Sunday, May 18, 2025
D+172/117
1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington state triggered the largest landslide in history, killing 57 people and causing over $1 billion in damage
1994 Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip
In bed at 9, awake at 4:50, and up at 5:10. 49°, cloudy, high of 53°.
Prednisone, day 368; 1 mg., day 10 /21; Kevzaara, day 6 /14; CGM, day 1/15; Trulicity, day 2 /7. Prednisone at 5:15 a.m. Other meds at 5:30 a.m.. Eye drops at 5:20 a.m., 2:30 p.m., and p.m.
My morning meandering mind. I woke up thinking about last night's dinner date with Micaela at the Peruvian restaurant in Shorewood and about how challenging it is to run a restaurant business. That got me wondering whether Shorewood, and indeed each suburb, had its own health department inspecting restaurants, which got me thinking about metropolitan government, which got me thinking about urban vs. suburban living, and the fact that, except for my time in the Marines, I had lived in cities my entire life until it was time for Sarah to go to high school, when I moved to Shorewood so she could attend Shorewood High School and avoid the Milwaukee high schools. Shorewood H.S. was racially integrated, not because of the housing demographics in Shorewood, which was overwhelmingly White, but because of the State's Chapter 220 Program that permitted and encouraged minority students from Milwaukee to attend suburban schools. But Shorewood schools were predominantly White and Milwaukee high schools were increasingly predominantly Black and the measured academic achievements of students in the two systems were markedly different, favoring Shorewood.
Sarah and her brother Andy had both attended Garfield Avenue Elementary School in Milwaukee's "inner city." It was a majority Black school, with an integrated faculty. Sarah's first teacher was a Black woman who had grown up in the South and had experience picking cotton. Anne and I were both pleased with Sarah and Andy's education at Garfield, and at their next MPS school, Hartford Avenue, where Sarah started both her study and eventual mastery of German and her interest in theater, two interests that combined to support the career she has been in for more than 30 years. But it was at Shorewood High School that she was able to pursue and develop those interests to a much higher level and to carry them onto the University of Wisconsin, where she earned the BFA and MFA degrees that led to her lifelong career in lighting. design and technology, headquartering her efforts for the last 15 years in Bavaria.
In any event, while looking back on Sarah and Andy's educational histories and the impact of Milwaukee's federal court ordered desegregation plan requiring busing school children all over the city and the creation of somewhat gimmicky specialty schools designed to attract mainly White students, I started wondering whether it was Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas in 1954 that really started the extreme social and political polarization that we are now living with. From last night's Peruvian dinner in Shorewood to America's polarization, Trumpism, and the end of democracy? It's quite a leap, or a meander, but I wonder if it isn't the case that Trump and Trumpism started with Brown v. Board of Education. This may be just another way of asking whether, despite the variety of issues on which 'red Americans' and 'blue Americans' divide, isn't the most basic polarizer in American culture and politics Race? Hasn't it always been so?
In 2020, Stuart Stevens published "It Was All A Lie: How The Republican Party Became Donald Trump." Stevens was no amateur political analyst or academic theoritician; he had managed 5 Republican presidential races, won the nomination in 4 of them, and won the presidency in two of them. He's a pro, an insider, 70 years old, and a native of Mississippi. He wrote:
[Donald Trump] is the logical conclusion of what the Republican Party has become over the last 50 or so years, a natural product of the seeds of race, self-deception, and anger that became the essence of the Republican Party. Trump isn't an aberration of the Republican Party; he is the Republican Party in a purified form.
The epigraph of his first chapter is a quote from the Republican dirty-trickster, Lee Atwater:
Y'all don't quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger". By 1968, you can't say "nigger"—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff.
It wasn't mere happenstance that Atwater mentioned 1954. That was the year of Brown v. Board of Education, which first affected de jure public school segregation in the South, but eventually extended to all public schools, including, of course, Milwaukee's.
Nor was it happenstance that Stewart combined race and anger as components of the essence of the Republican Party. No other issue more affected Americans "where they live" than forced racial integration, more benignly pitched as desegregation, and none more intimately than school desegregation and forced busing of children. The combination of Brown v. Board and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was a death blow to Democratic dominance in the South and eventually beyond the South to the Plains States and to all similarly inclined voters. No other issue stirred anger and resentment like government-enforced racial integration in schools, neighborhoods, and places of public accommodation. It was viewed as a loss of a right to freedom of association and as an assault on majority rule and traditional democracy. More than any other issue, it gave rise to charges of "communism," "Marxism," "socialism," and "reverse discrimination" thrown at programs intended to benefit any minority group, including women, and any economically needy group, i.e.., poor people, like food stamps and Medicaid. I try to think of any issue or set of issues prior to Brown v. Board, that triggered similar deep-seated anger, resentment, and feelings of oppression and grievance, or that led to massive shifts in political allegiences, and I can think of none, not any of FDR's New Deal programs or even Harry Truman's desegregation of the military. Nothing had an impact like Brown v. Board and what followed it. So I suspect I'm right that it was Brown v. Board of Education that really started the extreme social and political polarization that we are now living with. It was Brown and its progeny that led to Trump and Trumpism, and as Stuart Stevens wrote:
In my first race [in 1978], I had stumbled onto a truth as basic and as immutable as the fact that water freezes below 32° Farhenheit: race was the key in which much of American politics and certainly all of Southern politics was played.
So it was then, so it is now, and so it goes.
Nest Eggs
Robert Louis StevensonBirds all the sunny day
Flutter and quarrel
Here in the arbour-like
Tent of the laurel.
Here in the fork
The brown nest is seated;
Four little blue eggs
The mother keeps heated.
While we stand watching her
Staring like gabies,
Safe in each egg are the
Bird's little babies.
Soon the frail eggs they shall
Chip, and upspringing
Make all the April woods
Merry with singing.
Younger than we are,
O children, and frailer,
Soon in blue air they'll be,
Singer and sailor.
We, so much older,
Taller and stronger,
We shall look down on the
Birdies no longer.
They shall go flying
With musical speeches
High over head in the
Tops of the beeches.
In spite of our wisdom
And sensible talking,
We on our feet must go
Plodding and walking.
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