Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City 

David Garrett Interviews David Nicholson

It’s been a long time since I’ve written anything here, so if today's post seems over-long, consider it making up for lost time. David Nicholson is the author of a new book, Flying Home: Seven Stories of the Secret City (Paycock Press | $12.95 paperback). Though it won't be published until June 2, it’s available for pre-order on Amazon.com. There’s also a Facebook page with updates and news about upcoming readings at Washington area book stores, and a web page as well.

The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Q: Tell me a little bit about Flying Home.
A: Most of the stories take place in an imagined version of the neighborhood I grew up in. You know the opening credits of the Netflix show House of Cards? After the shots of the Capitol and downtown, when the camera shows an underpass and a street of brick row houses? It's about six seconds in. That's where my stories are set. In fact, one of the shots shows the intersection of North Capitol and R streets—two or three blocks from where I used to live. The characters are mostly men and women like the ones I grew up knowing—maids, taxi drivers, janitors and handyman, teachers, mailmen, and barbers.

Q: So, despite the subtitle, this isn't SF or fantasy?
A: No. The subtitle comes from W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote an article for The Crisis in 1932 called "The Secret City: An Impression of Colored Washington." Lots has changed, of course, since Du Bois wrote, but I still think black Washington remains a secret city.

Q: What's the origin of the stories?
A: Do you mean when did I start writing them? Or thinking writing about Washington might be a good idea?

Q: Either. Or both.
A: Well, I'd like to think I started to want to write about the world I grew up in when my mother—she was a librarian at the Library of Congress—brought home a copy of James Alan McPherson's Hue and Cry. I was a senior in high school, and that was a long time ago, so maybe I didn’t really think that. But I knew that I wanted to be a writer, and McPherson spoke to me in ways other writers, like James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, and Richard Wright, all of whom we were reading in English, did not.

Q: So how did you go from wanting to be a writer to becoming one?
A: I’m not sure I have. (Laughs.) But if I can be called a writer, it's taken a long time. I flunked out of college and did a lot of the things writers are supposed to do—dug ditches, washed dishes, was (briefly) a carpenter's helper, and worked in book and record stores. Finally, I got a chance to become a reporter. I worked for four years for the Associated Press and an Ohio newspaper before I decided to apply to the University of Iowa Writers Workshop.

Q: Which is where you studied with McPherson?
A: That's right. I’d applied to several writing programs while I was working for the Daily News in Dayton. When I got into Iowa, I took a Greyhound to Iowa City. (I took a lot of Greyhounds in those days, for reasons I can’t really remember.) Anyway, when I went to the Workshop office and introduced myself, they told me they’d lured McPherson from the University of Virginia and he was coming to Iowa City that fall. That decided me.

Q: And that's how you became a writer?
A: Well, sort of. McPherson was going through hard times, times he himself has discussed elsewhere, so there's no need for me to. But his troubles made it impossible for me to get what I wanted from him. Over the years, I’ve realized I got something else—maybe not what I wanted then, but something that’s proved more durable because I had to earn it. Part of that was coming to see that Ted Solotaroff’s title—A Few Good Voices in My Head—should be every writer’s mantra. The really lucky, and talented, writers at Iowa knew which voices to listen to. I wasn’t one of them, so it took me years to learn how to start listening to my own.

But Iowa did bless me with the seed that became these stories. One night, sometime in my second year, I met some friends in a bar where many of us used to hang out. There was a woman in the booth with us who wasn't in the program—she was studying to be a physician assistant. She'd grown up in D.C., or at least lived here a while. In the middle of our conversation, she asked if I’d ever written about Washington.

I was stunned, and I had to confess I hadn’t. I'm not sure I'd even thought about it. But I went home that evening and started to write one of the stories in this collection—"Seasons." I felt asleep at 2 or 3 in the morning. I slept for an hour or so, and then I was awoken by a voice. "It's all right," it said. "You can go home now." It should have been scary, but it wasn't because I knew it was true. 

Q: So you wrote the first of these stories that long ago?
A: I did. (Laughs) I’m a slow learner. I mean, I didn’t get married and have a child till I was almost 50. (Laughs again.) Some of the other stories have been sitting around for a while—I finally figured out a year or so ago how to finish them. One of the stories, the title story in fact, is a piece of a novel that I decided to take out. 

But I was also working full-time as a writer and editor for The Washington Post, most of the time in the paper’s Book World. The great thing about that was that every day was like a graduate seminar with some of the brightest book-lovers you could ever want to meet. The bad thing was that, as we’d sometimes joke, it was like playing piano in a brothel. We critics made a lot of noise, but the real action was going on upstairs. 

But I was writing fiction the whole time. And, for the first year or two at The Post, also editing the magazine I founded, Black Film Review. I wish I still had that kind of energy.

Q: What's the novel about?
A: For years, because I really didn’t want to talk about it, I’d say it was about black men, fatherhood, and violence. And it is. The main character, Shepherd, is a Smithsonian curator. In the story “Flying Home,” he goes back to his old neighborhood with his daughter, Jessica. In the novel, he is haunted—literally!—by the ghost of a slave who won his freedom fighting in the American Revolution. The novel’s called The House of Eli.

Q: Where do you get your ideas?
A: A little mail-order house in Saskatchewan. You get a good rate if you buy in bulk, but the import duty’s a killer.

Q: No, seriously.
A: I don’t much like talking about where my fiction comes from. I’m like those primitive peoples who won’t let themselves be photographed because they believe it will steal their souls. Writing’s hard enough—why tempt fate?

But “Among the Righteous,” the second in the collection, is based on a family story I grew up hearing. My grandfather bought his second house in 1928—he emigrated to Washington from South Carolina in 1917, so my family’s been here almost 100 years. Of course, that was right before the beginning of the Great Depression. He was a messenger in a government office and one day he went to work and his supervisor told him he’d been ordered to cut staff and so my grandfather was being let go.

When my grandfather told my grandmother, she said, “He can’t fire you. You’ve got a wife and seven children and you just bought a house. Go back and tell him he can’t fire you.” So he did and, according to family lore, his supervisor sighed and said, “All right. We’ll find something for you to do.” And he did. My grandfather kept his house. My sister lives there now, so it’s been in the family three generations.

I don’t remember my grandmother much, but she was a formidable woman from all accounts. The first time I heard that story, I thought my grandfather must have been, well, hen-pecked. The more I thought about it, though, the more I saw that he showed tremendous courage in doing what was right for his family.

Q: What are you working on now?
A: You mean what am I not working on now? (Laughs) Paycock is a small press, so I’m doing the bulk of the marketing and publicity. Before I set it aside, I was working on a biography of the Rev. William David Chappelle. He was an African Methodist Episcopal bishop born in 1857. As his name suggests, he was comedian Dave Chappelle’s great-grandfather.

Chappelle and my great-grandfather, Casper George Garrett, were contemporaries and allies in post-Reconstruction and early 20th-century South Carolina. Some time around 1916, the two men had a falling out. I’d gotten to that point in a family history/memoir when I decided I needed to find out what had happened to drive them apart. So I set aside the family history and began to look into Chappelle’s life. It just grew, and before I knew it, I had a 300-page manuscript! 

Q: Is there anything else you’d like to add?
A: Yes, I’m really grateful to Richard Peabody, Paycock's publisher. He's published three of my stories, and I’m thankful he believed in my work even when it was hard for me to think it worthwhile. I’m also grateful to Ron Roberson, who took the photograph that appears on the cover. It seemed like destiny when I found it on the Internet—the picture was taken two blocks from where I grew up!

Blues at the White House

With Sandy threatening outside, I used the last two days to catch up on some of the TV shows I've recorded over the past few months but never made time to watch. After polishing off the remaining episodes of Copper, I watched three of Hit and Miss, enough to tell I wasn't going to waste four hours of my life on the the four left on my DVR. Last night, I watched the three episodes of The Walking Dead that have aired so far this season.

And then, this afternoon, I went from the ridiculous to the sublime and finished the PBS broadcast "Red White and Blues," broadcast in February as part of the series In Performance at the White House.

 Actually, it wasn't all sublime.

Craggy-faced Mick Jagger, still prancing around the stage in leather jacket and red shoes though he's nearly 70, sent me to the fast forward button. But there was plenty to make up for Jagger's aging pixie act: Buddy Guy, Gary Clark, Jr., Keb Mo, Shemekia Copeland, and the master, B.B. King--almost 90, and still able to wring worlds of emotion from a single note.

What stuck with me, though, long after I turned off the TV, were the two full-length portraits of George and Martha Washington on either side of the stage.

For a moment, I wished it were possible to ask the Father of our Country what he thought of the motley, mulatto crew of musicians and their wailing electric guitars. And what would he have made of Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, son of an African father and paradoxically descended from American slaves on his (white) mother's side?

It was one of those times where I wished Ralph Ellison, gone these long 18 years, was still here to divine the meaning of that particularly American moment.

 

Watch Red White and Blues on PBS. See more from In Performance at The White House.

But I Was So Much Older Then. . .

The other day as I walked past my son's room, he looked up from the camp stool seat he was weaving (Boy Scout project) and said, "Hey, what do you know about Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band?" So I asked him whether he'd found some Beefheart among my music he's loaded onto his iPod Touch; I'd had had some albums years ago, but I was pretty sure I'd never bought any CDs.

Turns out though he had headphones on, he wasn't listening to Safe as Milk. Instead, he was listening to an audio book, I am a Genius of Unspeakable Evil and I Want to be Your Class President. The author, Josh Lieb, must be fan of Don Van Vliet (the captain's real name), for the four or five paragraphs about him include a tribute to Trout Mask Replica.

Anyway, the mention in Lieb's book inspired my son to look for music by Captain Beefheart on Mog. He found some songs, but he was disappointed he couldn't find Trout Mask Replica.

It's been interesting watching--and occasionally singing along in the car--as my son discovers the music I listened to when I was in my teens. Last Halloween, he dressed up as Jimi Hendrix, and he's been taking lessons at School of Rock. So far, he's played in three concerts. Here's a song from the most recent one in June:

One of the neatest things about being a parent is watching your child discover new things. It's incredible to watch him having fun on stage. And just think of all the music (new and old) he has yet to hear for the first time!

Something to Celebrate

Robert Gossett

 I flew out to Denver a little while ago to hear my story, "A Few Good Men," read by actor Robert Gossett, as part of a program presented by Stories on Stage. Stories on Stage is just what it sounds like--nine programs each year where actors read stories. The season's over, and the link might not be up much longer, but here it is anyway: http://storiesonstage.org/stories.aspx.

"A Few Good Men" was selected for Best African American Fiction 2010, but its road to print was anything but straight and easy. I wrote the story years ago, so long ago, in fact, that I've forgotten just when. My agent liked it enough to send it to Playboy. The fiction editor there liked it too; at least she said so in her rejection letter. She also said she'd come close to accepting it, but Playboy preferred its women to be more romantic.

My agent then sent it to Emerge, a magazine published in the '90s that's now defunct. There, the editor said he liked the story, and would consider publishing it if I'd rewrite it to include a black woman's viewpoint.

I didn't agree that the story needed rewriting, but I understood his reluctance.

"A Few Good Men" is about men in a barbershop talking about women. I wrote it because I didn't recognize the black men in stories and novels by black women writers like Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and Ntozake Shange.

And I certainly didn't find in their work men like my grandfather, who for more than 30 years walked downtown to his job as an electrician and then home again in the evening. After dinner, he walked to a second job cleaning two doctors' offices. On the weekends, he did handyman jobs for neighbors.

He had to, to feed and clothe his eight children and pay the mortgage on the house he bought in 1928. 

Eventually, "A Few Good Men" found a home in Rick Peabody's anthology Stress City: A Big Book of Fiction by 51 D.C. Guys. And from there, Gerald Early and Nikki Giovanni chose it for Best African American Fiction 2010. A copy of which, serendipitously, made it to the desk of Stories on Stage's artistic director.


It was an amazing, heady experience hearing a professional actor read my work. Robert Gossett (Lou Gossett's cousin) made each of my characters, even the minor ones, vivid and distinct. At one point, I found myself on the edge of my seat holding my breath, almost as if I hadn't written it and didn't know what was coming.

It got even better, though: After Gossett finished, I was introduced.

I'd taken books by the poets Melvin Tolson and Robert Hayden to read while I was in Denver. Tolson I found, well, too obscure, but I liked much of Hayden's work.

One poem, "Those Winter Sundays," stuck with me. It's about a father getting up early on Sunday to light a fire to warm the house, and the son's indifference to his father's sacrifice. It ends:

"What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?"

I could have stolen those lines for "A Few Good Men."

Energized by the trip to Denver, I've gone back to working on my book about my family. I'd count it a success if I could come up with one or two lines as good as Hayden's.

"Downton Abbey" in Black and White

Somewhere in Hollywood, there might be someone looking at the recent success of PBS's "Downton Abbey"--the last episode of the final season gained more than 5 million viewers--and wondering about the possibility of an American remake.

And why not an American version of the show about a family of aristocrats and their servants in the English countryside before and after World War I? Over the past few years, appropriating foreign successes ("American Idol," "The Office," "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo") has become almost a Hollywood tradition.

Except. . .

It was done nearly 75 years ago, and "Downton Abbey" is really just "Gone With the Wind" in white face. Both are lavish costume dramas whose idealized, romantic setting is changed forever by war. And, of course, (white) plantation culture of the antebellum South was a conscious attempt to imitate gracious English living.

I watched and enjoyed "Downton Abbey," bingeing on the entire two seasons (14 episodes) on successive days, courtesy of Netflix streaming and PBS's iPad app. I confess to some small embarrassment at writing that. But then, I grew up in the West Indies when it was the British West Indies. And, once a colonial, always a colonial.

Still, though I enjoyed the show--and intend to watch the third season next year--"Downton Abbey" (like "Gone with the Wind") didn't seem quite honest in its serene depictions of the inherently unequal relationships between upper and lower classes. It seems unlikely to me that aristocrats and their servants were as intimate as "Downton Abbey" would have them; just as it seems unlikely to me that Mammy, Priss, and the other black characters in "Gone With the Wind" were really all that happy being slaves.

I started writing this as a kind of thought experiment, imagining an American "Downton Abbey" set in the South before the Civil War. Morgan Freeman would be the butler and Denzel Washington the valet, which was as far as I got with the casting. Spike Lee probably wouldn't want to direct, but Tyler Perry might, as long as he could get his name above the title. Oh, and he'd want to write it and be in it too.

In some ways, though, he'd be be the least of the problems. How to, for example, translate Downton Abbey's relationship between the Irish chauffer and the lord of the manor's youngest daughter?

A good scriptwriter might find a way around the problem, forthrightly addressing still-painful aspects of our shared history. And history is full of surprises.

Researching my own family history, I discovered a great-great-great-great-great-grandfather who bought his freedom and his family's. Eventually, he emigrated to Liberia with his wife. Before he went, though, he wanted his family to be able to read and write, so he hired a white woman from the North. And to get around the laws that prohibited whites from teaching blacks to read and write, he somehow persuaded her to pretend to be a fair-skinned black from New Orleans.

Flight Time

If I'd paid attention to my former Washington Post colleague Courtland Milloy, I would have said no when my 11-year-old said he wanted to see Red Tails, the new movie about the Tuskegee Airmen. Courtland saw the movie. He hated it. He hated it so much, in fact, he wrote a column about how bad the picture was.

Fortunately, I didn't pay attention to Courtland's column, and my son and I went to see the movie a couple of weeks ago. To be sure, Red Tails isn't as good as, say, Glory, the 1989 film about black soldiers in the Civil War. But then Glory had stars like Morgan Freeman and Denzel Washington, while Red Tails has Cuba Gooding, Jr. and Terrence Howard, two actors on the downhill slope of their careers.

George Lucas--who financed Red Tails himself when he couldn't find Hollywood backers--has said he wanted to make a throwback to pictures like Flying Leathernecks, a 1951 movie starring (who else?) John Wayne. And he succeeded. Red Tails is a gorgeous movie with breath-taking computer generated dog-fights, but a perfunctory plot and little character development.

Considered as the picture Lucas wanted to make, Red Tails is pretty darn good. And, the thing is, there aren't that many movies about the history of blacks in the U.S. armed forces. A quick search found this write-up, which lists 19 pictures, but doesn't include 1984's A Soldier's Story, which also stars Washington, billed below David Alan Grier!, or The Negro Soldier, a Frank Capra propaganda film made to encourage blacks to enlist during World War II.

And, flaws aside, Red Tails was a great opportunity to talk afterwards with my son--who, by the way, has met two Tuskegee Airmen, and has a book autographed by one--about the rich history of blacks in the military from Crispus Attucks to the present.

And for My 70th Birthday. . .

When he turned 50, one of my oldest friends--we were roommates freshman year in college--jumped out of an airplane. For my 60th--I can't say I planned it, but it's as good a reason as any for doing it--I biked the C&O Canal towpath, nearly 185 miles from Cumberland, Md., to Washington, D.C.*

Writing this a few days afterwards, I feel better than I'd imagined I would when I was planning the trip this summer. I'd gotten a great new bike last year, a Cannondale Quick CX Ultra, but back problems and bronchitis kept me from doing much riding that summer. And though I went into the winter with the best intentions, once it got cold the bike stayed in my office. In April, when I finally got back on it, I went two-and-a-half miles before I had to turn back, completely winded.

Once I'd talked my friend Bob into doing the C&O Canal with me, I started to train. Early in the summer, I rode 35 miles one morning, the longest I'd ever gone. A few weeks later, I developed knee problems, which meant cutting back how much I rode. But at least the two orthopedists I consulted didn't tell me to give up riding completely.

I wasn't entirely convinced I'd be able to finish the trip, but my wife drove Bob and me to Cumberland on a recent Thursday morning anyway. After a few unseen delays--the purchase of a commemorative jersey at a bike shop; adjustment of the new grips on Bob's bike--we waved goodbye and took off. We rode about 45 miles to Little Orleans that first day and another 45 to Williamsport the second. From there, it was about 40 miles to Harpers Ferry.

The end of that third day was the worst of the trip. Not because I was tired or my legs hurt or I was thinking about the 60 miles we had to ride the next day. I was, they did, and I was. But what was truly awful was that the only way to get across the Potomac River to the hot shower and soft bed I so desperately craved was to climb a narrow set of twisting stairs with my fully loaded bike.

But I made it up the stairs (and back down again the next morning) and Bob and I made it to Washington. I feel pretty proud of myself for doing something I never thought I'd be able to. That is, until I think about the avid cyclist the innkeeper at Little Orleans told us about. He rode from Washington to Cumberland and back to Little Orleans--about 225 miles--all in one day.

It's something to aspire to.

*Now, the full disclosure implied by the asterisk above. I didn't really ride the entire 184.5 miles of the C&O Canal towpath from Cumberland to Washington. About a half-mile from the end, I got a flat near 31st Street in Georgetown. Since my wife was only 10 minutes away, I decided not to be a purist. But it wouldn't have mattered anyway: A few tenths of a mile ahead, the towpath was blocked by a chain-link fence.

Family History

Since I finished my novel more than a year ago, I've been working on a family history/memoir. (I'm pretty sure it's not going to be a memoir/family history.) For most of the time, I've been transcribing family letters. Members of my family have lived in the same house since 1929, and as people came and went over the years, they left behind things they probably intended to come back for but never did.

It's meant for a full attic.

In August, I went down to the South Carolina town one set of grandparents came from. I'd always intended to finish the research before I begin to write--making notes along the way, of course, so that I wouldn't forget important ideas. When I came back from the South, though, I was so excited by what I'd found in libraries and archives I decided I had to write while it still burned in me.

As part of my research, I've been reading a book called "History of the American Negro and his Institutions, South Carolina Edition." A kind of "Who's Who," it was published in 1919 by a man named Arthur Bunyan Caldwell. I don't know much about the history of the book, but Caldwell published seven volumes covering five Southern states and the District of Columbia. (One state may have taken up two volumes.) Each book includes profiles of about 300 prominent black men. There are a few women--four in the South Carolina volume.

With something like 5,000 family letters to transcribe, it's not as if I don't have enough to do. But I decided to go through Caldwell's South Carolina book a few days ago, making a count of the people profiled, their occupations and whether they'd been born before the end of the Civil War.

Interestingly, only about 75 were born before the end of the Civil War. Most of those, of course, were born in slavery, though a few had been free. Most of the men were preachers, the majority Baptists, followed by African Methodist Episcopalians. But there were doctors, lawyers, dentists, school teachers, college professors and college presidents. There were businessmen, farmers, leaders of fraternal organizations, undertakers, and insurance salesmen. One woman was a doctor, another a nurse.

A year or so ago, when I told a friend (she's white) about a relative who'd been a lawyer and college professor and administrator in the South in the late 1800s and early 1900s, she asked, "Was his wife white?" I laughed and said, "Of course not." Still, though I'm heir to that history, I never imagined then the variety I'd find in Caldwell's book.

Of course, the men and women he profiled weren't typical of black South Carolinians in 1919. They'd worked hard, seized opportunities, been lucky. In the process of getting college educations, going to medical school, and buying land, they endured privations and humiliations most of us can't imagine. When Caldwell allows them to speak, they are too often accommodationist in the Booker T. Washington vein. They had to be, of course.

Nonetheless, their example and their achievements speak powerfully across the years. Sarah Palin? Rick Perry? Michelle Bachmann? John Boehner? We've survived worse; we'll survive them too.

Coffee Shop Encounter

When I walked into my local Starbucks the other day, I nodded at a black man sitting at a table by the window. After a moment, he nodded back. There was something, well, off, in his acknowledgment, so I looked at him and the man he was sitting with more closely. They were, I realized, Somali or Ethiopian. I felt a little chagrined.

No wonder he'd looked at me strangely: It was a black thing, and he hadn't understood.

I don't know where this custom of African-Americans acknowledging each other in public--even when they don't know one another--came from. As a boy growing up in a Washington, D.C., where men still wore hats and women still sometimes wore gloves when they went out, I thought it was simple good manners. Those same manners, and a sense of racial self-worth, also meant black men and women who'd known each other for years would address one another as "Mr." and "Mrs.," granting one another courtesy titles whites did not.

And perhaps it was just Southern good manners, as most blacks who live in the North came from the South. But I think that obligation of recognition (which, sad to say, doesn't seem to exist anymore) was also part of what James Weldon Johnson called "the freemasonry of the race." It's similar, I think, to the way Jews of a certain era called each other landsman. Or the phenomenon of two Americans--of any race--encountering one another overseas. Just hearing American English when you've been struggling with French evokes a sense of kinship. At least when it doesn't send you running the other way.

Of course, the man in the Starbucks knew nothing of that. And as I said, I felt chagrined, though not as embarrassed as the time, coming out of the movie "Kung Fu Panda 2" (I've got a 10-year-old; what else can I say?), I asked an Asian woman what the Chinese characters that had appeared in one scene meant.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I'm Korean. I don't speak Chinese."

Well, I'm Back. . ..

I was a little surprised when, a few weeks ago, I saw I'd not posted here since April. I don't really know why. It wasn't a conscious decision. Part of it was that I was having some trouble with carpal tunnel syndrome. After a while, I invested in speech recognition software. It's cumbersome and inefficient, but I hope the keystrokes I save will eventually help my wrists heal.

But the other reason I stopped blogging was that I felt as if I'd run out of things to say. There are only five or six subjects I care enough to write about and being, like Winnie-the-Pooh a bear of very little brain, I felt as if I'd said everything I have to say.

What I've realized, though, is that I've been writing for such a long time it's hard to give it up. I may repeat myself, but I think I'll keep writing anyway.

Will Republicans Finally Come to Their Senses?

I felt a little sick yesterday reading about President Obama's decision to release his birth certificate. Strange as it may seem, the move Obama was compelled to make reminded me of the Leonard Rhinelander v. Alice Rhinelander trial. Born Alice Jones, Alice Rhinelander was a woman of mixed race, a laundress and nursemaid who married Leonard Rhinelander, a New Yorker whose occupation Wikipedia quaintly lists as "socialite." Leonard's father was a real estate magnate worth millions.

Shortly after Alice and Leonard married in 1924, newspaper stories began to appear claiming he'd married a black woman.

Apparently under pressure from his parents, Leonard soon left Alice and sought to end the marriage, claiming she'd deceived him about her race. The all-white, all-male jury couldn't decide just what she was simply by looking at her in the courtroom. To help them, Alice was obliged to disrobe (albeit in the judge's chambers) so that the jurors could inspect her.

Of course, the president hasn't been subjected quite the same kind of abasement since the 2008 campaign. Still, the harassment was grounded in America's continuing obsession with race, and a desire by conservatives to humiliate Obama. For members of the lunatic fringe right wing, it was never about the birth certificate. The real goal of these despicable people was delegitimizing the Obama presidency.

As the New York Times notes today, "[T]he birther question . . . was simply a proxy for those who never accepted the president’s legitimacy, for a toxic mix of reasons involving ideology, deep political anger and, most insidious of all, race. . . . It is inconceivable that this campaign to portray Mr. Obama as the insidious 'other' would have been conducted against a white president."

But here's what's truly mindboggling: Even though the president's released his birth certificate, the crazies on the right aren't going way. Some people--among them the irrepressible Donald Trump--are calling for an investigation into its authenticity.

A recent poll found that 45 percent of Republicans believe Obama was born outside the United States. Which leads me to wonder whether nearly half of Republicans are crazy or just plain stupid. Or whether there's something about being a Republican that makes people delusional once they join the party.

And, as if I needed more proof that there's something fundamentally unAmerican about contemporary conservativism, this afternoon some Republicans pronounced the whole thing Obama's fault because he hadn't released his birth certificate earlier.

My country, my country.

'Nuff Said

The Knight Life
by Keith Knight

The Washing Machine

In late July, 13 months after the expiration of the warranty--and a month after the American Express extended warranty had expired--our Kenmore washer quit working. The error code on the LCD display translated as a water inlet problem, but nothing the manual suggested worked.

The repairman who came (in early August) diagnosed a broken pressure switch. With parts and labor, we were out nearly $300. Three cycles later, the machine stopped working again.

The same technician came Aug. 12. This time, he said two circuit boards were bad. He didn't have them, so he'd have to order them. With labor, we'd be out nearly $800.

Added to what we'd already spent on the first repair, the cost was starting to approach what we'd paid for the machine. And when you pay that much for a washer, you expect it to last a long, long time. Here's what happened after my wife wrote the president and CEO of Sears:

Sept. 10 -- Call from Sears Executive Offices. Woman offers to issue retroactive one-year extended warranty. She makes a Sept. 13 service appointment; assures us she'll call after repairman's visit.

Sept. 13 -- Repairman does not have parts required, knows nothing about extended warranty. Call woman from Executive Offices. No answer, leave voice mail. Call several times over next several days. No response.

Sept. 15 -- Call Executive Offices emergency response number. Woman who answers promises to e-mail original woman who called; promises response within 24 hours.

Sept. 16 -- Call Sears Home Services. Warranty is on file! Make appointment for Sept. 28.

Sept. 17 -- Call Sears Home Services: Will repairman have parts? Request parts be ordered.

Sept. 20 -- Call Sears Home Services. Have parts been ordered? Service order has note about parts. Will they guarantee repairman will have parts when he comes? Transferred to different department. Learn technician must order parts. Explain I have parts numbers. Ask what point to tech coming out again just to order parts? Put on hold. Woman comes back, says she's found a way to order the parts. Tearfully express my thanks.

Sept. 23 -- Parts arrive. One good thing about this--practicing my Spanish at laundromat.

Sept. 28 -- Repairman scheduled to come between noon and 4 p.m. Call Sears at 3:30 p.m. Advised repairman running late. Repairman calls at 4:16, advises he will call when on his way. Wife calls Sears at 7:30 p.m. Advised that repairman tried to call but received no answer. Check voice mail; no message.

Sept. 30 -- Still waiting to hear from Sears Executive Offices. Repairman arrives; replaces parts. Two hours after repairman leaves, attempt to run clean cycle as per his instructions. Washer reports F27 error code. Call Sears Home Services, advised repairman can come Friday or Monday. Call Executive Offices, leave message I'm renting pickup truck, loading washer, and leaving outside front door of Sears store in mall.

After this, I stopped taking detailed notes, but the woman from the Sears Executive Office who'd first called finally called back. At first, she said she'd replace the machine, then after she checked, she found out Sears' policy was to try one more time to repair it.

The service tech came on or about Oct. 1, and replaced the water pump. It worked for several cycles and quit again. Alas, however, we were not to get our new washer because the very first service call back in August didn't count on Sears' three-strikes policy.

The same tech came out Tuesday and made an emergency order for three new parts and a service appointment for Oct. 28. The parts came Friday and I called Sears Executive Offices and got the appointment date changed to Saturday.

I'm waiting for him as I write this. This time, they promise, we get a new machine if the repairs don't work.

Norman Rockwell's America

Over at his blog, Little by Little(hales), my long-time friend Bret Littlehales recently posted a paean to painter Norman Rockwell. Bret and I have known each other since high school and, in that time, he's compiled an enviable list of accomplishments. He's a formidable photographer and an accomplished blues harp player. (You can read about his recently released CD here.)

Bret's not too shabby a writer, either. I'd been to see the Rockwell exhibit at the Museum of American Art at about the same time he did, but reading his comments on Rockwell's technique, I realized how much I'd missed. Of course, I was with my 9-year-old, and before we went to see Rockwell's paintings he'd had to endure the exhibit of photographs by Allen Ginsberg at the National Gallery of Art.

I suppose I don't really have to tell you which exhibit my son liked best.

I agree with Bret that Rockwell's technique was extraordinary. Rockwell seems always to have done work for hire, however, and I've always wondered what he might have done had he invested that technique in some pure product of his heart. Interestingly, the work in the exhibit comes from the collections of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, two Hollywood craftsmen as concerned--as was Rockwell--with creating striking images as with keeping people coming back for more.

But that doesn't explain my growing sense of unease as I walked from painting to painting. I was halfway through the exhibit before I asked myself, "But where are the black people?" As it happened, I was in front of a magazine illustration from the '20s or '30s featuring two boys, one of them black. It was, I think, the only depiction of African-Americans in the show.

Of course, Rockwell began his career in 1913 (he was just 19!), a time when black Americans rarely appeared in popular art as anything other than caricatures. And it's true that he did include images of black men and women in his later work. One of his most famous, and most moving, paintings is of 6-year-old Ruby Bridges on her way to integrating a New Orleans elementary school. It's about as far from the coon stereotype hanging in the Museum of American Art as you can get.


Maybe it's just my growing sense of paranoia--justifable, I submit, given the latest assault by Newt Gingrich on President Obama or given nutcases like the one my friend Eileen Pollack interviewed for a piece about the militia movement. An IT professional, he's presumably smart enough to know better, yet he believes "President Obama is going to make an end run around the Second Amendment by requiring every bullet in America to be inscribed with a traceable serial number"--but I found it significant that the Rockwell exhibit was packed and that virtually all of the visitors were white.

I suspect many found Rockwell's paintings comforting. And how could they not, in the confusing, polyglot nation that is America in 2010? In contrast, Rockwell showed us an America as American as, well, apple pie. In his country of barefoot boys and pig-tailed girls, honest, thick-fingered workingmen don't fear speaking their minds at town meetings, and tough, road-weary truckers are decent enough to be moved by a grandmother and her grandson saying grace in a diner.

It's hard not to be moved, too. And, in the end, if it's true Norman Rockwell didn't really show us as we truly are, it's also true that he showed us as we, deep inside our secret hearts, want to be--a nation of values, a people of possibilities. A few good movies from the 1930s and '40s do something similar: The Best Years of Our Lives, say, and, less successfully, Since you Went Away. We could do worse than to remember and celebrate that, amidst the idiocy and the name-calling of this fractured, fractious political season.

Newspaper Stories

I was lucky enough to start work at a newspaper when messages were sent via a system of pneumatic tubes, there were still Linotype machines, and smoking was allowed. No one chewed tobacco--it wasn't that long ago!--so there no spittoons, but a few smokers eschewed the ashtrays to ground out butts on the floor.

When I told that to someone once, he said, "Now that's a real newsroom!"

I began as a copy-boy (actually, we were called copy-aides because so many were female, and all of us were over 18), working from 7 p.m. to 3 in the morning. Late at night, after the dayside editors and reporters had gone, and the composing room was sending plates for the final edition to the presses, some of the men who'd worked at the paper for years would tell stories.

The head nightside copy-aide, a man nicknamed Noodle (for reasons I never learned), had lots of stories. One of the best one was about a summer intern who couldn't seem to do anything right. After reading his copy one afternoon, his editor stalked over and threw the pages on his typewriter.

"I don't know why they even bothered to hire you," the editor bellowed. "You'll never make a good reporter. You can't write. You can't spell. Look at this story. It's got holes big enough to drive a truck through. You don't know the first goddamn thing about going out and getting a story."

The editor stalked off, and the intern turned quaking to the old reporter whose desk sat beside his.

"Did you hear?," he stammered. "Did you hear what he said to me?"

And, the old reporter said, "You? I thought he was talking to me."

I've forgotten the name of the old reporter, but perhaps it was the same one who, sick of driving to College Park to cover Maryland football, decided to go to the bar across the street and watch the game on television. He might have gotten away with it too, except for not being able to go to the locker room to get quotes from the coach and players.

And perhaps he was the same sports reporter who took his editor's hat, stuffed it into a plastic capsule, and sent it to the composing room in the pneumatic tube system with a note reading (in its entirety) "HTK," newspaperese for head[line] to come.

I must have heard dozens of those stories over the 15 or so years I worked at the paper as copy boy, editor, and writer. Like baseball, journalism is full of characters, or used to be before editors and writers had to worry about seven-figure mortgages in Cleveland Park or Chevy Chase and private school tuition. And, while a newsroom on deadline is filled with furious concentration, after the paper's been put to bed, newsmen (women too) relaxed by telling stories as they had a few at the bar downstairs.

At least, they used to.

Sadly, Noodle died of cancer a few years ago and, at the memorial for him at the paper, I learned that while he was full of good stories, he was also the subject of a few.

The funniest didn't take place at the paper, though. It happened when two guys with guns walked into the house he shared near Du Pont Circle, years before the area's gentrification.

They made everybody sit in the living room while they gathered wallets and valuables. Noodle, being Noodle, was unable to resist making wisecracks. Finally, one of the gunmen said, "If you don't shut up, I'm going to shoot your friend."

To which Noodle, even then a budding editor, replied, "What makes you think he's my friend?"

And The Rain Came Down

About 3 a.m. on what would have been our third day camping on Assateague Island, I woke up to the sound of frozen peas hitting the tent's rain fly. Seconds later, thunder and a flash of lightning told me the twenty-somethings in the campsite next door weren't pelting us with vegetables because I'd gone over to ask them to be quiet so my son and I could sleep.

After 10 minutes or so, it quit raining, and I went out to find the friend I'd gone with taking his daughter to the bathroom. There was another scary flash of lightning before they came back, so I went to their tent, woke up his son, and told him we were going to the car.

The five of us woke up three or four hours later to gray skies, soaked clothing, and a drenched campsite. I hadn't known it was going to rain, so I hadn't even thought about putting away the stove or covering the food and supplies with a tarp.

Since the forecast called for a 100 percent chance of rain, it seemed like a good idea to forget about that last night of camping

Still, it was great till the rains came. The children had fun playing on the beach. We all went canoeing. And, as you can see from the picture, once again Assateague proved to be the only place where I can get a kite into the air.

If we go again next year, I'm bringing a tarp to cover everything that doesn't go in the tent.

Heard on the Street. . .

My wife took the car to go to a picnic at a co-worker's house this morning, so my son and I caught the bus to the mall. He needed to buy a birthday present at the Lego store, and I thought I'd treat him to lunch and a movie.

Getting the bus turned out to be less hassle than I'd expected. WMATA, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority, has GPS-equipped buses, so we were able to log on, find the time the bus was expected at our stop, then leave the house a few minutes before that.

The driver was a man in his 30s with near waist-length dreadlocks. Most of the people said hello to him when they got on, and thanks when they got off. The mall was at the end of the line, and when we got off, I overheard him tell a woman her hair looked nice. She told him thank you.

Seems like you must know most of these folks, I said to him.

See 'em every Saturday, the driver replied. These are my people.

Later, waiting to get popcorn at the movies, I heard an older woman ask a younger woman (her daughter?) if she was planning to go out tonight and what time she'd be back.

I don't know if I wanna go out with him tonight, she replied. Not if we're just gonna break up. I'd feel too sad.

So why not just spend the night with him at his place, the older woman said, and then break up in the morning?

So Many [Fill in the Blank]; So Little Time

Even if I only owned 600 CDs, 300 LPs, 100 DVDs and VHS tapes, and 100 cassette tapes), I suspect I'd still feel overwhelmed by my entertainment options.

But I've also got months of MP3 files on my computers for my five (working) MP3 players, Slacker and Pandora accounts, and several hours of movies purchased from iTunes, mostly to entertain my 9-year-old on long car trips.

Then there's Netflix.

For a while, the offer--watch as many movies as you want for $17 a month--seemed too good to be true, but I gave up my Blockbuster card once I did the math. I was getting about eight movies a month, which cost about the same as a Netflix subscription. And I didn't have to worry about surly clerks and driving to the store.

Things got even better when Netflix began to offer movies on demand. It took some experimenting, but after a while I was able to do it with an old laptop hooked up to the TV via the VHS player and a cobbled-together array of cables.

It was just enough of a hassle--dragging out the laptop, finding the cables, connecting them in the right order, waiting for the computer to boot, realizing it wasn't configured for dual displays, rebooting again--so that we mostly did it only when I'd forgotten to queue up a kid-friendly picture for Family Movie Night.

I suppose we could have just gotten a new DVD player or some other device that connected to the Internet, but we were too cheap. And then Netflix announced that it was offering streaming video on the Nintendo Wii. Suddenly, watching movies on-line became a lot easier.

So, here I am now with nearly 150 movies in my regular Netflix queue, about 82 in the Watch Instantly queue, and 23 (release date unknown) in the Saved queue.

I don't know how those numbers compare to other Netflix customers. I do know that, sometimes, contemplating my queue, I start to feel a little guilty. I really should organize it, deleting the movies I'll never watch (even though I know they'd be good for me), and arranging what's left so all the musicals, film noir, and Hollywood blockbusters aren't clumped together.

I might, one day, just like I might actually sit through Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. Meanwhile, I'm thinking of a Qwest commercial from the days when the company's catchphrase was "ride the light." In it, a man checking into a seedy motel asks if there's any entertainment. The clerk tells him they've got "every movie ever made in every language, anytime, day or night."



I couldn't find the time now to watch just the ones in English, but maybe in 20 or 30 years, when I'm old. . . If I can still lift a remote.

New Wheels (Part Two)

I didn't know it then, but while I was signing the credit card slip for my new Cannondale bike, I was coming down with bronchitis. And then, a few weeks later, when I was finally feeling better, I had minor surgery on my ankle. The result was that the new bike sat in the basement for about six weeks before the orthopedist gave me the okay to ride it.

The temperature's been in the 90s, but after it had cooled down Thursday evening, I went out with a friend. We rode to Reston and back on the W&OD Trail, about 13 miles. And yes, the bike was as comfortable and as much fun to ride as it was the first time I got on it.

Smart People (Part Two)

So, after I wrote about how more and more it's begun to seem to me that Americans mistrust intelligence, Judith Warner writes about the same thing here in the New York Times Magazine.

She begins by observing that U.S. Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was probably downplaying her intelligence during her recent confirmation hearings because "[a]ny hint of an I’m-better-than-you sentiment, especially if that sense of superiority is based on intellect or fancy speech or having attended an Ivy League school, can go over very badly in America today, where 'elite' has gone from being a word of admiration to one of insult."

Given how prevalent this anti-intellectual bias seems, I'd been thinking that it wasn't a new phenomenon. I'm probably right. Warner goes on to quote from Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life. (It won the Pulitzer in 1964.) This one sentence sent me to Amazon.com in search of the book: "[Intellect] is pitted against democracy, since intellect is felt to be a form of distinction that defies egalitarianism."

Warner also quotes Susan Jacoby, whose The Age of Unreason contains frightening examples of what Americans don't know.

According to a survey Jacoby cites, American 15-year-olds rank near the bottom in math literacy when compared to students in 28 other countries. Two thirds of us don't know the three branches that make up our government and an equal number can't name one Supreme Court Justice.

Now, just one more set of numbers, these from a column by the Times' David Brooks: "In their book, The Narcissism Epidemic, Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell cite data to suggest that at least since the 1970s, we have suffered from national self-esteem inflation. . . . In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an 'important person.' Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes."