Biden's Rolex, Wolfe's 'Chills' and Part II on the 'Will of the People'

Plus Springsteen and Morello, Bessie Smith and Ry Cooder.

Below, after a couple of short items, here’s Part II of my tribute to Will Rogers, one of the past century’s most influential Americans and friend of common folk—and the godfather of modern political humor and monologues. Here’s Part I from yesterday. Now read why he mattered so much during a U.S. crisis, the Great Depression, when an earlier Democrat with a hopeful grin took the White House—and why his words still mean so much today. But first, a powerful commentary on the same era: Springsteen and Morello with a spectacular live version of Bruce’s “Ghost of Tom Joad.” And down the page, Ry Cooder profiles another Steinbeck character and we go down the road to see Bessie Smith.

Telling Times.

First, The New York Times was widely mocked Saturday for an article blowing the lid off the first Joe Biden scandal: The new president is allegedly a “watch geek” and, egads, wears a Rolex! Well, at least it’s not a tan suit and he may not love Dijon mustard, another Obama crime. Reporter Alex Williams informs us, “Whether a conscious fashion statement or not, the high-end, but macho, watches suggest that, even at 78” Biden “still wants to be seen as a he-man, rugged and young at heart (see his aviator sunglasses).” This comes shortly after the Times happily promoted the White House “Pelotongate” crisis.

Then Lauren Wolfe—fine journalist and longtime activist for abused women with Women Under Siege and for the Committee to Protect Journalists—was dismissed by the Times, where she was a senior editor on contract, largely (it seems) for tweeting, on her personal account, that when she watched Biden arrive at Andrews on the morning of his inauguration, “I got chills.” These three words were flagged by Glenn Greenwald and others, and then Fox News, the New York Post and the Daily Mail, and now she is being doxxed and receiving death threats. Wolfe had also criticized in a tweet what she saw as a “childish” and “mortifying” choice not to send a military plane to escort the Bidens. The president-elect actually chose to take his own plane, and Wolfe deleted her comment.

As recently as ten days ago, besides her editing duties, she had co-authored a piece on the global pandemic for the paper. Two weeks before that she wrote or co-wrote three other pandemic-related articles for the Times. Now, late Saturday, she tweeted, “Hard to fathom all the talk of ‘cancel culture’ on my timeline while I’m left without an income during a pandemic. I’m not an ideology, I’m a hard-working person who can no longer pay her bills.” No explanation from the Times so far (as numerous folks claim they have or will cancel subscriptions) so we’ll see what the fuller story may be.

Alyssa Milano early Sunday tweeted out a #RehireLauren to her 3.7 million followers. Wolfe tweeted, “Please don’t cancel your subscriptions to @nytimes! It is an incredible paper filled with talented journalists. We need them and we need a thriving free press. Thank you!” Will Bunch commented this morning: “The NYT conundrum: A) Its amazing individual journalists again do a real public service--exposing Rep. Scott Perry's role in Trump's coup--and B) the same day its leaders idiotically cave to right-wing pressure and fire a staffer over an innocuous tweet.” Ali Velshi weighs in: “On Saturday I delivered a commentary about the monumental nature of Joe Biden replacing an insurrectionist dangerous President. Everything I stated was fact. All Lauren Wolfe said was that she had chills from the same transition of power. She lost her job at @nytimes. Why?”

With that in mind, here’s a column today by her former colleague Nick Kristof: There’s new DNA evidence that suggests yet another innocent man is languishing on Death Row.

As if to match the Times’ recent catalog of all of Trump’s personal insults over the past five years, the Washington Post now charts over 30,000 of his lies or misleading statements.

The Will of the People, Part II

During the early years of the Depression, Will Rogers voiced the despair of the average American and appeared at countless benefits, for victims of all races, to raise relief money. "What is the matter with our country anyhow?" he wondered. "With all our brains in high positions, and all our boasted organizations, thousands of our folks are starving, or on the verge of it. Why can't there be some means of at least giving everybody all the bread they wanted, anyhow?"

What many consider his most important radio address came in 1931 in a program he shared with President Hoover, which made Will’s comments even more troubling—for Hoover—especially since tens of millions were listening. (Rogers was also the most popular male movie star and newspaper columnist.) One of them was the governor of New York, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was mightily impressed. Rogers in his talk dismissed as distractions every issue that did not address seeing to it that “every man that wants to is able to work…and also to arrange some way of getting a more equal distribution of the wealth in this country….

Now Prohibition, we hear a lot about that.  Well, that’s nothing to compare to your neighbor’s children that are hungry.  It’s food, it ain’t drink that we’re worried about today.  Here a few years ago we was so afraid that the poor people was liable to take a drink that now we’ve fixed it so they can’t even get something to eat….

So here we are in a country with more wheat and more corn and more money in the bank, more cotton, more everything in the world—there’s not a product that you can name that we haven’t got more of it than any other country ever had on the face of the earth—and yet we’ve got people starving.  These people that you’re asked to aid, why they’re not asking for charity, they are naturally asking for a job, but if you can’t give ‘em a job why the next best thing you can do is see that they have food and the necessities of life. 

You know, there’s not a one of us who has anything that these people that are without it now haven’t contributed to what we’ve got.  I suppose the most unemployed or the hungriest man in America has contributed in one way to the wealth of every millionaire in America.

It wasn’t the working class that brought this condition on at all.  It was the big boys themselves who thought that this financial drunk we were going through was going to last forever.  They over-merged and over-capitalized, and over-everything else.  That’s the fix we’re in now.

Soon, he was backing FDR's election, and then given partial credit for helping him achieve it. When Roosevelt was about to take office, Will sent along a list of soon-to-be-immortalized suggestions:

“Kid Congress and the Senate, don't scold 'em. They are just children that's never grown up... Keep off the radio till you got something to say... Stay off that back lawn with those photographers. Nothing will kill interest in a president quicker....If somebody gets all excited and tells you, 'Wall Street has just done a nose dive,' tell them, 'Those Republican organizations don't interest me in the least.'"

Roosevelt followed his advice almost to the letter. When the president declared a bank holiday, Rogers commented: "The whole country is with him... Even if he does something wrong they are with him, just so he does something... If he burned down the Capitol, we would cheer and say, 'Well, we at least got a fire started anyhow.'"

And: “Every American international banker ought to have printed on his office door, 'Alive today by the grace of a nation that has a sense of humor.'"

FDR would move forward with all sorts of New Deal programs on relief, jobs, Social Security and much more. Will Rogers was not alive to see many of the fruits of this, after he took that fateful flight across Alaska with Wiley Post in 1935. The national mourning and outpouring of affection expressed profound appreciation for Rogers helping to set much of that in motion—and for all the laughs along the way.

Three years later, when Roosevelt dedicated his memorial in Oklahoma, he observed, “When he wanted people to laugh out loud he used the methods of pure fun. And when he wanted to make a point for the good of all mankind, he used the kind of gentle irony that left no scars behind it. That was an accomplishment well worthy of consideration by all of us.”

Song Pick of the Day

A Woody Guthrie song from the Depression era which, like Bruce’s “Tom Joad,” was inspired by Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, here by guitar master Ry Cooder.

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including the bestseller The Tunnels, the current The Beginning or the End, and The Campaign of the Century, which was recently picked by the Wall St. Journal as one of five greatest books ever about an election. For all of the 1970s he was the #2 editor at the legendary Crawdaddy. Later he won more than a dozen awards as editor of Editor & Publisher magazine. He recently co-produced a film about Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony andnow has written and directed his first feature, Atomic Cover-up, which will have its American premiere at a festival this spring.