JON'S WINTER READING LIST

I was sitting around my sister's kitchen table, with one of my nieces and a nephew, late this summer.  Somewhere in a discussion, I mentioned how a friend, decades ago, had made me a list of ten books to read, labeled Jimmy's Summer Reading List.  My nephew sat up and said, "I'd like to have a 'Jimmy's Summer Reading list!"  OK, Jon, several months late, but here you go. 
 
Jon's request was to keep it short and to lean toward non-fiction.  But, where to start?  Where to stop?  And I love fiction.  Also, I like historical fiction and believe sometimes you learn more there than from volumes of dry scholarship.  I made two lists, one fiction and one non-fiction.  So, as Rod Serling would have said, "presented, for your consideration...  "
 
FICTION

1. 1984   George Orwell
2. Uncle Tom's Cabin     Harriet Beecher Stowe
3. Lincoln      Gore Vidal
4. Watership Down     Richard Adams
5. A Tale of Two Cities     Charles Dickens
6. Johnny Got His Gun     Dalton Trumbo
7. Cat's Cradle     Kurt Vonnegut
8. Grapes of Wrath     John Steinbeck
9. Trinity     Leon Uris
10. The Fountainhead     Ayn Rand

NON-FICTION
 

1. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee     Dee Brown
2. Roots     Alex Haley
3. Saving Capitalism     Robert Reich
4. Gulag Archipelago     Alexander Solzhenitzen
5. Hitler:  A Study in Tyranny     Allan Bullock
6. The Story of the World's Great Thinkers     Ernest R. Trattner
7. The Brethren     Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong
8. The Mainspring of Human Progress     Henry Grady Weaver
9. A People's History of the United States     Howard Zinn
10. Silent Spring     Rachel Carson

Well, this should start some arguments.  I've read thousands of books, and was surprised how hard it was to just pull 10-20 to the fore.  These are not presented in any order.  They are not lists of my favorite books, nor of what I think are the "best" books.  Jon asked for books he "should read".  I attempted to list books I thought everybody should have as general knowledge.  Also, that I could think of, on a Saturday afternoon!  Some probably need some explanation.
 
I didn't read Uncle Tom's Cabin until I was several decades into adulthood.  The term "Uncle Tom" has taken on such negative connotations in the last 50 years, that I was surprised at what a powerful story it is.  I was angry reading it.  No wonder Abe Lincoln, and others, referred to it as the book that started the war.  It paints a searing picture of terrorism and of courage under seige.
 
I have read, and re-read, Lincoln many times.  I love Gore Vidal.  I read this years before Doris Kearnes Goodman published her non-fiction Team of Rivals.  I  was startled to realize that I knew the entire story in detail.  I learned nothing from her book, that I did not already know from Vidal's novel.  And his is more fun!
 
Watership Down is still my favorite book, of all time.  Period.
 
Leon Uris sometimes gets knocked but I think Trinity is a great introduction to Irish history and the background to The Troubles. 
 
The Fountainhead is not great literature.  But, I think Atlas Shrugged is wretched.  So, given Ayn Rand's influence over our current ruling party's ideology, this is a window into her philosophy/ideology of Objectivism.  At least it's a novel, with a story, as opposed to her non-fiction propaganda. 
 
I haven't read the Trattner book, since I was in grade school.  My father had it on our bookshelf.  It was my introduction to Copernicus, Malthus, Darwin, Marx and others.
 
The Mainspring of Human Progress was included with a folder of pamphlets and booklets, that one of my uncles sent me.  I never met him.  Our only communication, that I remember, was this one mailing that I received, when I was about ten.  A folder of free market/capitalist propaganda, from the American Enterprise Institute!
 
Silent Spring is the one book on the lists I have not read.  It's on my winter reading list. 
 
 
 
 
 

NEED TO IMPEACH?

I was asked, last night, what I think of Tom Steyer and NeedToImpeach.com.  I don't know anything about Tom Steyer, beyond what I read today on Wikipedia.  I'm uncomfortable with the idea that we need a rich guy to save us.  It's a pattern:  Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, Trump and, now in IL, JB Pritzker.  All billionaires.

As to impeachment, I'm torn.  The Russia stuff leaves me cold.  I think it's a fantasy that everyone wants to be true.  Hillary Clinton uses a private email server to circumvent freedom of information laws, gets hacked, leaving a trail of evidence that the Democratic Party primary process was a sham and, for a host of other reasons, manages to lose the election to an ignorant reality show host.  Wouldn't it be satisfying if he was guilty of treason and the evidence was....  the act of hacking her emails?  Vindication!  ...Bullshit.

There is no reason to believe that the hacked emails, or attempts to hack, steal and alter voter data in various states, by Russia, had anything to do with Trump or, for that matter, Wikileaks.  Did Trump's campaign attempt to obtain info, after the fact, from Russia?  It appears so.  Is that illegal?  Maybe.  Did they try to coordinate the timing of the release of info with Wikileaks?  Maybe.  Is that illegal?  No.

The Russians may have been involved in hacking various Democratic accounts.  They apparently have also tried to tamper with state electoral commission rolls.  That needs investigated and dealt with.  If Trump refuses to do that, that should be the crime.  Collusion is just a feel good narrative.

I suspect there are financial crimes that he is guilty of too, unrelated to the election.  Failure to execute the laws as president and tax evasion are real crimes.  That's where any possible impeachment should be focused.

Should he be impeached?  Will he be impeached?

I struggle with the first one.  I loathe him and want him humiliated.  But, let's assume he is impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate and removed from office.  That gives us President Pence.  Beyond Trump's ignorance and personality disorder (and I recognize how dangerous those are), would we be better off without him?  Most of what Trump does on a daily basis is a freak show.  Yes, we feel like we need a shower at the end of the day, but the reality is that the major destruction comes from the cabinet he's put in power.  Trump is an ignoramus, in over his head.  Pence believes in all this bullshit.  I don't see an end to an advancing police state, racial strife or environmental destruction in Pence World. Plus, with Trump, people are focused on resisting.  If he gets impeached, the attitude will be, 'we overthrew him!' and everybody goes back to being sheep.

I'm not convinced he will be impeached in any circumstance.  The Republicans have a majority. They have shown, in both houses of congress, that they no longer have any sense of responsibility.  The Republican Party is utterly without conscience.  They currently are endorsing a senate candidate that, regardless if one believes the accusations that he likes having 14 year olds touch his Little Roy through his underwear, has publicly said (within the last three months) that his idea of when America was last great was during slavery.  They are not going to impeach a guy who does their, and their donors, bidding.  That leaves the Democrats.  Let's assume they win the House.  Nancy Pelosi, who famously declared impeachment "off the table", before the 2006 election, has now essentially done the same for Trump, when recently questioned about the NeedToImpeach campaign.

So, should he be impeached?  Probably, just to confirm the rule of law.  Will he?  I doubt it, as long as our rulers are people like Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell.

A TEACHER PUTS HER CHALK DOWN

Today is Katie Carl's last day of work at John A. Logan  College.  Tomorrow is her first official day of retirement.  That can't go unmentioned.  Her last day in the classroom was in May; she has taught on-line, this summer.  She didn't get a gold watch, there wasn't a reception for her at the College (she didn't want one and some of her friends would have been in an awkward position attending, given that they were laid off!).  She didn't make a speech, though David Cochran made an eloquent toast at a private party, in her honor, earlier this summer. 

The College she loved fell apart and the job she loved changed.  As she heads toward the proverbial door, she's been questioning, "was it all worth it?"  "Did I waste 30 years of my life?"  No.  ...No!

While teaching ENG 101, (in addition to Mythology, Speech, Literature and Journalism) which every college kid has to take, she touched hundreds (thousands?) of lives over the years.  I started to type "young lives", but so many of them weren't.  She loved the returning, non-traditional aged, students.  And she gave them the confidence to go to college, after so many years removed from the class room. 

As a role model, she was a magnet for the troubled students, some of whom treated her as a mother figure and clung, by phone and letter, to her for years after leaving Logan.  As an advisor for Phi Theta Kappa, she gave some students their first glimpse outside of southern Illinois and first glimpse of a cosmopolitan city. 

As advisor for the Journalism program, she learned herself, and then taught her student staff, how everything from newspaper writing to investigative techniques to the nuts and bolts of advertising sales and getting the stories into print.  She traveled to the printing plants and took students to conferences.  Then, when the technology changed, she started over and she, and they, learned how to produce on-line content.  She has former journalism students living across the country.  She is their biggest fan and many of them remain hers.

As an academic advisor, she didn't just make the effort to understand what the students needed to transfer and how to build a schedule.  She guided many into unthought-of (as yet, by them) majors and careers.  Her former students and advisees include lawyers, teachers, photographers and journalists. 

She was always excited to think up, or learn of, a new teaching technique. She took pride when others asked to copy her discoveries and she loved the camaraderie of discussing students and teaching with her colleagues. 

Just when she finally achieved her ambition of becoming department chair (a position she wanted not because of extra money, but because she could put many of her ideas into effect), the Board of Trustees reorganized the College and abolished her chair.  They also laid off 55 of the Logan staff.  While frustrated at what happened to herself, as a result of the reorganization, she was broken hearted at what had happened to others.  She not only took an active role in the grievance process, defending her fellow teachers, she became a shoulder to cry on, a sympathetic ear and a voice of counsel. 

She didn't just teach Mythology, she related the stories to the present day.  She taught her students that lessons, values, triumphs and tragedies of the gods and goddesses, and the concepts such as "hubris", were always applicable to our democracy.  Teaching mythology didn't end at the school house door.  For 30 years she has been telling the stories to this son of a Greek, who knows so much less about it than she.  She, last night over dinner, once more, explained how Cassandra, Athena, and Aphrodite related to the story of Agamemnon, Achilles and the Trojan Horse.  Logan's loss is the gain of her oldest student.

Good job, Katie Carl!  Congratulations!

THE FOURTH BE WITH YOU

The Fourth be with you.  The fourth.  Star Wars.  Fourth of July.  Four.  Four dead in O-HI-O.. 

Today I watched, on CSPAN, as craven congressmen, in the House of Representatives, voted to kill a health care act I was never excited about.  They did it without reading the text, without waiting for the report of their own Congressional Budget Office, without knowing how much it will cost and without knowing who it will affect. 

As I scroll through Facebook, throughout the day, I see my lifelong friend, Dirk Keller, posting articles, links and songs about the Kent State killings.  It was 47 years ago today.  He expresses his outrage every year.  Good.  We need to be reminded, constantly, that our own government would order our killings and that uniformed police and soldiers would willingly carry them out. 

I was in the 8th grade, in 1970.  I lived down the street from MacMurray College, in sleepy Jacksonville, Illinois. Back then, MacMurray was a small but thriving little religiously affiliated liberal arts college.  It's students were probably affluent and many came from out of state.  It was common to see license plates from Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York and other northeastern states.  By the late 1960s, their hair grew longer and some were staging small protests against the Vietnam War.  Oddly, I felt no affinity for those I saw with hair curling down their necks or those carrying protest signs.  That seemed foreign to me.  While I idolized the Beatles, I also liked my Sgt. Rock comic books. 

It was a confusing world.  I was checking books by Eldridge Cleaver out of the library, buying the Walker Report on the Chicago police riot (what 13 year old reads a government report?) and checking biographies out of the library on Lenin, Stalin, Tito and Che.  And then I would go home and watch reruns of Combat on TV.  I watched Patton, in the theater, and loved it (I still do). 

One sunny day, the first week of May, I came home and started to walk into the living room where my dad was watching the nightly news.  I stopped in the doorway between the dining room and the living room as I started to realize what they were saying and showing.  National Guard troops, at Kent State University in Ohio, had fired on students armed with nothing more than rocks bottles and tear gas canisters (which they were returning to sender).  Some were actually running away as the soldiers, whose faces were concealed by gas masks, fired on them.  I was stunned.  I had a Eureka! moment.  Those students down the street at MacMurray weren't much older than me.  They were the ones I had most in common with, not the politicians or police.  If they would shoot those kids in Ohio, they would shoot people like me!  In that instant, I knew which side I was on. For life. 

As the days went on, students went on strike throughout the country and many universities were closed down for the year.  Some were occupied by their own states' National Guard troops.  One of those schools was Southern Illinois University in Carbondale.  Many years later, I would move to Carbondale, and attend SIU.  In those days (late '70s), one would still see flyers stapled to telephone polls with the message, "Remember Kent State".  Thanks to people like my friend Dirk, who keep the flame alive, we pause briefly each year to remember the fallen at Kent State and at Jackson State. 

Yes, Jackson State.  Because while the media focus was always on what happened in Ohio, those four weren't the only students killed that week.  Students were killed in Mississippi as well.  And that brings us to the present, because the reason we didn't hear as much about Jackson State, nor remember it today, is because those students were black.  No one was punished for the Kent or Jackson killings.  No one is convicted for the murders of unarmed young black men, by those wearing the uniform of the state today.  We hear apologists for the police asking why the hashtag for the movement is #BlackLivesMatter.  It's because they don't.

In the end, those controlling the levers of the state will kill all they deem necessary, to suppress dissent that threatens their wealth and power.  They won't care what we look like.  One of the most inspirational movements in recent times has been the Native American led protests at Standing Rock, in the Dakotas.  They were peaceful.  They were prayerful.  And they were met with violence.  They were attacked with dogs, threatened with guns and sprayed (in below freezing temperatures) with hoses.  Politicians across several states have responded not with reflection on the object of the protest but to attempt to outlaw protest itself.  Some have gone so far as to introduce legislation immunizing from prosecution anyone striking a protester with an automobile. 

Clearly, in these charged times, the atmosphere exists where one spark could light one or many Kent States.  Those of us who believe resistance, to unconstitutional and militaristic acts by our government and environmental degradation by polluting corporations, is our moral duty must recognize that we may suffer casualties.  We may be the casualties.  But, we must....  persist. 

The fourth be with you.

BUT MY FATHER GOT IN

It's Islam now; it was Bolshevism then.  It's Middle Easterners now; it was southern and eastern Europeans in the 1920s. My father came here in Aug 1920. Had he, and my Aunt Martha, tried to come a few years later, they might not have gotten in.  In 1924, Congress, responding to nativist hysteria, created restrictions for immigrants from certain countries, including Greece.  For instance, the quota, for Greece, in 1925 was 100.  What are the odds that the teenaged brother and sister, Demetrios and Martha Skarlatos, would both have gotten in?  They would have been 2% of the entire quota for the country for the entire year. There were at least 23 Greek immigrants coming in to Ellis Island, on the S.S. Themistokles, that day (I have a copy of the ship's manifest, in my lap, as I type this).  One ship, on one day. 

But my father got in.  He was a resident alien for 16 years, before being granted citizenship.  Depending on what time it is, and who is interpreting the rules, green card holders from restricted countries may not be able to return to the U.S. under Trump's Muslim ban.  If those rules had applied in the 1920s and 1930s, people like my father could not have visited their relatives in Greece, and returned to the United States.  Now, as it happens, my father never returned to Greece.  But, his brother John did.  He returned after the Spanish Flu pandemic to collect two of his orphaned siblings and bring them to America.  My Uncle John was a resident alien, had a business and a wife in the U.S.  What if a ban, such as the one now imposed on Muslims from certain countries, was imposed in 1920?  He would have left the U.S. to settle his family's affairs and care for his siblings, only to find himself unable to return to his wife and business in the U.S.  The United States of America:  the country he had fought for in the trenches of France, in World War I. 

There is a reason some of us are reacting so viscerally to Trump's actions.  A short dictionary definition of 'empathy' is "the ability to understand and share the feelings of another".