There was water dripping down around the perimeter of it and I can imagine that it would make a really nice spot to do some reading. We hustled inside a bit on the early side. This allowed me the opportunity to buy Palast's latest tome, Armed Madhouse and wander around the shelves for a while.
Whenever I go to a bookstore here in Madison, I invariably peruse the Local Interest shelves at some point. And so I did the same at Barbara's. Chicago has about as many neighborhoods as Madison does people so there were plenty of books that profiled individual areas. I found one book that had some really neat photos of the same stretch of Michigan Avenue that The Dulcinea and I had walked down the evening before. Looking through the various books and seeing all the pictures, I thought about how amazing it must be for my 90-year old grandmother to have seen all the changes in the city since she moved there. The year was 1933 and she was a young woman of 18. She'd traveled the 100 or so miles from Spring Valley to Chicago to see the World's Fair. I remember her telling me about how amazed she was at the massive Sky Ride and that she loved the city so much, she stayed. Seventy-three years of change has she been witness to. She witnessed the building of the massive skyscrapers downtown; the migration of Southern blacks to the city after World War II; radio cede to television; the original Mayor Daley; the city's first subway; the building of the interstate system and the expressways of the city; and the Cubs lose three World Series. Just driving around the city 19 years after having moved away, I notice lots of changes but they don't compare to those she's witnessed. Three o'clock neared and we headed into a back room where Palast would speak.
Sorry about the crappy photo but it was the best of the lot. Palast seemed to be exactly as he was on television. The tube didn't put weight on him or make him look taller. I really like his hat – it reminds me of how my grandfather and great-uncles used to dress. There was just something gentlemanly and dignified about them walking in the door and removing their hats before sitting down to play pinochle and drink beer. Whatever happened to hats? I mean real hats like men wore in the 1940s, not baseball caps. On the other side, the only things I like about George Will & Tucker Carlson are the bow ties. I really dig 'em. Lord help us if those really thin ties from the 80s come back into fashion.
It is quite appropriate that I'm listening to a Steve Earle concert from 2004 right now because Palast had no kind words for the Bush administration or the neo-cons. He spoke for over an hour, if memory serves, and his criticisms came hard and fast. While there was plenty of the usual stuff, I was really taken aback by his account of the Republicans tried to scrub voter lists of African-American soldiers.
Here’s how the scheme worked: The RNC mailed these voters letters in envelopes marked, “Do not forward”, to be returned to the sender. These letters were mailed to servicemen and women, some stationed overseas, to their US home addresses. The letters then returned to the Bush-Cheney campaign as “undeliverable.”
The lists of soldiers of “undeliverable” letters were transmitted from state headquarters, in this case Florida, to the RNC in Washington. The party could then challenge the voters’ registration and thereby prevent their absentee ballots being counted.
One target list was comprised exclusively of voters registered at the Jacksonville, Florida, Naval Air Station. Jacksonville is third largest naval installation in the US, best known as home of the Blue Angels fighting squadron.
I believe that this was the instance in which he obtained the voter rolls from the Repugs by setting up a fake website - georgebush.org instead of georgebush.com. Funny how these voter lists made their way to him. Palast also mentioned that he had finally moved back to America as he didn’t want his kids to have funny accents. You see, Palast is a reporter for the BBC and The Guardian newspapers in the UK as he can't get his stories reported in the mainstream media here in the States. I presume that he and the Beeb have come to some sort of agreement which allowed him to repatriate himself.
In addition to attempts at voter fraud, he discussed Venezuela and America's thirst for oil and the cover story which got us into Iraq. I won't say much more about his talk as I can't do the content justice. I will say, however, that Palast was never hopeless. His duty, as he saw it, was to arm the citizenry with information or "the truth", if you like. And speaking of the citizenry, the room filled up and then some. The walls were lined with folks standing to hear him. Most people there were middle-aged and one guy had a big Dr. Seuss hat on with a sign affixed to it saying "Impeach Bush". The significance of the average age there really didn't hit me until a week later when The Dulcinea mentioned visiting her grandfather who was reading Palast's book. Her grandfather is Clarence Kailin, a Madison notable. He was a member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade which was a group of American who fought against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War and he's fought for social justice for most of his life. I met him at the Socialist Potluck back in April. Now in his 90s, Mr. Kailin's days of leading the charge are long gone but he still keeps up with current events and fights for social justice. My observation here is that the folks at the Socialist Potluck and at the Palast talk were generally middle-aged and older. Very few young folks. Do they all do all their organizing on the Net and then show up at protests?
Palast was in a hurry when he was signing books at the end. He'd been at a rally earlier and had to get to O'Hare. I asked him to come to Wisconsin again. In his haste, he mentioned that he was at Fighting Bob Fest a couple years ago and that he'd try to go there again.
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