Editorials

The best inauguration comment I’ve heard so far was a stand-up comedian guesting on NPR.

“I fell asleep during the President’s speech” she said. “That’s the first really relaxing sleep I’ve had for months.”

She’s not the only one of us who desperately hopes to be bored by the Biden administration. Sadly, he’s got so many hard-to-swallow items left on his plate that boredom might not be an option.

The other hot post-inauguration topic is tears shed watching the guard change: “When did you cry?” Even the sainted Paul Krugman owned up to it, saying “ I know I wasn't alone in suddenly and unexpectedly finding myself tearing up. “

Me, it was just as Kamala was sworn in. A number of commenters have nodded approvingly at her purplish suit (on my screen purple tending toward blue). They, especially the young, white and male ones, have been guessing that it was meant to symbolize that unity between the red team and the blue team which is at the top of Joe Biden’s fantasy wish list, but those of us who can remember all the way back to 1970 have a different take.

The first documented assignment of red to Republicans and blue to Democrats, per Wikipedia, was by NBC in 1986. Even at the time that choice seemed odd to my cohort. We remember that The Left, especially the scary left of socialism and communism, was previously called The Reds, and still is in many places. There’s even a stirring song about The Red Flag still sung, in Italy at least, Bandiera Rossa: 

Way back in 1970, when the left still ruled the red, purple had another meaning. As Kamala Harris, one of the women who dressed in purple for the inauguration, has said, purple was Shirley Chisholm’s color. Congresswoman Chisholm was the first woman of color to seek the nomination of a major party and the first Black woman elected to U.S. Congress. 

Now almost a half-century later there are still some of us around who were part of the Chisholm campaign who were particularly moved by Harris’s achievement. One of us, Berkeley’s Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who ran the California campaign, wore a string of Shirley Chisholm’s pearls, a gift from her family, to the inauguration. Our Michigan campaign, almost all women, was proud of getting, what was it, 5% of the vote in the 1970 Michigan Democratic primary. The winning nominee, George McGovern, was a lot less colorful in all ways than Ms. Chisholm, and he didn’t do very well as it turned out. 

It’s only taken a half-century since then for a woman of color to get half-way to the top. Perhaps Vice-President Harris will be able to speed the path for those who follow. 

The other teary moment for many was Amanda Gorman’s splendid poetry reading. She’s a poised young woman of 22, but from my advanced age she still looks like the girl she recently was. Her piece reminded me of the role young African Americans have played in recent decades of bringing poetry back into the center of life. Gorman’s poem was within the late 20^th century free verse tradition, but it pleased the ear because it also reintegrated older rhetorical devices like alliteration, assonance and rhyme which now survive best in vernacular contexts with rap and other spoken word art forms. 

Seeing and hearing her reminded me of another campaign, one I worked on in the 60s, a doomed effort to elect a primary candidate who opposed the Vietnam War and supported civil rights. He lost, of course, because he was prematurely right, but it was a noble effort. 

At the time we lived in a historically Black neighborhood, in a period when the hottest local controversy was whether to pass an ordinance prohibiting racial discrimination in housing. Our block had lots of lively kids on it, particularly a bunch of little girls who spent their free time, in this pre-video-game era, playing in the street. 

They got wind of the campaign we were working on when we put up posters advertising an upcoming rally with our candidate, and they came to me with a proposal. They thought that the best way to attract a crowd was with performance, and they showed me how they could provide it. 

They were six girls, 11 or 12 years old. They’d taken their traditional jump rope chants (do girls still jump rope?) and written a whole new set of well-rhymed political verses complete with movement and a bit of hand jive which they proposed as the warm-up act at the rally. 

Of course I accepted immediately, and as they and I suspected, they were a tremendous hit. They were so good, in fact, that the candidate employed them for subsequent rallies, though they were not able to win the election for him in the end. 

But a decade or three later, when topical rap and its cousins became popular forms of what might be called social entertainment, I remembered that my groovy girls had pioneered the form. This week, seeing Amanda Gorman reminded me that what’s old can be new again, and is pleasing because it is so. 

Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign wasn’t successful, and yet it was. It was an inspiration for many effective women who worked for Shirley like Barbara Lee, and also for younger women like Kamala Harris who came later. 

Amanda Gorman is just a couple of years younger than I was when I worked on those varied campaigns with the general goal of saving the world. Oddly enough, the world still needs saving, and perhaps always will. That’s why I’m happy to be reminded that there are still young people like her out there who are working on it, and to remember that in the end it's not the triumph of the red flag or the blue one which counts, but the hope and enthusiasm that such people bring to the ongoing task which will keep the earth turning.