Pardon me, Mr. President

As Trump fishes for more pardons to give, you wonder if he will soon be issuing his own Emancipation Proclamation to rebrand history. In an absurdly ignorant move, Trump offered to pardon Muhammad Ali, blithely unaware that his conviction had been overturned long ago. But, His Trumpness was looking for another high profile pardon in the wake of Jack Johnson and Alice Marie Johnson, which came after WH visits by Sly Stallone and Kim Kardishian. It seems to pay to have friends in Hollywood.

This all part of Trump's new gambit of turning black voters out for him in 2020. It arose after Kanye West's surprising endorsement, or rather re-endorsement, as the rap mogul had first supported Trump back in 2016. At the time, Kanye's buddies chalked it up to fatigue, but he has reappeared fresh and as energetic as ever, ready to stretch his label beyond music and fashion and into architecture. Get ready for Yeezy Home.

While Kanye's heart may seem to be in the right place with his push for affordable housing, his man in the White House is proposing a 20 per cent hike in rents for HUD recipients. However, it doesn't stop Kanye from singing praise for Trump, or getting his wife Kim on board the Trump bandwagon. She was positively "starstruck" by her visit to the White House. Frederick Douglass would be proud!

Trump is convinced he is winning the black community over, even as he lashes out at NFL players over the national anthem. Recently, he disinvited the Eagles to the White House. Yet, he wants NFL players to give him suggestions for future pardons, as he tries to play both sides of the political divide in the warm up to the fall mid-terms.

Maybe he can pardon Leonard Peltier, if he is genuinely interested in those treated unfairly by the justice system. No previous president has been willing to take the chance. This might make up for his horrible decision to advance the Keystone and Dakota pipelines through tribal lands in the eyes of the Native American community. But, I wouldn't hold my breathe. Not a yuge demographic here to work with.

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The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

Welcome to this month's reading group selection. David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908. At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades. Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society. I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran. Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro

Dylan in America

Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan. Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose. Looks like only yesterday. Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.

Team of Rivals Reading Group

''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005

Dispatches from Vilnius

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