Jack Lessenberry Essays and Interviews

Jack's Essay: Ring Out the Old - 12/23/05

When President Kennedy was assassinated, most of the first people to learn about it were housewives watching soap operas.

  There were no all-news channels in those days. When the soaps were interrupted by the bulletins from Dallas, the women called their husbands, and the news fanned out from there.

   The fact is, news is actually a lot like soap operas. Most of the time, you can miss a day or two and not miss very much.

   However, you usually have to watch for years before you get everything. Before you really know all the characters, and all the history behind them, all the nuance and detail.

  Cataclysmic events sometimes occur in soap operas. Sometimes their full meaning is immediately apparent. Sometimes it takes years for their impact to unfold. That’s exactly how news is.

  For the last hour, we’ve been discussing what happened this year. But we really don’t know everything yet. And we certainly don’t know its significance. On July 4, 1776, King George III wrote in his diary, “Nothing of Importance Happened Today.”

  Nobody doing a year in review story in December 1879 would have mentioned that Albert Einstein had been born that year. Einstein got a lot of attention in 1955, the year he died. But nobody then knew that in that same year, Bill Gates had been born.

Most truly significant events happen gradually, like geologic time, with no clearly defined beginning and ending. We think what is happening with our auto industry is like that. We think the bankruptcy at Delphi and the financial crises at Ford and General Motors are significant signposts. But we don’t know yet exactly what they mean, or exactly what will happen.

  Let’s hope that we are still ignorant of the most important news of 2005. Let’s hope that somewhere, in some laboratory some breakthrough happened that will lead to an end to AIDS or Alzheimer’s. Let’s hope that will be the real news.

And that this year’s most important baby will be a lot more like Albert Einstein than like the most important baby of 1889, Adolf Hitler.

Confucius supposedly said the worst curse you could ever lay on anyone was to say, “May You Live In Interesting Times.”

He probably never really said that. But Edward R. Murrow, who is sort of a Confucius-like figure for broadcast journalists, really did sign off by saying Good Night, and Good Luck.

And I can’t possibly do better than that.

12/23/05

What a Year - This has been an event-filled year in Michigan with the state budget crises, worries about the future of the auto industry, and a big election upset.  What was the biggest story of the year?  What major developments should we be watching for in 2006?

Jack talks with Nolan Finley, Editorial Page Editor of the "Detroit News"; Sarah Hulett, Reporter for Michigan Public Radio Network; and Wesley Maurer, Publisher and Editor of the "St. Ignace News" and "Les Cheneaux Island Weekly Wave."

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Jack's Essay: Capturing Conyers - 12/22/05

John Conyers was there, in Mississippi with Martin Luther King, when that was about as dangerous as wandering around Fallujah without a flak jacket. He was elected to Congress before most blacks could vote in the South.  He told LBJ off over Vietnam. He stood on a car with a bullhorn, trying to stop the riots of 1967. He became the first congressman to call for Richard Nixon’s impeachment -- and did so a month before Watergate.

  And John Conyers is still there, politely but firmly sounding that uniquely measured, distinctive tenor whenever he feels the times, or the issue, call for him to be heard. He has served in the U.S. House longer than any other African-American in history.

  When he got there, in 1965, there were only five other blacks in Congress, most the docile products of big city machines. The only one with much spunk, Adam Clayton Powell, had no interest in sharing the spotlight. Conyers politely but firmly fought to establish the Congressional Black Caucus, which has 43 members now.

  The troops fighting in Iraq today hadn’t yet been born when he was fighting to pull out of Vietnam. He’s fought even harder against this war.  Conyers is a Detroiter through and through; born in the city in an era when blacks got shot for being in white neighborhoods at night. He worked in the auto plants, where his daddy was a union official. Served in Korea; put himself through law school.

  He’s represented Detroit in Congress for 41 years. He cares about his people and his race.  Nobody did more to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a holiday than he.

  Nobody else has ever served on committees that attempted to impeach two presidents. John Conyers was there when it happened to Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton. There is a part of him that strongly feels that it should happen one more time.

  But he has also sponsored resolutions commemorating jazz and tap dancing. Nor is anyone who knows him surprised.  John Conyers marches to his own drummer; always has.  There are days when he is an incisive as a laser beam, and times when he has seemed like a visitor from another planet. Once, he told the Detroit News that he thought of himself as The Congressman From the Planet Earth.” There are worse things to be.

Personally, I always think of him as the world’s most elegant old street fighter, one who is usually on the side of the angels. And who has been making a difference for an amazingly long time.

12/22/05

Congress and Conyers - John Conyers could be next chair of the House Judicary Committee.  He's a co-founder of the Congressional Black Caucus.  And he's the only member in history to have taken part in two impeachment hearings.  What does Conyers still want to accomplish?

Jack talks with Congressman John Conyers.

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Jack's Essay: Tattoo Metaphysics - 12/21/05

     A few years ago, I was at an attorney’s house for a barbecue and drank a little too much of his excellent red wine.

     Otherwise I might have held my tongue when his teenage daughter came home. She was covered with tattoos. On one forearm she had letters spelling the number nineteen in Gothic script.

She had an ankh on her cheek. Gently, I wondered, “Do you ever worry about what that will look like when you are 45?“ She shot back no, “because I will be on machines and tubes by then.“

     That gave me some insight into both tattooing and a reminder of what it was like to be young. Now I grew up in a day when kids were sent home from school for having their hair too long. I know about, understand and even approve of adolescent rebellion. I know also I am a cultural dinosaur. I have no interest in a TV phone unless I can get the Smothers Brothers on it.

     I grew up in a world where the only people I ever saw with tattoos were U.S. Navy veterans, and motorcycle gang members. There was also the barber and the man in the coin and stamp store. They had numbers on their arms.

     I knew what those meant.

    Tattoos on anyone other than Popeye don’t appeal to me. However, Ihave a more reasonable objection to tattoos, which is the same as my objection to suicide. Both things are essentially permanent. I did things at twenty that I would never do today.

     Matter of fact, I did some things at forty I wouldn’t do today, at least not since I became an adult a week ago.

     Dye your hair green, get a Mohawk, stick a ring through your nose -- fine with me. You can easily change your mind later and decide to look like a Republican.

     But it won’t be so hard for one student of mine to lose the giant dragon she had tattooed on her chest.  (I sent her off to a job interview with strict instructions to wear a ruffled collar.)

     The truth is that I am hopelessly provincial. I have a four-year-old goddaughter named Nora, and I recently told her mother I couldn’t bear to think of her tattooed.

     “You have nothing to worry about,“ she told me. “By that time, her world will be full of old ladies with sagging tattoos. That will be the last thing her friends will ever think of doing.”

     I can die content.   

12/21/05

Trend Or Mistake? - Once upon a time, tattoos seemed limited to sailors and South Sea islanders.  Now, tens of millions of American men and women are getting tattooed.  Will they live to regret it?  Will millions seek tattoo removal in the future?  Or is it likely to be an enduring trend?

Jack talks with Bob Baxter who is the editor of "Skin and Ink Magazine"; Myrna Armstrong who is a Professor of Nursing at Texas Tech; and Dr. Jeffrey Orringer, Director of Comsmetic Dermatology at the University of Michigan Medical Center.

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Jack's Essay: As American As Apple Pie - 12/20/05

Come Senators, Congressmen/Please heed the call/don’t stand in the doorway/don’t block up the hall/for he who gets hurt/will be he who has stalled/there’s a battle outside and its ragin’. And it’ll soon shake your windows and rattle your walls. For the times they are a changing.
    They sang that at a thousand protest marches in the 1960s. The author, Bob Dylan, becomes a senior citizen in May. He hasn’t led many protests in recent years, but that doesn’t matter. Societies that have an active, vigorous tradition of protest are healthy societies. Those that don’t are mausoleums, or prison camps.
    You couldn’t get away with demonstrations in ancient Sparta or Nazi Germany. Protests, and you got dragged off to a prison camp or a psych ward in the old Soviet Union. But one day even a writer who had sold out to the regime wrote a poem that said: If you cover the entire earth with asphalt, in that asphalt there will be a crack. And in that crack, grass will grow. Politicians, from George Wallace to Lyndon Johnson to Richard Nixon and George W. Bush, say they pay no attention to protesters. But history suggests that isn’t true. In the end, Wallace got out of the school house door, LBJ got out of the White House and Nixon got out of Vietnam. Suddenly, George W. Bush is admitting that mistakes were made in Iraq.
    Not that all protestors are Mahatma Gandhi. Richard Nixon figured out that if you eliminate the draft, you end most student protest. Once you don’t have to go, or your boyfriend doesn’t have to go, who cares about the poor Appalachian kid sent to Fallujah, Let’s party.
    Eventually, however, reality bites, and bites hard. Politicians who denounce protest could take a lesson from Nicolae Ceausescu, the awful dictator of Romania. He allowed no dissent. Then, sixteen years ago tomorrow, this smug nasty little tyrant addressed his nation on live TV. And a group of incredibly brave people stunned everyone by booing their defiance. For a moment, before they cut off the broadcast, real, animal fear flickered across his face. He was afraid. It dawned on his people that the monster was afraid . . . of them. Ceausescu was next on TV four days later, as he was led to the stone wall where he was shot.   
    Whatever your politics, stifling protest is a dangerous thing.

12/20/05

You Can't Always Get What You Want - We've grown up with the images of protestors from the 1960s filling the streets and helping change the national mind on issues from civil rights to Vietnam.  How much do protesters affect what policy makers do?  Is protesting now different than in the past?

Jack talks with Shanta Driver, Co-Chair and National Spokesperson for The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, Integration & Immigrant Rights and Fight for Equality By Any Means Necessary (BAMN); Kevin Saunders, a law professor at MSU; U.S. Congressman Joe Schwartz; and Blaine Stevenson, a sociology professor at Central Michigan University.

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Jack's Essay: Thoughts On The Homeless - 12/19/05

    Years ago, I was talking to Thomas Sowell, the conservative black economist. I asked him about the homeless.
“Pardon me?” he said. “When I was growing up, we didn’t call them homeless. “We called them bums.”
     So much for the compassionate view. On the other hand, the Michigan Coalition for the Homeless website shows a picture of a pretty blond woman with an even prettier blond three-year-old.
I haven’t seen anyone like that on Skid Row lately, or ever. The truth is as complex as the number of homeless itself. Five years ago, a serious study estimated that 340,000 people in Michigan had been homeless at some time or another.
     According to Goodwill Industries, there are an average of 66,000 homeless in Michigan every night -- and 41,338 of those are sleeping on the streets, not in a shelter.
     Families with children account for just over half the homeless. Yes, many of them have made serious mistakes in life. Yes, some of the homeless are self-destructive addicts and alcoholics.
     But it is a national disgrace that anyone can’t find a warm place to sleep in the United States of America.  Even if we don’t owe that to the homeless, we owe it to ourselves.  Society especially owes it to the children. We need to get a lot tougher on child endangerment.
     No matter what it costs. We safe and secure people should remember every day that no matter how good we are, most of us were born with a vast advantage, like not having been hatched in Haiti.  My favorite story about a homeless person concerns a woman named Dorothy who became homeless, as so many do, when she fled her husband after he threatened her baby with a butcher knife.
     She simply ran away. Fortunately, she had parents who eventually caught up with her, and helped her start a new life in a new city and a new state, which happened to be Michigan.
     Everything turned out all right for them. You may even have heard of the baby. He went on to become President Gerald Ford.
     When it comes to the homeless, you never can tell.

12/19/05

They Do Exist - We think about them more when the cold weather hits, but they are with us all year long.  They are the homeless.  People who lack a place to live in the richest nation on earth. Who are today's homeless - and what can we do for and about them?  We'll look at new approaches for ending homelessness.

Jack talks with Chuck Kieffer, the Homeless Policy and Planning Administrator for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority; Nan Roman, the President of the National Alliance to End Homelessness; as well as the Mayor of Grand Rapids, George Heartwell.

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