So, funny story. My last post from Friday night about that sign I painted and how I had a good night’s sleep after sticking it up in my front yard late at night……today its in someone else’s front yard or dorm room or down a ravine. It did occur to me that it being a relatively mild Friday night with lots of young folks zipping around on the streets it might get nicked.
I woke up at 4AM and peeked out a window and saw that it was gone. I didn’t mind that much. I thought about making a replacement but decided going back to sleep would be better for me. I did and it was better.
The making of the sign had served a useful purpose Friday night. It kept me awake so I could see a PBS program about the making of the hot new musical “Hamilton.”
I already knew a couple things about it. It was based on the Pulitzer Prize winning bio written by Ron Cherno. Its one of the books I’ve bought in past years circling the airport waiting for me to read it. It also has a heavily minority cast including the figure of Hamilton and his killer Vice President Aaron Burr.
If I hadn’t gotten engaged in laying out the sign and painting it I would have gone to bed. I was dog tired. I have a couple observations from watching the special on Hamilton. The heavy influence of minority actors gives me great hope. That black Americans could take the story of a white founding father and press it to their breast and make it their own tells me that we will survive this crappy election. In doing so we will defy Donald Trump and continue making America the great nation our white founding fathers hoped it would be with their soaring rhetoric that paved a way to a more humane future. We still have work to do.
I shared this personal commentary from a conservative blogger about the abuse being heaped on him by Donald Trump’s fans to a friend. Limbaugh treated Obama as a joke early on. He called him a “halfrican american” back in 2007. Limbaugh keeps pouring it on and now his fans are tweeting venom anonymously with pictures of the children of Trump’s critics photoshopped into Auschwitz ovens. Tonight I watched another superlative PBS offering about Norman Lear the showman who brought us All in the Family. Lear told of being nine and listening to his crystal radio set broadcasting a speech by Father Coughlin explaining how Jews threatened America. Lear was a Jew.
After quitting TV Lear formed People for the American Way to challenge the new New Father Coughlin’s of the Moral Majority. Jerry Falwell’s response was to write to his supporters that Lear was bringing “filth and sexual perversion” into American homes. Good Christians saw to it that Lear got the same treatment that is now being heaped on Mr.French.
Claudia, who’s sign was stolen, and I talked about the Trump army. Her take is a lot like mine. These are people who are hurting. They deserve more sympathy than antipathy. I’ll confess that I can’t muster any for the trolls who photoshop children’s faces into images of the holocaust but I understand that every cause has its fringe – mine included whatever it may be.
