The Attack on Civil Society: How Poets Respond

Reprinted in slightly revised form from The Broadkill Review, Vol. 5 No. 2

Civil society is bizarrely heterogeneous, comprising everything from the Pagans Motorcycle Club to the now defunct non-profit ACORN to unions to poets. Nevertheless, it is the chorus of Liberty and Democracy and it is under attack, one voice at a time. Permit me to summarize a couple of the more recent examples, provide a little philosophical entertainment, and humbly suggest a role for poets.

The first is the November 2006 killing of Iraq War vet and Pagan member Derek Hale by Wilmington, Delaware Police.  Investigating alleged drug dealing by the Pagans, a swat-type team of cops arrived at the home of a Pagan friend of Derek’s and found him sitting on the steps. Derek, for whom police had no arrest warrant, rose. Before he could comply with orders to take both hands out of his pockets, he was tased repeatedly. Then, as he lay on his side paralyzed and vomiting, and as a mother and her two children also on the steps looked on in horror, a policeman fired three fatal  .40-caliber rounds into his chest. According to Attorney General Beau Biden’s report exonerating police, Derek was shot as he "continued to keep a hand in his pocket as if holding a weapon and was turning in a threatening manner toward an officer armed with an empty Taser."

Let’s not forget that folks have a right freely to associate with the Pagans, in spite of how they may offend middle-class sensibilities. I worked side-by-side with several Pagans at Chrysler and even considered a few my friends because they did their jobs, shared our collective burdens, and could be relied on for the union cause. I described the spiritual travails of an imaginary biker in my Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, and I did not stint in describing the less savory activities of some bikers.

The second event was the destruction of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), the nation-wide non-profit that specialized in empowering the poor through such activities as credit advocacy and voter registration. Readers may remember how several Federal Prosecutors were fired because they resisted Bush administration pressure to concoct bogus charges of voting fraud against the group.

However, it is easer to destroy a reputation than to prove an accusation. Thus, in 2009, a group of right wing operatives with hidden cameras began trolling ACORN offices to see if they could trick ACORN workers into seeming to wink at illegal activities. Highly edited videos of these visits were widely disseminated on-line and on Fox News, and in short order foundation funding dried up, and Congress—Democrats and Republicans cravenly alike—stripped ACORN of federal contracts. Subsequent investigations by several state’s attorneys and the federal GAO found no wrongdoing by ACORN regarding the insinuations of the video. A Federal court voided the stripping of ACORN’s funding as an unconstitutional “bill of attainder.” But all that was too late. By November of 2010, ACORN was bankrupt and dead.

Also too late for Derek Hale, in December of 2010, Wilmington settled a wrongful-death lawsuit with Derek’s widow for $875,000. While Wilmington Police did not admit culpability, the deal certainly made their case look bad, as Wilmington News Journal editorialist Ron Williams demonstrated witheringly in recent columns.

Ironically, joining the ACLU in Derek’s widow’s case was Thomas Neuberger, leader of the Rutherford Institute, a Christian right-leaning civil liberties organization. Additionally, one of the most eloquent advocates in Derek Hale’s case is William Norman Grigg, who blogs at LewRockwell.com, a Ron Paul-type libertarian web site. Grigg ties the killing of Derek Hale to what he refers to as the “unitary, militarized, Homeland Security apparatus,” a component in the right-wing narrative that sees a slippery slope toward federal encroachments on state’s rights and the eventual deployment of UN forces in the USA.

It is well known how the corporate elite funds the right. Paradoxically, not only did the right defend the proletarian Derek Hale, but its very emblem is Joe the Plumber, leading a working-class charge against immigrants, gays, unions, affirmative action, taxes, Muslims, Big Government, and the latté-sipping elite who evince moral superiority to the proles but know nothing of their burdens.

No telling how much the involvement of Beau Biden, son of U.S. Vice-President Joe, had to do with tempering the voices of outrage over Derek Hale’s death. When Joe was a senator, he was able to sell Delaware on his proto-Patriot Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996 and his Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005, which latter was to make the world safe from bad loans.

Now for that philosophical entertainment: Slavoj Žižek, the leftist Slovenian Philosopher, has some words on the European anti-immigrant movement that might shed light on the paradox cited above. Says Žižek,

[I]t’s absolutely crucial how this anti-immigrant explosion is linked to the withdrawal of leftist politics, especially in the matters of economy and so on. It is as if the left, being obsessed by the idea that we shouldn’t appear as reactionary in the economic sense, that is to say that “No, no, no, we are not the old trade union representatives of the working class, we are for postmodern digital capitalism” and so on. They don’t want to touch the working class or so-called lower ordinary people. And here right-wingers enter. Do you know, the horrible paradox is that, apart from some small leftist fringe parties, the only serious political force in Europe today which still is ready to appeal to the ordinary working people are the right-wing anti-immigrants? So you see, we, the leftists, we have no right, absolutely no right, to take this arrogant view of offended tolerant people who are horrored—no, we should ask the question, how we enabled what is going on. “Slavoj Zizek: Far Right and Anti-Immigrant Politicians on the Rise in Europe, Part II." Democracy Now with Amy Goodman. 18 October 2010. <http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2010/10/18/part_iislavoj_zizek_far_right_and_anti_immigrant_politicians_on_the_rise_in_europe>.

What happened to ACORN demonstrates a great deal about “how we enabled what is going on.” ACORN had attempted to be a transmission line between the power of corporate foundations and government to the people at the base. When that line was snapped, instead of uniting to defend ACORN, terrified liberal politicians and civil society thought only of securing their own teat on the increasingly stingy corporate-government sow. Repeatedly, when reactionaries have led the charge, liberals have led the retreat.

So now, in various ways, the onslaught against democracy, economic justice, and civil society continues. Shirley Sherrod, Planned Parenthood, NPR, and climate scientists have all been subjected to the same political warfare, a warfare that has escalated with the stripping of collective bargaining rights in Wisconsin and other states.

A soldier, Bradley Manning, who may or may not have had something to do with leaking a video to Wikileaks showing an American helicopter machine-gunning civilians in Iraq is treated like an Arab terrorism suspect. Arab terrorism suspects continue to be treated like non-persons at Guantanamo. American Muslims are vilified in McCarthyite hearings in Congress. The poison spreads and fear abounds.

So, what do we poets have to do with all this? Promote Solidarity.

We already do, of course. By our very nature, we are motivated by Solidarity, “the conviction of which” according to Joseph Conrad, “knits together the loneliness of innumerable hearts, [. . . ] the solidarity in dreams, in joy, in sorrow, in aspirations, in illusions, in hope, in fear, which binds men [and women] to each other, which binds together all humanity—the dead to the living and the living to the unborn.”

Beyond expressing that mutual resonance of human experience, poets are reluctant, justifiably, to prescribe solutions to social problems.  They also don’t like to take marching orders. But what’s wrong with suggesting that poets attune their antennae to the onslaught of repression creeping across civil society? To suggesting poets be more relevant to the nitty-gritty majority in our country, where ideas swirl in a messy, non-academic mix, where the social infrastructure is shredding, where prison is more likely than a diploma or a good job and where the repression that is overwhelming civil society is nothing new?

Tell you what I’ve been doing. I’ve been going to Solidarity with Wisconsin rallies armed with new-lyrics labor songs like “On Wisconsin” (Fight for workers’ rights).

When I was the featured poet for the April Second Saturday Poets, I put out a special invitation for other poets to join me reading works on the theme of Solidarity. I even wrote a bit of agitprop verse about it that some of you already saw.  It includes the lines,

Would you sing Solidarity in the Old Union Hall,

chicken dinners, picket lines, all for one and one for all?

Blood and sweat’s our gender, our race, of broken backs,

barricade of all nations, when capital attacks.

Pay your monthly dues and rise with the other guy.

Or would you, had you just one wish, if shared, lose one eye?

The rest of the poem was previously posted at the Broken Turtle Blog: Are You Stirred By Solidarity?

And on Friday, June 3, I’ll be sharing my verse in support of the 22^nd annual Soweto Festival, sponsored by the Delaware Committee for Racial Justice & Harmony and Delaware Artists for Racial Unity. I’ll be performing around 6 p.m. at the Artist’s Reception at the Gallery at Grace, Grace United Methodist Church, 900 N. Washington St., Wilmington, DE 19801. The affaire is a project of Delaware Pacem in Terris. See http://depaceminterris.pbworks.com.

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Spoiler Alert

I’m kind of strange. I don’t care if you tell me the end of a movie, book or television show, even if it’s an ending with a twist. For me, it’s not the ending that’s important, but the story you travel to get there. After all, there are really only a finite number of plots. All genres have their standard story lines. What distinguishes a good story from a bad one is the journey, not just the ultimate destination.

In some cases, though, knowing the ending can put us at a singular disadvantage. Lately, I’ve been thinking the problem with history — especially in regards to progressive activism — is that we know the ending. We hear stories about the Founding Fathers, the abolitionists, the suffragettes, the early union organizers, the Freedom Riders, etc and because we know they were victorious in the end, we assume those victories were inevitable. We think because we know the ending, our forebears somehow knew it too, and it was this secret knowledge that gave them the strength and courage to wage the battles they did. Unlike us, they could actually see that light at the end of the tunnel; they didn’t have to fumble around in the dark.

When the Founding Fathers signed the Declaration of Independence, we know this act (along with a brutal war) helped found a nation, but at the time, they had no idea. For all they knew, they were signing their own death warrants. They hoped it would lead to something better, and they had the courage of their convictions, but there was no way they could be sure everything would work out in the end. In fact, they had every reason to believe it wouldn’t. I imagine it felt a little like jumping off a cliff.

Likewise, when abolitionists hid runaway slaves along the Underground Railroad, they risked their lives, reputations, and property to commit what was then a serious crime. They felt compelled to do the right thing, but they had no guarantees doing so would dismantle America’s peculiar institution. Slavery was pretty entrenched in this country. The Southern elites had a good racket going. They were rich and growing richer. Insane profits with a payroll percentage of way less than the “optimal” 20%. No way were a few rogue operators going to persuade them to stop.

It is tempting to be lulled into reading the history of this country as a frustratingly slow — though ultimately heroic — march towards a yet unattained but inevitable state of perfection. We believe perpetual progress is our birthright and that we are ordained by the universe to keep getting bigger and better. But the activists who came before us knew no such thing. You have to be willing to risk it all to do what is right and good even when the odds are stacked against you, even when you are almost certain to fail. Because many times you will fail, and the those few victories you do win will be tenuous. You have to keep fighting every day.

This country has gone dark and our enemies seem untouchable — but it’s been that way many times before. One annoying thing about history is that it keeps repeating itself. If you really think about it, are BP, Bank of America, the Koch brothers, and Fox News any more intimidating than the ruling monarch of a superpower, the antebellum Southern aristocracy, or the robber barons of the First Gilded Age? Activism has always been difficult and often futile. So many good works get thrown down a black hole. Why did Bernie Sanders make that speech? Why did those veterans chain themselves to the White House fence during a snowstorm? Why did all those people camp out in Madison? What good did it do?

There’s a character in my novel-in-progress, The Plague Child, named Father Anthony, who is an activist priest. The novel is set in an America of the future, and frankly, that future isn’t too rosy. The country is broke and barely holding together. There are huge uninhabitable Dead Zones. A few corporations control everything and sometimes declare war (yes, actual war with guns and everything) on each other. Violence, sickness and poverty are commonplace and most people are too busy with merely surviving to mount any sort of coherent resistance. Still: Father Anthony wages a battle for change he is almost certain to lose. But he’s no Don Quixote. He sees the world for what it is, and continues with his work. Another character says of him: “He sees everything so clearly, so starkly; he stares down the darkness and does not flinch. And yet: he persists in doing good.”

That is precisely the sort of courage we must have. We owe ourselves and those who came before us nothing less. Victory is far from certain and there is no guarantee of a happy ending. No matter what we do, there’s bound to be some rough sailing ahead. But if we give up and do nothing, we’ll deserve the ending we get.

Preface to 2nd Edition Autoplant

            On December 19, 2008, the last production shift at Newark, Delaware’s Chrysler Assembly Plant, scene of my 1992 Autoplant: a Poetic Monologue, filed out, leaving behind their last Christmas cards, half-full coffee cups, production charts, cotton gloves, and dreams of sharing the American Dream.

            The world where the imaginary Big Man, Gravy, Billy Goat, Warthog, and a fictional version of myself had worked, sweated, and turned from mutual torment to solidarity was gone.

            Folks who have read or seen Autoplant may take it in different ways. Some may find it to be a cautionary tale about how some workers and students, deluded by 60’s revolutionary fantasies, disrupted industry and academia. Others may see it as some sort of a romance, a quest, complete with mythic characters, a dark night of the soul, and ultimate redemption. Still others may see an inspirational lesson in how ordinary folks, with all their fears and limitations, can apply the lessons of solidarity to improve their lives.  However you see it, the issues that led to their actions (or delusions) are repeating themselves today in new forms. Thus, and since the old edition is sold-out, it seems appropriate to produce this second edition. Fair warning to the squeamish: you’ll find adult situations and crude shop-talk here, but as I say in the monologue, “if the shoe fits, it’s your own damn fault.”

            Back when I wrote Autoplant, my concern was with how exploited labor produces spiritual alienation. Alienation—as in “inalienable rights”—means to make foreign or separate. Long story short: assembly lines separate us into little parts of production and only use little parts of our abilities, so we are alienated from our whole selves, spiritually carved up. And then the bosses  separate us from the value of the product by taking out some to buy supplies and machines, which they control, keeping a chunk in profits*, and returning a portion to us in wages and benefits, about 8% of the price of the vehicle for autoworkers. Alienation is what gave me the nightmares of dismemberment that I recount in Autoplant.

            Now, with deindustrialization, NAFTA, the Great Recession, and the firing of millions of us, we are even separated from the machines that were built with our labor. As the UAW anthem, “Solidarity Forever,” written in 1915 by Ralph Chaplin, describes it:

It is we who plowed the prairies; built the cities where they trade;

Dug the mines and built the workshops, endless miles of railroad laid;

Now we stand outcast and starving midst the wonders we have made;

            These days, instead of dreaming fretfully of infants chewed up in the jaws of a machine, I dream about Newark Assembly as a place of belonging, of harvest sharing, of that  “solidarity forever” expressed in the last line of that verse above:

But the union makes us strong!

            Ironically, my present employer, the University of Delaware, which played so prominently in Autoplant as the dream “gymnasium” from which I wandered to the nightmare of assembly line dismemberment, has purchased the Chrysler site. UD intends to use it as a new hub for high-tech research, business, and academics. New jobs are unlikely to be blue collar or even local, however, as tenants of such industrial parks tend to import their employees in-house and in any case will only be hiring those with technical and advanced degrees. Alternative purchasers, industrialists who might have re-hired Chrysler workers, were discouraged from bidding on the site.

            You see, UD is a bit of a hermaphrodite enterprise: both public and private, depending on which gender suits it on any given occasion. For example, according to the News Journal (24 Oct 2009), “[i]n a footnote in the bankruptcy court filing, attorneys for Chrysler noted that other potential purchasers may have been reluctant to ‘take the risk’ of buying the property because UD had the possibility of gaining the land, under state law, through eminent domain and has publicly indicated a willingness to use such rights [of a public enterprise] to secure the property.’” Not only that, but UD is giving most demolition and re-construction contracts to out-of-state and non-union firms. UD argues that their Board requires that they take the low bid, typical of any private enterprise. Prevailing wage laws that would induce them to hire local union firms are only for public institutions.

            The greater significance of UD’s shrewdness in nailing this deal is how replacing blue-collar with lab coat jobs is seen as part of the inevitable evolution of the global economy. Those jobs are gone forever, it’s time to get over it, start your own business, or retrain after some twenty or twenty-five years out of high school. You can do it all on your own lonesome. After all, ain’t individual responsibility the American Way? Now, many Chrysler workers are making it, but some just barely, and some have become economic evolution’s collateral damage. Personally, I’m doing OK. I retired in 2001 after thirty-one years, and now I’m “teaching more than a minutes worth of Shakespeare” at UD.

            Time was when folks would admire us in our UAW-emblazoned jackets as men and women who worked hard, had fought the boss shoulder to shoulder, and had won a fair share of the wealth we created. We might not be genteel and sophisticated, but our solidarity was an inspiration to any regular working Jane or Joe who believed she or he could fight for a better deal.

            Somewhere along the way, about the same time industrialists were shipping jobs overseas and investors began gambling on credit default swaps, solidarity became the big enemy.  According to current fashion, if you combine your strength in unions to make the boss pay you a fair wage, then you are a thief and a socialist. We’re led to believe that any guy big biz pays more is merely taking from the guy big biz pays less. We’re led to believe workers should let the infallible market set their pay in the same mysterious way that hedge managers and oil barons do. And don’t blame the banksters for the economic melt down. Instead, blame Arabs, blacks, gays, feminazis, immigrants, ACORN, taxes, and unions, such as those representing government workers.

            The month that I write this, March of 2011, the nation and the world is seeing what solidarity can do. In Egypt, men, women, middle class, poor, young, old, Muslim, Coptic Christian, socialist, and traditionalists combined to topple a dictator. In Wisconsin, teachers, sewer workers, pencil pushers, students, firemen, and cops are confronting an oil baron’s flunky, the Governor of the state, who has attempted to strip them of fundamental human rights.

            Now, Autoplant is not a Bible for revolution; it has more to do with redemption. And while I wanted to let Americans know what hard work means, Autoplant was largely motivated by a desire to make sense of what I experienced at Chrysler, to laugh about it a little, to apply some of what I know about poetry, and to reclaim parts of myself I felt I was losing by working there. With this second edition, I am hoping that I, along with my UAW Chrysler sisters and brothers, can reclaim some of what we have lost since Newark Assembly was shut down.

            Sparking a new revolutionary spirit wouldn’t be so bad, though.

*See “The Crisis at Chrysler 1979 at the beginning of chapter 3

Are You Stirred by Solidarity?

Invitation to Read Poetry at Second Saturday
On the Theme of Solidarity
With Featured Poet Phillip Bannowsky

Poets, tell of Solidarity; what it is or what it’s not.
Is it the bell that laughs with every tongue, the storm that weeps with every drop?
The common hope for a brighter dawn,
or a contagious yawn?

Are you stirred by multitudes pulling tyrants down?
The hands, the shoes, the shouts, the risking all
for victory? Or do you check what scrapes your ass?
Would the fate of your 401(k), the price of your gas,
not to mention brown skins and head scarves more you appall
than all their hearts stopped in their mouths, their brains upon the ground?

When the earth tumbles to her knees
and shakes loose her seas
Do you open both your heart and wallet
Or just click the videos on Facebook “Like it.”

Do you upon the brink of personal release
like Bodhisattva pause recumbent
and with your finger in the grease
compassion choose for all the sentient?
Or do you cry, I’m all right, Jack, and snatch enlightenment?

Would you sing Solidarity in the Old Union Hall,
chicken dinners, picket lines, all for one and one for all?
Blood and sweat’s our gender, our race, of broken backs,
barricade of all nations, when capital attacks.
Pay your monthly dues and rise with the other guy.
Or would you, had you just one wish, if shared, lose one eye?

So poets, tell of Solidarity,
What it means, choose voluntarily:
If it’s the history of our species in every cell and myth,
Compassion, inspiration, or some kind comradeship.
Tell it for the ages, or tell it for the date,
April 9, at Shenanigans, 5 p.m. Don’t be late.

Second Saturday Poets, 2nd Saturday of every month at 5 p.m.
Shenanigans Irish Pub and Bar, 2nd and Market Sts., Wilmington, Delaware
Free Parking across Market

Finding the Ghost of William D. White

She called him a ghost. A good term to use. What trauma, what injustice causes him to haunt us? His work remained, but it was hidden. Some of it was smashed.

Ghost is what happens to pariahs, after amnesia has run out of time and aliases are assigned to hide the evidence. A friend of mine, an artist, and I spent the day together as detectives hunting down the ghost of Delaware artist William D. White. My artist friend knew White when she was a girl. My father and White were friends from their days on the WPA.

The stories about William D. White are both spurious and legendary, anecdotal and difficult to trace. Yet, they persist. Stories of White railing against the extravagance of the local ruling class during the depths of the Great Depression, then turning around to buy up coats at the Goodwill, giving them away to Depression era homeless.

The mural that White painted for the Federal Artists Project (FAP) of the WPA was thought lost for years until recently rediscovered languishing in a building belonging to the Methodist Church in Dover. Much of White's works of art have been scattered in the effort to pay back corporate debt. A collection White painted about the mining industry has found a home in Arizona. Sometimes something spectacular by White comes along and just as rapidly disappears, haunting us. Sometimes one of his paintings pop up in plain sight and is misidentified and mishandled. They are that ghost calling out.

Between my artist friend and me, we've gathered a nice body of White's work. Finding information about White's life has proved daunting. People who knew him are gone. Yet our intent is to make an eventual public display of William D. White's art. He was arguably the best of the group of FAP artists, and an equal of Edward Loper who was also an early FAP artist.

Might it be said of William D. White on some future Antiques Road Show, that his work is rare. Because of professional differences with some of his peers and most agents of patronage, his work has become rare. The composition is tight. If more of White's work is found we'd be recognizing themes. Certainly he had an affinity with the poor working class and minorities. He liked painting children. His paintings today are most certainly worth more than White made when he was living.

If there's anyone out there with a bead on any of White's paintings, drawings or writings we'd like to hear from you. We also like to to hear any credible stories about William D. White as well.

Steven Leech's Literary Manifesto

Because we believe this work is so important, we are offering this excerpt from The Wedgehorn Manifesto and a special opportunity to obtain a PDF copy free.
-Phillip Bannowsky, BT Blog Editor

About the Cover

On the cover is a map that accompanied the 1938 publication, A Guide to the First State. Produced by the Federal Writers’ Project, the map does not show I-95. You can almost see all the old roads on which flowed life in this part of Delaware in the late 1930s. Later, after World War II, came what we would call—in some neighborhoods—“Dupont Driveways,” those roads and highways that seemed only to lead to the various Dupont plants, laboratories, and offices that dotted the area. Even later, the great wealth of our post 1950s world flowed through Delaware on I-95 which resulted in the great suburban sprawl that began to cover northern New Castle County.

The addition I’ve made to this map is to illustrate the portion of land that was held in dispute because of the inexact science of geography and cartography in the 18th and 19th centuries. Mason may have made a chronometer that in Delaware literature is still ticking, but he wasn’t able to get Delaware’s unique border exact.

That piece of inexactness on the Maryland side of that border is called the Wedge. As an author I have exploited the Wedge’s potential for telling a story—a story which has included elements of Delaware’s literature. That sliver along Delaware’s arcing border with Pennsylvania has not inspired me. Much of it runs through “Chateau country.” A few remember it as the Horn.

What inspires me is that I’m always conscious that I’m walking the same streets in Wilmington as those that F. Scott Fitzgerald, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Clifford Brown and Nikki Giovanni once walked, to name but a few of the illustrious. I still see the rooms they once occupied even though the buildings are gone. In some cases the rooms are still there. Dunbar-Nelson left a living legacy in Wilmington. I see in the same kind of way an artist would, but the paintings are in books, like Biggs’ Seven Days Whipping, where I see a unique vision from a part of my own neighborhood just south of Wilmington. In two of Charles Wertenbaker’s novels I see familiar scenes where stories have provided me a different perspective from those which I’ve been led to believe. Now I know where all those “Dupont Driveways” really lead. Some essential parts of Wilmington from the turn of the last century in novels by Henry Seidel Canby, Christopher Ward, and in one important story from Alice Dunbar-Nelson are saved in the annals of American literature. All of this, including the story of Wilmington’s artists and musicians and the sounds and sights from them that are still around us, inspires me. A little like Paul Herbert Fricke from Christopher Ward’s One Little Man, I see through this world into other worlds that are depicted from so near by through our local literature. I also remember how, in the 1950s, I had been entranced by the cultural presence in Arden and wondered why the community in which I lived, Richardson Park, where Delaware artist J. D. Chalfant once lived and work, couldn’t be more like what I perceived Arden to be.

I am inspired by the history and existence of these locations under the unique crown of the Wedge and the Horn. In concert with the towns of Newark and New Castle, there are greater stories to be told from these places, and stories help us to see. 

To read more, obtain a free PDF copy of The Wedgehorn Manifesto at publisher@brokenturtlebooks.com.

Are We Making Progress in the Culture War?

Since the midterm elections many with whom I've discussed the outcome have shared the dismay regarding the gains of the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party. My response has been that at least in our northern part of Delaware we seemed to have had better sense. As the results came in, I examined the voting trends by consulting those maps of Delaware provided by various media that displayed the red and blue areas of our state. Delaware was pretty much divided into a blue northern part of the state with a rim of red that ran across the arc that borders us with Pennsylvania where the wealthy live in chateau country, and a mostly red southern portion of the state except for an enclave in the vicinity of Lewes and Rehoboth where there is a large population of retired well educated professional people and artists.

Seeing this blue enclave in a sea of red downstate where I have a growing circle of friends in the burgeoning cultural community was heartening. It made me wonder if our efforts in the northern portion of Delaware with regards to our cultural activity over the past thirty years has paid off.

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan was reelected, I kind of saw the handwriting on the wall and backed away from the intense direct political activity in which I'd been engaged and sought a kind of cultural rapprochement. Part of the reason was connected to personal survival, but the major reason was to broaden the struggle into a larger social arena. That initial wave of extreme right wing lunacy seemed to be riding the crest of cultural initiatives that I perceived to have reactionary content.

In short, direct political activity might be good for winning the minds of people, but cultural activity might be better to win their hearts.

In general, I concluded that cultural activity added social value that both is ineffably valuable to the quality of our lives and comes closer to inherent truths within our individual selves. While the corporate and banking ruling circles in our country were using the ascendancy of the right wing to impoverish us economically, I felt it important to add cultural value to provide cohesion to those inherent truths of who we are and who we've been, and based on these, who we could become.

Considering all this, my conclusions still insisted on taking the form of questions during the course of reassessing my previous cultural activity. As far back as the late 1970s, when I became involved with Wilmington's Black press, I gained an innate understanding of the cultural component of a community and the value for social cohesion it embraced. This had been an important element in our efforts to undermined the Marshall machine and to begin to elect Black candidates to city offices and to pave the way to electing Wilmington's first Black mayor. After 1984, and after the ruling circles in Delaware conspired to crush The Delaware Valley Star, my writing in the local Black press reflected issues related more to social and cultural ones, like the effects of the "drug war," along with matters of music, literature and other aspects of local cultural history, and the social and cultural need for the ruling circles to pay reparations for the damage incurred by slavery and the institutionalized racism that has followed. But, to return to the subject, would the Black community at large have voted for right wing lunatic fringe candidates? I think not!

Nevertheless, questions of my work on behalf of providing cultural value to our local community persist. Has my work contributed to at least some people thinking more deeply, clearly and more critically about our environment? Has my work, under the aegis of the Dreamstreets project, on behalf of local literary artists, both from the past and in the present, improved our social and cultural environment? Has my broadcasting work on behalf of our local literary history and community, as well as our history of jazz artists, had an effect on protecting our ignored cultural history from those right wing lunatic fringe elements who would wish to belittle that legacy in order to gain some cultural hegemony based on Delaware's tired old legacy of cultural mediocrity, which serves the interests of the ruling corporate and banking circles that seek to control our lives? Have any of those who have joined in on performing this kind of cultural activity contributed even some small modicum of difference? I'd like to think so, even in some minuscule, intangible way so that people in this part of Delaware can think more sensibly about the political decisions made in the voting booth.

Even if I'm giving myself too much credit regarding my role in social and cultural progress, what matters most is that whatever it takes to counter the intent of the lunatic fringe from negatively influencing our lives is helpful. I don't intend on stopping. Never give the bastards an inch because they will take a mile.