Baltimore

Funny how you can know nothing of a place and then it crops up twice in quick succession. I have been a late entrant to The Wire fan club but am now two episodes off the end of the fourth and final series. If you like character-driven drama and can cope with bad language, sex and violence then this is for you. Gritty is an over-used adjective for street-cop stories but I'll allow it in this case. It's set in a corrupt, drug-fuelled Baltimore.

I've also been reading the biography of H.L.Mencken, the great American journalist, by Marion Elizabeth Rodgers. He was a wonderful mapper of the change of language use, a great satirist and a poker-of-fun at all fundamentalist Christianity - he also, for some reason, had it in for osteopaths. He worked for the Baltimore Sun and Baltimore Herald newspapers. There's the link. One city, two stories. One true, one fiction. 100 years separate the two. Fascinating.

RIP Studs Terkel

I am an avid collector of quotes. One day I will become an avid organiser of my collection but that may need a sabbatical. One advantage of this is that if I know I have a quote written down somewhere in my two-volumed collection then much thumbing-through needs to happen before I chance upon it. I can occasionally picture whereabouts on the page it is, which is an advantage of having a part-functioning photographic memory. The thumbing-through is a nice exercise because it often reminds me of a quote I had long forgotten and, thus placed at the forefront of my thinking, gets used in the near future in talks and presentations. Is originality simply forgetting where you put something for a few years?

Studs Terkel, who has died aged 96, was an American commentator who gave much of his life to chronicling ordinary American life. I've never read a book of his but I have constantly bumped into his wisdom.

He was quoted this morning on the radio as having said he never met a picket line he disliked and never saw a petition he didn't want to sign. He identified with causes, pure and simple.

So this is the quote I found:

America preaches values, but it is value-free. You can't tell these days what's trivial and what's serious; on television the sport is the serious stuff compared to the rest. Trivia as a joke, fine. But not when it chokes you; when there is no difference between politics news and entertainment. I think I know why Reagan was so successful, and why there is a yearning to have someone like him back; you were not going to confuse him with Einstein. People thought, if the President can be dumb, then I can be dumb too.

(Studs Terkel, interviewed by Ed Vulliany in The Observer 28th May 1995.)

Read that afresh at the end of the Dubya years and it rings as true as ever. Sadly Terkel passed away on the edge of the, for him, promised land of an Obama presidency. I will look out for his books being displayed prominently.

What's Black?

WikiAnswers says, 'Barack Obama is a multiracial American. His father was an economics student from Nairobi, his mother a white American. They divorced when Obama was young, and his father returned to Kenya. Obama was raised by his mother until about age 10, when his maternal grandmother in Honolulu took him in.'

OK listen. I'll try and do this in as PC a way as possible but might slip up. It won't be intentional. Let's leap in. Why, when he is of mixed race, is Barack Obama described as black?

Consider this. He is campaigning in the deep (and occasionally racist) south. Would he say, 'I am proud to stand here before you ready to be the next in a long line of great, white Presidents of the USA.' I can't imagine that. The evidence before the eyes of those who believe anyone with a bit of black in their genes is competely black, would be overwhelming. This man looks black (they would say).

So when Obama allows commentators to say that he will be America's first black President (24 having smoothed the way for him, well done President Palmer) is he actually playing the race card he seems to so despise?

Now get me right here. I am an Obama fan and care not for ethnicity in making that decision. I think he will make a great president and hope he makes it. Galatians 3:28 is the guiding light to that which I already felt I knew by common sense.

The melting pot that is my much-invaded island probably means I contain a fair chunk of Latin, Norse and Germanic genetic material. Further back? Who can know? Friends. We're all mixed race aren't we?