#352 – Dick Bernard: August Wilson: the Triumph of an Ordinary Man….

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On check-in at my hotel in downtown Pittsburgh, I asked if the August Wilson Center (AWC) was somewhere in the neighborhood.
That was an easy question: it was three short blocks away. I walked there, and found the back side of it was visible from my 15th floor room (the orange traffic signs are alongside AWC in the photo – click to enlarge).

August Wilson Center from Omni William Penn, Pittsburgh PA, March 25, 2011


August Wilson?
If you don’t know who he is, note the Center website link above. There is plenty of information. He is one of America’s most noted playwrights, one of the very few winners of two Pulitzer Prizes for his plays; the only African-American playwright ever to have two of his plays performed simultaneously on Broadway.
I met him when he was, literally, a “nobody”, like me….

Portrait of August Wilson at August Wilson Center, Pittsburgh.


Best as I can figure, it was sometime in 1979-82 time period when I met him, briefly, when he was a part-time cook at Little Brothers in Minneapolis MN. I was a sometime volunteer there, and August was the cook. Laura, my friend who introduced me to Little Brothers and got to know August better than I, says he was an outstanding cook, and I’ll take her word for that. My specialty is eating! She spent more time than I at Little Brothers; I was more part of the Catholic Charities circle in those years.
But I did meet August.
Later, I saw eight of the ten plays in his Pittsburgh Cycle – the plays that led to his fame. All of these were produced locally at St. Paul’s Penumbra Theatre. Gradually, I came to know that the playwright August Wilson was the same August Wilson who I’d met as a cook at Little Brothers some years earlier.
In April, 1998, my daughter and I visited Pittsburgh and were privileged to be given a tour of Augusts Hill District by his older sister, Freda, including going into the tiny home in which they grew up. (In the photo it is the last building on the right, and it is now a historic site in Pittsburgh at 1727 Bedford Ave. Its backyard was the setting, August said, for his play “Seven Guitars”. Note the skyline of downtown Pittsburgh in the background. Indeed, the Hill District is on a hill overlooking downtown.

August Wilson Boyhood home, 1727 Bedford, Pittsburgh PA, April, 1998


Freda remembers her younger brother as always being serious. It was not an easy road for he, his siblings or any persons of color in his growing up years. He wrote a paper in school, and it was so good he was accused of plagiarizing it, and dropped out. No one seemed much interested in his re-enrolling. Ultimately, he received an honorary high school diploma from one of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Libraries, which is where he delved deeply into history, particularly African-American. He wrote, and wrote, and wrote.
My friend, Laura, remembers August as very modest and humble. When he won his first Pulitzer (1987), Laura recalls him as being excited to be able to take pictures of the famous people he would see there, not much aware of his own fame…that, in fact, he was now famous, too.
At the conference I attended in Pittsburgh, I invited August’s sister to speak to the 200 retired National Education Association educators in attendance, and publicize the new Guidebook (it is excellent) which has been published about August Wilson’s Pittsburgh. Here is the flier she distributed: August Wilson book flier. Her picture is below:

Freda Ellis, Pittsburgh, March 27, 2011


As for me, I’m working to learn more about how Little Brothers in Minneapolis assisted in August Wilson’s career development, and to help get Little Brothers recognized as well. As best I know, he completed at least one of his plays while there, and refined one or more of his “Pittsburgh Cycle” in his two or three years there. Yet Little Brothers merits hardly a sentence in any descriptor of August Wilson. Minneapolis’ Little Brothers is a very important part of his ‘roots’.
We all have our heroes and sheroes: August Wilson, and Freda, too, are among mine. I’m so happy we crossed paths….

#347 – Annelee Woodstrom: A Woman's Perspective on the Ravages of War and the Elusiveness of Peace.

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Note from Dick Bernard: This Essay seems particularly appropriate to present at the anniversary of the bombing of Iraq March 19, 2003, and our seeming continued reverence for War as a solution for human problems.

Our wonderful friend, Annelee Woodstrom, grew up in Nazi Germany. She was 7 when Hitler came to power in 1933, and in 1947, after WWII, she came to the United States to marry the “Gentleman Soldier” from Crookston MN who she had met when the Army liberated her town of Mitterteich, which was and is near the Czech border, and later was just inside what became West Germany after the War. Since her marriage in 1947, she has lived in northwest Minnesota, most of that time in the community of Ada MN. She is a retired teacher.
The following essay is one which she presented recently to a woman’s group in her town. This is designed to go with a power-point presentation which I cannot present here, of course. It is her script for the presentation, thus the capitalized letters for emphasis. This essay is passed along with her permission.
Uncle Pepp was a prominent small businessman in the town – a baker. There were two Jewish families in the town. To my knowledge, both left and both survived the war.
Annelee has written two very well received books: War Child: Growing up in Adolf Hitler’s Germany; and Empty Chairs, about her life in the U.S. Her website is here.
Annelee Woodstrom:
During March 1945 I had been ill. In this excerpt from my book WAR CHILD you will meet my Uncle Pepp. He isn’t easy to forget!!
I knocked softly. Uncle Pepp opened the door and motioned to the big chair. “What can I do for you?”
“Nothing. — I came to say good-bye.”
“So good-bye it is,” Uncle Pepp mumbled. His voice and his demeanor startled me.
“If you are busy, I’ll leave.”
“No, you just sit there, and I’ll tell you when you can leave.”
RESTING HIS CHIN in his hands, he looked at me, pondering. “Everybody comes and tells me, ‘I’m leaving.’ Are you leaving today? You should be home with your mother, but you are out there, getting bombed and shot at just like the men.” His gaze went past me. “The men went and fought, but most of them didn’t come HOME.
The ones who DID are crippled for life in one way or another. Tell me, for what?” He nodded. “Oh, yes, for the THOUSAND Year Reich. What a Reich it is!!! It started with Adolf Hitler and a few crazy men — who hollered and screamed as they led us and lied — until everyone followed blindly into THE abysmal destruction of humanity. Now,— we drown in our own blood. How they have changed us.”
“Uncle . . .”
He didn’t hear me, and I didn’t dare to move as he went on.
“They didn’t change us, we did that ourselves. Now, the whole world will hold us accountable.”
He shook his head. “All my life I tried to do right. Then, in one minute, I ruined it all. Just because Cousin Karl joined the Nazi party and didn’t tell me, I pushed him into this damn war. Now he is in France, doing God knows what? Killing, fighting, or RUNNING to save himself. He shouldn’t have joined the Nazi party without telling me . . . SO I REFUSED TO sign that I needed him in the bakery TO SECURE FOOD FOR THE TOWN. Now, nothing is the SAME . — He and I have changed.”
I had never seen Uncle Pepp like this. I got up and GINGERLY
put my hand on his shoulder AND TRIED TO CONSOLE HIM. “It wasn’t your fault! It’s the war! The Government would have taken Karl anyway. Everybody has to go to war. AFTERnTHIS WAR ENDS, there won’t be any more wars, because there isn’t anyone left to fight.”
Uncle Pepp laughed bitterly. “You would think so. We learn a lot in a lifetime, but no one in THIS world learns about keeping peace. Every time there is a war, they say it is for some cause, and then it will bring peace FOR EVER !!! The human race is the dumbest species there is. For thousands of years legions of people have fought and maimed each other for one cause or another. They TOOK LAND FROM THEIR so-called enemy. When you look around, you see that years later they gave it back. Never mind the corpses UNDERNEATH THE LAND the young were told to conquer.”
Uncle Pepp’s eyes bored into mine. “You think this war is the
last war? Anneliese, don’t mind MY LAUGHING. Some day YOU MAY HAVE A SON who will get his draft notice to fight in another WAR . . . AND AGAIN they’ll promise you, ‘THIS IS THE LAST WAR OF ALL WARS.’ On the other side there will be a mother who will have to send her son for the same reason — TO STOP WAR! What we have NOT YET learned is the simple truth: Wars lay the seeds and breed another more horrible war than the ones before.”
Uncle Pepp came close to me. “I always told your papa you should
have been his first born son, but I’m glad you’re not. Maybe you will
make it through this war. You will, if you’re lucky and have a say
about it.” He kissed me on THE CHEEK,— “Now go, and do come back, you hear me!”
IT WAS March 1947 I WAS LEAVING GERMANY TO COME TO AMERICA AND MARRY KENNEY. MY COUSIN Erna boarded the train with me.
The wheels of the train grated over the worn-out tracks and sparks spewed as we reached Nuremberg. The train stopped near MOUNTAINOUS DEBRIS THAT FOUR YEARS AGO had been the railroad station.
Instantly, we were engulfed by moving masses and WE PUSHED AND SHOVED until we found an empty platform space. Dreading the layover, we PUT our luggage behind our backs, huddled to keep warm and watched. Children, women and men, stood SPRINT READY as they LOOKED and pointed down the trodden path where an American PATROL CAR turned the corner.
At will, the soldiers flipped cigarettes and cigarette butts IIN THE watchers’ direction. The Americans talked, laughed and shook their heads at the spectacle they had created. The watchers sprinted forward until they spied a cigarette landing near them. Within a flash, they threw themselves on the ground, pushing, and fighting until SOMEONE ROSE, arms raised, jumping joyfully and clutching their treasure while their friends cheered.
Erna and I knew that cigarettes were sometimes better than money. With a good barterer, enough cigarettes could sustain the hungry or sick. We watched silently as men traded seven cigarettes for a pound of flour. Another group traded for water, and while the hunger-driven sat and salivated, their chosen leader mixed the flour with water until he held a lumpy dough. Eager hands pulled the dough into sheets that hardened none too soon for the lucky owners. No one took chances WITH THEFT; they devoured the finished product and the hunger pains were stilled for now.
Near us crude scaffolds covered with scribbled messages and weather-beaten pictures of soldiers, children, and families were the meeting places for refugees and all the other survivors of the war. These messages and pictures were the lost and found network of Germany’s twentieth century’s mayhem and madness.
We were overwhelmed by the constant motion that surrounded us. Dressed in tattered clothes, which were probably all they owned, bedraggled hollow-eyed homeless walked by looking for a space where they could perhaps stay for a few hours, or maybe a night. Others searched for a familiar face, or someone who might know the whereabouts of missing family members, friends, or acquaintances.
Groups of people groped through the rubble for anything that could keep them warm.
The most pitiful sight was the refugees. They had lost their homes which had been built by their ancestors centuries ago. Torn apart for the past four years by the ravages of war, families still huddled on their wagons or on the ground. Their nomadic life had taken its toll, and there was no end to the misery that surrounded us.
Disbelieving, WE STARED at bands of German soldiers who had withstood years of fighting on all fronts and were now clad in ill-
fitting shirts, pants, and jackets. Some had lost their limbs, their
hearing, or their sight. The more fortunate ones still had shoes, others had rags tied around their feet. Most soldiers had discarded their Army uniforms, while others wore them ONLY in the darkness OF NIGHT to keep warm. The daily struggle for survival, the unsuccessful searches for their loved ones, and the constant reminders of a lost war had robbed them of their once proud stance.
Children who had been taken from air-raided cities and relocated in designated safety zones WERE NOW ORPHANS — they survived because they had joined street gangs.
Tired and discouraged, we boarded the Wurzburg-bound train.
We stood by the window and viewed in silence what once had been THE BEAUTIFUL CITY OF NUREMBERG. We had heard that unrelenting bombing raids had obliterated the city, but we had never seen such total chaos before.
For miles, — as far as the eye could see, burned-out shells of homes
stood only because the mountains of rubble did not permit them to fall and come to rest. Uninhabitable buildings stood with gaping holes in their sides exposing denuded rooms, and the JAGGED remnants of walls thrust their ragged edges toward the heavens, lamenting their fate. Streets were now winding footpaths through piles of debris.
Throughout the remainder of our trip, through Wurzburg and onto our final destination, Frankfurt/Main, ERNA AND I realized that our Fuehrer had gotten his wish. In 1944, as the Allies encircled the
borders of Germany, shortly before his self-inflicted death Adolf
Hitler had shifted responsibility and blame for Germany’s military collapse onto his people. At meetings, he raved at his district leaders and generals that his people had betrayed him. They were cowards, and they deserved DEFEAT, HUMILIATION and even DEATH at the hands of GERMANY’S enemies. Now, his wish was reality. Germany lay in ruins, its people were destitute, and the once-feared Army had been annihilated. Germany’s regions were divided, and its borders were guarded by four allied nations.
Frankfurt, in twilight, was an image of grotesqueness and it embodied the savagery of war. The stately, CENTURIES OLD stone and brick houses lay reduced to rubble that flowed like lava out into the streets. Weather-beaten cardboard signs with crude, black letters pointed the way to avenues and streets. As the train stopped, we noted that the customary friendliness toward strangers we had taken for granted before the war, was no longer with us.
After my heart-breaking good-by with Erna, I landed in New York , met Kenny , and we took the train to Washington DC
TO MEET WITH [then-Minnesota] Congressman Hagen.
As we left the UNION STATION, Kenny hailed a taxi. The driver joined the evening traffic. The darkness of the night did not penetrate the streets of Washington, D.C. Lights glared everywhere, YET, the traffic flowed smoothly and steadily. I found no chaos here, nor morbid darkness. Everything was so unlike the Germany I had known these past eight years.
I continued deep in thought while Kenny and the driver talked. Suddenly, Kenny put his hands over my eyes and made sure
I could not peek out.
The taxi stopped. KENNY REMOVED HIS HANDS, — Lights engulfed everything around us, and the brightness made me blink rapidly.
Abruptly, I sucked in my breath and shivered as goose bumps crawled through my skin. Wonderstruck, I sat SILENTLY. The beauty and the massiveness of the [U.S.] Capitol Building was beyond anything I could have imagined.
It seemed the past and the future HAD merged RIGHT HERE, and penetrated into the very interior of our car. Thoughts and feelings bombarded and captivated my whole being. I felt so SMALL and insignificant, YET so special at the same time. I hugged my own body and sat still until Kenny spoke to the driver. He started the car and we were silent while he drove past the White House, the house where President Harry Truman lived.
Slowly, I understood I WAS TRULY in another world. How beautiful it was! How stately! How serene!
Realization crept into my mind and took hold. “So that is the way PEOPLE LIVE — where there is peace!” I said softly. TEARS welled up IN MY EYES until the lights were a blur. I THOUGHT OF MY LOVED ONES IN GERMANY AND WISHED, “If only Mama and everyone, everyone in the world could live where there is peace!”
I suddenly felt drained and sad. I had not known peace and serenity since I was in SEVENTH GRADE waiting to celebrate my thirteenth birthday.

Uncomfortable Essays

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The document which makes up the title of this post is 48 pages and was written by Dick Bernard between September, 2008, and July, 2012. It speaks for itself, including, especially, the word “Uncomfortable”.
Uncomfortable Essays 2008-2012
It consists of 17 Essays on assorted topics which could generically be considered thoughts on more effective organizing for the peace and justice community.
An earlier 4-page document, initially written in the Fall of 2002, generally articulated the same ideas to the same general audience. It can be read here: MAPM organizing Dick B Recs Jan 2003
The organization to which the thoughts are addressed is the Minnesota Alliance of Peacemakers (MAP), founded in September, 1995, and still in existence. You can see more about MAP here.
The author of the Essays has been active in MAP since 2002, and was President of the Alliance for three years 2005 through 2007.

#339 – Dick Bernard: Part 9. The Rich

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Pretty clearly, the Rich have won, at least temporarily. Not the ordinary rich, but the Filthy Rich.
Take a moment to look at what “rich” means, thanks to a series of charts published in Mother Jones magazine.
Then, there’s an interesting commentary entitled “Koch Dreams” which refers to a David Koch piece in the Wall Street Journal, and some counterpoint. That is here.
There are over 2500 comments to the Mother Jones piece. One can get a flavor by just looking at a few of them.
I am always interested in the apologies/justifications for the Rich folks: they’ve earned it, they deserve it; it’s to their credit, etc. The poor, were they not such dolts, could do as well. The America dream is open to everyone, or so the Ayn Randians suggest. Go for it.
For some of the rich, money does indeed grow on trees…until the tree dies. Ask the supposedly savvy folks who queued up to be accepted as investors by Bernard Madoff. Each of them had heard of the risk pyramid – the greater the return, the greater the risk. But the siren song of guaranteed high returns on investments proved irresistible. And then the crash came and they lost anything, and it is everyone’s fault but theirs. They earned that money, they say. Until it disappeared.
There are lots of followers of Bernie Madoff-likes….
Money does grow on trees, only because it is abundantly fertilized by those of less means. It is the middle and lower classes that fuel wealth in this and other countries. One wonders, then, why the wealthy is obsessed with making the middle class poorer, and weaker, and the lower class destitute. That is what seems to be happening these days.
If I venture outside my suburb to the inner cities, I’ll come across pan-handlers working very hard to collect enough money for their evening delight, whatever that happens to be – or for their very survival.
If I accept the stereotype – that it’s cheap booze they’re after – they have to buy the booze, and in so doing contribute to an entire food chain of wealth, right up to the super wealthy. That panhandler contributes to the wealth of that entrepreneur who markets the cheap wine. It’s legitimate business. But without the addict, it would be a little more difficult for the rich guy.
This doesn’t stop at my communities poor. I have a particular affection for Haiti. If one goes to Haiti these days, the only rice one sees is labeled American rice. That’s because the domestic Haitian rice farming enterprise was deliberately destroyed back in the 1980s by American government policy, giving the long term competitive advantage to American rice growers. Sell cheap rice, drive Haitian farmers out of business, corner the market and increase the prices…. It’s easy.
Haiti is one of the world’s poorest nations. Every time I’d go to a meeting about Haiti someone would ask why there is such an interest in keeping Haiti down. There were a number of different answers.
The one which made the most sense to me was this: there are about 8,000,000 Haitians, and if they have an average resource of $1 a day, perhaps one-fourth of that, a quarter in American dollars, goes for food, usually rice. Doing some simple math, that’s $2,000,000 a day, or $730,000,000 a year – and this in the poorest country in the hemisphere. Low hanging economic fruit.
Bigger picture: the only advantage the rich do not have is the numbers. For every rich person there might be as many as 99 who are not so rich.
This is a known problem for the wealthy, and the strategy is how to keep the vast majority quiet and in chains.
So far they’ve been successful.
But they always live in fear of being found out.
More on that in a following post.

#334 – Dick Bernard: Part 4. Why are we doing this to ourself?

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Yesterday the combination of a snow-blocked driveway and Presidents Day led to an unusual amount of television viewing by myself. Being President’s Day, the History Channel had some interesting programs about the U.S. Presidents. I watched some of the programs, and they were fascinating. Being President of the United States is a complicated job.
It led me to think back to my senior year in high school, 1957-58, when my teacher father, Henry, took on the task of reading the biographies of all the Presidents till that time. He would borrow the books from the ND State Library in Bismarck, and to my knowledge he completed his project of reading about all of them. Probably the last biography was of Harry Truman, as Dwight Eisenhower was President during and after his home reading project.
I also was led to think about a famous quotation of H. L. Mencken in the Baltimore Evening Sun on July 26, 1920. In a column entitled “Bayard vs. Lionheart”, Mencken commented on the office of President of the United States and how its elected representative “represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folk of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
Well…I have heard no one say that President Obama is a moron in the White House. He is a brilliant and extraordinary man. But I have heard it said that he is too intellectual (among other assorted complaints), none related to his capabilities.
Fortunately, while Mencken was wrong in his assessment of the deteriorating quality of the occupants of the office of President, he seems to have hit a home run when looking at the quality of the people we are choosing to represent us closer to home, too many in state legislatures and Governerships and Congress. They may not be “downright morons” elected to represent us, but their attitude certainly does not reflect any lofty aims for our country. More and more, they seem simply to be a collection of individualists elected to dismantle to the extent possible the great institution which is the United States of America.
We don’t seem to elect people with the people’s interests at heart these days. We go for the guy or the woman who looks and sounds good,and speaks to our own very parochial and individualistic wants, often fear or anger based. It does not serve us well in the short or long term.
Very stupid decisions are made when driven by fear or anger. Such decisions, once made, are not easily reversed. The very word, “decide”, is a sibling of other words of very clear meaning: suicide, homicide, insecticide. Decisions are not reversible. You can’t undo a killing….
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
There is a long list of reasons, tailored to each one of us as individuals. Even those who might mostly agree with me will say, “yah, but….” We want what we want.
Politicians pander to people’s fears, to people’s anger, to people’s prejudices.
We look at the short term and not the long. We have people newly elected who presume to change long established programs in an instant just cuz they have a majority at this moment and feel no need to respect a minority opinion.
Our vision is limited to the individual or the smallest unit of group activity…to what we understand.
We are, we seem to say, all in this, alone, when we need to be in this together.
My town is not an island; nor is my metropolitan area; nor is my state; nor is my nation. Even in my town, or in my homeowner’s association within that town, there are differences to be respected and appreciated and not steam-rollered because they’re minority.
We need wisdom in our governance, and understanding of other points of view.
Twice today, in various portraits of Presidents, I saw past Presidents of the United States together in formal and informal settings: at the White House, in Indonesia, in Haiti…These were politicians united only by the common experience of attempting to govern a very complex and powerful country. They understood and appreciated each other. They all aged more quickly in office, than before their election.
They all learned how complicated this world is.
So should we.
Related: here, here and here.

#331 – Dick Bernard: Part 1. "On, [the public employees of], Wisconsin!"

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Thursday afternoon, February 17, we went across the Mississippi River to see a music program at a local suburban St. Paul elementary school. The performers were about a hundred fifth graders, one of whom was our grandson. The audience was classmates from other grades, and the usual assortment of parents, grandparents and others. It was standing room only in the gymnasium.
It was a great program – they always are. Classroom teachers, and all public school employees, on average are genius level when it comes to working with kids. The average civilian would hardly last a day with one-fourth of the students a normal teacher is assigned each and every day. Ditto for those cooks, custodians, secretaries, Principals, etc., etc., etc. Occasional problems? Sure. There are, after all, nearly 50,000,000 kids in those places called “school”.
Thursday we watched one of this large elementary schools music teachers work his magic during the impressively choreographed and timed program with his young charges. Thursday evening the program was repeated.
Teachers – indeed, all school staff – are to be celebrated.
But those same employees are certainly not to be tolerated if they get uppity, and wish to share a tiny bit in the riches of this country.
Across the river, down the road perhaps 300 miles in Madison Wisconsin, at the same time I was listening to my grandson and his classmates, teachers and other public employees were engaging in rarely seen huge protests over an arbitrary attempt to strip them of rights and benefits under the guise of balancing the state’s budget. At this writing, it appears that the employees, with the help of Democrat legislators who literally left the state to prevent the dominant Republicans from achieving a quorum, will manage to at least minimize their losses in the short term, and bring powerful public attention to the problem of attempts to break unions, particularly unionized public workers.
I taught public school (Junior High) for nine years, followed by 27 years of representing unionized public school teachers. Union dues paid my salary and helped fund my private pension. I grew up in a teachers family, and on and on and on. So I am not unbiased when I cheer on those valiant souls who challenged the Wisconsin Governor and hopefully cause he and his slash and burn allies to regret their move (such unanticipated results do occur from time to time.) It’s past time to take a stand.
Public workers are essential to the public good, and not ‘essential’ as defined by those who would wish them to work as, truly, “public servants”.
Many years ago I heard the issue defined well by a colleague: “public employees are the last to reap the benefits of prosperity, and the first to be burdened by the costs of recession.” He was speaking an abiding truth. The public employer gets the leftovers, if there are any, and were anti-union forces to get their way, the good old days of “come to the table and beg” would again become policy.
Probably half of my nine years of teaching were in those “at will” days where the teachers got what the school board wished to give, which usually wasn’t very much.
By happenstance, my career as union staff coincided exactly with the beginning of collective bargaining in my state, and while both sides made mistakes that first year nearly 40 years ago, and later, we did learn, and collective bargaining has worked reasonably well ever since.
Actually, it would work even better for ALL parties, including the public, were the bargaining playing field opened to include all of the abundant issues which face public education, but managers are afraid of bogey-men that exist in their “minds eyes” about allowing practitioners to – horrors – have a say in education policy.
Get rid of bargaining? Honest managers would agree that unions bring stability to employer-employee relations generally. I know. I did the work, and I know people who worked on the other side of the table back then.
I applaud those courageous workers who when faced with an arrogant challenge by a wet-behind-the-ears new Governor took to the streets and made the national news.
May they be an example to their colleagues everywhere.
The writer taught junior high school geography from 1963-72; and from 1972 to the end of his career in 2000 was field representative for the Minnesota Education Association/Education Minnesota. A career long primary interest has been positive relationships between public schools and the public at large. In addition to this blog site, he retains a site with ideas for better public school engagement with the non-school community. You can access it here.

#328 – Dick Bernard: Part 4. A Message to the Proles*

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Shortly after the Super Bowl, even with the events continuing in Egypt, the nightly news paid a lot of attention to the rollout of Donald Rumsfeld’s new book, “Known and Unknown“.
There is no need to waste words or even internet links about Donald Rumsfeld – anything one wants to know, positive or negative, about the man, can be easily found…except his own personal secrets.
Personally, I believe that his career – most of his work life – as a “public servant” exemplified manipulation by use and misuse of all of the means of Power** at his disposal, as that word is defined by people who are Powerful. This includes the right to do wrong and never, never, ever admit that you make mistakes, and blame someone else for whatever mistakes were made.
I didn’t see all of the interviews, but the ones I saw were of the Rumsfeld of old: completely on message, not about to be tricked into going off script even the tiniest amount. No accountability.
Examples of shady kinds of behaviors by powerful people are endless. Rumsfeld is way up near the top of the list of those who feel righteous in what they were trying to do, including supposedly to bring, euphemistically, “democracy and freedom” to places far away, all for the greater honor and glory of themselves.
I am particularly interested in the title of Rumsfeld’s book: “Known and Unknown“. I’ve been intrigued by that phraseology since I first heard him use it in the early days of Iraq War.
It brought me back to a lesson learned in one outstanding program of an international company called Landmark Education in the summer of 1998.
In the programs of Landmark, we learned many obvious things that most of us never really connect with.
One of the lessons that stuck was this (paraphrased): “There are things that we know that we know. There are things we know we don’t know. Finally, there are things that we don’t know that we don’t know.”
I could have sworn, from his use of this phrase, that at some point in his development Rumsfeld had taken the same Landmark program that I did. He simply parroted these words, much to the delight of the media, since they were so quotable.
In my assessment, he had the vocabulary down, but he misused the entire concept in denying any culpability for catastrophic calculations made by himself and others at the highest levels in the U.S. Government during the entire post 9-11 time of Iraq.
Not part of that Landmark Lesson was a fourth phrase that I’ll coin that perhaps should well be paid attention to: “There are things that we don’t know because we don’t want to know them.” Think a gangster leader who sends word, “take care of that problem”, and somebody downline ends up dead….
You can never tell what to believe from an executive with Rumsfeld’s experience. Rumsfeld will likely die not revealing any unspoken truth. No apologies at least to his earthly counterparts.
Perhaps the best strategy for us is to believe nothing on first hearing or reading. To be endlessly skeptical. But to retain hope that you can impact on the system.
That’s my message to the Proles (of which I am one).

* – In George Orwell’s book, 1984, the masses were called the Proles. “Prole” was probably a shortened version of the word “proletariat” and 1984 was apparently modeled on then-Soviet Union. Orwell’s book was published in 1949.
In Orwell’s book, the Proles were caricatured through images like the meek housewife, happily singing a tune while hanging out her wash on a clothesline; and the boys hanging out at a pub, getting drunk on cheap gin. In Orwell’s world, Big Brother and his minions were in control in a gigantic pyramidal headquarters in London, and Newspeak (i.e. “war is peace”, etc.) was the alternate official language of power. Telescreens and the Two Minute Hate against a distant enemy kept the rabble afraid and compliant.
The Proles vastly outnumbered the power, but (it seems) never got organized.
The first decade of the 21st century we’ve been living in “1984”, in my opinion.
** – Power defined. I once heard an excellent talk about some of the many kinds of “Power” in plays in all of our lives. As I remember them: there is the power that comes with authority (“I can fire you”, or variations usually involving money); there is the power that comes with the capability of defining the rules of society (“I can make laws”). Power comes with family connections – a family marries into a family with power. The list goes on.
But there was one power I paid most attention to, and the speaker called it “referent power” or “the likeability factor”. For people immersed in the other kinds of power, this is the scary one: this is the problem of relationships, and builds outside, and independent of, the others.
Related Posts: Feb. 6, Feb. 7, and Feb. 8

#320 – Dick Bernard: Las Madres: Mothers of the Disappeared

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Sunday we were privileged to attend a photo exhibition and talks telling the story of the Las Madres, Argentine Mothers who lost children during Argentina’s “dirty war” 1976-83.
The event was presented by the Twin Cities organization World Without Genocide, a group worth learning more about.
At the Sunday gathering, the photographer Sylvia Horwitz gave a powerful commentary on her equally powerful photographs. Her story began, ironically, with a 2003 trip to Argentina to learn the Tango.
During that trip she learned of Las Madres, and later returned to document the continuing demonstrations to keep alive the memories of horrendous atrocities against basic human rights during the dictatorship of 1976-83 in Argentina. The photo exhibit continues at the Basilica undercroft through March 5. It is very well worth the visit.

Sylvia Horwitz Jan. 23, 2011. Las Madres photos in background.


Also speaking at the Sunday gathering was a twin cities teacher who survived the awful detention and torture. Her journey to near-annihilation began very innocently, as an idealistic young person leaving fliers on a bus bench. She was noticed by the wrong person, detained and tortured, and in the end was very lucky to survive. Most of the detained weren’t: they simply disappeared.
Among the materials I picked up was a commentary from the Nov. 27, 2010, issue of The Economist on the architect of this “dirty war”, Emilio Massera, who died November 8, 2010, at the age of 85. The description of Massera’s self-delusion – “cleansing the country”, as described in the commentary – is chilling; as is his fascination with the manipulation of language to wield power.
Like tyrants of any age, Massera felt he could learn from the mistakes of tyrants who came before.
In Nazi Germany, for instance, detailed records were kept of everything.
In Massera’s Argentina, there were no records, and thus it is virtually impossible to reconstruct the atrocities, determine what happened to the victims, or establish evidence to convict the perpetrators.
The memory of the atrocities lives quietly on, even in minds of persons who have no particular background or interest in Argentina.
Saturday morning, a friend of mine leaves for Buenos Aires in the first leg of a cruise around the Horn of South America. In conversation, he and some friends were wondering about how safe it was to go to Argentina.
That is the legacy of 1976-83 living on.
At the end of the program, a friend of mine, a retired attorney, reflected on what we had just heard and seen. What happened in Argentina in those lost years, he said, could as easily happen here, and has happened elsewhere.
One needs to be vigilant.

Greg Halbert reflecting on photos of three of the Las Madres. There are many more such photos in the exhibit.

#317 – Dick Bernard: Some thoughts on Haiti, Duvalier, Aristide, reconstructing the deconstructing….

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Baby Doc Duvalier materialized in Port-au-Prince about a week ago. You’d be led to think Duvalier’s trip was a surprise to the international community. Reading the media, it almost seems as if he just jumped on a plane and flew home after 25 years in France.
The odds of Duvalier’s trip to Haiti being unknown to the international community are about the same as my odds of winning the lottery.
His arrival has re-ignited the conversation about Haiti, particularly about the Duvalier and Aristide years.
The events brought back my own memories, recounted below. My key learning, then: take nothing at face value if the topic is Haiti or, in particular, former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.
We set foot on U.S. soil after spending a week in Port-au-Prince on December 13, 2003. It had been a powerful week for me: my first visit. Basically we had met with persons and groups favorable to President Aristide, though we didn’t meet with him. We went by, but didn’t enter, the iconic Presidential Palace. Excepting the last day or two in Port-au-Prince, which were a little tense, there were no reasons to be concerned about safety. I felt welcome in Haiti.
In Miami, before the flight home, I picked up the Miami Herald for December 13 (below, click on photo to enlarge). It speaks for itself. The complete news article is here: Miami Herald 121303001) Less than three months later, Aristide would be gone.

Front page Miami Herald December 13, 2003


The trip caused me to want to learn more about the geopolitical relationship between the U.S. and Haiti, something I knew little about at the time. I’ve been studying this ever since, not only from the academic perspective, but from the grassroots as well.
Freshly home, in early January, 2004, I went to the U.S. State Department website and discovered the following news release on Haiti (Click on it to enlarge. There’s no need to look for it on-line – it disappeared from the State Departments website and cyberspace by the middle of 2004, if I recall correctly.

Handwritten notation on left margin added by Dick Bernard early 2004


I wrote the Haiti desk at the State Department in mid-January, 2004, asking where the money identified for Haiti had been spent (relevant documents here 04001). Much to my surprise, in early February, I received a phone call from the State Department. I simply restated my desire to have information in writing. At this point, I was still very trusting of my government…I thought my question would be very easy to answer, since it was directly from an official document and very recent as well.
Succinctly, I never got a detailed answer to my question, even after a Freedom of Information Act request, and a passage of two and a half years. By the time I dropped my request, the matter had been turned over to U.S. AID and the Department of Defense. My last response from USAID seemed to indicate that the person knew more than she was authorized to tell me; Department of Defense never did provide specifics.
I received only incomplete and vague information from my Government about how it spent my tax money. I became enough of a nuisance so that I am probably a name on file in Washington.
Seven years after that first trip to Haiti I have had no choice but to conclude that even official U.S. government information cannot be trusted, regardless of the source; and that the likeliest reason for the non-disclosure in 2004 was that the so-called U.S. aid to Haiti was primarily being used to destabilize and ultimately overthrow the democratically elected government of Haiti on February 29, 2004. I found other evidence of blatant dishonesty in U.S. reporting of another important event in Haiti. There is the additional problem of deliberate dessemination of misinformation via supposedly credible sources who may not even know they are spreading untrue information.
The initial information about President Aristide’s motivation and intention to help his people, which I received on that first trip to Haiti, turned out to stand the test of time, and was credible, and endures even after constant attempts to destroy Aristide’s reputation.
Now information – and misinformation – is again swirling, occasioned by Duvalier’s return to Haiti; and the seeming continued efforts to smear Aristide and keep him out of his native land.
An excellent 16-page booklet, We Will Not Forget! The Achievements of Lavalas in Haiti by Laura Flynn and Lisa Roth was released in 2005, and reprinted in 2010, which endeavored to tell the largely untold story of what the Aristide administration was working for – and toward – in Haiti. Simply type the title in your search engine for more information. It is worth reading.
There are many chapters yet to be written about Haiti.
Keep seeing Haiti.
My personal perspectives on the Haiti I visited in 2003 and again in 2006 can be found here. While the site needs updating, I have continued to be very engaged on the geopolitics of Haiti and particularly the United States.

#313 – Dick Bernard: Old Music and Family History

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Last night we attended the Minnesota Orchestra, where we’ve had season tickets for many years.
I’m a fan of classical music, but not a particularly well-informed one. Before we left home, Cathy asked “what are we seeing tonight?“, and I said “I don’t know.” The ticket wasn’t helpful: “Symphony and Song” is all it said.
The program turned out to be a delightful potpourri of all-Mozart, including the always outstanding Minnesota Chorale.
I never tire of Mozart-anything. One of the pieces played, Veni Sancte Spiritus, was composed by Mozart when he was twelve years old! (That was about the age when I first became a terminally resistant pianist. It took a while for me to get around to truly appreciating music. I got a D in Music Appreciation in college….)
But, January 16 was a delightful evening, as evenings at “long-hair” music events almost always are for me.
This particular night, for some reason, I fixed on Wolfgang Amade Mozart’s biography: born January 27, 1756 in Salzburg; died December 5, 1791, Vienna. His was a short, intense and extraordinarily productive life. Apparently the music never went out in his head.
1756, his birth year, had a particular attraction this night.
It was about 1757, when Mozart was a year old, that my last French-Canadian ancestor, Francois Collet, came across the big pond from Bretagne (Brittany) to Quebec. (The first known ancestor in North America was Jean Nicolet in 1618.)
Two years after Francois Collet arrived, the English defeated the French at the Plains of Abraham and Quebec became part of the British empire.
Sixteen years later came the American Revolution; and fourteen years after that the French Revolution of 1789 (Les Miserables, and all that).
In 1791, at the ripe old age of 35, Mozart died. In 1805, Francois Collet died in Quebec at the age of about 64, and life went on for families left behind: one with a famous descendant; the second whose story lives on in his surname (now spelled Collette) and many descendants, one of which is me, 7th generation downline.
As one of our families historians, I know that the history of all families, most especially ‘ordinary’ ones, are full of blank spaces, many of those spaces never to be filled. Indeed some of those blank spaces are intentional…”know all, tell some”…we all have our share of secrets….
All we know is that we descended from an almost infinitely long line of predecessors who left us with certain pieces of their abilities or disabilities. We are a sum of many parts.
During intermission I continued to read the program and came across an Essay on Mozart’s Ave verum corpus, by one Dan Chouinard. This piece was part of the program. (You can read the Essay here: Dan Chouinard Essay001)
Chouinard is most definitely a French surname, and in this case Dan Chouinard rang a bell: Dec. 7, 2010, my sister wrote about meeting Dan at an event in the town where she lives, and talk got around to our shared French-Canadian histories. Were we related, she wondered. “Dan Chouinard (Prairie Home Companion, pianist extraordinaire) and Prudence Johnson performed here in Park Rapids on Friday, hosted by the Kitchigami Regional Library with Legacy Amendment funding. Dan introduced himself as French-Canadian ancestry, whose early family immigrated to NE Minneapolis before Minnesota was a state. Of course, I told that I, too, was French Canadian, and told him about your family history project. He wondered if it was archived at the Minnesota Historical Society, and I’m glad to see that I was correct when I told him I was sure it was!
I briefly cruised through the genealogy part of the document we have and couldn’t see any Chouinards. Apparently some people in his family have also done a great deal of work on their genealogy, too.”
I don’t know how or if our families intersect in a genealogy sense, but I do know family pioneers were in the present day Twin Cities area “before Minnesota was a state” [1858]. I haven’t heard much about music as a special talent in my French-Canadian ancestry; my interest seems to come from my mother’s German side. But, who knows?
I’m going to see about meeting this Dan Chouinard….