Wednesday, August 26, 2009

The Lion of the Senate, R.I.P.

Edward Moore Kennedy, Democratic Senator from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, died last night.  His struggle against malignant glioma—a particularly grim form of brain cancer—came to an end.  He will be buried in Arlington National Cemetery, near his assassinated brothers John and Robert.

After the passing of Eunice Shriver two weeks ago, Jean Kennedy Smith is the only surviving sibling of that tragically-storied clan.

Would that there were enough humanity, enough compassion, remaining in the Senate of the United States to honor Teddy’s career by passing a reasonable, workable healthcare reform.  Would that this country could join the civilized world by replacing its corrupt, dysfunctional, profit-driven healthcare non-system with something like the sort of program envisioned by Senator Kennedy.  Would that his memory could be honored by naming a rational and comprehensive approach to health care as a right after the late Edward M. Kennedy.

In that thought, I join Robert C. Byrd, one of only two individuals in the history of our country to have served longer in the Senate than Ted Kennedy (Dan Inouye will pass Teddy in a couple of months).  Byrd’s sorrowful statement included these poignant words:

I had hoped and prayed that this day would never come.  My heart and soul weeps at the loss of my best friend in the Senate, my beloved friend, Ted Kennedy.

Sen. Kennedy and I both witnessed too many wars in our lives, and believed too strongly in the Constitution of the United States to allow us to go blindly into war.  That is why we stood side by side in the Senate against the war in Iraq.

Throughout his career, Sen. Kennedy believed in a simple premise — that our society’s greatness lies in its ability and willingness to provide for its less fortunate members.  Whether striving to increase the minimum wage, ensuring that all children have medical insurance, or securing better access to higher education, Sen. Kennedy always showed that he cares deeply for those whose needs exceed their political clout.  Unbowed by personal attacks or by the terrible sorrows that have fallen upon his family, his spirit continued to soar and he continued to work as hard as ever to make his dreams a reality.

In his honor and as a tribute to his commitment to his ideals, let us stop the shouting and name calling and have a civilized debate on health care reform which I hope, when legislation has been signed into law, will bear his name for his commitment to insuring the health of every American.

Hundreds and hundreds of tributes to Ted Kennedy have been written already, have been spoken already.  Of those I’ve seen thus far, none have been more heartfelt than the words of Vice President Biden, who had shared the Senate chamber with Ted Kennedy for 36 years before his election to the vice-presidency:

I was particularly moved by his recollection of the thoughts of Kennedy’s widow, Victoria Reggie, speaking what we all wanted to say:

He was ready to go, Joe ... but we were not ready to let him go.

Godspeed, Senator Kennedy.  There will be none again like you.

[UPDATE] You simply must read “nemokc“‘s dKos diary, A Private Moment with the Lion.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

3 Days of Peace and Music

I was at Woodstock.

There, I said it.  I’m well aware that the number of people who’ll tell you that they attended momentous events always vastly exceeds the actual count.  It’s often noted that, for example, that a couple of million people were among the 34,320 fans in the Polo Grounds on October 3, 1951 when Bobby Thomson hit the Shot Heard ‘Round the World.  (Parenthetically, Hall of Famer Dave Winfield was born on that very same day, in St. Paul MN.) In my case, though, it’s the god’s honest truth.

My experience of Woodstock was a bit different from what’s usually reported.  Yes, we had some difficulty getting to Bethel NY, but we were fortunate to have started the drive from Hartford, not South Jersey (where I lived at the time).  So we didn’t have to go to and through New York City.  We ran into a lot of traffic, but we didn’t run into anything like Arlo’s bemused observation that “the New York State Thruway’s closed, man!”.  My brother (then 15) and I had flown up to Hartford to travel to the festival with my Dartmouth buddies David and Bob.  Unlike most of those who went there, we actually had tickets to the event ... my brother still has them.

We didn’t have a really good idea of exactly where we were going.  We had a roadmap, of course, but it had very little detail of the rural upstate area we were visiting.  Somehow, though, we got to within a few miles of Yasgur’s Farm.  We pulled our tents out of the car, set up a little camp by the side of the road, and started walking with the crowd.  We figured somebody had to know where to go.

Well, obviously somebody did, because we eventually arrived at the hillside on Max Yasgur’s farm.  The fences that were supposed to have separated ticketholders from everyone else had long since been trampled down, so we swung past the stage and began to work our way toward a piece of open ground.  At exactly the time we stepped onto the grounds, the first percussive notes of Richie Havens’s guitar rang out.  As always with Richie, it was impossible to tell exactly which song was about to be played.  According to Wikipedia, Richie’s opener was High Flyin’ Bird, but I couldn’t find any video of that song.  But the looooong intro in the Woodstock video below (Handsome Johnny) might have just as easily become High Flyin’ Bird or any of the other songs in his set:

Friday’s set ended in the dark of night, with Joan Baez leading the crowd in We Shall Overcome (video below).  It had drizzled just a bit during the evening, but it wasn’t really a problem that night.  The entire crowd wandered off the hill afterwards.  I have not the slightest idea how we were able to locate our campsite, but I know we did get there.

Many people were much the worse for wear as we headed back to Yasgur’s farm on Saturday.  Water and food were scarce—the stores in the little village nearby, the site of the famed pond full of naked people, had long since sold out of everything.  Thankfully, any number of the people living on the country roads between our camp and the venue generously offered water from their garden hoses to the endless stream of sunburned “freaks” walking past their homes.

We settled in for a long, wondrous, amazing day and night (and, it turned out, morning) of music that day.  In the daytime, we heard (among others) Country Joe, John Sebastian, Santana, and Canned Heat.  This was the first time I’d ever heard of, much less heard, Santana, and their set absolutely blew me away.  It was rock combined with world music, with Carlos Santana’s jazzy guitar and young Michael Shrieve’s drumkit, creating an astonishing sound unlike anything I’d previously known.

The nighttime set was even better, except for one disappointment.  This, as it turns out, was the only time I ever saw The Dead in concert, and they were, ummm, terrible.  They made several attempts to start some of the tunes before they could figure them out.  Unfortunate… But the rest of the night was sublime—Creedence was clean and concise, Janis Joplin wailed out her set, Sly & the Family Stone generated enough energy and funk to power a city, and The Who played Tommy in its entirety as the sky went from darkness into daylight.  The poor unfortunate Airplane was left to play its set to an exhausted crowd in the early morning daylight.

We couldn’t stick around for the rain-soaked, muddy Sunday sets.  No Cocker, no Ten Years After, no Band, no BS&T, no CSN&Y, no Hendrix.  We didn’t have to deal with the worst of the weather or the worst of the traffic jams in trying to get out of Bethel.

The reason?  Because we college students had to get back to our summer jobs on Monday morning.  I’d already begged off on Thursday and Friday, and it would be very bad form to miss Monday as well.  For the record, I worked that summer at the Frankford Arsenal.  I was, in the summer of 1969, a civilian employee of the United States Army.  I rationalized it as “subverting from within”, but I was participating in basic research on the protective effects of metal plating on steel when exposed to high ambient temperature and humidity.  In other words, helping the Army figure out how to keep its weapons and materiel from falling apart in the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia.

Woodstock was an irreproducible event.  3 Days of Peace and Music turned out to be exactly as advertised (and much, much more), despite logistical nightmares and serious weather problems.  Unfortunately, the excitingly positive vibes generated by those 3 Days of Peace and Music couldn’t last.  The Woodstock Nation, born on August 15-17, 1969, came to an end less than four months later, at the Altamont Speedway on December 6, 1969.

Wednesday, August 12, 2009

Back in "da Burgh"

Ah, Pittsburgh, the City of Champions.

I’m back in the city where I lived for almost 15 years while learning, and then doing research in, epidemiology.  It’s my first extended time here since I left for New Hampshire in 1996.  In fact, it’s only the second time I’ve been here at all since then, following a celebratory weekend honoring my dissertation advisor in 2003.

The reason I’m here is Netroots Nation 2009, the fourth in an annual series and the third I’ve attended.  I participated in Las Vegas in 2006 (it was then called YearlyKos) and in Austin last year, but missed Chicago between those two.

Things are still ramping up for the official beginning tomorrow.  This morning, I spent a bit of time helping out with the preparations, breaking down a couple of pallets of some sort of snack food that will be included in everyone’s goodie bags.  I’ve already seen a few familiar Kossacks, like teacherken, ct, and side pocket, and met others (among them ex-Pittsburgher Dreaming of Better Days, blue jersey mom, and jlms qkw).  The last addressed me by nom de blog, though I didn’t know her; she remembered the story of my rotator cuff and my incapacity to tie it back.  That was in February, but it apparently made an impression.

And then there’s the Seattle Kossack I ran into at, of all places, Fallingwater.  Which, of course, gives me an excuse to display a gorgeous photo of a spectacular place:

I was heading back toward the visitor center after an enjoyable tour, which brought me past the next group of visitors.  As I approached, who should pop out of the gaggle approaching the entrance but my good friend mcjoan?  Not merely a local, but a local-kid-made-good ... she’s a highly respected front-pager at dKos.

Though I’d tried to recruit other NN09 attendees to join me on the trip to Bear Run, I hadn’t been successful.  Doing it on Tuesday before a Thursday start was poor planning on my part, I suppose.  Well, Joan obviously hadn’t seen my diary, so she found her way there separately.  I didn’t hang around to hear her impressions as a first-time viewer of Mr. Wright’s masterpiece, but I’ll ask her sometime or another.

Now I’m off to get ready for a big group dinner with a mob of Kossacks, and then tomorrow we dive into the meeting itself.  More later, I hope…