Democracy and the Zen of Voting

So you’re sick of the whole political process? A pity about you! The real question is – are you going to vote?

I sure as hell am, if only because I don’t want my long-interred grandfather hovering over my bed the night of November 6th.

“People died for your right to cast a vote,” he used to say. “If you hate them all equally, then vote for the most harmless.”

Not bad advice in the current political environment.

Amazingly only 57% of the voting age population exercised this sacred right in the 2008 presidential election but, at least, that trumped the 49% of 1996. The highest modern turnout was in 1960, not coincidentally the year of the first televised debate, when 63% chose between Jack Kennedy and Richard Nixon.

The greatest turnout was a staggering 81% in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln defeated Douglas, Breckenridge and Bell. But as my granny would say, “Sure where would you get another Lincoln?”

Nor does the future look so promising. Despite all the ballyhoo in 2008 when 18-24 year olds were supposed to have swamped the polls, only 49% of those eligible actually cast a vote, compared to 47% in 2004.

They did, however, vote in large numbers for Barack Obama which might not augur well for the president since he’s generating much less enthusiasm among Generation Y of late. Of course, if voting could be done by text or tweet Gov. Romney might as well stay home in San Diego and design a couple of new garage elevators.

On the face of it adapting social media tools to vote might seem like a crazy idea but democracy is ever evolving: the 1860 election was one of the first where ownership of property wasn’t an essential qualification for voting.

Women didn’t even get a vote until 1920; while there have been repeated attempts of late to deny the poor and uneducated the right to vote - all in the name of protection against voter fraud. If only people were lining up to vote twice – hardly the case since voting once seems to be beyond so many Americans.

Then again, democracy is about much more than just having a vote. To stay healthy and vibrant it should also provide an avenue for economic advancement. With the rich getting richer the great American middle class is being squeezed ever tighter. The figures say it all: 1% of the population now owns over 40% of the country’s wealth compared to the 33% they controlled in 1987.

Is there a solution? Sure, vote for candidates eager to change the tax code’s preferential treatment of income from investments – that would help level the economic playing field. Such candidates, however, tend to be hard to identify in election years when they’re busy shaking down well-heeled donors.

Oh my, democracy can be exhausting – especially in a sound-bite age where you can pop on your television and get all the news that’s fit to yell in tasty little morsels.

Voting against candidates who wish to scrap the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act would be a shot in the arm for both democracy and economic equilibrium. This pesky piece of legislation gives nightmares to those in the financial industry who almost drove the country into the ground four years ago – and will do so again unless stringently regulated.

The greatest threat to US economic democracy, however, may have already arrived in the form of High Frequency Trading (HFT). Upwards of 60% of all transactions on the US stock markets are now being made by unregulated HFT cowboys who trade stocks amongst themselves at warp speed and reap billions annually.

Nice work if you can get it, says you! Unfortunately, your 401(k), pension funds and savings are being buffeted by this ongoing gale-force financial onslaught. Can a crisis of major proportions be far away?

Democracy must grapple with such issues on a daily basis. That’s why it’s so important that you vote, especially for the odd visionary who might help the system adapt so that it can deal with the many obvious threats and, just as importantly, those we’ve yet to imagine.

Judy Blue Eyes

Stephen Stills called her Judy Blue Eyes. The color is still vivid but the first thing you notice is the fierce intelligence that informs those eyes.

There’s a wariness too, common to those who have spent long years in the public eye. But that dissipates at the first mention of her father, Charles Collins, a legendary radio host in Denver where Judy spent much of her formative years.

Chuck Collins was a larger than life figure – he never let the fact that he was blind hold him back from anything, including, apparently, driving a car. However, it was his identification with his Irish roots and his love of music that was to give Ms. Collins a foundation that would stand to her through a vaunted career.

As likely to burst into song around the house as in the radio studio, he gave her Danny Boy, Kerry Dancers and countless other ballads – all of them a link to a homeland he never visited though its soul was ever restless within him.

He provided her with the DNA of the song that would introduce me to her back in McCullough Pigott’s music store in Dublin. In those days you could take a private listen in a booth before buying an album.

The voice that emerged from the muffled speakers was clear and cool as a mountain stream flush with melted snow. Her delivery may have been calm and controlled but there was no doubting the deep well of feeling from which it sprang.

My father always promised us that we would live in France
We’d go boating on the Seine and I would learn to dance
We lived in Ohio then, he worked in the mines
On his dreams like boats we knew we would sail in time…

Amazingly it was only the fourth song she ever wrote. Pain, regret, hope, optimism, and many other high and low water marks of the human condition surfaced in those magical five minutes.

Her father never heard it. She finished it four days before his death. She didn’t make a big deal of this; in a life of tumult and creativity such things happen. Mark them and move on, for as much as she’s experienced, there’s always a new song to write, a new performance to be given.

That’s why the Irish American Writers & Artists bestowed the fourth annual Eugene O’Neill Lifetime Achievement Award on Judy Collins on October 15. It was given as much in recognition of the promise that lies ahead as for the trailblazing life of achievement she’s led.

As befits the honoree of an organization set up to pursue progressive goals shortly before the 2008 Presidential election, Judy Collins has long stood for civil rights and an ongoing insistence that every woman, man and child on this planet deserves to be treated with human dignity.

Perhaps her finest quality is her generosity to other artists – despite being a master songwriter she has never stopped championing the talents of Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Jacques Brel, Randy Newman and perhaps, most famously, Leonard Cohen.

Had she not persuaded a reluctant Mr. Cohen to perform for the first time at Town Hall in 1967 and then insisted that he return after he fled the spotlight with an extreme bout of stage fright, we would all have been the poorer.

But that’s Judy Collins for you. The tales of her intuitive kindness are legendary. No doubt her friend, Tom Paxton, will expound on this and others of her sterling qualities on Monday night. Or he could just play us her version of his classic, The Last Thing On My Mind.

Dry-eyed and cool as a prairie winter she breathes new life into this tale of regret and sends the turbulent years reeling away. At such moments you can trace the graceful woman back to the girl in the Colorado kitchen listening to her Irish father sing the songs of a country he never set foot in but knew so well.

Here We Go Again

Well, we’ve hit the final furlong and, as a Mets fan, I ain’t talking baseball! We’ve entered the rundown for the Presidential, and just as importantly, the congressional elections.

I’ve been keeping my powder dry, partly because of the degeneration of the race into a money-grubbing disgrace, but also on account of the abject failure of Gov. Romney to come up with any credible economic platform. His old company, Bain Capital, wouldn’t give his national business plan a second look.

According to a friend none of that matters. She feels that this election will be settled on social matters – that women will think long and hard before handing over power to a party that’s being fueled by a misogynist Christian Right.

I wonder? Personally, I think that two numbers will decide the election – should the national average for gas remain under $4 a gallon and the Dow above 13,000, President Obama will be entertaining Malia’s high school boyfriends in the White House over the next four years.

Awful though it may seem, Americans have become somewhat inured to the 8% unemployment figure. Not that they’re being heartless but most are just plain relieved that they’re not on the bread line themselves.

If the unemployed were to feel that they would get a better deal under Gov. Romney, then the president would soon be updating his resume; but given some of his recent “victim” statements one gathers the Republican candidate is not a fan of unemployment insurance.

Gov. Romney talks about creating 12 million jobs. Where did he get the figure from – the 12 apostles? Might as well have said 47 million and given Black 47 the credit.

He’s obviously pulling figures from a hat – a common Republican economic practice ever since President Bush, in his wisdom, cut taxes while fighting two wars.

Now despite his bellicose tirades about Iran, Gov. Romney is hardly crazy enough to bomb the ayatollahs, yet he’s reciting the same old failed Bush economic cant – lower taxes and abolish regulations.

Oddly enough, over the last 25 years economic growth has closely followed tax increases, while there’s been a corresponding economic decline in the wake of tax cuts. Go figure!

Amazingly, bad as things have been, more private sector jobs have been created in the three plus years of the Obama regime than in either term of the George W. Bush administration. And yet we’re being asked to place our faith in Gov. Romney, a man who hails from the world of venture capitalism where the lure of profit usually trumps any thought of job creation.

As for his running mate, I wonder if he’s using a pseudonym? I’ve known many Ryans and, to a person, they all call it as they see it. The gentleman from Janesville, WI has no problem doing the calling, but is either not very good at arithmetic or is a born optimist.

He wishes to redraw income taxes into two brackets 25% and 10% and slash corporate taxes. This would, of course, knock the bottom out of government revenues; quite conveniently, he neglects to mention the spending cuts necessary to make up the shortfall.

The most obvious cut is the mortgage-interest deduction. Try explaining that to homeowners, not to mention that it could really put the boot into a housing market that is finally showing signs of revival. No wonder the Republican ticket tiptoes through the tulips whenever this sensitive subject is broached.

What else could be pared down? Defense, hell no! And have all those poor arms contractors go belly-up? It’s far more likely that infrastructure renewal, education, medical and scientific research would get a severe haircut; whereas investment in each of these sectors is far more likely to spur economic growth than tax cuts. So where does that leave us?

One could quote Democratic president, William Jefferson Clinton and complain of Gov. Romney’s grasp of basic arithmetic, but in the interests of bipartisanship, I defer to that most revered Republican president, Ronald Wilson Reagan, and instead declaim, “there you go again!”

Working Class Hero

One can always tell the economic, if not spiritual, health of Ireland by the regard in which James Connolly is held.

Had he sprung from his quicklimed grave during the Celtic Tiger he would barely have raised an eyebrow. In the current economic malaise, however, his policies and warnings have been gaining renewed traction.

American Labor has no such influential theoretician, even giants the like of Big Bill Haywood and Mother Jones barely merit footnotes nowadays. Indeed, if Americans even think of labor leaders, Jimmy Hoffa is probably the first to spring to mind.

Connolly continues to have influence because of his prescience. Over 100 years ago he warned of the threat international big business would pose to the financial wellbeing of workers and their families. Between outsourcing, union busting, and a well-financed media assault, oh Mr. Connolly, how right you were!

One has only to look at that darling of corporate America, Apple Inc. On the face of it, I’m an admirer. I’m typing this column on a Mac Book Pro, my iPhone is within grasp; chances are, if Apple got into the booze business, I’d probably jettison my beloved Sierra Nevada for iPaleAle.

And yet this titan of innovation that turned a profit of $26 billion last year pays its iGenius staff just over 11 bucks an hour. Why? Because it doesn’t allow unionization! In fact store managers undergo “union awareness” training.

It seems those awfully outdated institutions, labor unions, tend to put a dent in corporate profits with such petty demands as a decent living wage. Unions even go so far as to frown on exporting jobs to Chinese sweatshops.

Come to think of it, Apple’s investors could use a union of their own since this fabulously profitable company has only paid one dividend in the last 17 years. Talk about corporate dictatorship!

Now there is no denying that in the past unions have made bull-headed calls that have led to the closure of businesses; but this has hardly been the case of late. Even the mighty UAW compromised and settled for an entry-level $14 per hour last year - hardly a wage that promises a white picket fence, let alone a house within.

Add to that the fact that jobs in the $12-$21 per hour class are fast disappearing and being replaced by those in the $7-11 field. You will be happy to learn that jobs in the $22-50 per hour stratum are holding steady.

This trend will eventually lead to a vast underclass with little hope of social mobility; relatively speaking, the same situation that James Connolly faced a century ago. My, oh my, what progress we’ve made.

To make matters worse most of this new peon class has little or no representation and thus barely any political clout. Of course, there is the possibility that through hard work some can leapfrog to the $20 plus per hour club. However, because of inequality of educational opportunity that chasm is increasingly hard to bridge.

Labor and professional unions are the only hope now – not only for a decent wage but for any kind of job security. Look around you! Someone you know has been afraid to ask for a raise of late even as their standard of living is plummeting in this era of zooming corporate profits.

With a few exceptions corporate loyalty, a.k.a. job security is now a joke. In fact, the recent recession has provided a smoke screen that allows corporations to make a naked grab for power; this has led to a re-alignment in the balance between board room/management and both white/blue-collar workers.

Not only has boardroom/management won the battle of public perception – unions are now seen as the root of the problem rather than as an active partner in protecting the rights of workers who want a decent standard of living and an eventual dignified retirement.

It’s time to turn the tide and salute our labor unions rather than to continue vilifying and humiliating them. You may feel you don’t need them now but, chances are, you will in the near future.

Hard Times

Talk about 40 Shades of Grey! History’s tints are legion and encompass every color in the spectrum.

And yet we often speak of the past as though etched in black and white, untouched by humanity’s imperfect fingers, with the result that inconvenient facts and attitudes are often swept aside.

Take the great mid-19th Century migration of Irish to the US. At such a great remove the ultimate triumph seems inevitable. But oh what suffering these despised immigrants endured to gain a foothold on the slippery and unwelcoming “shores of Amerikay.”

Sick, hungry and baffled by this new bustling, indifferent world many were ripped off at shipside by scurrilous agents (often Irish) promising them safe lodgings. Some, indeed, saw more people on their first day in the US than they had encountered in whole lives spent back in their native countryside.

The sights, sounds, expectations and obligations were unfamiliar and frightening. Unable to support their families, some men cracked under the strain, retreating to shebeens; others fled to more familiar and welcoming rural areas never to return.

This left a surplus of Irish women, some of whom partnered with more affluent African-Americans who held good jobs as waiters, sailors and stevedores. These couples were called “amalgamationists;” for the most part they lived in their own streets and alleys of New York City’s notorious Five Points.

That all changed on July 13, 1863, when the Civil War Draft Riots broke out. These disturbances were sparked by a provision that allowed draftees to buy their way out of the Union Army for a sum of $300.

The tension had been mounting since January when Abraham “Africanus” Lincon had proclaimed the emancipation of slaves in the Confederate states. Unscrupulous Democratic politicians fanned the “unease” by suggesting that the New York City labor market would be flooded by an influx of newly freed slaves.

This is the volatile world I explore in Hard Times, a dramatic musical that opens tomorrow night at The Cell Theatre. For a score I chose mostly Stephen Foster songs since he was present in the Five Points during the riots and writing some of his best, though underappreciated, music.

Foster would die six months later at the age of 37 with 38 cents in his pocket. Some think his death was caused by suicide – his family claimed he fell on a jug and cut his throat in a Bowery rooming house.

I first became attracted to Foster’s music as a teenage guitarist accompanying customers in Wexford pubs. I used to marvel at the latent sadness of Old Folks At Home when delivered by a burly sailor, while a refined old man left dents in my heart from his melancholic delivery of Gentle Annie.

The old Five Points neighborhood is now interred beneath the Foley Square courthouses. Charles Dickens immortalized the area in his American Journals though he disapproved of the fraternization between Irish and African-Americans; nor was he particularly fond of the music they hammered out together, although he did admire their dance steps – these would later morph into Tap dancing.

While creating Hard Times I often walked down the same flagstones of the Bowery that Foster tread upon and wondered about this singular composer. What drove him to live out his days in a pulsing, melting-pot New York slum when he could have enjoyed a comfortable life with his wife and child back in Pittsburgh?

Supposedly he was by then a down and out alcoholic. But drunks don’t churn out 30 songs in a year – especially of the quality of Beautiful Dreamer, one of his last, or the even more haunting Why No One To Love.

The accepted portrait of Foster is that of a self-destructive artist, wan and pensive; but what then to make of a photograph taken of him, hale and hearty weeks before his death with his friend and collaborator, George Cooper?

What was Stephen Foster doing in the Five Points during the riots? Obviously writing – but was he also waiting for someone? We’ll never know for certain but some answers are suggested in Hard Times at The Cell Theatre, 338 W. 23rd St. NYC until Sept. 30th.

Open The Doors

I spent a couple of weeks in Australia last November working on a musical with Tom Keneally of Schindler’s List fame, an experience in and of itself.

What with jet lag and dealing with a new creative team, I was in Sydney some days before I even noticed the general buoyancy of mood. It was hard to put your finger on it, but this bustling city resembled New York of the Clinton years. It hit home for me just how oppressive our own current recession has become.

There was a can-do attitude in the Sydney summer air that you used to be able to cut with a knife across the length and breadth of the US. This general Australian optimism was spiced by the buoyant voices of young foreigners – many of them Irish.

Back in the 80’s and 90’s, the voices of a previous generation of young Irish were ricocheting around the pubs of Bainbridge Avenue, and on the construction sites and playgrounds of Manhattan.

What a loss! The best-educated generation of Irish people no longer sees the US as a viable emigration option. Now they bestow their talents on European nations, Australia and even Arab emirates; if they think of North America at all, Canada makes more sense.

Are we crazy? The United States is a nation founded by emigrants and nourished by them in successive waves. Now granted we had the tragedy of 9/11and the erection of Fortress America in the Bush years; but even President George W. himself made a sincere effort to enact an Immigration Reform Act before being stymied by his own party.

Although timid and pragmatic to an extreme, the current administration has made some concessions to common sense. President Obama did back the Dream Act and, in a small way, circumvented Congress’s veto thereof by ordering deportation deferral and a two-year work permit for children of undocumented immigrants.

Whatever about their parents, these young people are Americans; they’ve grown up in this country and were educated here. Why waste that investment in some Know-Nothing scheme to “repatriate” them?

In a time of little good news it did the heart good to see the pictures of 13,000 hopeful under-30’s lined up on Navy Pier in Chicago recently to receive help in filling out their immigration papers.

Finally, a dim ray of rationality in a ludicrous situation! The lunacy cuts right across the immigrant board. Where, after all, is the sanity in subsidizing and spending scarce resources to put foreign students through US colleges and then sending them back to their countries the moment they graduate? Give them all green cards, I say! They’ll more than pay their way.

The high-tech boom of the 80’s and 90’s was fueled by foreign STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics) graduates. Because of a feckless system of high school education not enough Americans venture into these fields in college, so what’s the solution? Send the foreigners home, even though US industry is crying out for graduates in such fields? Google, Intel, Yahoo and eBay, among others, were founded in part by foreign-born graduates.

Besides, a recent economic survey showed that immigrants are more than twice as likely as American born to start businesses. Stands to reason; if you have the gumption to sell up in your own country and make a new start in the US you’re going to do your damnedest to succeed.

As most Irish born immigrants will testify, when you arrive here you either sink or swim, and even if you have someone at home to call for help, you wouldn’t dream of it because of pride.

Which pretty much puts paid to the whole Nativist idea of the lazy immigrant leeching from generous hosts. I’ve known immigrants from all over the world but never a one that wasn’t hard-working with an eye to making life better for their children.

Apart from Native-Americans we’re all descended from foreigners but US history is strewn with those who as soon as they’ve established themselves wish to pull the ladder up behind them.

It’s time to throw open the doors of Fortress America again, let in some fresh air, and drop the ladder one more time.

Legal Menace

After the murder of 12 people and the wounding of 58 by a seriously deranged shooter in Aurora, CO I decided to let the dust settle before broaching gun control - or lack thereof.

But with the country awash in upwards of 300 million guns it’s hardly surprising that the carnage continues unabated. A white skinhead supremacist, so stupid that he couldn’t tell the difference between a Sikh and a Muslim, took out 6 more people in their house of worship scarcely a week later.

How can a criminally insane person manage to acquire an AR-15 assault rifle, a Remington 12-gauge 870 shotgun, two 40-caliber Glock handguns and 6000 rounds of ammunition?

A simple answer – without breaking a sweat; James Holmes, the Colorado suspect, was perfectly within his rights. Guy could have bought 60,000 rounds through the Internet with little more hassle than ordering a dozen albums from his favorite bands.

Just as Wade Michael Page could legally purchase a 9-millimeter handgun at a local gun store, despite the fact that he had a criminal record, a long and storied history of involvement in the white supremacist movement, and was dismissed from the US Army “without an honorable discharge.”

Ever met a white supremacist skinhead bigot? Well, let’s just say they’re not exactly the type you’d take home to Mom. But what’s a gun store employee to do. This creep had the law on his side – no matter how crazy, hateful and ignorant he may have been.

When will this madness end - this craven bending of the knee to the National Rifle Association? Well, not while we have the current brace of politicians running in the presidential elections.

One could hardly have expected any principled stand from Mr. Romney – while Governor of Massachusetts he supported an assault weapon ban and embraced strong anti-gun laws. However, as soon as he departed Red Sox Nation he joined the NRA and now boasts of his skill at blowing the hell out of “small varmints.”

President Obama, on the other hand, supposedly supports a renewed ban on assault rifles along with background checks on those purchasing weapons at gun shows. But, hey, a guy’s got to get elected in the fall. So mum’s the word on requiring the like of Holmes and Page to prove that they’re sane enough to be entrusted with the death-dealing sophistication of modern firepower.

In fairness to Mr. Obama, he’d have plenty of time come November to pen a new memoir if he did speak out. Or would he?

Hillary Clinton would now be president if she’d had the courage to speak out against the soon-to-be disastrous invasion of Iraq back in 2003. A week can be a long time in politics, nine years an eternity.

Why so? The Internet – where ideas of taste, manners and opinion can be swept away in a manner unthinkable a decade ago. A lone gunman with an AR-15 in rush hour Grand Central Station could trigger some first class national soul searching.

The ban on the sale of such weapons of mass-destruction was let slip into abeyance in 2004 by a cowardly congress afraid to speak up for fear of provoking NRA financial and organizational muscle.

The Second Amendment is now seen as untouchable, though its original conceit was that citizen militias bearing their own weapons could be quickly summoned, thus negating the need for an expensive standing army.

The truth is, the mania for gun ownership is of pretty recent vintage. For instance, there are few mentions of gunfire during New York’s 1863 Draft Riots.
Despite Hollywood fantasies, guns were not that prevalent on the Western frontier and cowboys were required to check theirs in with local sheriffs on their occasional visits to towns.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimates that 1.5 million guns were produced in the US in 1950, while this figure had shot up to over 5 million by 2010.

Those figures speak for themselves; just as the murder and general mayhem will continue until the myth of the gun and the invincibility of the NRA are challenged by ordinary citizens willing to confront a legal menace that threatens us all.