A Deep Voice Is Stilled: Reynolds Honold

If you had heard his voice, it would have stayed with you: Deep, resonant, baritone. He didn't speak often, but when he did, Democrats listened.

That's how I'll remember Reynolds Keith Honold, who passed away the other day at 86. I can't say I was a great friend. I rubbed up against his influence more than twenty years ago, but when I did, he helped make the most of it.

In 2000, I was assigned the organizing of what apparently was supposed to be a pro forma arrangement to supply the Wisconsin Democratic Party with a decent number of delegates to the Democratic National Convention. Typical of me at the time, I got carried away.

Apparently, I was supposed to acquire a had-been list of former delegates, call them and ask if they wanted to do it again, and/or get substitutes if they said no. At least, that's what I've surmised at a downwind distance. Subtle, quiet, almost apologetic.

But I sensed that George W. Bush represented a much greater threat to public education than your typically clueless Republican candidate. He had already set a record for disingenuousness with his now classic phraseology, "no child left behind." He meant nothing of the sort. He wanted to eliminate the influence of the NEA on public education to the greatest extent possible, and introduce, wherever he could, the undermining, terribly damaging influence of privatization.

So, as a member of the NEA Board of Directors, I set out on a statewide visitation of WEAC's various Uniserv Board, speaking to and encouraging people to either try to become delegates themselves--it was far from automatic; in fact, very competitive--or to suggest potential delegates that we could contact.

The WEAC budget for all this was pretty fat, I thought, so paying me for mileage wouldn't dent much of it. In fact, one night I was even so bold as to rent a plane to hit meetings in both Rhinelander and Beloit, two locales which encompassed nearly the whole north-south traverse of the state. That raised a lot of eyebrows. But hey--the powers that were put me in charge. That's what they got. 

I thought that this particular time had a great deal of importance attached to it. I wasn't, as the more cynical intraunion pols suggested, trying to feather my own nest and gain access to a future statewide position. At the time, I believed I had gained the pinnacle of my ascension by being elected to the NEA Board. (I would be wrong, but had no idea back then.) All I was trying to do was be sufficiently thorough so that nobody could complain that I hadn't put my best effort into it.

Anyhow, we made quite the dent in Democratic Party representation at the National Convention. In fact, we set a record of sending delegates that hasn't yet been surpassed. And that's how I met Reynolds Honold and his wife, Linda.

Linda was then the Executive Director of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, so I got a big foot in the door of access to the process of selection, both for me and others in my Congressional District (which is how the Democrats arrange selections). Reynolds stood by in support. I was swept up by the energy, and a couple of others were, too. WEAC had gained a solid representation in the 5th District, which included me.

Both Reynolds and Linda were easy to be with. They were assertive without being overbearing. They were there to help us. We circumvented, as it were, the proscribed method of getting oneself on the slate by cutting a union-based deal. Linda was at the center of it all. She must have sensed my determination and enthusiasm. Reynolds, influential as he was, had her back. The job got done.

The Convention, in Los Angeles, was one of the pinnacles of my (now that I look back on it) meteoric political rise. I got asked to be on a radio talk show, among other privileges. It was heavenly, like a dream. Other WEAC members, too, went on to be significant Democratic Party activists. It felt good to pay it forward like that. I had delivered a product to the mother union that would not be forgotten. That was what I was proudest of.

And that is what I mentioned when I stood in line to greet Linda upon her loss. I would have driven anywhere to pay my respects, but the wake was just at a church just a block from my apartment. "Funny, but I had thought about that," Linda said.

It was nice to be remembered, 22 years later. I will remember the Honolds, too, and that marvelous baritone. May Reynolds, a good man and a great Democrat, rest in peace.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

The 6-Year-Old on 8th and Locust

We've had a spate of good weather lately: Pleasantly warm, not a lot of humidity, mostly clear skies. The thing that the Midwest can provide in July.

I went to my chiropractor as I do occasionally the other day. Returning via freeway, I must get off on Locust Street, at the point at which, more or less, the rough part of town begins. Nonetheless, not two blocks from the exit ramp, a small grocery store maintains its business, pandemic or no.

It's at that store that, I stand to think, people buy a slew of bottles of Gatorade or similar fluids and try to peddle them for a slight profit, making the transaction in the 45 seconds or so that the light remains red. I say that without knowing for sure, for I've never made that purchase.

I have never seen a white person make those efforts, either. 8th and Locust is thoroughly The Hood, and nobody who looks like me would ever get caught buttressing their incomes on such an enterprise in such a location.

But I was impressed, then distressed, with who it was that approached my driver's side window that day. She couldn't have been six. Someone had put her up to taking that "shift," I suppose, while they went off and did, well, something else.

Yes. She was alone. No one to watch her. No one to take care of her. No one to spell her. There she was, the face of the awful franchise.

Is that the way six-year-olds are supposed to be enjoying their summer? They should be at the library, like some kids were at Zablocki Library on 35th and Oklahoma when I went to vote early. But those kids were white.

She should be on a playground. She should be playing hopscotch. She should be playing, not greasing someone's palm, for you know very well that whatever money she made during that stay, she would be allowed to keep little of it if at all.

I doubt that she did. It would get to be about 83 that day. It wasn't what we here in Wisconsin would call hot, which is somewhere nearing 90. I have lived in Arkansas and Texas, where 90 is not even worth a comment. The heat wave that envelops those regions has just been experienced and will soon return. Those people need Gatorade whenever and wherever they can find it, not Badgers in their air conditioned cars.

I found that unrelentingly sad. I wonder what that kid thought of her relatives, some of whom probably made her stand there. I wonder what she thought of white people, who seemed coldly uninterested in relieving themselves from the heat. I wonder if she thought that her race had something to do with it.

The discomfort from being approached like that sometimes causes people to take pity. Whatever. Their dollar bills have the same value. But just as many, seeing that potential motivation, are quick to reject any offers.

I thought of the film which I saw the previous week, called "Growing Up in Milwaukee," at Cedarburg's Performing Arts Center, after which I was invited to join a panel discussion, whether I really deserved to be there or not. It wasn't about the whole city of Milwaukee. It wasn't about a cultural milieu. 

It was about growing up, or growing up way the hell too fast, in the thoroughly black section of town, in which the previously mentioned street corner is in the very southeast region. It featured a close look at the lives of three black youth: one who wanted to get better but can't (for the moment) get out of 10th grade; one who got pregnant at 14 and had to give up the baby, but now wants to become a singer (she's really good); and one who wants to play basketball and will, but whether he can hang on to his eligibility is another matter. None of them had anything close to a normal, decent childhood. I had to wonder whether the little girl on 8th and Locust would join them in a world that defeated them before they really got started.

Like the other three, she's already trapped on that street corner in what would otherwise be the kind of summer kids dream of. It's not her fault, it's not her doing, but it sure as hell is her fate. How jaded would she be by high school age? How desperate will she be to get out of that situation, and make exactly the same mistakes as others have? Used as she is right now, will she be able to tell the difference when others wish to use her for other things?

Should I buy some Gatorade next time? I don't know. If I knew what it really meant, what I was really contributing to, maybe I would. But maybe I wouldn't. Maybe I would call the police instead for a fairly blatant case of child abandonment.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

As the New Dark Ages Begin

With three decisive, deeply penetrating rulings last week, the reactionary wing of the Supreme Court embarked us upon the new Dark Ages of America. We will now descend into a dystopia that we all saw coming, but were helpless to prevent.

Once with their hands on the mechanisms of access to power, the Republican Party threw off all pretenses of legitimacy as a harbinger of a certain kind of democracy. It is now angry at everything, desirous of everything, and ravenous in its intensity. It does not believe in democracy. It does not care.

People like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the ones with rational heads on their shoulders once connected with the Republican core, have seen and removed themselves from this horrible mentality of authoritarian bullying. But they are on the edges, the periphery. Yes, people once solid behind this cultishness are becoming somewhat shaky, but the 1/6 hearings will soon remove themselves from notoriety, and that will soon fade from view as having relative significance--that is, assuming the Justice Department does little to follow up. 

We don't know that yet, of course, and that is now our only hope--to rely on the last vestige of genuine detachment from partisanship. But that was arranged only by the victory of the last vestige of genuine interest in a just conclusion, run by an aging president who is being attacked from all sides, including his own, mostly for being a decent person and making decent decisions within a chaotic milieu foisted upon us by the deep and abiding corruption of the immediate ex-president, which continues unabated.

As he fades from view, the Democrats have little to replace him with. In the meantime, he must deal with three horrible mistakes that the Supreme Court reactionaries have dropped on his desk:

• Roe v. Wade's destruction--an absolutist's Garden of Eden. A feminist's nightmare.
• Strolling around with weapons if you want--Exactly the wrong stance at the wrong time.
• Open prayer to connect with religion on publicly-paid land--The ultimate twisting of freedom of religion to favor Christians alone, as if they were ever victims of anything.

He must also deal with the results of a horribly divided Congress, led by West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, a tease if there ever was one. He never wanted to do what Democrats do; he just wanted it all to go away. Finally, confronted with options that made perfect sense but which provided him no place to hide (an important component of much legislation for many legislators), he had to come out and say no. That he waited so long to do so can be hidden by posturing about knowing all options with the vagaries of the dance of legislation, but someone with his experience and knowledge knew very well what options he had to choose from. He just didn't want to do it.

So we sit here with crippled methods of dealing with climate change, because Joe Manchin thinks he'll be re-elected if he stands like a rock and continues to promote his West Virginia constituents drilling into the rock for coal--a mineral we need to walk away from, and quickly. He won't. That won't do it. He figures to campaign as a moderate Republican, but that won't even do it, either.

But that is the detritus of the result of an evenly-split Senate and a nearly evenly-split House, of trying to get something accomplished when there are so many opposing forces about. It makes one wonder why Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, edging up on perhaps their last go-rounds as chamber leaders, don't just pack it up early and keep going right on vacation after the August recess.

Because it appears as if the forces of backwardness, of disingenuous "originalism," which is nothing more than an excuse to make laws and rulings that propel us into an abandoned past, are succeeding enough to grind everything to a screeching halt. That may be the best we can hope for--that things don't get worse.

But inflation is still with us. Ukraine hangs on with hope but fewer soldiers who need more advanced weapons, about which we can see more brinksmanship with a twisted, depraved Putin monster. And we sit in an increasingly hot summer with only hopes that things will get hotter. And, of course, we are only starting to see the awful results of the above awful rulings.

Going backwards isn't going to work. Trying to wish things would settle down isn't, either. Not now. Not in the new Dark Ages.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark

Really? Cancel This Book? More Nonsense.

Back in the late '70s and early '80s, I taught a course named "20th Century Conflicts," about the diplomacy and wars of the 20th Century. That curriculum was about to expand as we went, of course, as we moved into the next century, taking on two more wars, one of which outlasted even Vietnam.

As we wound ourselves around World War II, we--that is, the Social Studies Department--decided to have some options about book reports we might want to have the students write about; not just any old thing, but something fairly germane to that war and things closely connected to it. So I thought that A Farewell to Manzanar was an excellent choice.

Short and simply written by Jeanne Wakasuki, it depicted her experience as a member of a family of Japanese-Americans incarcerated in an internment camp, the humiliation suffered by a group of true-blue, 100% Americans whose only crime was to look like the bandits who attacked Pearl Harbor and set us off to war with them. They were about as big a threat to our democracy and native soil as the bugs that bothered them in their tents.

The internees suffered a distinct lack of privacy, but they found solace in their mutual distress, as all prisoners do, justified in their imprisonment or not. The story ends kind of happily, of course, because it occurs to the government that not only will the Japanese Army not appear on American soil, but these harmless, perfectly patriotic people would not support them, as if they ever did. But the time lost to them, their once-thriving business and way of life, was pretty much irreplaceable.

That's partly why none other than Ronald Reagan, who otherwise started us down the path of national ruin, signed off on granting any of the survivors of Manzanar (located east of Fresno, California, on the edge of Death Valley, sufficiently detached from the Pacific Coast) and several other internment camps, one located as far east as Arkansas, $20,000 apiece in 1988. Of course, many of them had died by then, so the U.S. government got away with a bargain basement special. And $20,000 stretched out over 40 years really didn't amount to very much. But a Congressional committee that investigated the abuse concluded that it was racist, considering that the descendants of our other enemies, Germany and Italy, had not been similarly incarcerated.

So the gesture, the recognition of the unfairness and Reagan's official apology, was important. It was an admission that these people had been wronged. Unfortunately, the attitude did not live on. Overreaction to China's growing world importance, combined with the awful rhetoric of a stupid, racist ex-president, has resulted in some violent, unneeded confrontations in the streets of such cities as New York and Seattle, and injuries suffered by Asian-looking people who, like the temporary residents of Manzanar, are completely American and just want to live their lives happily and quietly.

Beyond that, the horrible influence of this awful man has led people at all levels of government to speak out against what they believe to be excessive diversity, as if such a thing could ever get excessive. Such people are in denial, again, because the numbers of non-white Americans are growing far faster than are the number of whites. It's like holding back a rockslide.

In the meantime, references to that growth are resisted. Another example has taken place here in the Milwaukee area, in the Muskego-Norway school district. A book called When the Emperor Was Divine, much like A Farewell to Manzanar in its scope and topic, was screened by a school board committee for Advanced Placement students and sent back to the faculty for reconsideration.

The reasoning, if it can be called that, echoed those who support the stupid ex-president. One school board member even wanted to re-emphasize the mentality behind the internment camps--that is, the attack on Pearl Harbor, as a decent explanation for removing these innocent people from their homes and jobs, located on the West Coast, just in case an invasion came and they decided to treason themselves against their adopted country. Again, these Japanese descendants were loyal Americans. Many of them were just as angry that their former country had slammed the U.S. Navy in a devastating, surprise attack. 

Someone actually mentioned the "rape of Nanking" as a reason behind the internments. The two events are completely unrelated, unless you believe that normal, decent Americans would torture and kill other Americans the second their related barbarians hit our shores. That attempt to gin up paranoia, hopefully, got nowhere.

Actually, when finally given the opportunity, many of the Japanese-American men signed up to join the Army, which created a separate division of them, the 442nd, to fight against Axis forces in Europe. That division was the most decorated of all U.S. forces in the entire war. It was as if they somehow needed to prove themselves by fighting harder. One of those soldiers, Daniel Inouye, lost his arm before returning to serve Hawaii as U.S. Senator.

All of that seems lost in the current controversy. Another school board member complained that When the Emperor Was Divine contained "too much poetry," as if reading a book for an Advanced Placement course  needed to have text, text, and pure text. Advanced Placement texts are written with advanced language. They posit complicated thinking, combining issues and viewpoints in a challenging way that flings a high school student into collegiate-level considerations. A little poetry wouldn't hurt a thing.

Some overreaction does, though. Trying to foster "balance" in the study of a conflict like World War II doesn't really work that well. Instead, it encourages the notion that there's something sinister behind Asians as a group, and Asian-Americans specifically. That's crazy. The leadership of the Japanese, as the Germans and Italians who were in power at that time as well, were made up of fascists. They utilized racial prejudice to inspire their peoples to fight and kill others who weren't of the same ethnic makeup.

Fascism makes one cold to the other forms of humanity which are evident amongst it. It lowers the estimation of the possibilities of others. It dismisses them as unnecesary. Would you like someone to find you unnecessary?

What we should be doing is emphasizing that in our history teaching, if only for the certifiably (by now) clear reason that such thinking is gaining momentum not only here, but worldwide. There is only one place all that is going, and that is to another world war. And the weapons we have now are far more frightening and devastating as the ones we merely scratched the surface with back in 1945.

Reading more, not less, about injustices like the Japanese-American internment can only help students who will soon turn into the leaders of tomorrow. It's not about just getting through a course en route to graduation. It's about adapting a compassionate, supportive mindset that accepts all people as fundamentally equal regardless of skin color. That we still have a way to go before that happens indicates the scope of the challenge. The quibbling in the Muskego-Norway school district won't help it.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark