Adventures in Solicitation

Not Adolph Reed

The suspension of Bernie Sanders' 2020 Presidential Campaign a couple of months ago in the face of the growing COVID-19 crisis left me a bit unmoored.  In the early days of the campaign I was moved to sign up for a stint of calling maybe once every two months or so, when panic set in-- something I could do from home as I felt like it thanks to the service of an automatic dialing program provided by the campaign.  But as Primary Season approached, although I am probably the opposite of a people person, I became a bit obsessive about it, calling 5 hours each weekend leading up to Super Tuesday.  Between New Years and the end of February I made hundreds of calls to at least 12 early primary states.  I started to see the phone script in my head when I closed my eyes at night.  When one of my automatically dialed calls on a get-out-the-vote weekend during the Nevada caucus reached a bemused and slightly annoyed Bernie organizer from his polling place, I figured I might have maxed out my usefulness as a phone volunteer.  In any case, I had in the meantime discovered the much less efficient but infinitely more satisfying activity of door-to-door canvassing.

While I was making calls, by far the most common outcome of a dial was no contact: reaching an answering machine; getting a wrong number; being hung up on.  A couple of times I would be conversing with someone distracted by an activity going on at the same time-- guests arriving for a party, or the engagement of a car salesman-- but happy to continue talking, until some missed cue clued me in that I was speaking not to a human but to a simulation of one, referred to in the trade as a "bot", a program designed to prank the unsolicited phone caller into wasting a huge amount of time talking to no one.  While I can see how something like that could traumatize an unsuspecting canvasser, I'd been warned so I mostly felt pleased with myself for catching on.  The technology was impressive, but it deterred me not in the least from moving on to my next victim. 

When I did make contact, I was happy to talk to anyone who would let me, on the theory that no one who had made up their mind indelibly would waste another second allowing me to try to change it.  I think I was able to maybe 3 or 4 times a weekend, and to plant seeds of encouragement to dream far more frequently.  Not always. There was a gentleman working the sandwich counter of a deli in New Hampshire on what must have been a slow afternoon who seemed civil enough and interested in conversation until it became clear that his libertarian leanings impelled him to disagree on principle with every point I made.  I only wasted 20 minutes or so with him before I excused myself from bothering him any further-- even though he gave every indication that he could have kept gainsaying me indefinitely.   Most of the people I reached did not have that kind of agenda.

Trump supporters flummoxed me at first until I realized that they too could possibly be persuaded.  They were mostly polite when I identified myself as a Bernie volunteer (except when they weren't of course-- but that was true of Warren supporters too). I had good conversations with a couple of them including one in Minnesota who, based on the trajectory of the conversation into the camp of radical labor politics might have switched to Bernie by November had the primary gone differently.  Biden voters who remained on the line with me were more interested in hearing my reasons for supporting Bernie and assuring me of their sympathy for his programs than in challenging me.  Biden was probably the least common candidate mentioned by the people who spoke to me, bolstering my theory that his supporters at that stage of the primary season, presumably making up the bulk of the hangups, were not interested in challenging their support for their hoped for vanquisher of Trump. 

Out of hundreds of calls, the candidates mentioned least by those I spoke to were Biden, Warren and Buttigieg.  Most of those I reached who weren't undecided or leaning toward Bernie but willing to listen were for Klobuchar oddly enough.  The campaign explicitly asked volunteers not to disaparage other candidates-- a request I honored for the most part.  But I made an exception only for last minute democrat Michael Bloomberg whose ads were flooding the airwaves at the time and generating excitement among the toadies of the mainstream media discouraged by Joe Biden's uneven performance on the campaign trail and in the polls, especially against Bernie Sanders. One woman in Colorado who expressed an interest in Bloomberg on the theory that an actual billionaire could surely defeat Trump, listened long enough to my objections to the man that she was convinced.  I felt bad when after 30 minutes of agreeable conversation in which we came to strong agreement on reasons not to vote for Bloomberg, she admitted with regret that she had already sent in her mail-in ballot for him.

Arnie, a 35 year old in Iowa who expressed strong support for Bernie at the mention of his name took me aback when he told me he wouldn't vote.  When I asked why, he muttered a word I couldn't understand.  I had to ask him 3 times before he said in a loud agitated voice, "FELON!"  I hadn't filled myself in on voter eligibility requirements in Iowa before calling, but it didn't sound right.  He had served his time, surely he could vote.  He insisted in an agitated tone that he was sure he couldn't.  I told him my opinion of that, asked him to tell his friends to vote on his behalf  and told him that I would in any case.    After hanging up I checked and Arnie was of course right.  Iowa is one of three states (along with Kentucky and Virginia) that permanently disenfranchise anyone convicted of a felony. (Indeed I gave a thought to Arnie and my incarcerated brothers and sisters when I cast my own vote by mail last month.)

My most unforgettable encounter was probably with Melrita from Detroit, a 53 year old counselor of some kind (she was receptive most of all about the mental health clause of Bernie’s Medicare for all plan). At the time, Bernie was the front-runner in Michigan and many other states, and according to a host of concurrent polls, the presumed nominee if trends continued.  He had won Michigan in the 2016 primary and I knew he was polling well with all groups under 45 but particularly with persons of color so I was expecting an easy time of it that day, but Melrita had other ideas.  She told me she preferred Andrew Yang--who was performing poorly and was rumored to be close to dropping out of the race-- because Bernie was not promising reparations to American Descendents of Slavery; and while no one still campaigning at that point was, including Yang, at least Yang was promising to give Black people some money.  She was pretty sour on Bernie, said she was going to vote for him if Yang dropped out but she wasn’t too crazy about the idea.  We had a very long conversation that was very honest (on her part especially) and difficult but not unpleasant or unproductive.  She was very sweet to me considering I was a know-it-all trying to tell her why this white man who was not promising reparations or universal income for her and her family was going to be a good thing for black people. Her children had been to college, so free college for all wasn't particularly moving her.  She actually led with Student Loans, that was her biggest concern as a mother of college graduates.  She didn’t realize Bernie proposed cancelling student debt for all -- no questions asked-- and she didn’t entirely believe me when I told her, but promised she’d go check it out.  So it ended with her bitching at me about having to vote for Bernie—a totally unexpected (and revoltin’) development.   

I sort of knew going into the conversation that Bernie was lukewarm on the concept of reparations, but I didn’t want to speak for him so I just went from the angle of let’s make life better for all.  She kept coming back to that’s great but what is he going to do for black people specifically.  I helpfully suggested that I'd heard that Bernie's views on the issue had been shaped by Cornel West and Adolph Green.  She was familiar with Dr West's support of Bernie Sanders but not fully convinced by it.  I tried prison, police and criminal justice reform as evidence of policies that would disproportionately help people of color but she was well-versed on the percentage of the black community that that specifically addressed and she resented the notion that helping convicts and those caught in the legal system automatically helped every black person.  She was rather determined not to be excited about Bernie being the best she could hope for.  Frustrating!  

After the call I looked into the reparations issue, and realized I had Adolph Reed's name wrong again.*  I had guessed correctly (but kept to myself) that Bernie did not want to support reparations without seeing a plan, did not want the government to write a $100,000 check  to every black descendant of a slave and then declare itself to have repaired slavery (assuming it could ever agree to proceed, let alone to a plan or an amount).  But he was of course interested in repair—that’s what his agenda was about.  While it was not targeted expressly to black people, since black people and people of color are disproportionately for historic reasons that are maintained into the present day at the bottom of the economic rung and Bernie's proposed programs are not means tested, they would disproportionately and automatically benefit those who have been historically cut out of the economic pie.   He is also one of several co-sponsors of the Senate version of the late Michigan congressman John Conyer’s HR 80 bill to study a path for reparations introduced by Cory Booker in May of 2019.  I don’t think I’d have swung Melrita from frigid to avid support if I'd known this information going into it, but as hard as the conversation was, honestly this is why you do it.

Bernie lost Michigan and within a month, the powers that be had amassed behind the theretofore  under-performing Joe Biden and forced Bernie out of the race.  Also within the month, the novel coronavirus ravaged Detroit, the rest of Michigan and the US. As a result, tens of millions lost their jobs including their health benefits.  In May, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis Police before our eyes for suspicion of having written a bad $20 check.  In response, communities across the country began marching in the streets for change.  While statues fell and Nancy Pelosi herself fell to her knee draped in kente cloth in the halls of congress, she made clear in short order that substantial police reform was off the table.  Joe Biden hinted at the strong possibility that he would select a black woman as his vice president and then turned around and engaged Wall Street about filling positions in his cabinet and promised to veto medicare for all if it should come across his desk if he wins in November. 

I could change my mind but at the moment, I've hung up my phone.  People will have to be bothered by some other stranger between now and November.

Not Adolph Green

~~~~~~~~~~

* I seem to have a block

Mid-Summer Unprovoked Dance Outburst

Hrdza - Štefan:

Robyn - Beach 2k20 (Yaeji Remix):

Rye Rye - Shake it to the Ground:

Kid Creole & The Coconuts featuring Coati Mundi - I Am:

Toumani & Sidiki Diabaté - Hamadoun Touré

Dara Puspita - Pest Pak Lurah:

Miss Pooja - Date on Ford:

Deee-Lite  - Runaway:

Dan Nkosi - Wash' Umkhukhu:

Renato Carosone - We no speak americano

Te Vaka - Mataloa (Choreography and Dance by Olivia Foa'i):

Shantel & Mahala Raï Banda - Mahalageasca (Bucovina Dub - Featuring Cyd Charisse):

Juan Gonzalez & Banda Criollo - Bomba Le Le

Taimane - Wicked Game:

Robyn Hitchcock - The Yip Song:

*****

Melbourne Ska Orchestra - Get Smart:

Let me rephrase that

Please note the following changes:

• Killing 2 birds with one stone => Empowering 2 birds with one bag of bird seed
• More than one way to skin a cat => More than one way to herd a cat.
• Throw out the baby with the bathwater => Throw out the back while throwing out the bathwater
• When it rains, it pours => When it pours, it floods.
• Old wives' tale =>  Rural legend
• Robbing Peter to pay Paul => Stiffing Jaden to venmo Skyler
• Bite the bullet => Take a topical anesthetic
• Speak of the devil => Speak of the remaining Koch brother
• The best thing since sliced bread => The best thing since socialized medicine
• Don't beat a dead horse => That comment section is closed
• Off your rocker => Off your ritalin.
• Running around like a chicken with its head cut off => Running around like a Roomba.
• Life's a bitch and then you die => I'm a bitch
• It's all fun and games until somebody gets hurt => On second thought, don't tweet.
• Jump on the bandwagon => Favorite the influencer
• So-and-so is cancelled => So-and-so is going into syndication.
• No such thing as a free lunch => Capitalism sucks
• What is the ask? =>  Ask is the what?
• Disrupting the sector => Fucking shit up
• A stitch in time saves nine => Gibble gabble gop
• A dime a dozen =>  Free shipping on bulk orders
• Indian giving => Making a treaty with first nation peoples
• Going through the whole song and dance => Giving a State of the Union
• Not playing with a full deck => Police academy material
• It's not rocket science => It's not accurate opinion polling
• It takes two to tango => You can't Zoom yourself
• That ship has sailed=> That Segway is halfway to the food court
• Mother fucker => Father mocker
• Awesome! => Stacked!
• Robust! => Awesome!
• Stacked! => Robust!
• Taking a dump => Laying bricks
• Time is money => I'll give you $20 to hurry up
• Yaas queen => Trust my opinion of you even though I'm the type of person who would adopt Yaas Queen as an expression!
• When Pigs Fly => The day after the Sanders Inauguration
• Choke the chicken => Drain the swamp  
• I'll be a monkey's uncle => Color me woke
• That screws me up => That jams my mobility scooter
• Wearing your heart on your sleeve => Rocking your pussy hat
• Sucker => Trump University Class of '08
• Rarer than hen's teeth => Rarer than sincerity from an America's Got Talent audience
• Seeing a man about a horse => Buying a drone on eBay
• Up shit creek without a paddle => At Burning man without a Selfie stick
• Two bricks shy of a load => 6 minutes short of a TED talk
• As God is my witness => As the surveillance state is my witness
• Fucking shit up => Disrupting the sector
• I can't even => Lo, it leaves me bereft of the very power to bring about the fullness of a mere sentence.  
• Turd in the punchbowl => Fart in the elevator
• The early bird gets the worm => The night owl gets the night crawlers
• Kicking the bucket => Buying the Google Glass.

Wisps and Ashes

A cigarette would be good right about now.  I don't smoke but I used to so I know what I'm missing.  Neither of my parents smoked cigarettes by the time I came along.  My father partook of White Owl cigars especially Saturday afternoons when he was working on something around the house and Half & Half pipe tobacco evenings when he sat listening to a jazz LP or reading a book. The cigar smoke was a bit strong, but I would sneak whiffs of the spent tobacco in the pipe bowl occasionally -- I liked the smell but the habit mystified me. I think the ritual and the paraphernalia appealed to him.  It was especially puzzling  that his smoking took multiple forms because at least for our benefit he was as anti-cigarette as my mother, herself an ex-smoker. My dad was officially an ex-cigarette smoker as well, but I remember on a couple of occasions the scandal that would erupt when my mother found a pack of cigarettes stashed away in his sock drawer. "I'm quitting after this pack," he'd tell her.  Her skepticism was alarming but to my knowledge he kept his word and he certainly talked the anti-smoking talk to me, condemning it as a "filthy habit."  The cigar and pipe smoking persisted without mention.

My mother's antipathy to smoking was no doubt inspired by her own mother's habit.  My grandmother, a great beauty in her day, was a rather shriveled and bitter lady, old before her time by the time I knew her, but she still fancied herself glamorous though she was the daughter of Eastern European peasants.  It took seven torturous hours crammed into the backseat of the station wagon to get from our house to hers, so visits were rare. She would sit in her armchair the whole time, inscrutably scanning us through cat-eye glasses, a Winston cigarette accumulating ash as it bounced between her wrinkled lips or lay smoking away in the crook between her first 2 fingers, occasionally requiring a tap with the index finger to jostle the continually forming shell of spent leaves at the tip into the ashtray, as she complained in an arch, slavic way about everything. Sitting in her throne, she'd crush the butt of one cigarette in the ashtray to extinguish it and immediately light another.  Her voice sounded like smoke, dry tongue smacking as she enunciated every word, parched lips sticking at the corners of the mouth.  Her laughter (always a bit forced, pointed and inappropriate) rattled her lungs in a distressing way.  But the all-consuming habit which engulfed her and suited her personality perfectly was hypnotic for a child to behold.  

After each visit my mother would complain bitterly about her mother's smoking.  The implication of an opportunity for disapproval if I were ever to take it up myself was not lost on me.  Somehow she wasn't reassured by my insistence at 10 that I'd tried it and knew it was not something I could ever want to do myself.  I had tried it.  One day during a visit to my grandparents that coincided with the moon walk, I somehow found myself in the same room alone with one of my grandma's cigarettes burning away in an ashtray.  I couldn't resist the opportunity to see what the fuss was about.  I lifted it between my two fingers like I'd seen her do a thousand times, moved the filter ringed with the still wet, wrinkled imprint of her hot pink lipstick toward my lips and started inhaling.  My lungs filled with fire.  I couldn't set the thing down fast enough.  Knowing I could never possibly take up smoking myself based on that experience, I was filled with a newfound respect for my grandmother.

I guess I was destined to be a smoker after that. I had a friend as a kid whose gregarious, gravel voiced father was the stereotypical 60s smoker-- a huge enticing selection of cigarettes-- Kents-- carefully removed from their packs and neatly arranged in a glass dish on the coffee table as though they were peanuts, fancy ashtrays and lighters within easy reach no matter where you were situated in the house.  Being driven to baseball practice or for an overnight stay at my friend's family camp in his big fully automatic luxury car was where I first learned about the incomparable aroma of a cigarette freshly lit from the glowing coils of a car's lighter-- a delight unknown to anyone born after 1996 when the smoker's convenience was replaced with an electrical outlet in the standard equipment of most new cars.  The glamour of this activity inspired us on occasion to steal away with a handful of Kents from the bowl, break into a home under construction in the neighborhood and try them for ourselves.  They never tasted as great as they smelled, and for that reason remained merely a very rare excuse for delinquency until college.

I became a smoker in earnest during my failed freshman year.  It was a revelation when I realized no one was going to stop me buying packs from the cigarette machine in the student union. I worked my way through all the brands-- the place names (Winston, Raleigh, Salem, Newport) the pretentious (Bel Air, Viceroy, Parliament, Chesterfield, Marlboro, Tareyton, Pall Mall), the exotic, evocative and romantic (Camel, Old Gold, Lucky Strike, Kool, True), the nonsensical (Doral) and by the time I'd tried each I was hooked . I slept all day through all of my classes and smoked all night. I didn't belong there and didn't pick up anything else*. But smoking stayed with me.  

I met my wife at my second more successful stab at college.  She was a smoker (Vantage Menthols) herself for a while.  I was aware that smoking was liable to kill me eventually-- I did not have the kind of luck that would ever allow me to be the centenarian with the lifelong pack a day habit, and I did not want to end up burping sentences through my tracheotomy like the old guy who performed the feat for us annually as an anti-smoking public service at junior high school assemblies-- so I was susceptible to my mother's plea that if I was going to smoke at all I should at least stick to light cigarettes.  I wasn't particular. My habit revolved around what I was comfortable asking the counter person for. Low tar brands at first. Merit Menthols for a while.  Then the ultra low-tar beige-packaged Barclays with the tightly packed filter that was impossible for a weak lunged smoker to draw any smoke through-- the laughingstock of my smoking friends.  When I worked in a full service convenience store in the heart of the student ghetto in my university town, I no longer had to ask for my smokes so again went through all the brands, occasionally splurging on the upscale imports-- Players, Export A, Dunhill, Gitanes, Sobranie. I finally settled on a brand that cleaved closely to the pop glamour I was seeking to emulate from the 60's: L&Ms.  

I quit cold turkey in my 30s following a deep depression, and my life turned around.  I started exercising, lost weight, took Arabic classes, composed music, learned to program, discovered I loved my life and my work.  My wife and I decided to have a kid.  Then one day, on my long walk home from work I happened to spot a pristine and perfect cigarette lying on the street.  I picked it up without thinking.  After a few steps I realized I had no way to light it.  I stared at it long and hard before throwing it in the nearest trash can so no one else could have it but leaving it intact to leave open a contingency for changing my mind.  Within a week, unable to shake the image of the pristine beauty of the found cigarette tube and unsuccessful at willing the procurement of any others by chance in the interim, I bought my own pack. I found excuses to sneak off for a daily smoke, thinking I'd be done after 20, but wouldn't you know, I was hooked again.  

Before the birth of my daughter my wife and I bought a house in the suburbs.  A small post-war cookie cutter just outside the city was all we could afford, but it hearkened back to my earliest days in the suburbs of New York.  I was living the dream.  Somehow the brand that went with the vintage and decor of the house was Lark.  I "did my best" to keep my habit away from the kid.  

For some reason, the activities we consider adult are among the least savory -- porn, strip clubs, liquor, gambling, smoking. Only a kid wants to be that kind of adult. The adults who engage in such activities can't help themselves.  Smoking was my shame. It was a louche habit that no one approved of, they were never shy to tell you.  Once ubiquitous and cheap, it became outre and increasingly expensive. Sticking smokers with steepening vice taxes became just as habit forming for municipal technocrats across the country as the addictive chemicals in cigarettes were designed to be for their captive tax base. They loved the revenue but hated the second hand smoke.  Cigarettes were banished from workplaces first, then restaurants, then even bars. The long slide of airline travel from the jet setting glory days of the 50s and 60s accelerated with the end of smoking on planes in the 90s.  I think the straw that broke the camel's back for me (so to speak) was one too many trips to the airport smoking lounge.  Dismal, smelly places full of hacking, wheezing, stressed, unhappy losers.  Of whom I was one. Too weak to tough it through a few hours without a smoke. Outside of travel, speaking the phrase "A carton of Larks" aloud to the jaded drugstore clerk became a dreaded weekly chore -- my own experience of being a clerk as a younger man which had shaped my habit had also informed me of the tell-tale stench that preceded the tobacco customer, which I was no doubt perpetrating for a new generation of counter help. What's more, it galled me that unlike some of my acquaintances who could take it up and drop it on a whim, I was enslaved to the habit.  I quit for good--cold turkey again over a long holiday weekend-- after another 10 years.

I never became an anti-smoker.  I still crave them from time to time.  I agree with one writer I read while giving them up, who was herself in the process of quitting, that the truly lamentable thing about forgoing cigarettes was giving up the meditative aspect of smoking, especially acute in an era in which local ordinances required you to exile yourself from conventional society in order to indulge in the habit.  To ease the pain of the transition I continued to take "smoke breaks" for a time, going outside to the smoking area without lighting up until I didn't need even that anymore. I don't think I'll backslide again. Not for the foreseeable future. 

I had a colleague once who was an avid smoker. She had worked at a law firm that had Phillip Morris as a client in the class actions era. She would announce every smoke break to everyone in her corner of the department like a rooster crowing up dawn. She would signal where her mind was at in long, dull meetings by stacking her lighter atop her pack on the conference room table. Word of my colleague's enthusiasm for smoking got back to the client somehow and in a show of gratitude, she was gifted with a rare trinket that marked her as a true cognoscente-- a model of a fetus smoking a Marlboro (her brand!) which she justifiably proudly displayed on her shelf for all to see. 

I hear she was cremated.  I wonder who got the smoking fetus.

~~~~~~~~~~

* I did "pick up" a rich girlfriend (and wonderful person) whose father (a great guy) made his fortune as a distributor of candy and tobacco products.  Exposure to his merchandise had made him a health fanatic and rabid anti-smoker by the time I met him.  Wealth had made him a hypocrite.