Remembering Bobby Short

One of my favorite channels on Pandora is “Bobby Short,” which also segues to the likes of Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, and others singers drawing from the “Great American Songbook.” But it’s Bobby Short whose voice and jazz piano stylings I listen for.

Robert Waltrip “Bobby” Short, born September 15, 1924, died in 2005 at age 80. Self-taught, Short played the vaudeville circuit in the Midwest before he was a teenager. By age 12 he was headlining in Manhattan nightclubs and playing regular engagements at the Apollo Theater in Harlem.

In various clubs during the 1940s he made his name as a cabaret singer and pianist and that, more than anything else, was his claim to fame. In 1968 he took a two-week gig at New York City’s Café Carlyle and remained a featured performer there until near the end of his life. He was in his element performing music by Cole Porter, Noel Coward, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, and the Gershwins. In 2000 the Library of Congress named him a Living Legend.

Short embodied smooth sophistication. His suave musical performances were matched by his elegant, impeccable wardrobe. His voice had a characteristic warble reminiscent of the heartfelt tremble of Sidney Bechet’s soprano sax. He played the White House for Presidents Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton.

I never had the pleasure of seeing Bobby Short perform. But to hear him is to fall in love with the “Great American Songbook” all over again. Check out “Live from the Café Carlyle” on YouTube at https://youtu.be/PzWrXDzjA7Y.

Sitcom Marriage

The so-called traditional marriage that rightwingers thump their bibles over is largely absent in biblical text. Man-woman marriage is there certainly, but so are man and brother’s widow, rapist and victim, man and multiple wives (with a few concubines thrown in), and so on. The “Christian” right traditional marriage actually is a sitcom staple from mid-20th century, the same era that gave us the corporate ad-gimmick God of “In God We Trust” (see the previous post, “God, Inc.”).

Some readers will be old enough to remember early television sitcoms that helped embed the “traditional marriage” notion in our collective consciousness: “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Leave It to Beaver,” “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and others. The sitcom family consisted of a working father (often the comic foil), a non-working but wise mother, and usually one or two children, good kids with a streak of mischief.

The traditional family sitcoms of the Fifties and Sixties idealized a dominant, though hardly universal, reality. According to Pew Research, the percentage of children living with two married parents in their first marriage in 1960 was 73%. As of 2013, that figure had dropped to 46%. Today a majority of children live in other, “nontraditional” families: 15% live with two married parents, one or both remarried; 34% live with a single parent; and 5% have no parent at home. So-called traditional marriage has been in decline for the past half century.

In fact, the vast majority of adults simply live together before or instead of marrying. According to a 2013 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study, only 23% of “first unions” (couples sharing the same address) were marriages. “Cohabitation is a common part of family formation in the United States, and serves both as a step toward marriage and as an alternative to marriage,” the study said.

While the radical right consistently fails to deal with reality, that should be no excuse for the rest of us when it comes to validating successful family configurations—marriages—of all sorts, including non-marriages, such as single-parent families and couples living together without being legally married. The notion of marriage equality is anathema to the so-called religious right because it does not conform to the sitcom marriage ideal of the past. But it’s a mistake to cite the Bible as the source when “traditional marriage” actually comes from Fifties television.

God, Inc.

It’s hard to call oneself a Christian when so many who flaunt that label behave in such unChrist-like ways. Too often Christian is synonymous today with racist and homophobe, which leaves many who actually attempt to live out the principles attributed to Christ feeling as though they are victims of identity theft. I wonder if God feels the same way.

The public context of God has been almost wholly subsumed in the identity of radical right “Christian” hegemony. Political Christianism is a rightwing gimmick. The God of “In God We Trust” is a “Christian” god for a “Christian” nation—both fictions designed to fool unthinking masses with feel-righteous rhetoric.

In a recent opinion piece in the New York Times (“How Business Made Us Christian,” March 15, 2015), Princeton history professor Kevin M. Kruse traced the formulation of God as an advertising ploy. Kruse attributes the mid-20th-century adoption of a decidedly Christianist God as America’s national trademark to the influence of business interests, particularly as stimulated and articulated by a young charismatic evangelist, Billy Graham.

Kruse quotes Graham as saying in 1952, “If I would run for president of the United States today on a platform of calling people back to God, back to Christ, back to the Bible, I’d be elected.” Republican conservatives have been banking on this ploy ever since.

Imagine a decade-earlier version of AMC’s Sixties advertising agency in Mad Men and one may better understand how corporate America began its drive toward oligarchy with the collusion of rightwing politicians. God got big in the 1950s. Government agencies initiated prayer services. In 1954 Congress added “under God” to the previously secular Pledge of Allegiance, and that was the year “In God We Trust” got added to postage stamps. The next year the phrase was added to U.S. currency. And in 1956 it became the official national motto.

In the current national debate about the character of the United States—a debate that affects education, the arts, the sciences, politics, global affairs, and all the rest—it is useful to remember that the public “God,” like the notion of being a “Christian nation,” is a recent invention—at root merely a crass advertising ploy and propaganda with no actual foundation in faith.

This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).

Language of Bias and Privilege

The headline read, “Muslim Americans Killed.” They were college students. Why not “Americans,” “students,” or simply “people”? The killer, who confessed and turned himself in, was “alleged killer,” not “Christian American” or “Christian extremist” or “Christian terrorist.” The killer was white, but readers only knew that because his photograph accompanied the article. If he were black, the article surely would have said so. It also didn’t note that he professed to be Christian, but most readers would assume that—and probably not want it mentioned. To say that the killer was Christian would be to view Christians in the same monolithic way that Muslims are too often viewed in the press.

The language we use, or choose not to use, identifies our biases. It preconditions our conclusions. The use of “Muslim” as a modifier situates these killings in the larger context of our notions about Islam and our stereotypes. Some readers will immediately see the homicides as tragic reminders of our society’s often mindless prejudice against Muslims. Other readers, who view all Muslims as evil, will automatically side with the killer. Both are biases.

If being Muslim was a factor in the victims’ murders, then should not the religious affirmation of the killer also be a factor? Imagine the reverse. Would a headline ever read, “Christian Americans Killed”? Certainly not in a domestic newspaper and certainly not without a comparable identification of the killer as some sort of religious fanatic. In the United States media language nearly universally privileges “Christian” and “white” by omission. Villains and victims alike who are not Christian or white are identified by a racial, ethnic, national, or religious adjective. The bias is clear. These modified Americans are second-class citizens at best. Their foreignness is emphasized.

It may be impossible to neutralize our language. The media may find it simply too mundane to report, “Three Students Killed,” and then delve objectively into possible religious bias as the killer’s motivation. Perhaps, as an alternative, we might strive at least for truth in labeling. If we must headline, “Muslim Americans Killed,” then we should in fairness label the killer as a “Christian fanatic.”

The Erosion of Common Ground

A hive of intellectual curiosity and pursuit. That was my impression as I looked up from the new Alexander McCall Smith novel I was sampling in the New Books section of our public library. Before me, spread throughout the spacious, well-appointed library were patrons of all ages, even college students in spite of the fact that the university nearby has several extensive libraries as well. The public library is a citizens’ space: common ground for the common good. Ours is heavily patronized by readers young and old across the economic strata. Yes, a number of homeless individuals take shelter there, reading the day away or using the pubic computers, avoiding the bitter chill of the Indiana winter. Why should they not? They are as entitled to the pursuit of knowledge or the pleasure of a good read as anyone.

Although the Digital Revolution has brought about changes in how we can engage in literate pursuits, those changes—the Internet, ebooks—have provided new options, rather than substitutes for volumes on shelves. I will gladly confess that in the course of writing five or six books since 2000, I have not darkened the door of traditional library to do the research necessary for them. The Internet has provided me with access to libraries, collections, and various media worldwide. But that does not mean that I consider traditional libraries obsolete. Far from it. Public libraries offer both traditional resources and access to digital resources, especially for those who don’t have computer media ready to hand. The emerging Digital Age is enlarging the role of public libraries, not reducing it.

That is not what those heavily invested in the Industrial/Corporate Age would have us believe. Corporate oligarchs are grasping at every possible means to extend the Corporate Age past its sell-by date, which was about the turn of the century. Much of this grasping is taking the form of attacking common ground: public places, spaces, and endeavors whose democratic mission is to foster and support the common good. The graspers are largely conservative, though not exclusively, and focused on elitist privilege, often corporate. The Digital Age is increasingly about individuation and diverse community, not about corporate personhood.

Public libraries, public schools, public—read “democratic”—anything is suspect in the eyes of corporate oligarchy, in which monied elites are focused on controlled parochialism. Gerrymandering electoral districts to ensure that candidates backed by corporate money win offices and become puppet legislators; undermining public confidence in public schools by unfounded criticism, underfunding, and the shunting of public money into corporate pockets through contracts for ever more testing, vouchers, and charter schools; widening the wealth gap between rich and poor through regressive taxes and tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy—all of these are the self-serving actions of those heavily invested in a dying age, the Industrial/Corporate Age.

The Digital Age, sparked by two key Digital Revolution developments, the computer and the Internet, is not an extension of the Industrial/Corporate Age. It is a revolution-worthy new era. Too many people already understand this. Maybe they read newspapers or see the information on Facebook. Maybe they come to the public library. However, they gain their understanding of the radical changes that are marking out a new cultural era, it’s scaring the bejezus out of conservatives hoping to preserve the dying Industrial/Corporate age. But beware. Those who are afraid are always dangerous. Those of us ready to embrace the Digital Age would do well to remember Gandhi’s words: “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but, it is fear.”

*This essay is cross-posted on two blogs: Advancing Learning and Democracy (http://advancinglearning.blogspot.com) and Arts in View (http://artsinview.blogspot.com).