THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN HONORS MONEY

Ah, Dr. Michael Bloomberg (D. Litt, Honoris Cause, University of Michigan 2016) doesn't like Bernie Sanders. He's cosy with Hilary, though--and if Trump were more of a gentleman, Dr. Bloomberg would like him. Hilary and Trump are both rich--and appreciate being so.  And Dr. Bloomberg appreciates every day--and appreciates appreciating. 

What happened to education?  It certainly isn't now what it used to be.  But I grew up with Father Ted Hesburgh as president at the University of Notre Dame, and then worked and taught in Robben Fleming's University of Michigan.  Maybe I learned what a university was--and should be--from them. 

The University of Michigan (I was a professor there for 26 years) was once a great liberal university. It had Robben Fleming as its president from 1968 to 1980, and he was a great leader, a great educator, a great and good man. But then it had Harold Shapiro, who was a crass, greedy, offensive man and a terrible president. (He supported George the First for president--and in introducing him to a large student audience conveniently forgot to mention his CIA career or his role in Nicaragua.)

And the University of Michigan now has one of the highest paid presidents in the university world. She sets a wonderful example--of GREED--for 50,000 students. Of course she would have Dr. Bloomberg as commencement speaker!

If Mr. Fleming had still been President, Bernie Sanders would have been Michigan's commencement speaker!

Bert Hornback

AMERICAN KNOW-HOW?

No.  It’s “nohow”—everywhere, and everyhow.  The question is whether the problems are caused by incompetence or  dishonesty.    If it’s incompetence, that could be traced to the long and highly documented  failure of the educational  system in United States, from kindergarten through high school  through college and university.  If it’s dishonesty, well—dishonesty is  the American Way of Life.

What don’t we cheat at?  How many religious tax-havens are there?   Could the rich be rich                   if they didn’t have lots of lawyers?

And politics?  In 1960 it was the Democratic vote-buying in  Chicago that beat Richard Nixon.   Was anybody satisfied with the Warren Commission’s report on the Kennedy assassination?  Was the 1968 Democratic convention rigged?   How did George W. Bush “win” Florida? 

  

Do you know anybody who cheats  on his or her income tax returns?  Do you know anybody who doesn’t?

Do college basketball coaches know who pays their players?  Of course they do.  They –or  their assistants in charge of that part of  every college’s athletics  “program”—know it:  organize and operate it.

Why can the rich get cocaine so easily?

  

How can the state of Arizona make such a botch of a primary election?  Would anybody be dumb enough to suspect  that  this was just  a “human error” or a “mechanical malfunction”?

I will believe in American political honesty—in the ability of  America to hold an honest election—when Robert  Kennedy is NOT murdered and Hubert Humphrey is NOT the Democratic party’s presidential candidate, and when Al Gore is sworn in as President of the United States instead of George W. Bush.  And when Hilary Clinton comes clean about how much she got from the big banks—and what she told them.

                                                                                         Bert Hornback

                                               

GOD BLESS AMERICA, LAND THAT I LOVE

            Millions and millions for electing somebody—to do nothing for poor people in America.  How many hundreds of millions have the rich spent trying to elect Hilary Clinton?  A billion?  And the not-so-rich have spent hundreds of millions more trying to elect Bernie Sanders.  The difference between the Clinton donors and the Sanders donors is that the Clinton donors expect to get all their money back—and more!  The Sanders donors want a decent society.

            Why can’t we have four week campaigns?  Other countries do, and successfully elect governments.

            If we replaced political campaigns with public work, we could begin to rebuild the United States as a decent place to live.   Maybe politics would begin to attract more decently social people who want to rebuild American society.

            Let’s pay members of congress the same thing ordinary workers earn.  And give them the same health insurance and the same retirement benefits ordinary workers have.  (Members of congress have complete health insurance and full pensions for life.  And they have long, long vacations.  And most of them get their “pocket money” from lobbyists.)

            Maybe to protect members of government, lobbyists should be required to register with the police, and have all their gifts and favors registered as criminal bribes.

            Maybe those who want military spending should be required to join the army, or the navy.  (Maybe, too, the navy shouldn’t have an air force of its own—and an army of its own, with an air force of its own!)  Let the militarists join the military.  

And all of those young people who enlist in the military because they have nothing else to do—nowhere to work—could be employed by the government to build schools and houses in our cities, or work on real farms—in agriculture, not agribusiness—to replace the huge industrial farm machines that destroy our land and pollute our rivers and streams and the air we breathe.  

And we could employ a million or more young people to go across America, collecting guns from two hundred million other Americans.

And. . . and. . . once we get started. . . .

Can we have such an America?  Of course we can.  And then the only big problem we will have is the really, really big one of how to get rid of all of our thousands of nuclear weapons.  The United States has been making and storing them now for more than seventy years.  And everybody knows that the older they get, the more dangerous they are.  So far, we don’t know how old they have to be to activate themselves—but we do know that seventy years is a long time.

How can 300,000,000 get anything so wrong as we have?  We began destroying this continent—and its people—as soon as we got here and those native Americans had taught us how to survive.  And perversely—stupidly—we sang “God Bless America” while we worked against God to destroy both this continent and this world.

The United States of America—disunited as it, with its citizens killing each other by the hundreds every day of the year—is a terrible danger to the whole world.  From its nuclear arsenal to its local home-town murderousness to its air-pollution and earth-destruction to its wide-spread poverty and general maldistribution of wealth to its impossible “national debt,”  everything about the United States is dangerous.

Can we recover?  Yes.  We can.  But we need—all of us, every last one of us—to get started now.

The Chattanooga Choo-Choo

Do you remember the old song about the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?  It’s a song—words by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren—from the musical “Sun Valley Serenade,” and then  made famous by Glenn Miller and his orchestra during World War II.

                                Pardon me, boy

                                Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo

                                On track 49?

                             Boy, you can give me a shine.

                                I can’t afford

                                To pay to hear your pitter-patter.

                                I got my fare,

                                And not a penny to spare.

                                You leave the Pennsylvania Station at a quarter to four,

                                You read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore.

                                Dinner on the diner, nothing could be finer

                                Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina!

                                You hear the engineer a-whistlin’ eight to the bar

                                And then you know that Tennessee is not very far!

                                Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep her rollin’—

                                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home!

A fun song, a catchy tune—and very much a feel-good song in the 1940s—forwhite

listeners.

But if you are black, you’ll realise right from the start what the situation is, and where you are. 

“Pardon me, boy . . . Boy, you can give me a shine.”  It doesn’t matter how old you are, you are still called boy if you’re black.

And the singer—the white guy isn’t going to pay you, either for the shoeshine or the singing:

I can’t afford

To pay to hear your pitter-patter.

I got my fare,

And not a penny to spare.

 That’s a lie, of course:  first he gets a magazine, and then his “dinner on the diner”—which wouldn’t be cheap.   And the waiter will be a black man.  And that black man will serve you your “ham and eggs” the next morning at breakfast.    But he won’t pay that black man—that “boy”—to serve him and sing for him.

                                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home!

                I learned that song as a child, and grew up singing it.  I never thought of it as a white song—simply because I was white, and ignorant of how wrong my world was, and of how insensitive I was in that wrong world. 

                I used to say “yes, sir” and “yes ma’am” to adults—and didn’t know that I shouldn’t, until one Sunday night at dinner I answered Hattie May Collier, the black maid “Yes, ma’am” when she asked me if I wanted more milk.  My dear, sweet, pious Irish-American grandmother reached across and slapped me.   “Don’t you call a nigger ‘ma’am’ in my house!” she said.

                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home.

                                                                                                                Bert Hornback

                                                                                                               13 April 2016Do you remember the old song about the Chattanooga Choo-Choo?  It’s a song—words by Mack Gordon, music by Harry Warren—from the musical “Sun Valley Serenade,” and then  made famous by Glenn Miller and his orchestra during World War II.

                                Pardon me, boy

                                Is that the Chattanooga Choo Choo

                                On track 49?

                             Boy, you can give me a shine.

                                I can’t afford

                                To pay to hear your pitter-patter.

                                I got my fare,

                                And not a penny to spare.

                                You leave the Pennsylvania Station at a quarter to four,

                                You read a magazine and then you’re in Baltimore.

                                Dinner on the diner, nothing could be finer

                                Than to have your ham and eggs in Carolina!

                                You hear the engineer a-whistlin’ eight to the bar

                                And then you know that Tennessee is not very far!

                                Shovel all the coal in, gotta keep her rollin’—

                                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home!

A fun song, a catchy tune—and very much a feel-good song in the 1940s—forwhite

listeners.

But if you are black, you’ll realise right from the start what the situation is, and where you are. 

“Pardon me, boy . . . Boy, you can give me a shine.”  It doesn’t matter how old you are, you are still called boy if you’re black.

And the singer—the white guy isn’t going to pay you, either for the shoeshine or the singing:

I can’t afford

To pay to hear your pitter-patter.

I got my fare,

And not a penny to spare.

 That’s a lie, of course:  first he gets a magazine, and then his “dinner on the diner”—which wouldn’t be cheap.   And the waiter will be a black man.  And that black man will serve you your “ham and eggs” the next morning at breakfast.    But he won’t pay that black man—that “boy”—to serve him and sing for him.

                                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home!

                I learned that song as a child, and grew up singing it.  I never thought of it as a white song—simply because I was white, and ignorant of how wrong my world was, and of how insensitive I was in that wrong world. 

                I used to say “yes, sir” and “yes ma’am” to adults—and didn’t know that I shouldn’t, until one Sunday night at dinner I answered Hattie May Collier, the black maid “Yes, ma’am” when she asked me if I wanted more milk.  My dear, sweet, pious Irish-American grandmother reached across and slapped me.   “Don’t you call a nigger ‘ma’am’ in my house!” she said.

                Chattanooga Choo Choo, won’t you choo-choo me home.

                                                                                                                Bert Hornback

                                                                                                               13 April 2016