Geeshie Wiley & Elvie Thomas: Lost & Found.

Some time ago, in one of my first blog entries, I wrote a piece about Geeshie Wiley's recording of "Last Kind Word Blues." At the time, virtually nothing was known of Wiley, which only reinforced the song's unsettling mystique. "Like Wiley herself," I wrote, "the song seems to mysteriously exist on its own terms, holding all but revealing nothing."

"Last Kind Word Blues" is a song about a woman who hears the last kind words of her WWI lover to send his body to his mother-in-law if he doesn't survive the war (he won't). It is a song about a woman who, when reflecting upon her own death, decides she'd rather be eaten by buzzards than receive a proper burial. It is a song about a woman whose simple actions—walking across a rich man's field, going to the depot & looking up at the sign—take on the epic weight of a Biblical parable. It is a song about a woman who recounts her mother's dying words to her to not be so wild, in a voice that is void of any sense of wildness, let alone any trace of youthful daughterhood. It is a song in which a woman looks across the Mississippi River & sees her own face on the other side. It is a song about a woman who is inflicted with a feeling that she cannot get out of her & believes she has to cross the deep blue sea.

It is a song about profound loneliness, the finality of death, & the solitude of sin.

It is a song about isolation, about entrapment, about depression.

It is a song about Purgatory.

"Geechie Wiley can see her face from across the Mississippi River because hers is the only face to see;" Greil Marcus wrote in Invisible Republic (later retitled The Old, Weird America: The World Of Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes), "all that she loves are dead, & there is no hint of community or society, of town & fellowship, anywhere in her song. The country it makes is a wasteland." Or, as Don Kent put it in the liner notes of the 1994 Yazoo Records compilation Mississippi Masters: Early American Blues Classics, 1927-35: "If Geeshie Wiley did not exist, she could not be invented."

But Geeshie Wiley did exist, as did her singing partner, Elvie Thomas, as evidenced in a remarkable new article by John Jeremiah Sullivan, "The Ballad Of Geeshie & Elvie," which was featured as the cover story on The New York Times Magazine last month. For anyone who's a fan of Wiley, Thomas, or the country blues, this article is a watershed & must be read in full; Sullivan's ability to describe the big picture while simultaneously focusing on the details is masterful, & much of his work would not be possible without the help of Caitlin Love, who dug through the trenches to provide the groundwork for many of the article's revelations.

In the article, it is Thomas who emerges most fully from the mystic chords of history. She was born August 7, 1891, went to prison at 18 for unknown reasons, played picnics with (& outsang) blues legends, teamed up with another female blues singer named Geeshie Wiley, recorded a few records with her in Wisconsin, then later turned to God, & apparently lesbianism. By the time she died on May 20, 1979, she was best remembered as a strict, God-loving hermit who chain-smoked cigarettes & had the most beautiful voice in the Mount Pleasant Church of Houston, Texas. She had cut off all ties to her blues-performing past—helped, no doubt by what Sullivan terms the "long, invisible blade between the two destinies" of "Elvie, a singer, who lives nowhere, & L.V., a woman, at her house in Houston"—such that her own family were surprised to hear of her unique blues legacy when the article was being published.

Geeshie Wiley largely remains in the shadows. We learn her birth name, Lillie Mae Scott, that she was born in Louisiana around 1908, married a man named Thorton Wiley who Thomas did not care for, & went off to live in rural Oklahoma some three years after recording her entire known catalog of a half-dozen sides. As Caitlin Love discovered, Geeshie Wiley comes sharpest into view is on the death certificate of her estranged husband who "died of stab wound between collarbone & neck" by a "Knife wound inflicted by Lillie Mae Scott."

What makes this so epic is that Wiley seems to predict this act of violence on the flipside of "Last Kind Word Blues" in a song called "Skinny Leg Blues."

I'm gonna cut your throat, baby, gonna look down in your face
I'm gonna let some lonesome graveyard be your resting place.

Given the events that soon played out after Geeshie Wiley recorded this song, these words are jarring enough, but considering the musical creative environment of the day, they are all the more bizarre and unusual. In their definitive Faking It: The Quest For Authenticity In Popular Music, Hugh Barker & Yuval Taylor write about what a relatively recent phenomenon the autobiographical song is: "Performers often use autobiographical song now as a talisman of their personal authenticity, parading their insecurities & problems through song in order to boast of how 'real' they are. But it was not common to give such detail in song until relatively recently, especially not in songs aimed at a mass market."

Barker & Taylor's example of a rare autobiographical exception that proves the rule is Jimmie Rodgers' "T.B. Blues," which he recorded in January 1931; when he died of tuberculosis two years later, people made the then-unusual leap of connecting the song's lyrical content with the singer's plight. Wiley's recording of "Skinny Leg Blues" was made in March 1930. In the time between Jimmie Rodgers recorded "T.B. Blues" & died of the disease he sang about, Geeshie Wiley cut her baby's throat.

Thus, a post-rock temptation to take all lyrics as autobiographical is seemingly justified by Geeshie Wiley's words & actions. If the most dire of her lyrics are proven accurate, what does this mean about her as a musical artist & lyricist? Is this another way in which she was ahead of her time? & does this now grant us the ability to listen to all of her songs that much more literally, the way we might be tempted to hear a John Lennon or a Joni Mitchell song?

Part of the unique chill of "Last Kind Word Blues" is how directly Geeshie sings it; this is not the lament of some overwrought torch song or a blues that uses irony like a shield to distance the singer from the hardship they express. When Geeshie tells you the last kind words of her lover, you take her at her word, just like she takes her lover at his word within the song.

The effect is that Geeshie is further drawn into the world of "Last Kind Word Blues" & further separated from our own. & yet, only a few weeks ago, it was largely unknown any concrete detail of her life, down to her real name. "Last Kind Word Blues," then, pulls the ultimate trick—it continues to recede even as we gain new facts that should allow us to view it closer. As Sullivan hints, our mind races at his article's newfound information. Given L.V.'s lesbian lifestyle & guardedness about Geeshie, is it possible that the two women were lovers? & if so, did Thorton Wiley suspect, know, or walk into the wrong room at the wrong time? Did L.V. secretly blame herself for Thorton Wiley's murder? It would be enough to make someone want to turn to the church & never look back.

It is tempting to say that we'll never know what happened, but given the recent small avalanche of information that has appeared, perhaps maybe we will. As a professor I sometimes do research for likes to say, "It's all out there waiting. You just have to find it."

Still, perhaps our postmodern, post-feminist readings of Geeshie & L.V. tell us more about the age that we live in than the one that we tell ourselves we are reconstructing. But now, with the long-forgotten murder of Thorton Wiley & Geeshie Wiley's recorded prophetic confession in the year prior, the strangest force imaginable now seems to attach itself to Geeshie's recordings: Truth.

One cannot help to wonder if maybe, just maybe, when Geeshie Wiley looked across the Mississippi River, she could see her face on the other side.

Stubble Disobedience.

When Henry David Thoreau didn't feel like paying his taxes to protest the Mexican War, he was famously arrested and spent a night in jail. He live-tweeted this as the founding document of American civil disobedience, cleverly titled "Civil Disobedience." It influenced Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and any 1980s sitcom with a "very special episode" in which the kids learn about the '60s by protesting something and get arrested, as their once-hippie parents join in and/or have to explain wistfully at the end that somehow, things have changed.

I reference Gandhi, King, and the first two seasons of Family Ties not because I put myself in their tradition—that would involve going to jail 'n stuff and the closest I've come to being imprisoned is sitting through Meet Joe Black—but because somewhere, sometimes things get so stupid you can't help but not take a stand.

As of this writing, the government has been closed down for eleven days because the Speaker of the House (I won't use names) just really, really, reeeally doesn't like a three-year-old law.

By this point, the shutdown has evolved from cute snowday to stupid inconvenience to national embarrassment to international disgrace. The best part is, the Speaker (still not using names) and all of his party members have all but conceded they're done protesting the three-year-old law but still refuse to end the shutdown or give a reason why they won't. If they weren't already in politics, I'd say they have a future in politics.

Which brings me to myself. As a resident of Washington, D.C., I am disgraced at my government's inability to, well, govern. I decided I should make some sort of protest.

I thought about what I could do. I could go down and protest at the Capitol, but that would involve leaving my house, and with the Metro's funding on life-support, I'm not positive I could get back home. I could call my local federal representatives, only the District of Columbia doesn't have any. I could even go to the Mall the set myself aflame, but then all of the hipster protesters would be like, "It's been done."

Unclear of what to do, I consulted my usual spiritual leader in times of crisis: Father Mulcahy.

There's this episode of M*A*S*H where Hawkeye and BJ can't stand Charles playing his French horn, so they protest by refusing to shower until he stops playing. (Apparently this is one of those convenient gaps where a week goes by with no fighting or patients, which does help to explain how they stretched out a two-and-a-half year war for eleven seasons.) Banished from the mess tent for their odor, they invite Father Mulcahy to eat with them outside. He politely defers. BJ reminds him, "Jesus ate with the lepers." Mulcahy considers that for a moment and says, "He was an exceptionally good sport."

Considering my wife gets mad when I don't clip my toenails, I knew that not showering was out. But I had been putting off shaving for the first few days of the shutdown, and after remembering how Eddie Vedder grew a mohawk to protest Bush invading Iraq, I realized that I could register my protest by refusing to shave. I'd call it "No Shave-Down 'til There's No Shut-Down."

This is the kind of thing that begs for social media documentation, but that would require taking "selfies," which I generally protest more than the government shutting down. So after testing the water with a Facebook post, I decided to follow it up with this, since I wanted to write about the shutdown in some way or another.

Thus, my facial hair is both a protest and a documentation of the time spent with no government. If things keep going how they're going, I could eventually start a ZZ Top tribute band (called AA Bottom, 'natch).

Besides, cool people have beards. Like our first president to have facial hair, Abraham Lincoln. And he was a trendsetter in more ways than one: After him, every president following had facial hair with the exception of Andrew Johnson (who was impeached) and William McKinley (who was shot), until Woodrow Wilson (who was, um, stroked?). Since Wilson, there's been nary a chief executive whisker since. Wait. Does that make Wilson the most influential president since Lincoln? I think I just blew my mind.

But I digress, mainly because Lincoln's on everyone's mind nowadays. "Today there is a New Confederacy," announced a recent op-ed in the Washington Post, "an insurgent political force that has captured the Republican party and . . . has accomplished what its predecessor could not: It has shut down the federal government, and without even firing a weapon or taking 620,000 lives, as did the Old Confederacy's instigated Civil War."

But if anyone's starting a Civil War, it's the Republicans on themselves. I'm half expecting the Tea Party to fire upon whatever is the equivalent of the "mainstream" (ha!) Republicans' Fort Sumter (the Bush family ranch? The Ronald Reagan Presidential Library? The Barry Goldwater Whatever He Has?). The Post op-ed was likely responding to an unnamed GOP Rep who compared the shutdown to Gettysburg—with the Republicans as the Confederates. I understand if you like the idea of still calling yourself "Lincoln's Party," but at this point, you either look like you're stupid or you don't care (not that those two are necessarily mutually exclusive).

And with George Will comparing Obamacare to the Fugitive Slave Act, it doesn't look like it's gonna end anytime soon. Oops, said I wouldn't name names. Well, George Will is a jackass.

At any rate, it's allowed me to tweet my favorite analogy:

The #GOP blaming #Obama for the shutdown is like John Wilkes Booth blaming Lincoln for missing the end of the play. #GOPShutdown #p2
— Eric Wolfson (@ericwolfson) October 10, 2013

Thoreau put it this way: "If the tax-gatherer, or any other public officer, asks me, as one has done, 'But what shall I do?' my answer is, 'If you really wish to do anything, resign your office.' When the subject has refused allegiance, and the officer has left his office, then the revolution is accomplished. But even suppose blood should flow. Is there not a sort of blood shed when the conscience is wounded? Through this wound a man's real manhood and immortality flow out, and he bleeds to an everlasting death. I see this blood flowing now."

Thoreau's words are like finding a snippet Quentin Tarantino dialog in the middle of Walden. They also predict the Civil War by about two decades, not to mention Lincoln's masterpiece, his Second Inaugural Address.

But even if the Confederacy was never able to shutdown the government, I would like to note that this last Congress has passed the fewest amount of bills of any Congress since 1861—which arguably makes it the most divided government since the Civil War.

Thus, in the spirit of Thoreau, I would like to take his words—"Resign your office"—and say them to the Speaker.

Because, at the end of the day, it's my God-given right as a freedom-loving American to do something that great Americans have done now for generations: Shave.

A Bullet from the Back of a Bush.

50 years ago today, a bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers' blood.

Although Evers is only dimly remembered compared to his contemporaries like Martin Luther King, Jr., & Malcolm X, he was well-known in his time as a Civil Rights leader & NAACP field secretary (the first in Mississippi) who fought to overturn segregation in the University of Mississippi.

But it was the desegregation of another college that led to the circumstances of Evers' death.  On June 11, 1963, President John F. Kennedy sent the National Guard to protect two African American students who had enrolled in the University of Alabama.  That evening, Kennedy made a national address that marked a turning point in Civil Rights. "We preach freedom around the world, & we mean it, & we cherish our freedom here at home;" Kennedy said, "but are we to say to the world, &, much more importantly, for each other, that this is a land of the free except for the Negroes; that we have no second-class citizens except Negroes; that we have no class or caste system, no ghettos, no master race, except with respect to Negroes?"

In the early morning hours following the speech on June 12, 1963, Evers was returning to his home in Jackson, Mississippi, after meeting with NAACP lawyers.  In his hands were a stack of NAACP T-shirts that said "Jim Crow Must Go."

A bullet was fired from an Enfield 1917 rifle, hitting him in the back, & ricocheting into his house.  Evers staggered a few feet & collapsed on his front lawn.  He was taken to a local hospital & died within an hour, less than a month before his 38th birthday.

* * *

Like Joe Hill or John Brown, Medgar Evers' death was immortalized in many gestures large & small--the Life cover story about his funeral; a key plot point in the smash film & book The Help; even in an episode of the '70s sitcom Good Times, when some FBI agents visit the Walker home & are asked by young activist Michael who killed Medgar Evers to the audience's applause ("We're working on it," is the FBI agent's answer, to the audience's laughter).

But as a matter of fact, someone had been tried for Evers' death--fertilizer salesman & member of the White Citizens' Council (& later the Ku Klux Klan)--Byron De La Beckwith, although two mostly-white juries resulted in deadlocked verdicts.  Three decades later, new evidence emerged (not the least of which was De La Beckwith's own bragging in the years between), & he was found guilty in early 1994.  De La Beckwith tried unsuccessfully to appeal & would die in jail at the age of 80 in early 2001.

All of which is interesting & telling, but fails to bring us closer to Medgar Evers, the person.  Perhaps because he died so early & so young, Evers remains elusive in a way that both King & Malcolm feel more complete--as I unintentially demonstrated above, in talking about Evers we often end up talking around him (his times) than talking about him (his life).

Perhaps the greatest tribute of all is also the most telling--Bob Dylan's early folk song "The Ballad of Medgar Evers," which he shrewdly renamed "Only a Pawn in Their Game," perhaps because he realized that Evers only appears at its first & last verses:

A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood
A finger fired the trigger to his name
A handle hid out in the dark
A hand set the spark
Two eyes took the aim
Behind a man’s brain
But he can’t be blamed
He’s only a pawn in their game

A South politician preaches to the poor white man
“You got more than the blacks, don’t complain.
You’re better than them, you been born with white skin,” they explain.
And the Negro’s name
Is used it is plain
For the politician’s gain
As he rises to fame
And the poor white remains
On the caboose of the train
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

The deputy sheriffs, the soldiers, the governors get paid
And the marshals and cops get the same
But the poor white man’s used in the hands of them all like a tool
He’s taught in his school
From the start by the rule
That the laws are with him
To protect his white skin
To keep up his hate
So he never thinks straight
’Bout the shape that he’s in
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game

From the poverty shacks, he looks from the cracks to the tracks
And the hoofbeats pound in his brain
And he’s taught how to walk in a pack
Shoot in the back
With his fist in a clinch
To hang and to lynch
To hide ’neath the hood
To kill with no pain
Like a dog on a chain
He ain’t got no name
But it ain’t him to blame
He’s only a pawn in their game.

Today, Medgar Evers was buried from the bullet he caught
They lowered him down as a king
But when the shadowy sun sets on the one
That fired the gun
He’ll see by his grave
On the stone that remains
Carved next to his name
His epitaph plain:
Only a pawn in their game

Dylan's "Only a Pawn in Their Game" is perhaps the ultimate tribute to Evers because it is the ultimate statement around him (as opposed to about him).  Evers is the inspiration, framing the song like a Greek epic, but disappearing in the middle three verses that examine the social scenario that led him to be shot in the first place.

As a work of economy & complexity, it is a masterpiece; for my money, Dylan never wrote a better song in his early folk period.  It is less about one man's murder as it is the entire social structure that led to that murder, a staggering undertaking pulled off in a mere five verses.

In its own way, the song is as much about Medgar Evers as it is about Byron De La Beckwith, & system that manipulated him into becoming a murderer in the first place.  There comes from the narrative something like sympathy for De La Beckwith's position, but in the end it is just cold rationale.

The song ties Evers & De La Beckwith together in a gesture of good & evil, famous & infamous, black & white--&, if there's any doubt as to where the singer's sympathies ultimately lie--King & Pawn.

The Day George Washington Died.

Today is a day that tragedy struck in American History.

On December 14, 1799, George Washington, the Father of Our Country & the First President of the United States, passed away from a throat infection in his Mount Vernon home at the age of 69.

He was the only president to both live & die in the 18th Century.

Convinced he would die at a young age like all men in his family before him, Washington not only lived, but—after having several horses shot out from under him in battle—at times would wonder if he wasn't perhaps invincible. Still, he worried about a premature death.

His fatal illness came about after he insisted to do his daily inspection of Mount Vernon even though it was cold & rainy (once a surveyor, always a surveyor, it seems).

It's tempting to look back & say, "If only he had listened to his family & servants & stayed home that day," etc., but history has a way of making our minds up for us—if only in retrospect.

Perhaps he was worried about something in particular that day; perhaps he was obsessive with his property; perhaps he sensed it was his time (or close to it, anyway) & felt he already had been living on borrowed time for too long in the first place.

We'll never know the motive.

But we'll never forget the result.

From the sketchiest flicker of psychological shadow comes the darkest truths etched in tombstone: George Washington would die on December 14, 1799.

By that point, the town of Newtown, Connecticut, had already existed for 95 years.

The Legend of the Million Dollar Quartet.

The Million Dollar Quartet, l-r: Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley, & Johnny Cash.

On December 4, 1956, Elvis Presley swung by his old label, Sun Records, where he found Carl Perkins cutting a session with a then-unknown Jerry Lee Lewis playing backup on piano; just then, Johnny Cash popped his head in while out shopping for Christmas presents, & the legend of the "Million Dollar Quartet" was born.

The truth, as it always is, is more complicated & less romantic: While the first part is essentially true, it seems like Cash was probably called in specifically from his house to complete Sun Records' rock & roll Mt. Rushmore. Also, Cash is inconspicuously absent from the recordings made that day, despite the iconic photo above & the contemporary newspaper report of the guys singing "Blueberry Hill," which is nowhere to be found.

But, as the Gods say, close enough.

The recordings that do survive of the Million Dollar Trio (if you will) are one of rock & roll's great lost founding documents, often overlooked for the very thing that makes them so fascinating: For all of the different things they sing — from "White Christmas" to "When the Saints Go Marchin' In" — there is very little of what we would think of as rock & roll. There's no "Blue Suede Shoes" or "Whole Lotta Shakin' Goin' On," & the only time Elvis does break into one of his classics, "Don't Be Cruel," it's to describe how an African-American performer sung the song better than him (the singer turned out to be a young Jackie Wilson).

Elvis imitating Jackie Wilson imitating Elvis imitating Dean Martin or whoever he had in his head the day he recorded "Don't Be Cruel" is essential listening, & should be sought out by any fan of music.

Yet it is a very poor indicator of the music made that day, which was partly blues, partly country, but mostly gospel. After blues & country, gospel music gets the short end of the stick, but here Elvis, Jerry Lee, & Carl make a case for it as being rock's great lost third influence. Check out the boys singing "I Shall Not Be Moved" — a gospel song in form & lyric, to be sure, but country-blues rockabilly in every other way, from the boogie rhythm to Carl's snapping solos:

Not only are these tapes the only known recordings of Elvis & Jerry Lee together, they are the only known records of Elvis talking freely about music, period, filled out by a stream-of-conscious playlist of illustrations. It would be like the Founding Fathers made a webcast of themselves raiding Thomas Jefferson's bookshelf. Only a lot more fun to listen to.

On Spielberg's "Lincoln."

The only known photograph of Abraham Lincoln giving his Second Inaugural Address.

An English professor I once had for a Civil War literature class told us that any historical film tells more about the time in which it was made than the time that it attempts to depict.

She used the cornerstones of Civil War film — which are also arguably the cornerstones of film, period — to back her up: Namely, the incredibly-cringe-inducing Birth of a Nation & the still-pretty-cringe-inducing Gone With the Wind. She believed that, culturally speaking, the Civil War never ended, & with each major cultural milestone, America was still trying to resolve the questions it left open. Thus, Birth of a Nation was the first film epic, while Gone With the Wind was the first modern, full-color epic. & they both had A LOT to say about whites, African-Americans, & the Civil War.

All of which is to say that I wonder what my professor — let alone D.W. Griffith or Scarlett O'Hara — would have to say about the Steven Spielberg film, Lincoln. The film is a creative crossroads of two things I've been culturally trained to be very wary of: Overhyped, "excellent" films (because they rarely, if ever, live up to their hype) & historical films (see above).

& yet, somehow, Lincoln is the exception that proves the rule. I chalk it up to the fact that you have Hollywood's finest living director (Spielberg) & its finest living actor (Daniel-Day Lewis, in the title role) adapting a slice of perhaps the best nonfiction book of the last decade (Doris Kearns Goodwin's Team of Rivals). More often than not in Hollywood, too many cooks spoil the soup.

But not here.

The film is so well paced, shot, acted, written, & edited, it seems to approach the textured richness of a Citizen Kane or high-period Hitchcock. The way funny scenes transition into serious ones, the iconic into the mundane, the public into the private, was near-effortless. The film strikes the rare balance between grand, overarching narrative & meticulous, historically-accurate detail that thrills people who know next-to-nothing about Lincoln just as much as those who have spent their lives investigating his world.

For me, it was the little touches that did it. The ugly patterns on the floor where Tad falls asleep while looking at glass negatives of slaves; the parade of blankets & shawls that adorned most of the characters who passed through the drafty, half-delapitated White House (not to mention the fingerless gloves on the telegraph operators); the cigars smoked by Seward & Grant; the jewelry worn by Mary Todd; the way that the martyred Lincoln was turned sideways on his deathbed to compensate for his height.

Grounding all of this detail was Daniel Day-Lewis's tour-de-force performance of Lincoln, easily his best in a career of bests &, I believe, will earn him a third Best Actor Oscar. Lincoln is nothing but an enigma in a way that few other Americans are (off the top of my head, I'd say only Washington, Jefferson, & Elvis come close, & even then, Lincoln probably beats them); usually to play Lincoln is to be blocked by the audience's idea of Lincoln. This is what makes Day-Lewis's performance so remarkable. He doesn't fall into caricature or ignore the man for his own incarnation with the Lincoln name, he seems to embody the man in a way that is altogether astounding.

By the end of the film, the use of light & shadows was tricking me into believing that it was like old photographs brought to life, all while spinning the many moods that make Lincoln so fascinating (& near impossible to pin down): Bawdy extrovert, sullen introvert, family man, backwoodsman, intellect, charmer, trickster, & politician. The latter is the most important because it anchors all the rest. Just like the real Lincoln, Day-Lewis often overlays several of these moods at once, all brought into focus by his political genius. Over & over, his Lincoln downplays himself only to come out of the woodwork with a conviction that no one could see coming, but always seemed to perfectly summarize what needed to be done & why. It's a bit like how Columbo solves a case at the end after acting the rumpled fool or how they say Bob Dylan could write his sophisticated early folk songs after talking like a political neophyte's kid brother — it was an all-American performance of reinvention, with gestures of love, toil, & inspiration that would've made Melville's Confidence-Man weep with pride. If this is the true American, then Lincoln is its archetype. He didn't just unite the nation in the past tense, he unites it in the present.

Greil Marcus writes about going to see The Godfather in 1972 & how it was the only time he can remember a theater being split evenly between white & African-American patrons. The film seemed to speak to both groups, with its Italian-American fable for the whites, & the prototypical "gangster" story for the African-Americans, which Marcus connected to the era's high period of soul (just think of Marvin Gaye's What's Going On & Sly & the Family Stone's There's a Riot Going On! to map the limits), & would set the stage for gangsta rap two decades later.

Similarly, when I went to see Lincoln, there seemed to be just as much of an equal distribution between whites & African-Americans. Furthermore, the African-Americans would softly talk back to the film when an African-American character had a line that was a perfect twist of truth & irony. "Mmm-hmm," "That's right." It made the film feel like a very subdued church. I find it hard to believe that Birth of a Nation or Gone With the Wind inspired the same kind of engaged reaction from their African-American audiences.

Spielberg shrewdly frames the film with Lincoln's two greatest speeches — The Gettysburg Address & his Second Inaugural. The Gettysburg Address is recited to Lincoln, by blacks & whites, soldiers & laymen, the words weaving a tapestry of Americas into an America. They say the greatest sign of change brought on by the Civil War was that, before the war, people said "These United States," & after the war, "The United Sates" — if this is true, this opening scene fits right in. Plus, we see the many moods of Lincoln in a matter of minutes: In one moment, the bold leader, in the next, the slightly perturbed genius who doesn't need his fans to prove their loyalty by reciting his words back to him.

[SPOILER ALERT?]

The Second Inaugural comes at the end, after Lincoln had died, when the camera went into a close up of a candle & then into what looked like an old black & white film of Lincoln talking, which then expanded to portray Lincoln in front of the Capitol giving his famous address. This ending scene was a rare dividing point in the film. Both the couple to my left (an African-American man & woman) & my wife on my right (a white woman) thought it was hokey & should've been left on the cutting-room floor. I loved it, if only because it seemed to be Spielberg addressing the Civil War tradition (which is to say, the American tradition) in film, using the flickering candle & the weird black & white Lincoln to harken back to the portrayal of Lincoln in Birth of a Nation.

It also allowed the film to end with Lincoln's greatest words — & with malice toward none, with charity for all — mixing the man & myth, fact & fiction, living life & history. Perhaps the film will age quicker than we expect it to (have you seen Glory lately?), but for the time being, it seems to bring to life a man & his time.

As a different president supposedly said about a different film depicting Lincoln, Spielberg's Lincoln seems to "write history with lightning."

Only that president was Woodrow Wilson.

& the film was Birth of a Nation.

All The President's Hashtags.

The 5 living US Presidents at the opening of the Reagan Library, 1991;
Reagan was known as "The Great Communicator" for his ability
to use social media to rally his base.

With the recent success of Obama's #My2K Twitter campaign, many assume that this is the first time a US President has used a hashtag to promote their agenda, but in fact, the hashtag is a long & proud American political tradition. For centuries, presidents have been using hashtags to rally their bases—first through printed leaflets, followed by telegraph, telegram, email, & finally, through Twitter.

American Wolf is proud to present the first time they've all been gathered in one place.

So, without further ado, here's—

A Brf Histry Of POTUS #Hashtags:

@TheWashington: #SpiritOf76

@JohnMFAdams: #XYZnot4Me

@ThomJefferson: #2xTheU@2centsPerAcre

@ConstitutionFather: #NoWayUK1812

@LastCockedHat: #MonroeDoctrine4All

@JQA: #Back2TheAdams

@OldHickory: #WeH8TheNatlBank

@LittleMagician: #DontPanic1837 

@OldTippecanoe: #2TermsOrBust

@FatherOf15: #2Legit2Quit

@YoungHickory: #GoWest

@OldRoughNReady: #OldSoldiersNeverDie

@MillardFillmore: #ISucked

@FranklinPierce: #IReallySucked

@JamesBuchanan: #IReallyFuckingSucked

@MrLincoln: #4Score7Years

@TennTailor: #PlsDoNotImpeach

@USGrant: #PopularButIncompetent

@RutherfordBHayes: #TildenWho?

@JamesAGarfield: #DarkHorseRox

@ChesterAArthur: #ImWithChet

@GroverCleveland: #IWillReturn

@LittleBenHarrison: #GrampasPride

@GroverCleveland: #2Kool2BKonsecutive

@WmMcKinley: #RembrTheMaine

@RoughRider: #TrustBust4U

@BigBillTaft: #Death2Washtubz

@ProfWilson: #14Points4USA

@WarrenGHarding: #GStands4GodAwful

@SilentCal: #_________

@GreatEngineer: #2Chickens4EveryPot

@FranklinDelano: #4Freedoms4EVA

@HarrySTruman: #BuckStopsHere

@GenEisenhower: #ILikeIke

@JackKennedy: #WhatUCanDo4UrCountry

@LBJ: #Gr8Society4All

@TrickyDick: #Waterg8Sux

@GeraldRFord: #IBegUrPardon

@MrJimmy: #Malaise4UandI

@TheGipper: #TearDownThisWall

@GeorgeHWBush: #NoNewTaxe$

@WilliamJClinton: #WeCannotFearChange

@GWBush: #MissionAccomplished

@BarackObama: #My2K

The Top 5 Most Bizarre Moments of the 2012 Campaign.

It's only been 10 days, but the 2012 election already feels like eons ago. The perhaps-likely win for Obama has become now-obvious, while Romney's disappearance from the mainstream Republican dialogue has been carried out with a velocity that is almost staggering.

But even as the surreal settles into the ordinary, the campaign still comes back to me in bits like a deep, long dream that stalks waking life. Like a dream, it was very weird — far more so than any other election I can remember.

Perhaps this could only be expected from the setup. On one side, you had Barack Obama, champion of all things hope & change, now trying to show that the hope had begun to deliver & that we could not risk change right now, despite the nation's economic woes. On the other side, you had Mitt Romney, a big-business Wall Street tycoon who was the exact person who was vilified in the financial crisis in the first place. Throw into the mix that Romney's signature achievement as governor, Massachusetts' universal healthcare, was the direct template for Obama's signature achievement as president, national universal healthcare, which put Romney in the position of arguing against his own achievement while Obama praised it, & you have a very strange predicament indeed.

Which in turn was only the backdrop for a non-stop parade of weirdness:

5. Three Debates in Three Phrases

Ever since MTV first reared its beautiful, frenetically-edited head, the news story has been morphing into the soundbite. This election took things one step further, turning the soundbite into a phrase that "summarized" (more like overshadowed) the 90 minutes of debating. The first, "Big Bird," was supposed to show Romney's small-government credentials but instead found him being sensationalistic (the average American pays $1.35 a year for PBS) & out-of-touch (Elmo is the new Big Bird!). The second, "Binders Full of Women," was supposed to be a passing phrase in a clearly-rehearsed story to prove Romney's cred with women, but instead stuck out like a sore thumb & succinctly summarized everything that made Romney oblivious to the very social issues he was trying to master. The third, "Bayonets & Horses" was the only pre-planned "zinger" that landed in the debates, & was Obama's sole debate catchphrase, used to show the anachronism that was Romney's vision of national defense. & with this, the evolution was complete. Soundbite, meet bit-bite.

4. Romney Proves Unqualified To Be a UK Tourist.

It shoulda been the most open-&-shut foreign policy trip either. Mitt Romney, savior of the 2004 Olympics (an accomplishment even most Democrats gave him), was going to visit the London 2012 Olympics, held in our strongest international ally & led by fellow conservative David Cameron. Instead, Romney gave an interview on the eve of the trip expressing "disconcerting" efforts made by England that implied a lack of preparation. The result was the worst American tour of England since Jerry Lee Lewis. Romney struggled to find his footing regarding the Olympics, called diplomats by the wrong title, & told the press about meetings that were supposed to be confidential. As the gaffes followed him to his scheduled stops of Israel & Poland, so too did the always-perfect tag from the Twitterverse used to document them: #Romneyshambles.

3. Obama Sleepwalks Through the First Debate.

A perfect storm of careless statements, international stupidity, & staffing blunders had taken hold of Romney's campaign by the time he walked onstage to meet the president in the first debate. Pundits on both sides agreed that if Obama could "win" the first debate, the election would be all but over for Romney. Instead, Obama choked. What everyone forgot was that Obama was never a great debater — Hillary won most of their primary square-offs in 2008 — & Romney had sharpened his skills in the two dozen or so Republican primary debates. With the assist of non-moderator Lehrer, Romney was able to bully & bluff his way through, keeping an upper-hand on the conversation in a strange mix of curt rudeness & blatant lies. For me, though, the most head-shaking-at-a-trainwreck moments for Obama came at the beginning & end: First, when he opened with a maudlin 20th Anniversary message to his wife & began his closing remarks by saying, "Four years ago, I said I am not a perfect man & I would not be a perfect president." WHAT?! Or, he coulda added, a perfect debater.

2. Romney Rejects 47% of All Americans.

There have been blunders & there have been blunders, but there has never been anything quite like Romney's infamous "47%" comment. Secretly filmed at a closed-door campaign fundraiser, the video leaked just prior to the first debate & threatened to take his entire campaign off-course. In it, he derided 47% of the population to be victims "who are dependent on the government" & believe the government has to care for them in an act of willful laziness. These are the "people who will vote for the president no matter what," Romney explained, failing to realize that the states with the largest-amount of government aid programs are in solid-Red states like Alabama & Mississippi. But what happened next made things even weirder. Forced to answer to the video, Romney held an awkward press conference in which he granted that his words were inartfully stated, but essentially true. So the man looking to lead the country secretly writes off almost half of its population & then publicly stands by this assessment. Romney didn't plan to reverse this until the first debate, when much to his shock (& everybody else's) Obama did not bring it up. It's too bad he didn't because, based on the tepid explanation Romney gave to Fox News later that night, it woulda landed a much-needed point in the president's favor.

1. Clint Eastwood Talks to an Empty Chair.

National icon Clint Eastwood gives a high-profile endorsement of Romney & is invited to speak at the Republican National Convention after making a great impromptu speech for Romney on tour. What could go wrong? Well, Eastwood could request a chair. & the rest is...history? Said Eastwood later: "If somebody's dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention & say something, they're gonna have to take what they get." & after watching some 12 minutes of his unscripted surrealism, this may just be the only 100% true statement to come out of the 2012 campaign.

By The People, Or: The OTHER Reason Why I Thought Barack Obama Was Going to Get Re-Elected All Along.

I realized after completing my last post about why I always thought Obama was going to win the 2012 election, I left out the one reason that had most inspired me to write the article in the first place, probably because it was the most partisan:

Barack Obama won the election because a Republican has not fairly won an election since George H.W. Bush was elected in 1988 — in other words, in the last 5 elections, the Democrats were or should've been the true winners.

Clinton's wins in 1992 & 1996 along with Obama's win in 2008 are the obvious ones. & everybody knows that in 2000, Gore got the most number of votes, but lost it in a perfect storm of Fox News, political corruption, & (most disturbingly) the Supreme Court's Gore v. Bush decision. (Which, if you don't think it's possible for something to be compelling that's written in legalese, check out Justice Stevens' masterful dissent, which concludes that the real losers are not Al Gore or the Democrats, but the people of the United States.)

Bush's "loss" to Kerry in 2004 is the kicker, & the one that'll make most conservatives roll their eyes & think you're a joke. To all the haters (as well as all the believers), I refer you to one place, which is one of the most overlooked piece of journalism of the last decade: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s "Was the 2004 Election Stolen?" from the June 1 issue of Rolling Stone, which has been reproduced on the progressive website Common Dreams & can be found here.

The 2004 election was a bitter one, in some ways just as much as 2000. But ultimately, in both cases, it seemed as though the "true" winners, Gore & Kerry, didn't really want it so much after all, & in some ways this was the hardest pill to swallow of them all. After a prolonged fight to election day, it was as though neither one had any fight left in him. If Gore hadn't dismissed all of the people contesting their votes (or lack thereof) in his waning days as President of the Senate, or if Kerry had shown the muscle he failed to in the swift-boat controversy, we might be looking at a very different chain of events.

Now, in the end, it was worth the crushing defeat of Kerry (& perhaps even Gore too) if that's what it took for us to get to Obama. With Obama in 2008, the Democrats finally had a candidate strong enough to beat the Republicans, no questions asked. & with Obama in 2012, the Democrats finally had a candidate who could campaign just as strongly as the Republicans, pulling tricks right out of their handbook: Namely, defining Romney before Romney could define himself through his tenure at Bain (this year's swift-boat, if you will) & capitalizing on the "47%" video (this year's "I voted for the war before I voted against it"), which helped to keep an upper-hand on the news-cycle.

But most importantly, in 2012 the Democrats were able to learn from their previous trials & tribulations & turn them around into a stunning mandate. Voter suppression & corruption at the polls were no match for an electorate that was diverse & well-informed. The Democrats were finally able to tap into the base they always knew was out there, & deliver on it honestly & fairly.

&, as icing on the cake, an exasperated Karl Rove on Fox News began accusing the Democrats of rigging Ohio, even after the channel's own people had called the state for Obama.

Pot, meet kettle.

Obama 2012: Second Terms of Endearment.

It's often said that the eskimos have over 100 words for snow. After this election season, I feel that pragmatic liberals such as myself probably have 100 words for "cautiously optimistic." I think I may have used that phrase at least as much as "please" & "thank you" & definitely more than second-stringers like "happy birthday," "let's watch TV," or "dude, this makes James A. Garfield look like Calvin Coolidge."

Suffice to say that after the defeat of John Kerry's so-called "loss" in 2004, I never again would take up any of that "when we WILL win" junk that made Bob Dole sound like the scrappy old white guy that he was in the '96 election. (& no one need be reminded that Bob Dole lost too.)

But now that the dust has settled & the race has been decided by everyone except Karl Rove's superego (pun intended), it is safe for me to finally unveil what I was REALLY thinking (very loudly) every time I spoke those two hollow words: cautiously optimistic.

Thus, I bullishly call my reasoning:

Why I Thought Barack Obama Was Going to Get Re-Elected All Along.

1. Party stalwarts almost always beat compromised choices. Whenever it comes down to somebody that one party is genuinely behind — think Reagan in 1984 or Bush in 2004 or Obama in 2008 — vs. a compromised choice — think Mondale in 1984 or Kerry in 2004 or McCain in 2008 — it usually comes down on the side of party favorite. This only makes sense. Pundits can sit around & rationalize all day about why their candidate could/would/should/will win (& Fox News certainly did that with Mitt Romney), but the fact is that at the end of the day, someone who's a true party consensus leader will turn out the base. It always feels better to vote FOR somebody than AGAINST somebody else, which in this case worked to Obama's advantage.

2. Barack Obama is the greatest campaigner of his generation, if not of all-time. Love him or hate him, Barack Obama ran what may have been the finest political campaign in 2008. & I study this stuff. I imagine the only people who could give him a run for his money would be JFK in '60, Reagan in '80, & Clinton in '92, but that's about it. So the Republicans weren't just going up against a decent candidate — like, say, an LBJ or a Harry Truman. They were going up against THE BEST. I think a lot of people really underestimated this fact. & indeed, outside of one major folly — that lackluster, if not utterly bizarre first debate performance — Obama ran a campaign that was nearly has smooth as the one from four years earlier. Meanwhile, Romney's campaign was a ramshackle mess, with gaffes & miscalculations running ramped, outside of that week or so following that first debate. Romney would've ran the lesser campaign against any decent competitor, but going up against Obama made him look downright amateur.

3. The media built the election up into a horserace that it never truly was. Again, I first learned my lesson in 2004. After Kerry won the first debate, it was then decided that Bush won the second debate, & that the third was — surprise, surprise — a "draw." I later read an interview with John Kerry in which he said he thought he had won all three debates. I had to agree. But biases are biases. At any rate, after the first debate, the usually unflappable David Gergen on CNN said, "Now we have a horserace," as though he had been waiting for the exact right moment to use that phrase. Meanwhile, the Romney campaign sent out emails proclaiming that victory was in sight. After the first debate, Romney was propped up as the neck-in-neck contender, even though his first debate "surge" was clearly dissipating after about a week or so. As one pollster I read commented, if this was truly neck-in-neck, Romney would be coming out on top just as often as Obama, yet Obama almost always maintained a (however slight) upper-hand. Even more to the point, Romney was never really up in Ohio, without which there was practically no way in which he could win the electoral map. & as Obama proved last night when he won Colorado, he had enough wiggle room to win the electoral map WITHOUT Ohio, Florida, OR Virginia. Which itself is rather staggering. The short version is, nobody stays glued to a campaign when it looks like a definite landslide. & first & foremost, our media is driven by ratings & print sales.

4. Polls can be manipulated, but ethnic demographics cannot. One of my favorite jokes of this election was the SNL Weekend Update in which Seth Meyers was reporting Romney's stubborn supposed lead in the Gallup poll. "That's right," Meyers said, "Out of all of the people who still have landlines & answer the phone when it's an unrecognized number, Romney is winning." It was a telling observation. So much was written about polls & how they are manipulated (or fabricated) by one side or the other, but often the "mainstream" polls were getting it wrong by under-sampling the African-American & Latino vote. Obama won the former at his taken-for-granted-but-still-rather-amazing ~90% or so, but just as important was the fact he won the Latino vote at 70%. The 2012 election marks the first time that Latinos broke into the demographic double-digits, comprising a full 10% of the electorate. (& everyone knows it's only gonna go up from here.) By championing programs like the Dream Act — & not having to pander to his base about immigration law that is about as up-to-date as a spaghetti western — Obama held the distinct advantage over Romney. That sound you hear is all Republicans scratching their heads trying to figure out how to better embrace the Latino voter while still not betraying their party base, or as I like to call it, 1952.

5. History is on Barack Obama's side. It's conventional wisdom among American History junkies that all of the great presidents were reelected for a second term: Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Wilson, FDR, & Reagan. Heck, even "near-greats" like McKinley, Truman, Eisenhower, & Clinton were as well. Excluding 3 of the biggest failed presidents — Grant, Nixon, & George W. Bush — there is a pretty direct correlation between greatness & getting reelected. The only real outliers are James K. Polk, who could've been reelected but held to his campaign promise of not seeking a second term (find me a candidate today who's willing to do THAT!), & JFK, who almost certainly would've won a second term (especially if he had run against Goldwater), but did not live to do so.

Thus, if Obama was & is going to be as great as some people want him to be (myself biasedly included), he was going to need a second term. Part of this is just conventional wisdom — in the world of the political arena, eight years is a lifetime longer than four — & it takes a lot of time to get stuff done. & with the type of vision Obama has always maintained, he was going to need all the time he could get. (He shrewdly gave himself an "incomplete" when asked how he thought his presidency would be ranked so far.)

Well now, I am pleased to announce, he has gotten it. & no small feat at that: He lost only 2 states from his landmark 2008 victory (the traditionally-Republican Indiana & North Carolina — although the latter of which he just barely lost) & held on to the 3 major battleground states of Ohio, Florida, & Virginia (not to mention keeping lesser-but-still-significant battleground states like Romney's native Michigan & Paul Ryan's native Wisconsin...oh yeah, Nevada & Colorado too). In the popular vote, Obama is the first president since Reagan to receive over 50% of the total vote tally for each of his two terms. & he is the first Democrat to do so since FDR.

So despite all the nitpicking, etc., about the "closeness" of this election, Barack Obama won, & did so decisively. The catch is that the first term is always the glory term & the second is the hard one — thus, Lincoln's assassination, Wilson's 14 Points, Nixon's Watergate scandal, Reagan's Iran contra scandal, & Clinton's impeachment hearings all happened in the latter half of each respective president's administration. However, Obama has the experience & wisdom to weather through his second term better, beginning, hopefully, with a Congress that is not solely out to defeat him (& America) by making him a one-term president & willing to use some compromise on their part to get there.

For Barack Obama is now a two-term president, & God knows he's earned it.