Brain Fog Calls For A Road House In Another Time, Another Place

      . . . . Road House (1989)

What a secure time it was that something like this could be a movie.  OTOH, I swear to gd, this is kinda what the Jack Reacher novels went for. (First Jack Reacher novel was 1997.)  Here we have James Dalton, a bouncer -- excuse me, Cooler! -- who is not only a legend for cleaning up night clubs, but the whole towns and counties that are run by thugs and other nogoodniks in flyover country nowherelandia. Then he moves on. 

In this film, the nowherelandia is in Kansas – or is it Missouri? Not only are the reviewers kinda confused about this but it seems the film’s characters are as well, but everybody knows Something Happened With Our Hero in Memphis which is why he's no longer there. Our Hero Dalton has a network of bouncers, -- excuse me -- coolers! instead of marines and Big Gummit D.C. Intelligence allies that Reacher’s got, but still a network. Or at least Sam Elliott as Wade Garrett, who is an even more super Cooler than Dalton.

So it’s the lone gunman who cleans up the western town under a siege of terror by local thugs, except Dalton does it with what he’s learned in New York University’s philosophy department, and his Asian martial arts skillz, instead of two blazing six guns  (though there comes the point when gunz must uzed; this is America!).  Not to mention the best hair and exquisite wearing of pants (not jeans! those tight, sexy black levis are for Sam Elliott) that nobody else can get away wearing because they'd look so stupid in those high waisted, soft, flowing trousers – but Swayze’s ass and legs are magnificent in them.

Road House was edited by the same guys who edited Die Hard, RoboCop, Predator, Commando, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Tombstone, therefore we are not mistaken that Dalton's character is one of those larger than life sorts, like a superman, while flattering us that he’s just like us really, the way Spider Man is (while Batman isn't just like us, being a zillionaire and all) -- while making fun of both this superhero genre and affectionately ribbing this film in which the superhero is a – bouncer. The affection the editors have for the film shows in many ways, not least in how palpably we feel the sheer sexiness of the feelings at least three of the characters have for each other.  It is really one of the few really sexy films I’ve watched, I think, i.e. the characters even gave this watcher hot feels.

Other entertainments that RH appears to make part of a pattern are the Travolta Saturday Night Fever (1977) and Urban Cowboy (1980), which may have set off this examination of fairly specific, but disparate US cultures in connection with matters outside the law or accepted mores. Flash Dance (1983), Dirty Dancing (1987) of course, not only because of the amount of dancing in RH (though it is fairly muted -- just like the female characters are in RH, even Kelly Lynch's character, though Kathleen Wilhoite's Carrie has good moments, particularly when she melts into sexy feels inadvertently viewing Dalton naked (but then, everybody does, even when he's not naked, but her moments just felt so authentic and you like her for them too) -- unlike in SNF, FD, UC, or DD), through pop music combined with pro and non-pro dancing. Here are supposedly normal people like us, who love combining dancing for fun as well as going for our personal best. But only DD and RH star Patrick Swayze at his peak of gorgeousness. Not to mention equal peak Sam Elliott gorgeousness in a different manner, showing up in RH, as Swayze’s sidekick.

Closing day for the original Gilley's, Pasadena, TX.

In spite of this superheroing, I too have a lot of affection for Road House because 1) the sex parts really feel sexy;  2) I spent a lot of time in my earlier in the famous Texas outside of Houston's gigamous roadhouse, Gilley's (where Urban Cowboy did scenes); the Double Deuce, judging by the size of its parking lot, was the Gilley’s of its locale.

That world is gone, as much as NYC’s world of Studio 54, Danceteria and the Paradise Garage. They were of their time.

I suppose we must also think of Cocktail (1988) with hyper annoying Tom Cruise? Which I’ve never seen it, though I think I tried to watch it, once.  Now that is a truly stupid movie – just read the story line!  But then, for me, anything that features Tom Cruise (except when he was paired with Paul Newman) is unwatchable.

There was a Road House 2 (2006). It went straight to video. They Say it was a sequel in name only. 

O. Dear. They Say there’s a Road House remake in production. 

Fight at the Double Deuce!  SuperHero Bouncer Dalton is the only one who can stop this going on!

It’s interesting that from this perspective, there are so approaches to liking Road House. Though the reviewers in 1989 cocked snooks and sneered about it, it's a good action film with lots of other stuff going on, the kind thing that attracted so many of us to the Reacher novels. The action sequences are what we see praised these days as making a movie "that's fun to watch." for those who prefer action to feels.  Alas though, the ridiculous part is the entire premise of a bouncer and national fame for being part of a community improvement - gentrification action.  Nevertheless, I doff my sombrero to whomever had the brain storm to translate all those concerns of crime vs gentrification and the hierarchies of clublandia, all constant subjects then in the era, into this concept. That is, these were constant subjects if you lived where these matters were going on and of concern, all at once, anyway, as we did.

The film concludes with the Jeff Healey Band, which is featured mostly throughout the film, playing a cover of Bob Dylan’s "When the Night Comes Falling." This film, in a lot of ways is comment on US films and culture of the time, and if looked at with care, done as a goof on it, in the same way that Dylan’s own sense of humor has done in his own films like Masked and Anonymous (2003) funning on his long decades of dealing with celebrity and the intersections thereof, while determined to remain a working musician who riffs endlessly on US culture and musical traditions.  I mean, the penultimate great violent sequence in Road House is a monster truck driving into a car dealership and crushing all the brand new cars. This could only be imagined in America!

This has been one of the most interesting movies I’ve watched in years.  I wonder … if I’d seen it when it came out, would I have gotten all this?  I … rather doubt it.  Sure I believed I was truly tuned in back in 1989, but from the perspective of this year I see how freakin’ callow I was, and how little I really knew.

Just who were those people who got away with making this?  They must have had a lot of fun -- most of all, this flick is relaxed, like they had been doing yoga and tai chai daily, for years.

Have a Monster Truck!

~~~~~~~~~~~~

Essentially packed.  Have some hours tomorrow to copy edit, change mind, remember what is forgotten, etc.

Keepin' the Home Fires Burning

     . . . . Could this actually be a week in which decent people can have some joy?  The retreat from Kherson, inflation seeming to have hit peak, our midterms giving us the "Something not turning as out as bad as it could necer felt so good."

Somehow, the three feel related, along with the outcomes of both Colombia's and Brasil's presidential elections. Even so, I'm probably centering, wrongly, the US here?

OTOH, covid infections are increasing like mad here.  Glad I did the late autumn hair stylist visit early.  Also we are going back to NO next week.  Back in time for Thanksgiving with some friends -- who had covid, but are over it  But we won't have the usual second Thanksgiving we usually have with other friends, as they both have covid presently.  Pax is doing its job, but as one is so run down from years of caregiving and job, and the other is still recovering from emergency brain surgery, it's not so easy.

Another amiga has been subjected to round after round of chemo since June/July. She and I have email discussions about the books and television likes we have in common. The latest was around learning we both had liked The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism (2005) by Megan Marshall, is another of those biographies that work beautifully for me as well. I've read it, in fact, three times. 

Sophia Hawthorne was one of the sisters. She spent her life in Boston being sick, unable to walk or do housework.  The only treatment that worked for what ailed her was spending the winter in Cuba on a hacienda.  The further her ship got from the Boston, the better she felt, until, by the time she reached Cuba, she was quite, quite well.  She adored spending her mornings a-gallop on spirited horses of her host, across the river valley fields. Then, returning to Boston, the closer her ship got to US shores, and the closer to Boston, the more unwell she became.

 Reading this in the biography back then, sent me looking for Sophia's journals, and I found some material that el  V was able to use in his Cuba And Its Music. Sophia Hawthorne was as racist and non-condemning of slavery as she could be, without coming right out and saying she believed slavery was a positive institution, but she was observant, so there were bits that were of use. Her remarks on the enslaved form part of the unlovely picture of our nation's history of Black hatred. 

I want to blame her husband, since Sophia's sisters were quite concerned with slavery and abolition.  Nat. Hawthorne, though, was quite a piece of work. All his life he was in bromance with Franklin Pierce, and, even, quite possibly, his lover.  Hawthorne wrote Pierce's presidential campaign political bio for excellent pay, received sinecure government posting from Pierce, was with him on his deathbed -- he asked for him, not Sophia -- was totally in the slaveocracy's pockets.  Hawthorne was vocally anti-abolitionist, and decisively told people discussions of slavery were boring and a waste of time, and he didn't care about slavery one way or the other.  Quite out-of-step with fellow Concordians.  Though Sophia's Cuban trips began before she knew Hawthorne, of course, so it was more like-to-like than caused by Hawthorne. My, this book, and the experience of it, like everything before 2016 and covid feels far, far away in time.  

Coincidence: as I finished Sister Novelists, another biography of sisters appears --a new book about the Grimkés: The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery In An American Family, by Kerri Greenidge.  It seems to be a study intended to debunk their reputations as anti-slaverites -- the review I read suggests they profited immensely from slavery.

So, this morning, receiving the news the library had The Grimkés available, I dashed off to the library to pick it up, because it wasn't raining much, despite we being in Tropical Storm Nicola predicted wind and rain. I knew it was Veterans Day, but didn't stop to think this is a holiday and the libraries are closed.  Duh.  I'm smart that way.  Though I was wearing the rain-snow-storm boots I got last week, so I'm not so dumb that way!  Had on rain coat and carried umbrella too.  Which was good because the storm hit hard as I was returning home, due to the fog and heavy cloudfs, dark came even earlier than the roll back of EDST makes it. We're currently in fog, as well as dark, since the temps are fairly warm -- in the 60's. Well stocked with what we need, and even what we want, we are happily cozy and comfortable.  How lucky can we get?

The week was quite lively, while we ignored the pre-election and pre-results backbenching with all our hearts.  El V did another Postmambo Zoom last night, this time with live guest and his film,  from Lome, in Togo, Africa.    He also went out to several music gigs, and we taught two classes.  

Hope the internet stays on -- it's gone out twice now in less than 24 hours.  If no problems I plan to watch more Crown, season 5, 2022. This is the season to turn the mythologies of Di and Charlie inside out. The first two eps dull and dreary.  The actor doing Di is lacking in all that made cameras and screens bewitched by her.  We see her being acidly mocking and mean, o so not quite subtly (due to the bile and acid of bulimia?). It got interesting in the 3rd episode which was generally only about the Al-Fayed family and the man who was the Duke of Windsor’s valet until death – Fayed sr. hires Black Barbadian, Sydney Johnson, whom the Duke had taught everything that makes an English gentleman.  According to the show, Johnson was the one who advised Al-Fayed to buy palace estate, Villa Windsor, decaying on the outskirts of Paris – and Harrods Department Store, then finally buy some position in a most prestigious equine something or other so he can sit next to, and, finally, meet and speak with the Queen. Queenie’s not about to allow this unworthy vulgarian colonial his reward. She and her Equerry send Diana instead. The Princess insults him, and they get along famously.  Di and Elizabeth are equally nasty in this sequence. Later, at E’s court, the members eagerly check with each other as which possessions in the Villa belong to Them/the Crown/ -- and they go over the lists with the same avid attention any grocer would go over his delivery lists and invoices.  The Court looks small and grasping, petty and avaricious. And, always, deadly dull.

The other character is Charles (now Kingwingy Charles III). Played as he is by Dominic West – as Charlie then as now lacks all charisma, electricity and interest, whilst West can’t help splattering it everywhere just standing around -- this doesn’t work. Can you imagine The Wire's Jimmy McNulty having a temper tantrum over a ... pen?  No, we cannot, but Charlie did. Immediately on being king, even not yet crowned. 

If Charlie was in the least like West’s presentation, none of the messes would have happened in the first place.

So, history's revisionism continues apace, even revisionism of what we've 'always known' because we were there.  Ha!

New Year's 1987 CBGBs

 

     . . . . From Celia Noel, on twitter:

"That's me with Ned Sublette, Kenny Kosek and Jeff Myers at the iconic CBGB’s! #Flashback to New Year’s Eve 1987, what a night! #Sandunga #CBGBs"

They played "Ghost Riders In the Sky" as the lead-up to the midnight count-down.  I take pride in suggesting that tune. It became a staple of the band.

People Who Don't Work From Home Both Lose Their Jobs and Are To Be Forced to Take Jobs

      . . . .  "It’s Been Hard Not to Roll My Eyes”  and  "Pay A Living Wage Or Flip Your Own Damned Burgers."

....Many of these workers resent that people upset over being asked to return didn’t display the same concern for the safety of those who have been there all along. And they wonder why they’ve been left out of so much of the national narrative about what this year has been like for workers. They haven’t been stuck at home baking bread or going stir crazy from being cooped up with family members; they’re out risking their lives working with the public and/or in close quarters with colleagues every day, and they feel invisible in much of the conversation about pandemic life. More than anything, they’re deeply, deeply exhausted....

Goes right along with this WaPo's story about yet another expanding restaurant owner,  thinking we should all 'weep for me', unable as he and the industry are, at finding enough people to work in their intolerable conditions, for pennies and no bennies. 

The comments, which number, last time looked, hit nearly two thousand, are about 99.09 contemptuous of these guys.

I am particularly am contemptuous because this where the financial speculation industry, capitalists in general and rethugs in particular always point when pronouncing that 'people don't want to work and prefer collecting massive government benefits.  So make unemployment illegal!"  See: South Carolina, etc. Same states passing Jim Crow voting repression laws, who have 'right to work' / no right to unionize laws, etc. Also, recall these are the states that made it illegal for labor, i.e. African Americans, to leave neighborhoods and states and go elsewhere for work outside of sharecropping and domestic work.

https://money.yahoo.com/south-carolina-cancels-federal-unemployment-benefits-212914813.html

https://abcnews.go.com/US/south-carolina-montana-declining-federal-unemployment-funds-huge/story?id=77553102

https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/07/montana-south-carolina-ending-participation-in-fed-unemployment-programs.html

Why are they weeping though?  They've gotten what they've been howling about for decades: deportation and anti-immigration.  They promised then wages here would go up -- A Good Thing!  Now they have it, and yet, yet, yet, persist in whining ... about wages going up.

In the meantime the restaurant industry, i.e. owners and landlords, has gotten billions in federal  relief. Not to mention whole transfers of public, tax-payer owned property, for absolutely zero payment – nor do they even clean the messes their covid sheds make in the gutters, streets and on the sidewalks, where, of course pedestrians, blind people and people in wheelchairs can’t even navigate a path -- again, capitalism for the poor, socialism for the rich.  This also reminds me a great deal of England and Europe in wake of the 14th centuries first three great waves of pandemic Bubonic Plague, passing laws to keep prices for wages for labor and prices of commodities exactly what they were prior to the Plague, even though so many had died (which contributed greatly to all sorts of social mobility upward for non-aristos in the 14th and 15th centuries).

And ya, there is, and will be, inflation of up the wazoo, due to choked, interrupted, halted supply chains for absolutely everything, everywhere in the world, along with some damned bad harvests due to not only pandemic, but catastrophic weather.  It's going to get quite bad, one may think indeed, if judging by historical periods in which pandemic coincided with bad harvests and labor shortages -- while war continued, unabated.

Homo Saps are too stupid to survive.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

And GD!  Americans Will Lose Unemployment Benefits If They Turn Down Jobs, NPR SAYS Biden Says, just now.

Except Biden said NO SUCH THING. Not even in the text NPR posts under that headline.  Shame, Shame, SHAME! on NPR.  Gods I loathe NPR.

Biden, in his Monday remarks to reporters, pushed back on the suggestion that funds from the progressive relief package were being abused in any meaningful way and encouraged employers to offer competitive wages to court Americans back into the workforce.

"My expectation is that as the economy comes back, these companies will provide fair wages and safe work environments, and if they do, they'll find plenty of workers. And we're all going to come out of this together and better than before," he said.

"No one should be allowed to game the system."

Biden said that while he took allegations of fraud seriously, the government could not "turn our backs" on those who had lost jobs as a result of the pandemic. He placed the blame for the sluggish state of the national economy on his predecessor, former President Donald Trump, who Biden said "bungled" his handling of the virus and its fallout.

"We'll insist that the law is followed with respect to benefits. But we're not going to turn our backs on our fellow Americans. Twenty-two million people lost their jobs in this pandemic through no fault of their own. They lost their jobs to a virus, and to a government that bungled its response to the crisis and failed to protect them," Biden said.

SHAME, SHAME, SHAME on NPR.

But it's still hard to take, hearing Biden say that anybody offered an appropriate job must take it or lose benefits.  How does he get to decide what is an appropriate offer?  So it will be the chiseling, cruel restaurant owners.  Shame on you too, Biden.

Long Time Gone: Emergence

      . . . . It's May 7th!  Nor has there been a post here since last month, on the 14th.  I guess . . . things just happen . . . or don't happen?

True, a great deal has happened, while it continues to feel as though nothing is happening -- which that latter is untrue, that nothing is happening, because a lot has gone down and is happening  and is going to happen, from dental appointments to planning the end-of-June trip to . . .  Miami . . . in fulfillment of the grant provided to perform discographic research in the Diaz-Ayala Collection.  Not one's preference for first plane trip in 16 months, etc., but one goes where the materials are, when creating a syllabus for a Discography Studies, a program that has never ever existed. 

Next week Postmambo and NOLA Reconnect host, in cooperation with The New Orleans Center for the Gulf South and University of California, Berkeley- American Studies, A Conversation With Gwendolyn Midlo Hall:

Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle

Thursday, May 13, 2021 / via Zoom / 8 pm Central Daylight Time (9 pm Eastern)

Invite link: https://tulane.zoom.us/j/93931683186?pwd=bEcrMFhUYUMzajBTWnRJdVpkMklXdz09

Please join us in celebrating together with pathbreaking historian Dr. Gwendolyn Midlo Hall the publication of her long-awaited memoir, Haunted by Slavery: A Southern White Woman in the Freedom Struggle.

From the Haymarket press release:

The memoir of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall offers today's activists and readers an accessible and intimate examination of a crucial era in American radical history.  

 Born in 1929 New Orleans to left-wing Jewish parents, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall's life has spanned nearly a century of engagement in anti-racist, internationalist political activism. In this moving and instructive chronicle of her remarkable life, Midlo Hall recounts her experiences as an anti-racist activist, a Communist Party militant, and a scholar of slavery in the Americas, as well as the wife and collaborator of the renowned African-American author and Communist leader Harry Haywood.

    Telling the story of her life against the backdrop of the important political and social developments of the 20th century, Midlo Hall offers new insights about a critical period in the history of labor and civil rights movements in the United States.

    Detailing everything from Midlo Hall's co-founding of the only inter-racial youth organization in the South when she was 16-years-old, to her pioneering work establishing digital slave databases, to her own struggles against cruel and pervasive sexism, Haunted by Slavery is a gripping account of a life defined by profound dedication to a cause.

Produced by NOLA Reconnect, Postmambo Studies, and CubaNOLA Arts Collective, in association with the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University and the University of California at Berkeley American Studies. Admission is free.

Then there's always Postmambo Movie Night, which needs a lot of attention to set-up so the subscribers can have a smooth experience.

We're embarked upon planning and organizing a major move of books and music materials out of the apartment, which includes the use of professionals of all sorts. And the shredder.  I'm selling all the sf/f to a group who do very well with pop-up used bookshops in Brooklyn; they are desperate for stock.  Certain research groups will be kept, but more of them are going to be sold off, as how things are now we can't even access them, and it's highly unlikely we'll be writing any more books on these topics either.

Shopping / errands take a lot of time. My latest is shopping for a tablet, as the small computer is reaching the very end of its life.  It will be nice to have something that small, light and portable on which I can download books from the library and write and receive e-mail and have access to the internet.

We've also been very carefully initiating a slight approximation of social life, so far only with friends we know with absolute certainty are fully vaccinated, and who are doing the same. It has been very difficult to do this, which came as a shock. Thus this sense that nothing is happening.  Fortunately it seems just about everyone we know is going through this too, so we all understand each other, and there are no hurt feelings.  We'll get there certainly by the time it is warm enough to be comfortably outside at night.  None of us has any desire to meet in covid sheds or inside the restaurants.

It all feels just as weird now and hard to comprehend as it did a year ago at this time, but weird in a different way. Then we were closed down, really closed down, including a curfew. No covid sheds, no restaurant service at all except pick-up/take-out.  No library grab and go. No doctor appointments except emergencies, very emergency emergencies. Now we are very slowly attempting to come out of our cave-bubble, go shopping in real stores -- why yes, even with the tablet I've done research / comparison shopping places like Best Buy and in Apple (where one must have an appointment, as well as a mask in order to enter), buying jeans, since those from over a year ago fall off now, t-shirts and so on. 

Though the right dish drainer remains, evidently an impossibility. Moreover any place that has dish drainers has only a single variety, and it invariably is too small, is not wrongly designed for my space, which isn't, let me emphasize, is not a weird space for a dish drainer.  Cannot find one with a drainage tray that faces the right direction, fits the space, is not attached to the dish rack, large enough, no matter what.  I'm on the third one, which el V brought home the other day, and sure 'nuff, he didn't check, and the drain tray faces the wrong direction. 

But all around us, from Canada and Michigan to Mexico and Latin America, India and other places, the virus is burning down the house and a new variant seems to emerge every day -- while here the mayor and the governor race to be the one to open up the most the fastest and first w/o any restrictions of any kind -- and bring back All The Tourists, at least "36 million by the end of 2021."  One of the attractions?  Get a free vaccination injection, just walk in and probably get a Broadway ticket as swag.  This while pedestrian deaths from speeding cars, bicycles and scooters is already higher by this month than it has been in decades.

Now tell me this isn't weird.

Books, History, Asparagus, etc.

      . . . . Downloaded a really well done PDF of Owen Wister's Roosevelt: Portrait of a Friendship 1880 - 1919 (1930).  I can cut and paste out of it for the essay I'm working on, of the Gilded Age's boys who wouldn't grow up -- yet ran everything.  So like today.

Theodore Roosevelt, sophomore at Harvard

Even more so this time around reading Wister's book, the arrogant, casual white supremacy, bigotry, sexism leap out. 

Here we are, regarding the 'modern woman' already on page 10 -- recall the text proper doesn't start until page 4.

"Roosevelt’s mind was a great deal cleaner than the modern lip-stick girl." 

Quickly followed on page 14, in the context of their class's Hasty Pudding club theatricals, Ivanhoe as a musical production. This isn't the fault of Sir Walter Scott.

 "...Ellis Island had not yet diluted Harvard and imported Broadway into the college-spirit of our shows. Next day, the fame of Ivanhoe was all over Boston, and spread to New York."  

This is a dig at Jewish, Irish and Italian immigrants' own theaters, productions, writers and performers, that were very popular with 'proper' Americans too -- thus to Broadway.

One can never forget that Wister's grandfather was Pierce Butler, the largest slave holder in the south, before his bankruptcy that sent all the human property he owned to auction to clear his debts.

Fanny Kemble

His grandmother,  Fanny Kemble was a different sort of person. She left Butler due to slavery.  In her Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839, she left us an invaluable portrait of life in Jacksonian America's enslaved world, 

One cannot forget that Wister was a good friend to Thomas Dixon, the author of The Klansman: A Historical Romance of the Klu Klux Klan (1905), the third of his Klan trilogy, from which D.W. Griffith adapted the vile Birth of A Nation (1915). Spike Lee makes no bones about it. These books brought the revival of the KKK all across the US, which this time around was equally willing to lynch Catholics and immigrants as well African Americans.  Yet "journalists' etc. scratch their heads and wonder how such things as the murder of George Floyd, the beatings of elderly Asian American women, come to happen in this country.

One cannot forget either that Theodore Roosevelt's grandparents were Georgia plantation slaveowners, who sold a young girl to finance the lavish wedding at which they married off their daughter, Martha Bulloch to the New Yorker, Theodore Roosevelt Sr.  Needless to say, in boy Theodore's NYC home, he saw his mother and grandmother what they could to aid and succor the CSA's efforts during the War of the Rebellion.

~~~~~~~~~

Made a big kettle of split pea soup this morning. Cooked a sweet potato, mashed it, and folded it into the pea mixture of herbs, ground pork, carrots and red potatoes, plus some fresh squeezed lemon juice.  That sweet potato gave the rest of it a nice, silky texture, el V said.  “This might be the best split pea soup you’ve made yet!”  I have been making split pea soup for decades, so surely there had to be rivals in that time? What a splendid lunch -- especially with toast made in the new Toaster, a toaster than I now have.  Ha!

For the 6th time in the last 10 days we're having asparagus with dinner, accompanied by a bottle of Gruner Veltliner.  It's been a good spring for asparagus it seems; the Veltliners are plentiful in the local wine stores, good quality, and not expensive..

Best of all I was in the supermarket myself, picking out the asparagus -- myself.  I cannot believe the incredible pleasure I am feeling, shopping for groceries for myself in the stores, after over a year of not doing it.  Hey, I'm also a cheap date!  

I can't remember eating asparagus even once last spring; we weren't drinking anything then either except lots of tea, particularly herbals that promised soothing to the nerves.

~~~~~~~~~

Mail is definitely slower these days. We’d been notified by publisher the second half of last year’s royalties was in the mail. But the check only showed up today. Audio royalties still to come.

~~~~~~~~~

Recreational MJ was supposedly legalized today -- with enormous caveats as to who can and can't grow, buy, sell.  It will be just like the liquor licenses here -- very expensive, limited and mostly going to those who are deeply connected in the state's political apparatus.  It does nothing to make it easier for people to get access to medical mj either.  One still has to go through a gatekeeping 'state licensed to license medical MJ' physician -- yet another aspect of the necessity to be connected to the state political apparatus.  This requirement is really a license for the physicians who have them to print money.  A LOT OF MONEY.  They charge preposterous amounts to sign off on a form that they give you in their office to fill out.

~~~~~~~~~~

France shutting down again, for three weeks, due to massive surge in new Covid-19 infections.  Our turn again, soon.  When will the a$$hat$ running things ever learn?  Open -- surge; close -- contain.

~~~~~~~~~~

Still in the 60° range of temperature.  Overcast though, the predicted rain has felt imminent all day, but still holds off.  The western horizon looks as though rain is falling over there though.  Colder air coming in tomorrow night for a couple of days, They Say. 

Bubbly On Ice

     . . . . Beautiful day here.  Went to library and TJ’s and the wine store.  Got a bottle of bubbly to celebrate when, finally, the official call is made.  At 4:49 EST and it still hasn’t been, though everyone knows Biden-Harris carried the day, very slowly, and very carefully. Otherwise the Secret Service wouldn't be hardening the air space and other security over and around Wilmington.

Asshat ‘center Dems’ who lost their campaigns are whine blaming it’s because of AOC, the socialists, the ‘progressives’ and defund the degenerate cops movement. AOC ain't havin' that!  She breaks it down, as to what her sorts do and did, and their sorts didn't and won't.

Myself am giving All The Points for the Dems making it through this campaign and election to Stacy Abrams, the Squad, BLM and all the other progressive activists for the Biden-Harris ticket. 

Myself am also giving All The Points to OUR WHITE DEM ACTIVIST INDEFATIGABLS of C'town and all the other places like C'town, i.e. ‘white suburban women’ -- who have been knocking their brains out, doing everything to get people of every sector registered and informed and voting, including baking, cooking, driving and poll working, giving money -- and doing it not just this year but all the time, but particularly this year -- they too deserve every bit of thanks and gratitude from the rest of us.  They never give up hope and they always remain totally decent and always have a joke and never lose their sense of humor. All of them are totally competent to run everything -- but that's just it, they don't really want to run All the Things!  They just want a decent world for everyone and their kids, their grandchildren, the cats and the earth.  And that's all they've ever wanted from the gitgo.

Love and congratulations to all of you!

I know it may seem a bit premature, and that's what has become so cool about the Biden-Harris campaign -- they haven't prematurely done anything.  Biden projects and expresses calm and patience.  He counsels calm and patience.  Count every vote he says.  That projects confidence (as unlike the desperate flailings of you know whom).  Count. Every. Vote.  That means not a speck of dirt on which the clowns desperately trying to project their non-existent legal expertise can stand to protest the outcome.

In the meantime, have this photo of Stacy Abrams.  Abrams to run the DNC, hmmm?

4:49 – heard the first Friday night scream here.  The ‘restaurants’ are already starting to be packed.

Myself, giving myself a treat.  I’m having a glass of wine after not drinking any for about 3 weeks; no reason, other than disinclination. But the inclination is now here.  Cheers!

The Road To Vote Is Crooked With Many Obstacles

     . . . . Why won't the media call this for what it is, which is terrorism. 

This isn't 'election tensions.' This is straight up terrorism, yet the media won't say it.  Why?

Armed Terrorist Truck Trains closed down the bridges to and from NYC and New Jersey yesterday. It's only going to get worse. Cops did NOTHING because they're all in bed with Them. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/us/trump-biden-election-campaign.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/01/us/trump-biden-election-campaign.html

Variations of this is going on all over the country, and in many places far more violent with the active inclusion of the cops committing the violence.

Yesterday was, let's admit it, a scary day. For a while, I watched funny animal vids in order to take some deep breaths.

This, this! is much better:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2020/11/02/navajo-nation-horse-vote-polls-election/

The Good Old Days: Reading the Fictional 100 Years War

Doyle, Arthur  Conan (1891) The White Company and Sir Nigel (1906)

     . . . . Both novels are set in the 14th century within the 100 Years War.  But the later published Sir Nigel takes place earlier in the war against the backdrop of the Bubonic Plague.

The White Company, featuring a fictionalized mercenary company, under  the command of of the fictional Nigel Loring (modeled on the Prince's Neil Loring), is an historical novel of the Black Prince's Trastámara campaign, forced on him by his father, Edward III. Historically, this campaign broke the Black Prince's non-stop winning streak in place since his heroism at Crécy, broke his finances (his own habits helped, of course), and destroyed his health. Here began one of the declines of England's fortunes in France during this endless conflict.

This is the campaign of the famous historical Battle of Nájera, the campaign where Geoffrey Chaucer, the great English poet, was present, at least at the start, during the organization in the small Navarrese city of Olite, in the Pyrenees.  It was a catastrophic venture, because Edward III, falling into dotage, ordered his son to make it, without consideration of any of the realities on the ground, where King Edward wasn't present.  Edward III wanted the usurping but much saner and superior figure, the bastard brother Henry Trastámara, removed from the throne of Castile and replaced with the insane, corrupt, cruel but legitimately birthed scion (the Black Prince knew all this), Don Pedro. The Prince was never healthy again, which meant leaving the kingdom in England and France to an infant who grew up feckless and so we are all about the Wars of the Roses rolling afterward.

When I read The White Company as an undergraduate, I knew none of this history or geography. 

Even now, I find it annoying that for many chapters 'the prince' is referred to only as that, rather than as the Prince of Wales or even the Black Prince, which would have given this ignoramous some kind of chronological marker.  John Chandos figures in both of Doyle's 14th century novels, and I had no idea who he was either.  (But then, I didn't know who Froissart was either, who is one of the primary foundations for the study of the 14th century of England and France!  I mention this because I get such a kick out of knowing I learned what I didn't know then!)  It really frustrated me back then that The White Company wasn't what Barringer's Nuestra fantasy history was -- where I didn't need to know who anybody was, because none of it was history, except, to a degree, the idealized version of the 14th century's aristo chivalric view of itself, culturally and socially, that the class expected the entire social and economic strata to accept.

I found Barringer's trilogy around the same time I found The White Company.

So it was other historical fiction progenitor and progeny I've been considering most while reading these 14th century historical novels of Doyle's. Closes to his period was Leslie Barringer's 14th century historical fantasy trilogy, The Nuestrian Cycle. These were published more than two decades after Doyle's. Like Doyle's, Barringer's first volume of the trilogy opens with a primary figure-protagonist in a monastery, from which both are expelled due to family necessity.

Out earlier historical fiction, I noticed how much The White Company owes to the father of historical fiction, Sir Walter Scott, in his opening pages of Ivanhoe, though it takes place in the highly fictionalised 12th century. The romance tropes Scott initiated in this, his first work composed entirely of English subjects, are in full view in the earlier section of The White Company, particularly including as a featured hero, one descended of of the Saxon line as is the knight, Ivanhoe. 

While reading Doyle's books, though nearly 100% certain it didn't happen, I've been amusing myself with the idea it isn't beyond the realms of possibility at some point, Doyle, Kipling, Owen Wister, H. Rider Haggard and Theodore Roosevelt had dinner together. Owen Wister was a life-long friend of TR's, dedicating The Virginian to him. Both were Harvard men; TR's mother was a Georgian unreconstructed plantation belle, and Wister's mother was the daughter of Pearce Meese Butler, the largest slave owner in the south).  TR knew Haggard and Kipling, quite well too, and like Wister, they even spent some time with him in the White House.  In the run-up to WWI TR and Kipling were in close contact -- both snapping their teeth to convince the politicos and the public that preventive war with Germany was necessary.

Though he never did meet Arthur Conan Doyle, "When Doyle engineered his [Holmes's] return, Theodore Roosevelt sent word to him that a guest room awaited him at the White House."

Edgar Rice Burroughs should be at that dinner too, but maybe he wasn’t of the right class, despite being of the right time. He certainly read TR's On African Game Trails (1910), on his own 1913 visit to Africa. "The New York Times made its first mention of Edgar Rice Burroughs on June 14, 1914, when the paper’s Book Review included Tarzan of the Apes among “One Hundred Books for Summer Reading...." 

The Review's description of the book that follows would have been irresistible to TR except TR was engaged in his own hair-raising jungle adventure in 1914, in the jungles of Brazil, which damned near killed him and should have. One feels that only TR himself could have survived what he survived, with his pre-existing conditions, of a leg wound prone to re-erupting septically, recurrent malaria acquired in Cuba (called doncha know 'the Cuban sickness', overweight and hypertensive.

TR, frequently described as "a great boy" by everyone from his wife, to himself and other politicians, was well known for his love of what was called 'boys' books' of his time, including Booth Tarkington's Penrod stories.  What all these writers have in common, with the possible exception of Leslie Barringer (and Scott), is they were one and all conscious white supremacists,  imperialists who bought into the cult of ‘manliness, race and eugenics,' and that ‘good’ (white) women were owed their protection and respect, and ‘bad’ women were malicious schemers who worked for their enemies. They were indeed, of their time.  Not until the end of the 20th Century would we see again so many supposedly adult men devoted to entertainment that was originally aimed at kids, self-identifying with every sort of superhero, even overtly evil ones.

WWI – and the Great Influenza --was the explosion that shredded that.  So far, not even the novelcorona virus has done that to us. People are just itching to employ their manliness in shooting libs and blacks and feminists and LBGQT people and intellectuals-college-educated-writers-journalists and immigrants and atheists and depending on who and which group(s) among them Catholics and Jews and socialist-commies.  Gosh, people -- don't these manliest of the manly white supremacists look just like the Khmer Rouge?

~~~~~~~~~~~

Currently reading as well, still in the 14th century, and graduating slowly into the 15th, A.J. Pollard's Late Medieval England 1399-1509 (2000), Hugh Bichino's The Wars of the Roses 1455-1487: The Blood Struggle for England's Throne (2015; 2015), and re-reading for the 4th time, Malory: The Knight Who Became King Arthur's Chronicler (2005) by Christina Hardyment.

On another topic the book with which I'm deeply engaged is The Haitians: A Decolonial History by Jean Casimir (2020). This is meaty brain food, in the way French-Caribbean intellectual-historians of their world always are, providing viewpoints and conceptualization foreign and shocking to the historians born, bred and trained in the – former? – colonialist power nations.

As He Said: "The Past Isn't Even Past"

     . . . . Most of our current crises are connected to this nation's founding history in genocide and African slavery -- economically, politically and socially, even down to emergency natural disaster crews. 

As we all know, the vast majority of our vast incarcerated populations are of color -- and poor. Now many local California politicos and pundits -- and the state fire fighting agency --  are bitterly criticizing the state for giving prisoners early release due to the hotspotting prisons are for outbreaks of covid-19.  Guess what?  The state's fire fighting agency, underfunded by the taxpayers and the politicians, depend instead on what is essentially slave labor -- which for the moment at least it does not have so our homes burn.  How much you want to bet California doesn't make this mistake again?

We all benefited, we benefit even now, from this nation's history of  slavery and perennial racial injustice to African Americans and Native Americans, even if we are more recent immigrants, whether we are white or not. 

We are seeing it so clearly with our dependence upon the poor and of color as the real line of disaster fighting -- and just to get groceries, to get medical care.* Because, you know, we believe don't need to pay them even a living wage.

Really, who believes in their heart that $1 - $2 a day for fighting these wildfires is pay?  particularly for those whose lives and health are at such a high level of risk? Plus, we all know too, these firefighting prisoners are legally prohibited from getting jobs as professional fire fighters because that means paying salaries and benefits. It's so much more practical and tax saving to just refresh the prison population constantly.  Keeping people who have served their sentence from getting real jobs is an effective method of ensuring that constant refreshment.

We all benefit, then and now, who aren't African American, who aren't Native American.

The brilliant light of 19th Century literature in this country couldn't have happened without the resources of slavery.  Longfellow's wife, recall, was vastly wealthy, like all those Boston cultural luminaries were -- allowing them to dedicate their lives to art and culture. There were so many who had that wealth resource that within 3 centuries of first colonization the US there were enough heirs of such wealth to support a leisure class that supports the arts and literature.

Where did much of that wealth of New England and the North, like NY, come from?

As with Longfellow's wife, her father owned the vast wealth creating textile factory complexes such as his Lowell, MA.  Those textiles were produced from the slave-grown cotton.  Much shipping and insurance and banking in so many ways out of slavery -- even after the African slave trade to the the US was abolished, even after slavery itself supposedly was abolished.  

Immediately after the war those wealthy northern and New England movers and shakers headed south** and allied with the great pioneers of neo-slavery, sharecropping, such as the Percys of Greenville, Mississippi (Walker Percy's family -- which was why he could live and write without a job.)

It is nearly impossible to look at even the brilliant light elements of our past and not see it rooted in and shadowed by slavery and genocide -- including the massive removal out of "Dixie" to make that vast territory safe for slavery. 

This morning there's a Marine Dem retweeted on Bill Gibson's Twitter feed, who warns us from where he lives within a huge maga country enclave, that 'they' hate 'us' with almighty passion, they are voting.... it's all about white vs everyone else -- and women. If you can only get it by giving over all power to the insane, and destroying what's left, and dying too, so be it. Long rage the covid-19 hoax! as proclaimed by a relative undergoing chemo for cancer in a rally in a waiting room of fellow unmasked cancer victims.

It merges well with Jon Meacham on the history of the revisionist Glorious Lost Cause history of the War of the Rebellion -- which began immediately.*** 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/23/books/review/lost-cause-meacham.html?

[....]Here, then, was the ur-text of the Lost Cause, of the mythology of a South that believed its pro-slavery war aims were just, its fate tragic and its white-supremacist worldview worth defending. In our own time, the debates over Confederate memorials and the resistance in many quarters of white America, especially in the South, to address slavery, segregation and systemic racism can in part be understood by encounters with the literature of the Lost Cause and the history of the way many white Americans have chosen to see the Civil War and its aftermath.

To Pollard, the Southern side had fought nobly for noble ends. “The war has left the South its own memories, its own heroes, its own tears, its own dead,” he wrote. “Under these traditions, sons will grow to manhood, and lessons sink deep that are learned from the lips of widowed mothers.” Pollard declared that a “‘war of ideas,’” a new war that “the South wants and insists upon perpetrating,” was now unfolding.

And in many ways it unfolds still. The defiance of federal will from Reconstruction to our own day, the insistence on states’ rights in the face of the quest for racial justice and the revanchist reverence for Confederate emblems and figures are illuminated by engaging with the ethos of which Pollard so effectively wrote. He enlarged on his thesis in “The Lost Cause Regained,” published in 1868. Pollard wrote that he was “profoundly convinced that the true cause fought for in the late war has not been ‘lost’ immeasurably or irrevocably, but is yet in a condition to be ‘regained’ by the South on ultimate issues of the political contest.” The issue was no longer slavery, but white supremacy, which Pollard described as the “true cause of the war” and the “true hope of the South.”

The Civil War, then, was to be fought perennially....

We're already fighting our second civil war -- but while they are using their guns and everything else already, we insist on pretending it hasn't happened yet and it won't happen because we are going to win (one) election.  Which latter is in NO WAY assured of happening either. They certainly are doing everything, including shooting, to make sure it doesn't happen.

~~~~~~~~

*  For a breathtaking account of earlier dependence on coerced African American labor  even when slavery supposedly was over, see John M. Barry's Rising Tide (1997) for how the Walkers did it in their Yazoo Delta Kingdom in the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927.

** One of the most well recognized among those even now, is J.P. Morgan.  Not to mention all the racial injustice placating D.C. and presidents such as Theodore Roosevelt did for them, helping make labor laws and court cases go away, as he did for the Walkers with whom he happily went hunting.

***  In truth, though Meacham doesn't mention it, the revisionism began at least as soon as Vicksburg fell, with Davis and others suddenly dropping 'slavery' from their cause for fighting -- though it was top and center in their constitution as a 'nation' and the secessionist state constitutions, and in their many other printed works before and after secession.

Horses Have Their Part FOR Black Lives Matter

     . . . . Horses continue to do their part for Black Lives Matter, as opposed to the horses coerced by police against Black Lives Matter.

How one woman on a horse at an Oakland protest became a symbol for revolution‘You can’t ignore a big, old pretty horse with a black woman on it,’ says Brianna Noble

Since she brought Dapper Dan to downtown Oakland on May 29, she’s inspired black cowboys and cowgirls throughout the country to join protests.

Though somehow Owen Wister*, author of The Virginian (1902), which takes place in Wyoming, and his best buddy, Theodore Roosevelt, who proudly claimed the title of Cattleman and Rancher to describe himself, and both wrote extensively about "the cowboy", somehow they both managed to not notice there were black cowboys. Theodore Roosevelt went so far as to say, invoking his slaveowning Georgia family, that being a "Cattleman" was as good as being a plantation owner.  Owen Wister's Virginian flatly stated that the West was "white man's country."

Judge Henry, the Rich Feller in Wister's novel, who like Theodore Roosevelt, in North Dakota, owns the vast kingdom that he calls his ranch, which is made up of public lands to great extent, flatly explains to the effete eastern school teacher, that all this land was made for his exploitation, and when he's extracted all the animals, grass and minerals, they will just move on.  

Explains a lot about this country, doesn't it.

Thus these stories of Black Lives Matter riders, both men and women, are particularly important parts of correcting our erroneous ideas of history, both of who 'settled' the West and who made western culture.

~~~~~~~~~

*  Wister was one of the children English actress, Fanny Kemble, lost, when she left her husband, Pierce Butler, perhps at the richest slaveowner in the USA, appalled when she learned what slavery was.  Some years later she published (1863) Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation 1838-1839. This was done at the urging of abolitionists in the hope this account of a slave plantation would mobilize British opinion against the CSA.

During the course of researching and writing The American Slave Coast, we got to visit St. Simon's Island, where the plantation Fanny Kemble lived on, was situated.  Bits and pieces of it are still there.

It Always Comes Back / It Never Changes

     . . . . El V did The World That Made New Orleans Zoom birthday party last night, though as the party giver and her husband, whose birthday it was, are in California, it was afternoon in their backyard for them, and for their friends in their backyards.

It was so good -- for them, for him and thus for me.  Different faces and voices! A chance to talk about something else!  Things felt almost normal again.  This came after the horrors that Wednesday, and yes, mostly yesterday too, were.  I was just sick from it, and then yesterday I was sick from being sick.  The Zoom party pulled me back together. I slept pretty good then, last night.

Every time it seems we're plateauing it gets worse. And again, it is black bodies, black voices, black courage, who are out there, saying and doing what must be said and done, while I remain comfortably in our privileged white isolation.  History continues to go round and round, returning to where it begins.

But, hey, the stock market soars, so all's right with somebodies' world, and so what that the cops who wail on those whose worlds are not all right, and never have been, that's just how it has been, always has been, and always shall be, amen, because it stand between 'Them and the only thing that has value, that we value, OUR PROPERTY.  Never forget that for long periods what was meant by "a man of virtue" was, "a man of property." Property = virtue.  After all Our stock market and Your economy are not one and the same.  [ Current Reading Aloud is Riot. Strike. Riot. (2016) by the insufferable Joshua Clover.  It's stuffed with political economic theory, which he pontificates provocatively, sometimes erroneously, but always with a lively mind.  Like so many works that are published right before a momentous event and change, one cannot help but speculate fruitlessly as to how he might have written it if writing it right now.]

How can one be an historian, an historian of US history and slavery, and not be sick to her stomach? We're right back to where we were in the 1950's, the 1920's, the 1890's, the 1870's and all the years before that to 1619. Mirroring the 1850's this racial hatred too is the wielded means and the presented motivation for a coup on the nation.

So, since we wrote a book about the history of this from the beginning of it in our nation, up until that successful effort to go to war to take over the country for the benefit of the Slaveocracy haters, a group of pastors have asked us to do a Zoom discussion with their congregants about the material in The American Slave Coast, next Wednesday -- a current version of 'getting out of the house'.

     . . . . Here is an interview and photos with our friend K up at Jumel Terrace. It begins with a Forward by the interviewer,  that says better what I am feeling these last days better than I do, and who, being African American, has far greater moral authority and reason to feel and say it:

"I am so tired...."

...The black community’s determination and ingenuity to thrive and prosper in the face of adversity should be seen as nothing new – but it’s the continuous road blocks of systematic racial oppression and suppression that feel very, very old... 

Our dear friend is living right there, in the center of the Harlem Renaissance; his neighbors are their generation of black intellectuals and artists, as were their own parents and their neighbors, going all the way back to before the 1920's. They tend to meet most days and hang out, arguing, discussing and exchanging views, on his front stoop.  I.e. he lives in a real neighbhood, a real community, unlike us, down here which is dead fred, now that the real estate developers drove out our community for the sake of businesses that catered to tourists almost exclusively -- and now there are no tourists, and not even the NYU students.

The truth is – and Thometz knew it – was that he wasn’t going to be selling any of those books, at least not to any walk-in customers in 2015. He saw the bookshop as his own protest, to challenge and confront passersby about race. Situated in a historically-black neighbourhood, he was also aware of the difficulty for locals to accept the idea of a white man owning and selling rare books about black history. “I’m not naïve, I know that there are some people in the neighborhood talking about me saying ‘this white guy thinks he knows everything’. But you know, I understand that. The white people, I don’t understand as well.”

     . . . . This, from today's LRB daily email offering from their archive; the year it was published (2000 -- another age!) I requested the anthology for Christmas, and which shows that even Churchill, in the darkest days of WWII, sought out inspiration from black writers.:

...The Harlem Renaissance has been overlooked in many accounts of American Modernism, but the new Norton Anthology of American Literature gives it a good deal of space....

     . . . . As addendum to our adage from the song we wrote way back in the 1980's, and el V's band performed at CBGB's  "When The Plague Hits the City," -- everybody's disaster is somebody's good luck --  this has been good for book biz, which so very often denies black writers space and support, even while profiting from their suffering.

To paraphrase, my agent was pushing back a meeting necessary for the completion and timely release of my book — which is about how black people can apply the lessons we derive from traumatic experiences to our careers — so that white people could reflect on how to help black people. I countered, insisting that our meeting take place as scheduled because black people’s lives are in danger, and I shouldn’t have to sacrifice momentum on a book written for black people because white people are performing empathy.

     . . . . Everything about the action, thinking, language, rhetoric and behavior of white supremacists and racial injustice never goes away because we, as a nation of white people, cover it up comes back, Part the Umptyth -- shades of the Slaveocracy surveillance and control of the Post Office, monitoring and confiscating and burning any materials that even contained the word, 'slave' -- including novels, and not just Uncle Tom's Cabin, that screed penned by satan.

Law Enforcement Seizes Masks Meant To Protect Anti-Racist Protesters From COVID-19

The masks, reading “Stop killing Black people,” were meant to quell the spread of the coronavirus, which has disproportionately affected Black Americans.

... The Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) spent tens of thousands of dollars on the masks they had planned to send all over the country. The first four boxes, each containing 500 masks, were mailed from Oakland, California, and were destined for Washington, St. Louis, New York City and Minneapolis, where on May 25 a white police officer killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old handcuffed Black man, setting off a wave of protests across the country.

But the items never left the state. The U.S. Postal Service tracking numbers for the packages indicate they were “Seized by Law Enforcement” and urge the mailer to “contact the U.S. Postal Inspection Service for further information.”

And, then, you know, Rand Paul, blocking the anti-lynching legislation in the Senate -- Rand Paul who is such a despicable person his neighbor tried to kill him.  Anyway, shades of the entire history of the USA -- even FDR didn't even dare try for anti-lynching law -- too politically dangerous for him, as he continuously explained to his wife, Eleanor, who just as relentlessly kept pressuring him to do it.

The First Lady lost that battle, but she never gave up her war for equality and against systemic injustice.  We can't give up either. It is our job, our obligation, and, as John Quincy Adams declared, "my moral duty as deemed by Almighty God."