Confessions of a vision impaired stakeholder with dubious management practices embarking on an ill defined mission

Sam Smith, 2009 -  Have pity on me. Say a prayer. Drop a penny in the pond on my behalf. In a few days I have to go to a non-profit's strategic planning meeting. It's a great organization that does great things, but - like so many non-profits - it periodically seeks to cleanse and refresh itself by turning what it does into indecipherable abstractions. I'll survive and maybe there'll be some good food, but, as a general rule, I don't do strategic visions.

Still it's happening all over America. "Strategic plan" and its semantic variations have appeared on Google seven million times just in the past month. On the Review's list of cliches that's right between "empower" and that ultimate expression of corporate insincerity - "any inconvenience" - you know, the one for which everyone apologizes.

Strategic planning, in its non-military sense, got its start at the Harvard Business School in the 1920s. Not long after we had the Great Depression. The concept had a revival in the 1980s and contributed to the philosophy and practices that have left us with the Penultimate Great Depression.

Coincidence, perhaps, but bear in mind that in the 1950s - when the economy was booming - we were turning out only 5,000 MBAs a year. The number of people in business who had any idea of about strategic planning was minute. By 2005, we were churning out 142,000 MBAs a year and we had huge trade and budget deficits, a disappearing auto industry, one of our most costly and disastrous wars, a growing gap between rich and poor, and a constantly projected inability to care for our ill or elderly.

Worse, everyone in the country had been infected by corporate verbiage and values. And, often unconsciously, much of America had bought into the rightwing and absurdly simplistic Reaganesque view of life and the very voices that should have been among the loudest in opposition - non-profits - signed up as well.

Non-profits found that it helped to adopt the language of business. It made them seem responsible rather than just over-idealistic do-gooders. It also reflected one of the most misguided assumptions of the educated elite: if one can understand, identify, manipulate and be loyal to abstract principles, the specifics will obediently follow.

Editors and reporters, among others, know better. Reporters run into this sort of language constantly at news conferences and elsewhere. They have a professional term for it: bullshit.

And editors know that a reporter may come up with a great idea for a story and even have a strategy for carrying it out, but if the journalist doesn't know how find the right sources, or ask the right questions and write it all down, the strategy won't work.

Over the past three decades corporations have done an incredibly effective job of turning Americans into just so many more corporate employees desperate for a strategic vision that will foster formulations of actions and processes to be taken to attain the vision in accordance with agreed upon procedures in order to achieve a hierarchy of goals. It has - with bombast, bullying and baloney - convinced an extraordinary number of Americans that its childishly verbose and coldly abstract culture is transferable to every human activity from running a church to driving a tractor across a field.

Unfortunately, life doesn't work like that. You need to look no farther than the military to see this. During the post-war period when the US military devoted more effort to strategic planning that at any time in its history, it has also had the sorriest record. Over and over, the problem has been an attractive general principle overwhelmed or sabotaged by reality and facts.

Now bounce back 150 years to a war in which general strategy was more than balanced by specific generals. At one point a White House aide complained of General Grant's drinking and Lincoln invoked his best management practices - which was to tell the aide to find out what Grant was drinking and give it to all his other generals. Put that in your vision statement.

And the key battle at Little Round Top was won by a general named Joshua Chamberlain who had studied theology, taught ever subject except science and math and was fluent in nine languages. He had, however, never studied military strategy.

In any specific situation, a general strategy can quickly lose value without supporting virtues like wisdom, sufficient staff, adequate budget, imagination, energy and good fortune.

But of course, if all else fails, you can always fall back on your mission statement.

Like most people, I never read mission statements except under duress or when I have nothing better to do, like standing in the lobby of a pretentious restaurant waiting to be seated.

Gordon Luk said it well: "Douglas Adams wrote frequently about the human penchant for continuously stating the very, very obvious. Mission statements take that principle to the extreme, to the point where we even believe that we're going to persuade people about something or other by making an official public statement about what we are going to do that would be insane to negate."

Occasionally a mission statement rises to the occasion. The alternative newspaper Eat the State had one that read: "Missions were created by the Catholic Church to subjugate Native Americans in California. We oppose them." And a small computer consultancy business in West London posted a sign: 'We are not ruled by a mission statement, we are smarter than that'. But when you start to count the number of organizations - from religious to non-profit to social to political - that feel they can't get along without some gobbledygook on the inside cover of whatever they're publishing, you know the corporate cultural invasion is complete.

Which doesn't mean you shouldn't have plans, think about where you're going, discuss alternatives and figure out what you do best. But the better model should be the pragmatism, inventiveness and realism of small business culture which still provides most of America's new jobs - as many as 75 percent in some experts' view. Most small business people don't have time to sit around a table coming up with empty adjectives to describe their efforts. And they tend to call the people who buy their stuff customers rather than stakeholders, which makes sense, given that the pre-corporate definition of stakeholder was someone who held the bet during a gambling match and handed it over to the winner. Not a particularly exciting or profitable role in life.

Here's how David Weinberger put in back in 1999:

"Mission statements are vapid because they think of business as a march to a goal or a war of conquest. Businesses are far more complex than that. . . Further, missions are things you accomplish and are done with. Businesses, on the other hand, generally aim for long-term existence. The board doesn't get together and say, "Well, we've accomplished our mission of being the world's leading supplier of high quality wombats to blind gombricks, so I guess we can just shut it all down now. Good job, lads!"

"Businesses often are more like farming than like making war. How can we get maximum sustainable yield from this ground? And what happens when the ground changes radically? Are we going to keep trying to grow potatoes in the layer of ash, or are we going to see this as a splendid opportunity to succeed with ash-loving radishes?

"So, yes, write up something about your commitment to treating your customers well, building great products, and contributing to the lives of your employees and your community. Heck, even admit that you're in it for the money. But one thing is certain: if your mission statement achieves the usual goal of fitting on the back of a business card, then it's just about guaranteed to be empty of anything worth saying."

Which is why I don't look forward to my afternoon of strategic planning. We will declare, no doubt, some fine principles, but life is controlled not by the glories of the grand but by the uncertainties, blessings and perversities of the specific. It is in organizing the latter in some rational, useful, imaginative and, yes, enjoyable fashion that life becomes better. As Benjamin Franklin noted, happiness is not the result of great strokes of good fortune, but of the "little felicities" of every day.

Meanwhile, if you are still curious about my personal vision statement, please consult my optometrist.

 

What's a humanities?

 SAM SMITH, DC GAZETTE, 1979 - I have to confess something. I have strayed from the civic abstinence I promised on these pages a while back. I have once again joined a committee. But it's just a small committee and I think I can handle it. If not, drive me home and I'll never do it again. Promise.

The committee is called the DC Community Humanities Council. Fifty states and Puerto Rico have such committees - and the funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities that follow in their wake - but DC, through a combination of federal inertia and local indifference, has been years late to the gate. . .

I was invited to serve on the committee by the NEH for reasons that are not entirely clear, but presumably have something to do with what is known in the trade as "community outreach," or, as Senator Scoop Jackson put it even less felicitously the other day, providing another "rung on the spectrum." Since I had complained in print about the lack of a local humanities committee, I thought I ought to put some time where my mouth was. But there was another less honorable reason for my willingness to accept the invitation. You see, what the folks at NEH don't know is that not only did I graduate from college magna cum probation but I was so indifferent to the humanities and scholarship in general that my English instructor once sent me a neatly written card that read: "Mr. Cole requests the pleasure of your attendance at the next regular meeting of his course." Many of the courses I did attend left me thoroughly befuddled. The first hint that joining the fellowship of educated men was going to be a treacherous business came when I returned to my room after the initial day of classes. I settled down to dash off a bit of Max Weber before supper. Ten pages in my heart went into a barrel roll and my hands began to rattle. I hadn't understood one word the man was saying. This exquisite form of panic would return many times over the next four years.

I struggled to separate the thoughts of Locke from the sermons of Cotton Mather; Veblin and Bentham congealed in my brain; Karl Marx was, as far as I could discern, the opiate of sadistic professors; and when I walked into an examination hall I was certain that all around me could balance more philosophers within the margins of a blue book than I. The die was cast early as one of my anthropology professors noted on a paper. "This is pretty good journalism," she wrote of my painfully conceived review of the Naga situation, "but it is bad anthropology." I left the ivy-bedizened halls vowing never to return and, in fact, never did except for an occasional guest talk to the class of a professor or two of eccentric tastes. So for me to be invited to share responsibility for the fate of the humanities with genuine, certified, dissertating scholars was too good an offer to pass up - not unlike an ex-con being asked to serve on a judicial nominations commission.

So of course I accepted. This first thing that happened was a friend, when I told her of the project, described herself as "one of nine people in the city who knows what the humanities are." I passed on the remark to an historian who asked, "Don't you think that figure is a little high?"

Right away I knew I was in trouble. One of the real pleasures of graduating from college is that seldom thereafter does anyone ask you to define your terms. I had been away from the academic world for twenty years and had sort of assumed that in the interim they had come up with handy definitions for things like the "humanities." But apparently we were heading for square one -- back to Humanities 10: "Define the humanities and illustrate by example, citing sources where applicable." .

It all came back. The slush of ideas, concepts, symbolisms, metaphors, imagery, and philosophies through which I had so laboriously slogged during college, and so assiduously avoided since, was underfoot once more and I could feel my socks getting wet and clammy.

I had voluntarily agreed to serve a cause whose meaning and purpose I thought I understood, but which I couldn't decently explain to anyone who didn't understand. I had done so somewhat whimsically and capriciously, in part because I sensed it all had something to do with constructive irrelevance, a subject which has come to interest me after years of excessive relevance and the not totally satisfying product of the same. It also seemed to favor my anarchistic side, since the humanities like to ask questions without providing answers while politics tends to provide answers without asking questions. Further, humanists have a reputation for not doing anything useful, so perhaps if I became associated with them, people would stop asking me to do things that were useful.

But that would hardly do when we had to go out and explain what we were about and why anyone should be interested. You can't tell a sullen scribe from one of the dailies who asks "What do you see as the role of the humanities in this city?" something like, "If you have to ask, you'll never know." So I decided I better find out what a humanities really was before the National Endowment blew my cover and decided that this community outreach business had gone far enough. Here is some of what I found:

The word humanities doesn't mean much to most people. Most people to whom it does mean much work on college campuses. For them it means pretty much what it did when I was in college: it's what you major in if you're not in the physical or social sciences, haven't decided what to do with your life or want to go to law school but would like to learn something first.

Here are some of the humanities: philosophy, comparative religion, history, ethics, literature.

Here is one thing the humanities have in common: you feel a little foolish listing them on a job application form.

That may be one reason that most people who know about the humanities are found on college campuses: no one else will hire them.

There's another reason: Some people on campus feel that the humanities shouldn't be talked about too much off campus. They feel the humanities are a profession and that you should have a Ph.D. to be "in" them. They want people to treat them like physicians and lawyers and CPAs and lieutenant colonels, so they call each other 'Doctor' a lot.

It is confusing because it suggests that you might need a license to think about literature, religion, history or philosophy. This is not necessarily true. It is still further confusing because humanities scholars, when they're not calling themselves 'Doctor,' call themselves "humanists." Off campus, the word sometimes has a different meaning. The woman down the street may be called "a real humanist" because she set up a senior citizen center or organized the heart drive, even though she doesn't know who Kierkegaard was. You can't be a humanist on campus without knowing who Kierkegaard was, no matter how much you raise for the heart fund.

Finally, it is confusing because in many people's minds, a doctor is meant to fix something. Humanist-type doctors are hard-pressed to prove that they do. And in our scientific and technological society, we tend to discount what can't be proved. There is no morality program you can slip into the computer, no antibiotic against cultural vacuity, no certifiable benefits to be achieved through an acquaintance with the past and no minimum daily requirement for literature.

I think a part of what the National Endowment for the Humanities is trying to do is to end some of this confusion. This is good because even though the word "humanities" is not used that much off campus, we use what it describes all the time. We just don't have a name for it.

We practice it without a license and without credit. Some of the biggest issues of our lives are concerns of the humanities. Like whether we accept a politician's definition of "acceptable risk" at a nuclear power plant. Like publicly funded abortions or legalized gambling or how we distribute political power .

These are also political questions and their philosophical, historical or religious core often gets hidden behind the politics, which is too bad because good politics is a poor substitute for a good philosophy, whereas good philosophy can makes good politics.

Our best presidents, for example, were those who convinced people not just of their politics but of its philosophical or ethical base. The New Deal, the War on Poverty, the civil rights legislation and the Peace Corps would never have gotten off the ground if people hadn't accepted the philosophy before the politics.

We need, as Martin Marty said, a place from which to view the world. The media and the merchandisers would like us to think otherwise. They want us to acquiesce in their plan to create packaged consumers for their packaged products - whether it be artificial eggs, a new TV series or a president. They would like us to want more than to be. The thing that keeps us in rebellion is a part of what the humanities are about. This is the revolutionary aspect of the National Endowment for the Humanities. It proposes to fund the dangerous notion that we can still think for ourselves. That we still want to know why we do things as well as when and how much it will cost. That we still have some choices left. . .

Whatever a humanities is, it used to be different. Rod French, a scholar at George Washington University who happens to be both an academic and a non-academic humanist, described it this way in a paper prepared for the National League of Cities:

"At the opening of the modern age, in the city states of Italy in the 14th and 15th centuries, humanist scholars and poets handled state correspondence, represented their sovereigns as diplomatic emissaries and wrote orations for great civic occasions. But already in the 16th century, this whole class of scholars began a long decline into disgrace and neglect. Their ambition and poor judgment was responsible in part, but they were also the victims of deep social changes. The rise of the middle class and the democratic revolutions of the 18th century further displaced humanists from positions of influence. And then industrialization placed a premium on a set of new skills. Those who persisted in studying the humanities were forced to the margins of public life. . . .In the Renaissance, the term humanist referred to men (almost exclusively} who dedicated themselves to the study of the humanities. That happened to mean to them the study of the literature and history and politics and ethics and art of classical Greece and Rome. Today, hardly anyone in public life feels they need a humanist and few humanists feel they need a public life . . .

"The only way to get the humanist down from the ivory tower is to drag him into public affairs. If his alleged contribution proves in actual experience to be trivial or ephemeral, then the game is up. If the managers of society refuse even to give his questions a hearing then we can conclude fairly that they are not really friends of the good society."

Here is one more historical note: Tocqueville called the French Revolution the first great event in history brought about by men of letters. The Russian Revolution was another. So, as late as this century, some humanists have been found relevant.

The National Endowment for the Humanities says that all programs funded by state humanities committees should have "scholars involved centrally." Artists can get money from their national endowment without scholars being centrally involved in their sculpture or dance. Governments are more leery of unformed ideas than they are of unformed stone, which may be why federally funded thinking must be accompanied by licensed personnel. I think humanities scholars should have to prove that their ideas are worth something, just like anyone else, but they're on the dole far less than most groups, there isn't much risk that they will turn into a mandarin class in the near future, and they need the money, so what the hell. You can always pull the anchovies off the pizza if you don't like them..

One of the problems with defining the humanities is that it is hard to do anything well without them. A doctor or a nuclear physicist who isn't also a humanist can cause a lot of trouble. One of the purposes of the humanities is to give some direction to the other things we do. The humanities are often at their most potent when they modify something else rather than being just an end. Of course, you don't have to justify interest in the humanities on the basis of social utility. After all, the Declaration of Independence ranked the pursuit of happiness only after life and liberty as a basic right. It hasn't fared so well since. The humanities, among other things, have to do with the pursuit of happiness. As Hubert Humphrey said when the bill establishing the National Endowment passed, "At last the Congress voted for fun; at last the Congress voted and said let's have something that celebrates the rights of man to sheer fun."

But, then again, we may be too late. Newsweek seems to think so. It ran a headline over a book review recently that read: "Albert Camus: The Last of the Humanists." I hope not. . .

So what's a humanities? I can't really give you one answer. But I can give you several. It's asking why before we say yes. It's remembering something someone wrote two centuries ago when we can't remember what we wrote yesterday. It's mistakes we don't have to make because they've already been made and solutions we don't have to dream up because someone has already thought of them. It's how we got where we are and where we might go from here. It's things we can't measure yet know have depth and breadth. It's parts of our culture we might lose like the Indian tribe writing its language down and putting it in a book. It's parts of our culture that we're often slow to recognize as such, like the legislature in Georgia finally making "Georgia on My Mind" the state song and inviting Ray Charles to come down and sing it. It's the moral, philosophical, and historical issues hidden behind the political babble. It's rights and beliefs and their protection. It's preserving the past and the future and not just exploiting today. It's thinking as well as talking, questioning as well as answering. And it's placing human values and culture at the center of our world and making machines and technology and Channel Seven serve us rather than the other way around.

If we talk about things like these, we'll be talking humanities whether we know it or not. And I think we'll be reminded that they really do matter. And have all along.

Tales from the attic: Eugene McCarthy

Wikipedia - Eugene Joseph McCarthy was an American politician, writer, and academic who represented Minnesota in both houses of the United States Congress for over 22 years, then in the U.S. Senate from 1959 to 1971. McCarthy sought the party's presidential nomination in the 1968 presidential election, challenging incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson on an anti–Vietnam War platform. He ran for president four more times.

Sam Smith, 2011

OVER A QUARTER CENTURY or so, Mark Plotkin and I would have occasional lunches with Eugene McCarthy. Plotkin had been Senator McCarthy's campaign manager when he ran as an independent for president in 1976. The lunches were at such places as Duke Zeibert's - a haven for the untight powerful - and later in the Progressive Review’s conference room at La Tomate Restaurant - AKA the table just southwest of the bar. Between lunches, Gene McCarthy would write poetry, books of essays, columns (which I happily published in the DC Gazette), drink coffee at the H&J Grocery in Sperryville, Virginia, and, when the mood struck him, run for president. During or after lunch I would invariably find myself scribbling a few words on a napkin or in my butt pilot, the small note pad I keep in my back pocket. Here are some the things these notes recall. . .

 ONCE WE WERE having lunch at Duke's when Rob Reiner came into the room. McCarthy rose to greet him and the much shorter Reiner, clearly delighted to see him, rushed forward and then hesitated, asking "Do you do hugs?" Gene did.

 []

 ON ANOTHER OCCASION former Indiana Senator Vance Hartke sat down with us. Hartke had been one of the first senators to come out against the Vietnam war, but after leaving the Senate he lowered his sights somewhat, lobbying for riverboat gambling and getting caught at the age of 77 violating state election laws. He was convicted and put on probation. Hartke told us of visiting Governor Roger Branigan one morning. The governor was on his second whiskey and said to Hartke, "You know, I never wanted to be governor, I just wanted to be elected governor."

 []

 LONG BEFORE JERRY FALWELL, there was the colorful Catholic television character, Bishop Fulton Sheen, who not only spread the gospel but gave the future star of 'West Wing' his stage name. Sheen stayed in character off the set. McCarthy recalled sitting with him in a restaurant as a waitress took the orders. When she came to the customer in the fancy robes, she said, "And what do you want, cock robin?" 

 []

 MINNESOTA, Gene explained, was a place where people committed their sins in English, confessed in German and were absolved in Latin.

 []

 GENE VISITED MAINE ONCE. How'd you like it, I asked. "Well, it seems that all the women look like men and I got real interested in these places called redemption centers until I found they were just for old soda bottles."

 []

 GENE BELIEVED that the Senate was like a herd of cattle while the House acted more like hogs. The former would willing follow one steer with a sense of direction but the latter needed to be stampeded.

 []

 PRESIDENT EISENHOWER, recalled McCarthy, always asked God to care for the country while he was asleep. Gene said this was one reason he liked nighttime the best although he worried about those on the west coast because of the time differential.

 []

 GENE TOOK TENNIS LESSONS from Allie Ritzenberg at St. Alban's School in the shadow of the National Cathedral. Many of Washington's most prominent went there to release whatever aggressions were left over from their day job. Ritzenberg, when he wasn't winning titles himself, coached people like Jackie Kennedy, Katherine Graham and Robert McNamara. McCarthy viewed McNamara as a coward for showing up on the courts early in the morning when no one was around to see how badly he played. Gene told Ritzenberg that he was responsible for the Vietnam War because he kept hitting to McNamara's strength thereby boosting his ego. Then McNamara would go to the Pentagon and escalate the real battle.

 []

 SOMEONE asked what Gene would do if he were to become pope. He replied that he would cut the Ten Commandments down to four and reorder them.

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 HE LIKED PRINCIPLES YOU COULD FOLLOW: "An old Congressman - I think it was Brad Spencer - said, 'I'll tell you, young men, you may make a mistake once in a while, but vote against everything that starts with 're.'

 He said, 'Vote against all reorganizations.'

 'Vote against all recodifications.

 'Vote against all resolutions.'

They hadn't started to reinvent government then but he would have said, 'Vote against all reinventions.'

And, he said, 'Vote against all Republicans.' That was the last word and rather a good bit of advice."

[]

GENE AND I both owned property in Rappahanock County, Virginia, about two hours away. If DC had the population density of Rappahanock, it would have only 2,000 people living in it. I bought the place in the early 1970s from G. Brown Miller, who once told me, "You know, partner, your friend Erbin is a mighty fine fellow." I agreed. "He gave me one of them marijuwana cigarettes the other day." "How'd you like it, Brown?" I asked. "Well, it seems like to me, for a man who's lived on moonshine all your life, it don't do much."

I once entered the H&J Grocery store in Virginia and found a group of men drinking coffee, including a fully uniformed and armed game warden holding his coffee in one hand and a copy of Foreign Affairs in the other. It was explained to me that Gene McCarthy had been in earlier.

[]

DESPITE ALL HIS LOSSES in presidential races, his defeat in the 1982 Minnesota senatorial race sometimes appeared to bother him most. And Rappahanock County was partly to blame. It seemed his opponent had depicted McCarthy as a stranger who lived amongst the Virginia gentry and the horsey set. Gene tried to explain the difference between, say, truly horsey Middleburg, Virginia, and Rappahanock - such as the roughness of the latter's terrain and its groundhog holes. Challenged to explain who did live there, "I went on to explain that the men of my acquaintance in the county were country lawyers, well diggers, preachers, horse trainers and traders, orchard men, cattle breeders and horse breeders, wood cutters, timber men, a game warden, at least three country store owners, an auctioneer, two filling station operators, the keeper of the hounds, a real estate man who encouraged people to eat rutabagas, a county supervisor, one or two persons suspected of being moonshiners and bootleggers, poachers, a coon hound trainer and hunter, and one suspected of keeping fighting chickens, and a few scattered United Airlines pilots."

[]

FINALLY IT WAS TIME to go to a retirement home. As Gene had said when he turned 80, he was "beyond the reach of the scriptures" with their lifespan of three score and ten. But he didn't think all that much of his new form of exile. For one thing, there had to be at least three people at each table in the dining hall: "You need one to eat, one to talk, and one to hear." And he learned early not to sit at the same table with Victor Reuther who had developed an endless capacity for describing his near death in an attempted murder while a labor leader. Gene's view of retirement: "I feel like I'm on a cruise ship on the River Styx." And: "The line between assisted living and assisted dying is very thin."

[]

 The memorial service for Gene McCarthy ran a bit long, considering it was a tribute to a man who had once suggested reducing the number of commandments from ten to four. And it was disturbing to see Bill Clinton shamelessly delivering a tribute to a man of integrity, especially one who had once suggested, as a reform, that "we fire all the Rhodes and Oxford scholars and everyone from Arkansas." But then there was also Peter Yarrow singingthe m, oving memorials and the brass section of the National Symphony and, most of all, the guy sitting next to me in the National Cathedral pew who was wearing a baseball cap and a sports jacket. 

With pleasant earnestness he had turned to me before the service and asked, "Tell me, what did he do? He ran for president, didn't he? And was he a senator?" I was stunned, wondering what had led him to enter the cathedral in the first place, but straight forwardly described McCarthy's experience in 1968.

The man was interested and noted, "I wasn't here then but I just liked the way he stood up for the truth."

A light clicked. "You were in Vietnam," I said.

"Right. It really screwed you up. Every day you thought you were going to die. I'm still screwed up."

During the service, my neighbor made copious notes and took photos with his camera. At the end of the service, I shook hands and said I had been glad to meet him, adding, "Was it worthwhile?"  He smiled. "It was unforgettable. I feel alive again.

Tales from the Attic: Tips for progressives

  Sam Smith

This was written around 2010

 1. Get an agenda: One of the reasons that George Bush was able to define liberalism his way was because liberals hadn't done it first. In recent years political progressives have made no serious attempt to sit down and decide upon an agenda. If progressives can't state clearly what they believe in, who can blame the public for being confused? There is a need for a progressive platform, preferably one that can be written on one side of a sheet of paper.

 Since the sixties there has been a tremendous splintering of progressives into groups specializing in a single issue or a cluster of single issues. This has produced a high level of expertise on these issues, raised the national consciousness on many of them, and provided a cadre capable of writing and criticizing legislation. The bad side-effect has been that progressives have forgotten how to work in coalition with one another and seem incapable of providing a holistic vision of that for which they are striving. Like G. K. Chesterton's description of liberals, they can't lead; they won't follow and they refuse to cooperate.

 An annual conference at which progressive organizations came up with, say, a 12-item agenda would let someone other than the right define what it is that we are about..

 2. Don't be afraid of popular issues: One of the striking differences between old-style liberals and new-style progressives is that the former had a knack of finding popular issues. With a few exceptions, such as environmental issues, contemporary progressives feel almost guilty if they get involved in anything that will take less than years of activism to win general support. This is not to say that unpopular causes should be avoided, but simply to suggest that it is okay to leaven the difficult and the controversial with things people want. If we had done so over the past few years, we would be hearing today much more about national health care and less about abortion, more about housing and less about gun control, and more about leveraged buy-outs and less about furlough programs. The game is not only to win the national debate but to determine what the national debate is about.

 3. Describe a future worth fighting for: Optimism is deeply ingrained in American culture. Progressives are in a tough spot in this regard, because they tend to bring America the bad news.

 And America, in the classic tradition, kills them for it. We need a lot more skill in motivating people to correct what's wrong without simultaneously casting a pall over their vision of the future.

 Progressives should not surrender optimism to the reactionaries. Thomas Jefferson said, "My theory has always been that if we are to dream, the flatteries of hope are as cheap, and pleasanter than the gloom of despair." And it was the Democrats, after all, in the runaway election year of 1936, who labelled Republicans as "disciples of despair" floundering in a "fountain of fear." Roosevelt himself got considerable mileage by the unsupported assertion that we had nothing to fear but fear itself. More recently, one of the characteristics of the sixties was its vibrant, if unrealistic, vision of the future. It wasn't just the demonstrations that changed things; it was the dream of an Age of Aquarius.

 4. Go for redemption before recrimination: Andy Young went to South Africa back in the seventies and was roundly criticized for it. In response, he recalled what Martin Luther King had said about segregationists in the south: you had to work on the assumption that one day you would be friends with the people against whom you were fighting. The south is a much healthier place today because King believed in redemption in politics as well as religion. Progressives have to fight so hard to win that they sometimes forget that the antagonists are, in the end just wrong, a universal, if disappointing, human trait. Thinking of those opposed to us as potential converts rather than certain enemies may increase the former and lessen the latter.

 5. Speak United States: This dictum was delivered by my high school math teacher, Herman Breuniger, whenever we would offer a garbled or jargon-ridden comment. I think of it often in Washington  where so many, including progressives, speak in the artificial tongues of governmentese, poligabble and media slang. The people we are trying to convince speak United States; it helps to talk the same language.

 6.Think symbolically: Progressives are too rational for their own good. They are living in an age in which symbolism rules the world and they keep spewing out data instead of dreams. Politics at its best has always contained a healthy helping of theater, but many progressives seem determined to leave show business to the reactionaries. No wonder so many progressive acts close on opening night.

 7. Don't fight your own kind: The progressive movement is one of the few organisms that feeds on its own parts. The left has a long tradition of acting as though it believed a day without schisms was like a day without sunshine. In fact, progressives have enough problems from reactionaries, conservatives and extremist moderates without fighting amongst themselves as well.

 8. Don't be too pure: It's okay to be a saint but don't expect many others to follow you into self-deprivation, moral perfection, supererogation or martyrdom. A handful of Ralph Naders and Mitch Snyders is all the movement needs. Be happy if someone votes the right way, writes the letter you want or shows up for the meeting. And if you find some anti-abortionists who are against our policy in Central America, don't knock them; put them on a committee.

 Progressives need a constituency not disciples. Besides, most people aren't as interested hi this stuff as you are. They're like Oscar Wilde, who said he could never become a socialist because he liked to keep his evenings free.

 9. Be frugal: Both liberals and conservatives spend too much money on the wrong things -- when they are in office.

 But the liberals get 99% of the rap. Here is another case of the left stipulating a conservative definition. Frugality, at the moment, is an untouched political field. Progressives need to shuck the assumption that spending money in the name of something is the same as spending money for something.

 Billions are spent hi Washington in the name of good causes; considerably less actually serves those causes. A number of states have dealt with this problem as it applies to charities, placing a limit on the bureaucratic overhead a non-profit can have and still claim tax-exemption.

 Progressives should seek a similar standard for government.

 It could cause a recession in Washington but would easily mean more money for housing, health, farmers and so forth.

 Few things would change the popular impression of progressives more than if they would begin to concern themselves with the efficient use of the taxpayers' dollars.

 10. Think small: The large federal government has done wonderful things for America, but it doesn't follow that it gets better as it gets bigger, or that there aren't other ways to do wonderful things. Progressives need to shed their preoccupation with the federal government. Progressives should encourage decentralization of the federal government, should seek to empower neighborhoods, smaller towns and communities; and find ways of bringing small business into the progressive fold. These are important constituencies that neither Democrats nor Republicans have vigorously sought as yet..

 11.  Rescue patriotism: Many of the most familiar symbols of patriotism have been seized by the right. But the substance of patriotism, interestingly, is largely downplayed or ignored. The republic, for example, comes in second to the flag in the pledge of allegiance. The left prefers not to discuss the subject at all.

 There are, however, ways of discussing and symbolizing love of country without the hypocrisy and cant  of an American right that practices the cynical wisdom of Hermann Goering: "The people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders... Years ago, Woodrow Wilson, speaking to a group of newly Americanized citizens, said that they were pledging allegiance not to a particular set of laws, not to a flag, not to one administration or even to the American government in general. They were pledging allegiance to a set of ideals that are particularly American.

 Progressives tend to ignore the wealth of American history that could provide anecdotal, symbolic and substantive support for their positions. In the warehouse of the American past lies a vast array of tools for the contemporary activist, largely unused. This is, I suspect, in part due to a rejection of history because of the wrongs that occurred during it.

 Progressives  can meet the flag-wavers with their own symbolism. The progressive symbol of love of country could be the land itself. We should use photographs and graphics that suggest the physical magnificence of America and we could adopt such songs as America the Beautiful and This Land Is Your Land as the patriotic songs of the progressive movement.

 Far more than the flag, the land itself is the primal symbol of America and at a time when we need to save that land from rampant destruction, using that symbol would remind people of that need, and by extension, of a similar need throughout the world..

 13. Be serious, not solemn: Russell Baker once pointed out that Americans had forgotten the difference between being solemn and being serious. Many progressives suffer from this confusion. Remember that Emma Goldman, a serious radical, once said, "If I can't dance, I don't want to be in your revolution."

 

From anger to action

Sam Smith, 2017 - One of the sad things about the ethnic conflict that has increasingly defined our land is the lack of movements that produce change rather than merely more anger. While the victims of such things as police brutality have more than enough reason to express this anger, that doesn’t mean the anger will produce results by itself.

 Even when alternatives are proposed, the media continues to show its bias for conflict over resolution. For example a check of Google found that in the last month less than 5% of online news mentions of Black Lives Matter also included a description of the group’s list of police reforms it is seeking.

Then there are those of liberal bent who seem to prefer semantic and symbolic change over more substantial improvements. For them, to remove the sign on a building named after John Calhoun or to label a whole ethnic group as possessing “white privilege” takes the place, say, of actually changing how a police department operates.  

In fact, the number of whites in poverty is almost twice as large as the number of blacks and the number of whites earning a minimum wage or less is more than twice the combined black and latino figure. And because it is considered acceptable by many liberals to ‘dis lower class whites, it is not surprising that so many have sought salvation on the right.

To deal effectively with the issues that confront us, we need alter our language, convert justified anger into effective action, and build cross-cultural alliances that are currently ignored or disparaged. At the present time, for example, blacks comprise only 13% of the population, far too few to achieve righteous goals without the aid of a large number of whites. Lumping the latter into a constituency of privileged racists is not only wrong, it’s not going to change anything for the better. 

As the new book, Third Reconstruction, based on the important work of the Moral Mondays movement, points out:

 Fusion politics is about helping those who have suffered injustice and have been divided by extremism to see what we have in common. We do this by bringing people together across dividing lines and helping them hear one another. We have no permanent enemies, only permanent issues, rooted in our deepest moral and constitutional values.

 

Some of the authors’ other important approaches can be found here.

 And here are a few other ideas we could be talking about and acting upon, some of them excerpted from my book, Great American Repair Manual.

Stop using the word race: There is simply no scientific definition of race. What are considered genetic characteristics are often the result of cultural habit and environmental adaptation. As far back as 1942, anthropologist Ashley Montague called race our "most dangerous myth."

Yet in our conversations and arguments, in our media, and even in our laws, the illusion of race is given great credibility. As a result, that which is transmitted culturally is considered genetically fixed, that which is an environmental adaptation is regarded as innate and that which is fluid is declared immutable.

Many still hang on to a notion similar to that of Carolus Linnaeus, who declared in 1758 that there were four races: white, red, dark and black. Others make up their own races, applying the term to religions (Jewish), language groups (Aryan) or nationalities (Irish). Modern science has little impact on our views. Our concept of race comes largely from religion, literature, politics, and the oral tradition. It comes creaking with all the prejudices of the ages. It reeks of territoriality, of jingoism, of subjugation, and of the abuse of power.

DNA research has revealed just how great is our misconception of race. In The History and Geography of Human Genes, Luca Cavalli-Sforza of Stanford and his colleagues describe how many of the variations between humans are really adaptations to different environmental conditions (such as the relative density of sweat glands or lean bodies to dissipate heat and fat ones to retain it). But that's not the sort of thing you can easily build a system of apartheid around. As Thomas S. Martin has written:

The widest genetic divergence in human groups separates the Africans from the Australian aborigines, though ironically these two 'races' have the same skin color…. There is no clearly distinguishable 'white race.' What Cavalli-Sforza calls the Caucasoids are a hybrid, about two-thirds Mongoloid and one-third African. Finns and Hungarians are slightly more Mongoloid, while Italians and Spaniards are more African, but the deviation is vanishingly slight.

If we were to come to accept the fact that our social identity is best defined far more by the ethnicity and culture in which we are raised and live than by biology, we would, for example, pay more attention to the fact that our first “black president” spent considerably more time with the Harvard Law School then with a black parent. And that the color of his skin was not the best clue to who he really is.

The real reason race is important to us: Even as we talk endlessly of race, we simultaneously go to great lengths to prove that we are all the same. Why this contradiction? The answer can be partly found in the tacit assumption by many that human equity must be based primarily on competitive equality. Listen to talk about race (or sex) and notice how often the talk is also about competition. The cultural differences (real or presumed) that really disturb us are ones of competitive significance: thigh circumference, math ability and so forth. We accept more easily other differences -- varieties of hair, degree of subcutaneous fat, prevalence of sickle cell anemia -- because they don't affect (or affect far less) who gets to the top.

We don't spend the effort to separate facts from fiction because both cut too close to our inability to appreciate and celebrate our human differences. It is far easier to pretend either that these differences are immutable or that they don't exist at all.

The Catch-22 of ethnicity: It is hard to imagine a non-discriminatory, unprejudiced society in which ethnicity and sex matter much. Yet in our efforts to reach that goal, our society and its institutions constantly send the conflicting message that they are extremely important.

For example, our laws against discriminatory practices inevitably heighten general consciousness of race and sex. The media, drawn inexorably to conflict, plays up the issue. And the very groups that have suffered under racial or sexual stereotypes consciously foster countering stereotypes -- "you wouldn't understand, it's a black thing" -- as a form of protection. Thus, we find ourselves in the odd position of attempting to create a society that shuns invidious distinctions while at the same time -- often with fundamentalist or regulatory fervor -- accentuating those distinctions.

The most important fact about prejudice - It's normal. That isn't to say that it's nice, pretty, or desirable. Only that suspicion, distrust, and distaste for outsiders is a deeply human trait. The anthropologist Ruth Benedict wrote that "all primitive tribes agree in recognizing [a] category of the outsiders, those who are not only outside the provisions of the moral code which holds within the limits of one's own people, but who are summarily denied a place anywhere in the human scheme. A great number of the tribal names in common use, Zuñi, Déné, Kiowa . . . are only their native terms for 'the human beings,' that is, themselves. Outside of the closed group there are no human beings."

Many attempts to eradicate racism from our society have been based on the opposite notion -- that those who harbor prejudice towards others are abnormal and social deviants. Further, we often describe these "deviants" only in terms of their overt antipathies -- they are "anti-Semitic" or guilty of "hate." In fact, once you have determined yourself to be human and others less so, you need not hate them any more than you need despise the fish you eat for dinner. This is why those who participate in genocide can do so with such calm -- they have defined their targets as outside of humanity.

What if, instead, we were to start with the unhappy truth that humans have always had a hard time dealing with other peoples, and that much ethnic and sexual antagonism stems not from hate so much as from cultural narcissism? Then our repertoire of solutions might tilt more towards education and mediation and away from being self-righteous multi-cultural missionaries attacking yahoos in the wilds of the soul. We could turn towards something more akin to what Andrew Young once described as a sense of "no fault justice." We might begin to consider seriously Martin Luther King's admonition to his colleagues that among their dreams should be that someday their enemies would be their friends.

Telling stories: If we are to rid our minds of stereotypes, something needs to fill the empty space. Nothing works better than the real stories of real people drawn from the anecdotal warehouses that supply many of our deepest values, feelings and philosophy.

If you find your classroom, organization or workplace bogged down in cultural tension and abstract confrontation -- or perhaps feeling the silence that comes from being near one another and not knowing what to say -- why not take a break and let people tell their own stories?

How Mr. Platt did it: In the middle of the stolid, segregated, monolithic 1950s, Howard Platt taught one of two anthropology courses available in an American high school. I was lucky enough to be among his students. Mr. Platt showed us a new way to look at the world.

And what a wonderful world it was. Not the stultifying world of our parents, not the monochromatic world of our neighborhood, not the boring world of 9th grade, but a world of fantastic options, a world in which people got to cook, eat, shelter themselves, have sex, dance and pray in an extraordinary variety of ways. Mr. Platt's subliminal message of cultural relativism was simultaneously a subliminal message of freedom. You were not a prisoner of your culture; you could always go live with the Eskimos, the Indians or the Arabs. By the time the bell sounded I was often ready to go.

Mr. Platt did not exorcise racism, and he did not teach ethnic harmony, cultural sensitivity, the regulation of diversity, or the morality of non-prejudiced behavior. He didn't need to. He taught something far more important, something so often missing from our discussions on race, something frequently absent from college curricula. Mr. Platt opened a world of variety, not for us to fear but to learn about, appreciate and enjoy. It was not an obstacle, but a gift.

Be friendly and respectful: In a culturally varied society, it is easy to transmit signals that are misunderstood but, fortunately, kindness, friendliness and respect come across clearly. Make good use of them.

Learn about other cultures: We typically try to resolve inter-cultural tensions without giving people a solid reason for liking one another. Mutual enjoyment and admiration provide the shortest route between two ethnicities. Education is one thing that we know reduces prejudice. Yet for all our talk about diversity, this isn't so easy to come by. We could well spend less time on abstractions of racism and more on the assets of each other's traditions.

We could be teaching, in high school classes and college seminars, the variety of the world as something to explore and enjoy, not just as a problem or an issue. You don't have to teach diversity. Diversity is. You don't have to defend it in lofty liberal rhetoric. Studying humanity's medley is not a moral act; it is simply intelligent.

And you don't have to learn it all in school. France became a haven for black exiles in the last century in no small part because of French enthusiasm for jazz and African art. Similarly, jazz clubs and concerts were among the few places in segregated America that apartheid was regularly ignored.

Diversity within cultures counts as well as that between them: Just because jazz is important to black culture doesn't mean all blacks like jazz. Or that colleges shouldn't recruit black cellists as well as black forwards. Or that just because someone's white, they have to be Anglo-Saxon or a Protestant.

Find something in common that's more important than what's not: It can be a political goal, a sport, an avocation or a business. I've seen it work in situations as diverse as a project to train church archivists, a kid's team headed for a playoff, the creation of a city’s major third party, and the stopping of one of the largest planned freeway systems in the country. The importance of ethnicity is often inversely proportional to what else we have on our minds

Stop being shocked by prejudice. We have attempted to exorcise racism much as Nancy Reagan tried to get rid of drugs, by just saying no. It has worked about as well. Once we recognize the unpleasant persistence of human discrimination, once we give up the notion that it is merely social deviance controllable by sanctions, we will be guided away from puritanical corrective approach towards ones that emphasize techniques of mitigating harm, and towards activities and attitudes that become antibiotics against prejudice.

Talk about it but not too much: At a meeting called to discuss racial problems, a black activist said, "I don't want to talk about race unless we are going to do something specific about it." It's not a bad rule for every public discussion of race. Unproductive talk can leave people feeling more helpless and frustrated than when it began.

Diversity includes people you don't like. Even liberals don't talk about this but a truly multi-cultural community will include born-again Christians opposed to abortion, Muslims with highly restrictive views on the role of women, prayer-sayers and atheists, Playboy readers as well as Seventh Day Adventists. Remember that you're not required to express -- or even have -- an opinion about everyone else in the world. Encourage reciprocal liberty: I can’t have my freedom unless you have yours.

Don't sweat the small stuff. Common sense is a great civil rights tool. Even in a multi-cultural society, loutish sophomores are going to use tasteless language, fundamentalists will sneak in private prayers on public occasions, and eight-year-old boys will grab girls where they shouldn't. Hyper-reaction to such minor phenomena hurt and trivialize the cause of human justice.

Try to avoid putting virtues in competition: School bussing placed the virtue of integration in direct conflict with the virtue of neighborhood schools. Often such conflicts can be avoided or mitigated by choosing other tactics. For example, why was there so much attention to bussing and so little to residential integration?

Attack economic discrimination, too: After every ethnic or gender group gets its rights, the powerful among them will still discriminate against the weak and the wealthy against the poor. As Saul Alinsky said, "When the poor get power they'll be shits like everyone else." Opposition to affirmative action might have been much less had the programs been based on zipcode as well as on race and sex. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed out in 1964 that "the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education." And bear in mind that slavery was not just ultimate ethnic discrimination, it was also ultimate economic discrimination as well: the master had all; the slave nothing.

Be tough on leaders, not on followers: Those with tightly defined ideas about how we should behave often make little distinction between people who merely accept the values of their culture and those who control, market and manipulate them. It helps to remember that we are all creatures of our cultures and often speak unconsciously with their voice. This may not be an admirable characteristic but it certainly is a human one. After all, if it weren't for Rush Limbaugh, dittoheads would have nothing to ditto.

Recognize that we are all part something else. By dint of exposure to TV alone, it is virtually impossible to live in America and not have absorbed aspects of other cultures. We all, in effect, belong to a part-culture, which is to say that our ethnicity is somewhat defined by its relationship to, and borrowing from, other cultures. There are almost no pure anythings in America anymore. The sooner we accept and enjoy this, the better off we'll be.

Remember that everyone is an ethnic something. There are no unethnic Americans.

If you are in a minority you can still lead the majority –There are all sorts of ways. The moral leadership of civil rights activists, political leadership,  leadership in the arts and literature, or in a high school.

Or creating cross cultural spaces such as the traditional Irish bar As one politician said in Chicago many years ago, “An Italian won't vote for a Jew and a Lithuanian won't vote for an Pole but all four will vote for an Irishman.”

Create new alliances:  A long needed black-latino alliance representing approximately 30% of American would shake up our politics. Create a black-latino-labor alliance and politics could be changed forever. You don’t have to agree on everything; just go for the goals you all like.

 

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The passing wonder of fame

 Sam Smith – I have become fascinated by the extent of coverage being given the murder of the CEO of United Healthcare. For one thing, I had never heard of him before. I can’t even remember his name. And I noticed that MSNBC in its headlines referred to him just as CEO rather than giving his name which I suspect means I’m not alone in my ignorance on this topic.

We’re apparently meant to respect him and scorn his killer because he is a CEO, a position of significant importance to those working in firms like MSNBC, but for me it’s another case of something that has interested me of late, namely who is important and for how long. Having recently turned 87, I have a daily acquaintance with insignificance, which doesn’t bother me since the alternative might be mortality or having to do  some stupid stuff. Beside I have lived a life with some amazing people. They just weren’t famous.

I have also been mulling the topic of fame and what happens to it. People put a lot of energy into achieving it, but even if you’re famous for awhile, not long after you are forgotten. In fact, I think there is a period ranging from a few years ago to the past century in which even history hasn’t earned its fame by our standards.

I was reminded of this recently reading a book that discusses Lyndon Johnson, a major figure early in my life but – like Richad Nixon and Hubert Humphrey – rarely mentioned these days. Even Franklin Roosevelt doesn’t get that much attention. I’ve come to call this period protohistory.

Then I remember that during the four decades I was covering national news in Washington, I was also deeply involved at the local level. And when I think back, I can only come up with one national figure – Senator Eugene McCarthy – with whom I actually became friends.

There were local issues like DC self government, civil rights and freeways that absorbed me and created activist friendships. And when I think back of the people who had  the most impact on my life they were overwhelmingly local friends and neighbors, teachers I had in high school, a farmer for whom I worked in the summertime when a teenager and so forth.

I’m coming to feel that our view of who’s important has been seriously distorted by the mass media of modern times, giving us role models that  we won’t think about much in a few years. Very much like the media handles movie stars. Fame is just a passing status.

Obviously, some of these – like Donald Trump – can cause considerable damage along with those they give fame, like Robert Kennedy Jr., but can you remember who was the first director of then Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. And what did Oveta Culp Hobby do of particular interest?

What I’ve concluded from this is that fame is a passing advantage. During the long decades of protohistory even the famous are forgotten and only a few are revived by scholars.

The truth is the most important people in our lives are those with whom we live near, talk much, share ideas and do each other favors.  This is the actual world of our lives rather than what the media tries to tell us.

The guy who’ll help you most with today’s being problem may live right across the street.

Tales from the Attic: Getting started in civil rights

 Note: Some of this was written before the term Negro was replaced by the term black. 

Sam Smith, 2010 - There was a story that wound its way across the pages of The Idler -  forerunner of the Progressive Review. It was first expressed in a moving fashion in letters written from Mississippi in the summer of 1964 by my college roommate, ex-wrestler and ex-paratrooper Gren Whitman. From Biloxi on August 8, 1964 he wrote:

|||| Fear cannot be described, only felt. I have been frightened many times In my life in varying degrees, in varying circumstances. And courage is not the absence of fear. Fear is the essence of courage. What are your emotions now, driving with us along a lonely highway in rural Mississippi, in an integrated car? It you are frightened, you are with friends, and you are sane. If you are not afraid, you know nothing about Mississippi. You have never heard of the Freedom Rides and how they ended in Jack-son. You have never heard of Herbert Lee and Louis Allen, and countless others. You have not heard of Neshoba County. You have never talked with a Mississippi Negro or a civil rights veteran.

And if your fear has overcome your convictions, you have no business with us. Go home. Our three colored companions are profoundly aware that two whites are in the car with them and what this will mean if we are stopped for any reason. The two of us, likewise, know that though we are white, we become as black as tar once we are known to be CR types. White Mississippians make no distinctions. There is a strange and wonderful and, for you, a new bond between us, compounded of fear, and dedication and brotherhood. . . . 

In January 1966, I got a chance to help plant the seed. The notorious DC Transit wanted to raise its fares and the local chapter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee had organized to stop it. They urged citizens with cars to drive bus passengers during a one-day boycott. I joined the volunteers. On the morning of January 24, 1966, I hauled myself out of bed, swallowed a cup of coffee, warmed up my '54 Chrysler, and made my way to Sixth and H Streets Northeast, one of the assembly points for volunteer jitneys. A boycott organizer filled my car with three high school girls and a middle-aged and rather fat woman.

If both the fat lady and her husband worked, the five cent fare increase Chalk was seeking would cost them two week's worth of groceries over the course of a year.

I let my passengers off and headed back to Sixth and H. At Florida and New York, I counted five empty or near-empty buses. It wasn't even nine o'clock in the morning and the boycott was working,

"It's beautiful," the man in the slightly frayed brown overcoat said after he told me he was headed for Seventeenth Street. "It's working and it's beautiful. Hey, you see those two there. Let's try and get them."

I pulled over to the right lane by a stop where two men stood.

"Hey man, why spend thirty cents? Get in," my rider called to the pair.

"You headed downtown?"

"Yeah, get in."

"Great. It's working, huh? Great!"

At the delicatessen at Twenty-fourth and Benning, one of the assembly points, a young black who worked with SNCC greeted me: "Been waiting all morning for a car to work from here; said they were going to have one, but they didn't send it. Want a cup of coffee?"

"Thanks."

"I'm tired, man. Been up all night down at the office. We got some threats. One bunch said they were going to bomb us, but they didn't."

We got into my car and continued east on Benning. Lots of empty buses.

"We've got to live together, man. You're white and you can't help it. I'm Negro and I can't help it. But we still can get along. That's the way I feel about it." I agreed.

"You ever worked with SNCC before?" "Nope," I said.

'Well, I'll tell you man, you hear a lot of things. But they're a good group. They stick together. You know, like if you get in trouble, you know they're going to be in there with you. If you get threatened they'll have people around you all the time. They stick together. That's good, man."

Later, I picked up a man at a downtown bus stop. The woman in the back seat asked him, "You weren't waiting for a bus, were you?"

"No. I just figured someone would come along and pick me up."

"That's good, 'cause if you were waiting for a bus I was going to bop you upside your head."

We all laughed and the man reassured her again.

"You know," the woman in back continued, "there were some of the girls at work who said they were going to ride the bus and they really made me mad. I thought I'd go get a big stick and stand at the bus stop and bop 'em one if they got on Mr. Chalk's buses. Some people just don't know how to cooperate. And you know, you don't have nothing in this world until you get people together. Hey, lookit over there, let's see if that guy's going out northeast."

People stuck together that Monday, I carried seventy-one people, only five of them white. SNCC estimated that DC Transit lost 130,000 to 150,000 fares during the boycott. Two days later, the transit commission, in a unanimous but only temporary decision, denied DC Transit the fare hike. The commission's executive director dryly told reporters that the boycott played no part in the decision. He was probably right. The commission worried about such things as cash dividends, investor's equity, rate of return, depreciated value, and company base. The boycotters worried about a nickel more a ride. And in the end, the commission was to approve the fare hike and then more; a few years later the fare was up to forty cents.

But the boycott was important, anyway. Never had so many Washingtonians done anything so irregular and contrary to official wishes. The assumption that DC residents would passively accept the injustices of their city was shattered. SNCC and the Free DC Movement had laid the groundwork for future action.

After the bus boycott, I wrote a letter to its leader congratulating him and offering to help in the future. Not long after the leader, Marion S. Barry, and his colleague, L. D. Pratt, were sitting in my living room talking about how I could help in SNCC's public relations. I readily agreed; for the first time in my life I had joined a movement.

Three years earlier Barry had quit his $5,500 a-year post teaching chemistry at Knoxville College in Tennessee and joined SNCC. He was the group's first chair. He then showed up in Washington to head the local office. Barry early formed an improbable and ultimately nearly explosive partnership with an erstwhile farm implements manufacturer, salesman, self-styled nutrition expert, and economic theoretician named L. D. Pratt. Barry was lean, black, soft-spoken, self-contained, and given to wearing a straw plantation style hat; Pratt was husky, white, excitable, demonstrative, and covered his baldness with a felt fedora that made him appear a character out of a one-column cut in a forties edition of Time magazine.

Together they designed the boycott and a drive to win self-government for the colony of Washington. Barry and Pratt both worked themselves to the marrow and it was during those months that Barry first gained a long-lingering reputation for always being late for appointments, news conferences, and actions. "I work on CPT-- colored people's time," explained Barry. Part of my job was to stand on the street-corner and convince the press that Marion really would show up if they just waited a bit longer. The reporters would bitch, but since Barry was shaking up the city, they mostly waited anyhow.

Barry's subsequent moves in his drive for passage of right-to-vote legislation in Congress included an effort to get businessmen in downtown stores and along H Street (a black shopping area second only to downtown in commercial importance) to support the movement by displaying its sticker in their windows. Hundreds of orange and black stickers with the slogan "Free DC" below a shattered chain went up in store windows; but the threat of a business boycott led other merchants to cry blackmail, and some of the more traditional civil rights and home rule leaders began to back away from Barry's tough tactics.

In the coming months, Barry and his organization would disrupt the calm of the city with increasing frequency. A number of Free DC supporters were arrested at the annual Cherry Blossom Festival. By the following fall, Barry would have been arrested three times, for failing to "move on," for disorderly conduct, and for holding a Free DC block party without official sanction.

Barry used his arrests to make points. After being arrested for failing to move on at a policeman's order, Barry said, "It is a bad law that gives policemen the sole discretion in such matters. Especially in Washington where the cops are so uneducated and awful. They use the law as a harassing device against Negroes." And he warned, less than two years before the 1968 riot, that the attitude of police might lead to an outbreak of racial violence.

While Barry was on the streets, on the tube, in court, and in jail, his associate, L. D. Pratt, was developing a reputation as the mystery man behind the operation disturbing the tranquility of the colonial capital.  Pratt refused to be interviewed by reporters and, although it was known that he was closely involved in designing the bus boycott, few knew who be was or what he was up to.

The pair belied their public images. In person. Barry, the mortal threat to peace and order, was personally a gentle and quiet individual and Pratt, the mystery man, was, out of range of the press, open and loquacious.

Marion was leading a movement, but it had some of the intensity, closeness and spirit of a rebellion. Barry enlisted into the cause anyone he could find. You would be talking on the phone and a friendly special operator would break in with an "emergency call" and it would be Barry or Pratt or someone else with the latest crisis or plan. There were black cops who had been spiritually seconded to the movement and ministers who served as a link between the radical Barry and the more moderate civil rights movement and friendly reporters who still believed there was an objective difference between justice and injustice,. And through it all was movement, excitement and hope, not even dampened by the thirtieth chorus of "We Shall Overcome" sung in a church hall while waiting for Marion finally to show up.

Pratt described his relationship with Barry this way: "I am the theoretician and Marion is the practitioner. I just give suggestions and he makes the decisions. I re-spect his opinions more than my own."

Barry and Pratt not only upset policemen and government officials; they perturbed the established civil rights and home rule leadership in the city. It was not just the Free DC's militancy and independence that upset the old leaders. They also were profoundly disturbed by the rise of the black power idea; Coalition co-chairman Channing Phillips stated, "The black nationalist stand of SNCC is inconsistent with the Coalition's philosophy."

Still, while the 20-something Barry was an anathema to the white business leaders and considered a rogue by the local civil rights establishment, as early as 1966 a poll found him ranked fifth by black residents as the person who had done the most for blacks in DC.

In SNCC and elsewhere, the spirit of black nationalism was indeed awakening. Black power had its roots in the deep frustration of the civil rights movement with the progress towards some sustainable form of equality. In 1963, Howard Zinn, then a professor at Spellman College, told a SNCC conference that the ballot box would not give blacks much power. Zinn said SNCC should build up "centers of power outside the official political mechanism."

This was a time when the official symbol of the Alabama Democratic Party included a banner reading "White Supremacy -- For the Right." The SNCC-organized Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party had attempted to be seated at the national Democratic convention and was rebuffed, offered only two non-voting at-large seats to represent not just Mississippi all American blacks. SNCC communications director Julian Bond twice won election to the Georgia legislature, and twice that body refused to seat him. Jerry Demuth, writing in The Idler in October 1966 asked: "After Julian Bond, Atlantic City and the Alabama Democratic Party with its proclamation of white supremacy, what is there except a Black Panther Party?"

The voices of black power of the time were varied. Two months after being replaced as SNCC chair by the more militant Stokely Carmichael, John Lewis explained:

"I support the concept of black power and I have tried repeatedly to articulate it to people in terms they can understand, so that they will know it is for civil rights, not against whites."

The National Committee of Negro Churchmen of the National Council of Churches tried to combine black power and integration in an August 1965 newspaper ad:

"A more equal sharing of power is precisely what is required as the precondition of authentic human interaction. We understand the growing demand of Negro and white youth for a more honest kind of integration: one which increases rather than decreases the capacity of the disinherited to participate with power in all the structures of our common life. Without this capacity to participate with power -- i.e. to have some organized political and economic strength to really influence people with whom one interacts -- integration is not meaningful. For the issue is not one of racial balance but of honest racial interaction."

But this was a hope far from current reality and many more blacks listened to the view of Carmichael: "Integration is an insidious subterfuge for white supremacy." He told a crowd in Greenwood, MS, "We been saying 'freedom' for six years and we ain't got nothing. What we're gonna start saying now is 'Black Power.'"

The most important white at SNCC, L. D. Pratt, continued to play a important role for some time, but his ability to work with Barry declined sharply and, and after receiving physical threats dropped out of the local scene. . .

But before it was over, Barry and Pratt had one more "good shot," as L.D. liked to call them. Hauling an odd assortment of black and white activists off to a weekend retreat, the pair organized a lecture, seminar, and planning sessions to pave the way for a massive push against slum housing. In fact, that's what it was going to be called - PUSH, People United against Slum Housing. It would be no ordinary effort. Barry theorized that the reason slumlords were invulnerable was because protests were usually directed against only a small portion of their holdings. If you could uncover the full economic interests of a slumlord, Including his commercial holdings, you could organize an effective boycott against him.

From L. D.'s theoretical charts and Marion's discourse, the action moved to strange places like a hall at a Catholic woman's college where volunteers sorted out thousands of paper slips containing important information about DC eviction cases over the past two years, and the basement of the Court of General Sessions, where a friendly judge had permitted the group space to do its research closer to the source material. The little slips of paper slowly built up information concerning slumlords, lawyers, front corporations, and their interconnections. From the long tables in the basement of the Court of General Sessions, the slips went to the Recorder of Deeds office where more volunteers began arduously sifting through official records. The project never got much beyond that. Perhaps it fell of its own weight; the task of organizing all those slips of paper without a computer was staggering, Perhaps the separate directions in which various participants were rapidly going was a factor, In any event, the days of the Free DC Movement were just about over.

And sometime later, I attended a meeting in the basemen to the SNCC office. There were only a handful of whites there. Stokely Carmichael arrived and announced that whites were no longer welcomed in the civil rights movement. My time with SNCC was over

When people would write about Marion Barry years later, they wouldn't mention the good part because they had never seen it. All they saw was the cynical, corroded shell of a man they hadn't known and thought it had been that way all along. Like an old car rusting in a pasture.

As Barry moved into politics, first on the school board, then the city council, then the mayor's office I had moved my support and enthusiasm with him, and without apologies. Once in the top job, however, his weaknesses quickly lost their constraints and whatever greatness Marion might have possessed started to disintegrate.

And yet I still think of the good years. The years in which Barry was one of a handful of people who made self-determination for DC possible, the years in which he was the voice of progress and sanity on the school board and city council. I think of a man who was willing to risk his life for the freedom of others, who was willing to go to jail on the chance it would help others gain a measure of liberty. And like Jack Burden writing of Willie Stark, "I have to believe he was a great man. What happened to his greatness is not the question. Perhaps he spilled it on the ground the way you spill a liquid when the bottle breaks. Perhaps he piled up his greatness and burnt it in one great blaze in the dark like a bonfire and then there wasn't anything but dark and the embers winking. Perhaps he could not tell his greatness from ungreatness and so mixed them together that what was adulterated was lost. But he had it. I must believe that."

On the wall of my office was an autographed bumper sticker from Marion's first campaign for mayor. It read: "Barry -- the way things ought to be."

Our relationship deteriorated during the years he rose to power. But I still remember something he said about me that, given his nature, I still take as a compliment: “Sam’s a cynical cat.”