On New York’s Upper West Side, just beyond the 392-foot bell tower of Riverside Church, two graves watch over each other. One, Grant’s Tomb, is the largest mausoleum in North America. In it lie the remains of the 18th president and his wife Julia. Ulysses S. Grant was the victor in the bloodiest war in American history. Above the tomb’s entrance are the words: “Let Us Have Peace.”
Read MoreAny justice who upholds my right to burn the American flag can’t be all bad, and, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg showed us, Antonin Scalia, who died Saturday, could be your personal friend even as he was your ideological foe (“I love him, but sometimes I’d like to strangle him”), which is exactly how it should be in a republic. A man of great intellect and wit, who defended with integrity what was in truth a very narrow vision of the Constitution and the country, Scalia also bears some responsibility for the partisanship and incivility that are strangling the public discourse. I think his embrace of “original intent” (the belief that the meaning of the Constitution was set at its creation) was more nuanced than either his apologists or his critics contend, but in the end it simply underestimates the founding fathers he claimed to revere, men trying desperately to hold together a confederation on the edge of dissolution. They disagreed deeply about the composition of the new nation – and since they didn’t agree, it’s improbable they thought they could speak with certainty for unborn generations. They had lived through times of tumultuous change, and when they looked around America, they did not yet see heaven on earth. They knew that some issues could only be resolved when the nation had matured. One – the “slavery question” – would take the Civil War to settle.
“[T]he multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently ‘living’ document,” writes Joseph Ellis in The Quartet, his exceptional collective biography of Washington, Madison, Hamilton and John Jay. “For it was designed not to offer clear answers to the [state or national] sovereignty question (or, for that matter, the scope of executive or judicial authority) but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberative fashion. The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of ‘originalism’ or ‘original intent,’ this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end" (p. 172).
The Constitution, Jefferson insisted, is not “too sacred to be touched.” Its brilliance is that it provides an architecture for governance and a process for resolving issues deliberatively and reasonably. Judging by Saturday night’s debate, it has its work cut out for it.
In memory of Judge John H. Mason (1945-2004), who loved the King
Here’s something to make us feel a little older: Elvis Presley would have turned 80 tomorrow. (Former English students, note the use of the future perfect subjunctive.) I remember, in the fall of 1956, watching his first appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan had said only three months earlier that he’d never have Elvis on his show, calling him “unfit for family viewing” and suggesting he wore “a Coke bottle” inside his pants. But 60 million viewers changed his mind. Among them were my sister and I. She was 13, I was 11. Elvis had barely warmed up when my sister emitted a little squeal. I think she even startled herself. Then she lost complete control. “I can’t help it,” she said apologetically, as she screamed at our small black-and-white TV. I was just disgusted.
Not for the last time did I find myself on the wrong side of history.
Elvis went on to sell 600 million records before he died, a prescription-drug-addicted zombie His last years were enormously sad. He made terrible movies and shallow songs, becoming a bloated, bespangled caricature of a star. He seemed so old. He was 42. But his early music lives, not just in the songs he recorded, but in all the diverse influences he absorbed into it and then sent out in completely new forms. Some resented him for usurping and profiting from black rhythms; others for mongrelizing white country. But he embodied both in a respectful but revolutionary way, one that empowered his music to transcend his biography.
The first thing I notice about a man are his hands, probably because mine seem so pitiful to me, their cracking blisters rarely turning into callouses. In winter I vainly try to toughen them by going gloveless. Yesterday morning, the wind blew out of the southwest – a clearing sign – but the sea was still a steely gray as I looked across the white caps to Cranberry Island in the early light. I thought of Harold Alley, an islander of legendary strength and endurance, who, it was said, once lifted a car back onto the ramp of a ferry and put a harpoon through the backbone of a great white shark.
Years ago, before plastic traps and motorized winches, he was lobstering well offshore on a winter day when a sudden storm knocked out his engine and left him stranded in the growing darkness. As the night came on, he knew that if he gave into his fatigue he would freeze to death, and so, in an effort to stay awake, he began to lower and raise a lobster pot.
In antiquity, some thought Sisyphus – who was condemned by the gods to push a rock forever up a hill – personified the waves rising and falling on a “treacherous sea.” For Albert Camus, Sisyphus’ “struggle toward the heights” gave his life meaning in an absurd world.
All through the night Harold Alley hauled up the rope and let it drop again, his bare and freezing hands his only sign of life.
Charity Hicks, a Detroit social activist and policy director of the East Michigan Environmental Action Council, died on Tuesday in a New York hospital. Early on May 31st, Charity was waiting for a bus to take her to a panel discussion when a car veered off 10th Avenue, slammed into a hydrant and the bus stop sign, which fell on Charity’s head. She never awakened from her coma. Despite having his car, eyewitness descriptions and a first name, the police have not yet arrested the driver who fled the scene.
I met Charity several years ago at the Center for Whole Communities in Vermont. She was wearing, as she always did, African clothes of bright colors and speaking in rhetorical cascades about the world’s injustices. Heir more to the Black Power than the Civil Rights movement, she fought for dignity for all people. She devoted her life to Detroit’s oppressed, focusing on food and water security, supporting her extended family on a part-time university stipend. In May, while demonstrating against the city shutting off water to the poor, she was jailed. “The conditions,” she said, “are meant to shame you, demoralize you, criminalize you and break you down.”
She was a fighter with a very human heart, filled at times with self-doubt, subject to depression, yearning for peace in places she would never visit. “My work is in the city,” she once said. “But my heart is in the wild.”
Charity was my friend. I will miss her big heart.
The Moses of the modern world died yesterday. Nelson Mandela led his people to the Promised Land, where the lion really does lie down with the lamb. But Mandela, like Moses, never got to enter that valley because it does not exist, either in South Africa or anywhere else. And so he left behind a powerful, unrealized dream, built on extraordinary courage, sacrifice, blood, endurance and humility. He was the man I most admired in the 20th century. In declining a second term as president, he eschewed the totalitarian paths of Lenin and Mao to walk with Gandhi, Havel and King. He was neither a saint nor a hero, but seemed instead a profoundly human person. In truth, we need fewer saints and heroes, who are archetypes set on fragile pedestals rather than people struggling in a stubborn world, people who experience tragedy and joy, who make compromises and trade-offs, who are inconsistent and often unfathomable, who choose life over immortality.
And Mandela was a towering person, enduring 27 years on Robben Island and emerging to ask his jailer to join with him to build a community that few had even been able to imagine. (His English first name, bestowed in grammar school, seemed a symbol of his longing to bridge once intractable divides.) He paid a heavy price – in his torture and incarceration, in his loss of a private life that sustains us on this journey – to give all of us a vision of a better world.
I’m not sure why I even read it. Maybe it was my times in Ireland and my sense of connectedness to that enchanted, benighted land. Or the smiling face of young Joe Reilly, freckled and red-haired, born in the Mission District of San Francisco in 1926, who died almost 88 years later not far away in San Leandro. The grandson of immigrants from County Armagh, he sold newspapers on the city’s streets as a boy, enlisted in the navy at 17 and spent three years in the Pacific, returning home in 1946 to marry Bess, his wife for 67 years, and raise 10 children. He delivered milk in Berkeley Hills, where his customers welcomed his smile and laughed at his blarney. When Berkeley Farms ceased home deliveries in 1970, he became an ice cream man, working a second job as a concessionaire at Oakland Coliseum. Joe was an entrepreneur as well as a salesman – an early distributor of mineral water to local health food stores, he subsequently discovered a geyser well and launched Napa Valley Springs Water Company, which he sold four years later. He spent his last quarter century happily retired, traveling with Bess, playing with the grandchildren, fishing daily with his buddies at the lake. A long, happy life lived within 20 miles of his birth, yet filled with the tragedy of living. Childhood poverty. Witnessing the carnage at Midway. Enduring the deaths of two daughters and a great-grandson. A life like millions of others, tracing the arc of 20th-century America, unique and precious.