right out and say it.

The night of 1-20-2009, you and Mitch McConnell got together and called a meeting of your fellow Washington Republicans to get them NOT to work with the man who'd just gotten through raising his right hand and repeating after John Roberts.

You know who I'm talking about.  

And, not long after his- Barack Obama's- signature legislation became law, and it was time for the employee mandate to kick in, you begged him to delay it a year.  

AND NOW YOU WANT TO SUE THE PRESIDENT BECAUSE HE WENT AHEAD AND DELAYED THE AFFORDABLE CARE ACT'S EMPLOYEE MANDATE!!  

You and your fellow Republicans have been after this man right from the start. McConnell couldn't get his wish to turn Obama into a one-term chief executive, so now you and your House Republicans are trying this. 

Hmph.

This stunt wouldn't even take place if you and your fellow Elephants had resolved to take care of the business America's citizens- not America's 500 largest corporations- had asked you and other politicians to work on.

People want to see this country's minimum wage increased. They want to see this country's borders secured. They want Americans of both genders to realize complete access to health-care products and services. Americans want better, more effective gun-control laws. They also want this nation's infrastructure repaired.

Mr. Boehner, your very district is one of way too many with bridges on the brink of collapsing.

AND YOU DON'T EVEN CARE!!!  

Matter of fact, the ONLY thing you and the other Washington GOPers care about is kicking the first non-Caucasian American to run this country's government out of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

You'd do the same thing to Jim Clyburn or Cory Booker or Sheila Jackson Lee or Maxine Waters or Bobby Rush...let alone to Bill Cosby or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey. 

I remember when Steve King was cracking on some Mexican children and talking about how their thighs supposedly are "as big as cantaloupes," the better to hide illegal drugs.

I was hoping you'd get up the courage to reprimand this bigot from Kiron, IA.

YOU DIDN'T!!  

In fact, I feel you're very proud of the extremists in your party. 

After all, these extremists transformed you from House Republican leader into the Speaker of the House.

Mr. Boehner, I wish you'd find courage before you wrap up your tenure as a US representative from Ohio, let alone House Speaker.

And I wish SOMEONE in Cincinnati or its Ohio suburbs would get the courage to challenge you.  

Throw away your cowardice and start getting your fellow House Republicans to vote on the things rank-and-file Americans are worried about.

You and your fellow Republicans are the biggest threats to American democracy today. 

And it's all because you REFUSE to offer real solutions to get the country back on its feet. All you offer is opposition to any efforts to get the United States really humming again.

And the rest of the world can see that!  

Do you really care?

Sincerely, Jim Boston

The Tenth Time Around!

Well...we did it.

On Sunday, 7-13-2014, at Omaha's First Central Congregational United Church of Christ, the Great Plains Ragtime Society staged the tenth version of an event called the Ragtime to Riches Festival.  

Okay...we didn't completely fill up the church's Memorial Hall. But we did get more of an audience this time around than in 2013.

And right from the time the doors opened (1:00 PM Central time), the place was jumpin'.

The first event right after the doors of First Central's Memorial Hall open is an open-piano session.

So glad someone else got it going.

And, at this year's open-piano hour, Brent Watkins (he competed in the early 2000s at the World Championship Old-Time Piano Playing Contest and Festival, then went on to coproduce the first documentary about the event) got the ball rolling on one of the two pianos at Memorial Hall. (Brent did "Maple Leaf Rag" on the hall's 1920s Mason & Hamlin grand; eventually, he tried the other piano...a 1900s-or-so Anderson & Newton upright.)

I'm glad Brent went up to bat first, because I was still nervous about the second R to R event...something I was still furiously preparing for. 

People started coming in while the man from Iowa City (by way of Cedar Rapids, IA) continued to knock out rags. And by 2:00 PM, we got our biggest audience of this year's festival.

And those thirteen people watched me switch between contemporaneous speaking, the use of note cards, and a few turns on that A&N upright...as I delivered a workshop about how Tin Pan Alley sounded during the 1900-1909 period.   

The main message I tried to get across was that, when the 20th Century started to kick in, America's music publishing industry started to grow and grow and grow...not just physically, but also in influence, what with more and more people coming over from other lands to get in on the bounty America had to offer. (And in many cases, the newcomers of the early 20th Century met with real resistance, too...just like the newcomers right here in the early 21st Century.)  

Plus: The resistance of 100-110 years ago showed up in lots of Tin Pan Alley songs. 

And...did I mention that Broadway was starting to become an entertainment force at that very moment, thanks to composers like George M. Cohan? 

Originally, this workshop was to stop at 1919...but to cover nineteen years in sixty minutes felt more like a fly-by overview. (Even so, chopping off the 1910s turned the presentation into a drive-by summary. But the crowd- including an official from the Nebraska Department of Education, John Sieler- liked it.)  

They liked it even more when Faye Ballard took to the stage.

The OTPP contest coordinator/collegiate office manager from Champaign, IL delivered a concert that doubled as Ragtime 101. In her first Ragtime to Riches, Faye turned in a set that emphasized the music of ragtime's Big Three (that's right- Scott Joplin, James Scott, and Joseph Lamb). 

And for good measure, this star of "The Entertainers" (the movie Brent coproduced) threw in Zez Confrey's "Dizzy Fingers," Jelly Roll Morton's "Grandpa's Spell," and three of her signature numbers: "Sailin' Away on the Henry Clay," "Mack the Knife," and "It Had to Be You."  (Maybe you've seen Faye's version of "Mack the Knife" on YouTube.) 

When Faye's 14-tune concert wrapped up, we showed...that's right, we showed "The Entertainers."

Now if eight of those thirteen people had stuck around to see the film...they would've loved it, too.

At the end of each showing of the now two-year-old documentary, there's a question-and-answer session. Usually, Nick Holle (he was here in Omaha for this year's R to R) conducts it; sometimes, his fellow "Entertainers" codirector, Michael Zimmer, does the honors (which was the case when the movie was shown in San Diego on 3-14-2014). And the rest of the time, Michael and Nick team up to field audience questions.  

This time, the Q-and-A involved an audience of one: A local pianist named Kevin Robinson. (Check out his "Play Me, I'm Yours" videos on www.youtube.com.) 

Still, this Q-and-A session was no less effective than previous ones. (And I remember when Redd Foxx talked about being able to entertain a one-person audience!)  

Well, another open-piano session took place (with Faye and Brent taking to both pianos); after that, Nick, Brent, Faye, and I ate dinner (we got take-out food from a neighborhood restaurant called Crescent Moon Ale House; it's at 3578 Farnam St., 68131).

Then, at 7:30 PM, it was time for the last event of the 2014 Ragtime to Riches get-together.

Last year, I built my own concert around the memory of some of the big-name newsmakers and big-name celebrities who passed away in 2012, focusing on the Number One recording on the day this or that personality came into the world. (For instance, "For Me and My Gal," recorded by the duo of Van & Schenck, hit the top spot on the pop charts on 7-17-1917...the very day Phyllis Diller was born. And I even ragged up "So Much in Love," the leading pop hit on the Billboard charts on 8-9-1963...Whitney Houston's birthdate.)

For 2014, since this year's R to R would be the tenth one, I wanted to call up tunes whose titles had a T, an E, and an N...in that order.

As a result, the fans who hung around got to hear numbers like "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight," "Listen to the Mockingbird," "After You've Gone," and "Hardhearted Hannah." There was also a 1952 song from composers Johnny Lange and Hy Heath, "There'll Be No New Tunes on This Old Piano." (Tennessee Ernie Ford put it on his 1962 album, "Here Comes the Mississippi Showboat." And I even saw him sing it on his old TV show when I was little.)

Two rags were in there, too: "The Entertainer" and something I wrote in 2001 (on an old piano, of course): "Stompin' at the Children's Museum." 

I'd never performed my own rags at any R to R before...and I was relieved to find out the audience liked my ode to the nine years (1997-2006) I spent not only banging the 88s at the Omaha Children's Museum, but watching the children themselves (and some adults) show off their own skills on the old upright.

Some of Faye's (and some of my) offerings at the festival made it onto YouTube. (Just type in "Ragtime to Riches Festival.")  

Man, we had a ball at R to R 10.0, and we raised $140 for the Great Plains Ragtime Society.

Don't know how the eleventh annual festival will shape up...but I do know this:

I hope you'll be able to check out next year's Omaha/Council Bluffs/Bellevue ragtime outing. We think you'll have a ball, too.  

We're Much the Better for It

It happened fifty years ago tonight.

A man who spent his first 26 years in Washington (beginning in 1937) sticking up for Jim Crow had a change of heart...and stuck his neck out for America.

Not his own political legacy. Not his Democratic Party.

Lyndon Baines Johnson stuck his neck out for his country when, on 7-2-1964, he signed into law the first really meaningful civil rights legislation in this country's history. 

It happened thirteen months after Johnson's predecessor and old boss (that's right- John Fitzgerald Kennedy) made the initial pitch to get this bill put together and put before Congress. And to even make that pitch required Kennedy to show his own change of heart.

On 1-20-1961, JFK gave one of the most famous and most memorable inaugural addresses in American annals. In it, the youngest chief executive ever elected called for the United States to spread democracy all over the globe. 

Too bad he didn't call for the spread of democracy throughout these fifty states. 

Yeah, I know...if Kennedy had mentioned just one domestic issue during his inaugural speech (including That One), those Southern Democrats in the Senate [like Georgia's Richard Russell, South Carolina's Strom Thurmond (that's right- Thurmond was still a Donkey back then), and the Mississippi duo of John Stennis and James Eastland] would've torn the new president to pieces. 

Maybe at the Inaugural Ball.  

It took lots of events- before and after JFK got in at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue- before he could understand that a country whose name supposedly means freedom and wants to expand it all over the planet ought to ensure freedom for all its citizens.  

That understanding was probably one of the reasons Lee Harvey Oswald ended the presidency of a man born in Brookline, MA 1,036 days after that term of office began.  

And so, from the time LBJ raised his right hand, he decided to make the passage of the Civil Rights Act a top priority. 

The man from near Stonewall, TX was going to finish JFK's unfinished business.  

To do all that, Johnson had to pull out all the tricks that served him in good stead as the Senate Democratic leader (LBJ was minority leader from 1953-1955, then majority leader from 1955-1961). He knew what the US senators he left behind when he joined Kennedy's administration wanted...and he knew how to appeal to that.

Yes, it got coarse...but Johnson got it done.

And when it was all over, 27 of the 34 Senate Republicans voted for the Civil Rights Act. Meanwhile, 46 of the 66 Democrats then in this country's Senate went all in.  

With the Voting Rights Act passing in 1965 and the Fair Housing Act getting signed into law three years later, America began to open up...at long last.

And that even with so many Democrats who didn't want the new legislation to get on the books switching over to the GOP.

Thurmond was one of the defectors...and he helped shape the current Republican tone. (That's right...that angry, blustery, obstructionist tone that keeps making headlines.)

What today's Republicans- the ones the 1948 Dixiecrat presidential nominee left behind when he passed away in 2003- don't accept and don't understand is this:

A nation works best when ALL its citizens get to have their say...whether it's at a polling place during an election or someplace else where people can get their opinions noticed. 

I'm glad the Civil Rights Act of 1964 got the ball rolling.