"No Kings" in the City of Angels
We can achieve the impossible when we hear our song
A few days ago, Kanchha Sherpa, the last surviving member of the first team to climb to the top of Mount Everest, passed away.
He helped guide Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay in 1953, as they ascended the highest peak on our planet, something that many earthlings thought impossible.
But with determination, ingenuity and selflessness, as well as music in his soul, Kanchha Sherpa led the mountaineers to the summit of the Himalayas, nearly 30,000 feet high.
As so many Americans gathered today at “No Kings” rallies around the country, I was thinking about how all of us, if we have a song in our heart, can summon our love and courage and be part of a team that can accomplish things few can imagine.
People may have laughed when Edison recorded sound or when Marconi invented the radio, but, as George and Ira Gershwin wrote, Edison and Marconi, like the Gershwins, and mountaineers like Kanchha Sherpa, Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay, did extraordinary things that have inspired all of us over the ages. These pioneers pushed the limits of what humans are thought to be able to do and showed us that, when we do push ourselves, we can make breakthroughs in the arts and sciences, sports and politics, breakthroughs that enrich the lives of everyone for the greater good.
Today, Carol, my wife and Muse, and I joined millions of people nationwide when we demonstrated at a “No Kings” rally; in our case, we joined some friends by City Hall in Pasadena, a suburb of Los Angeles. We saw many witty signs about how we did not vote for a Fuhrer, and how the only orange monarch we need is a butterfly.
Yes, we were all in good cheer, as we stood maybe 50 yards from the speakers at the “No Kings” rally, political leaders and others, who, like those carrying placards, spoke with their own wit and charm beneath a majestic cupola, while we gathered in a plaza close to bronze sculptures of the heads of Jackie and Mack Robinson.
Jackie and Mack Robinson are civil rights icons, who broke so-called color barriers in baseball and track and field, accomplishments that, like those of the aforementioned mountaineers, composers and inventors, inspired the world.
It seemed perfectly fitting that we would be standing by the portraits of the former Dodger star and his older brother, who won a silver medal at the 1936 Olympics, just one day after Shohei Ohtani, another pioneering athlete, a superstar from Japan, clinched the National League Championship Series for the Dodgers by hitting three home runs, while pitching six shutout innings and striking out 10 batters, a combination never done before in a Major League Baseball game.
There will always be haters, who doubt the capacity of human beings to achieve great things.
There were racists, who wanted Jackie Robinson to fail. But Jackie Robinson showed everyone with his brilliance, eloquence and restraint on and off the playing field. He would lead the Dodgers to their first World Series title in 1955 after the franchise had battled decades of futility, and in so doing he would defeat the lie that Blacks could not succeed, that they could not be leaders.
With remarkable grace, Jackie Robinson showed courage by not fighting back against the racists, by not dignifying their evil, by refusing to get into brawls with those who wished him harm, and by dazzling baseball fans and non-fans with his stellar play.
Like Jesus, Jackie Robinson turned the other cheek, and he will always be a role model, an inspiration, to all of us, giving hope to and forging a new path for African Americans and anyone who has ever been marginalized.
Sometimes, the world of sports can lead the way in our country, can set the tone before we make progress in other areas, such as the world of politics and law.
It is useful to keep in mind that Jackie Robinson integrated baseball seven years before the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education that the doctrine of “separate but equal” from Plessy v. Ferguson, an odious decision by the High Court in 1896, was inherently flawed in discriminating against Blacks.
Yes, Jackie Robinson and the Dodgers blessed our nation in so many ways; when he broke the “color barrier” in baseball in 1947, he gave us confidence that we could make advances in civil rights throughout our country.
Like Jackie Robinson, Mack Robinson, Jackie’s brother, and Jesse Owens, two African-American runners, also overcame the haters, the racism of Hitler and others some years earlier, at the 1936 Olympics, by winning, in the case of Jesse Owens, five gold medals, then a record, in the track and field competition.
Unfortunately, we are living at a time when the progress that we have made in civil rights and civil liberties is being threatened and set back by a man who wishes he were a dictator and by those who are enabling him.
Our Supreme Court has perverted the progress of Brown v. Board of Education and other cases by overturning affirmative action and by ruling in an emergency decision that racial profiling is permissible on immigration raids.
While Texas and other red states gerrymander congressional districts, a result of which could be to disenfranchise people of color, the High Court also seems inclined, from its oral questioning, to eliminate section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which had helped to protect the voting rights of African Americans in the South, where they had historically been subjected to poll taxes, literacy tests and other acts of intimidation to strip them of their rights.
As I have pointed out numerous times before, our chief executive, a racist, in the vein of Hitler, is trying to take away all of our freedoms. This tyrant, a wannabe Fuhrer, is systematically attempting to dismantle all of the institutions in our democracy, and he is warping our immigration system by offering enhanced refugee status to white South Africans and neo-Nazis in Germany, while he authorizes illegal raids that are denying due process to American citizens and non-citizens alike.
This hateful man is poisoning all of us, but particularly people of color, with his evil and his noise.
At a time such as this, we particularly need to remember heroes like Jackie and Mack Robinson, who refused to give up, who did not listen to naysayers, who conjured a fierce love, a song of love and nonviolence, and who accomplished things that few believed to be possible.
As my wife and I protested peacefully with thousands of others today in Pasadena, the sculpture of Mack Robinson faced City Hall, while the bronze portrait of Jackie Robinson tilted to the East.
Both men grew up in Pasadena, north of downtown Los Angeles, but Jackie did venture East when he joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and won the rookie of the year award, before later earning the Most Valuable Player Award and capturing a World Series title, which again was the first one in the history of the Dodgers.
The team would later move west to Los Angeles, where the Dodgers have continued to break barriers with other pioneering athletes, like Fernando Valenzuela, Hideo Nomo, Chan Ho Park and Shohei Ohtani.
A mile or two east of Pasadena City Hall, A Noise Within, a repertory theater company, is staging Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, an August Wilson play.
Wilson, one of our country’s greatest playwrights, passed away 20 years ago, just after completing the last of the 10 plays in his cycle, one for each decade in the 20th century.
Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, like so many of Wilson’s plays, deals with the repercussions of slavery and racism, repercussions still felt to this day.
The tragedy of slavery, our nation’s original sin, remains palpable in our country when we have in Trump a racist, a xenophobe and a traitor, who, as already noted, is trying to subvert our democracy and who is scapegoating people of color and immigrants, as well as those of us, who are protesting his policies at rallies, such as the “No Kings” demonstrations held today.
But Wilson’s play does not leave us without hope.
Enchanting readers and theatergoers is a mystical figure, a “conjure man,” named Bynum. Played brilliantly by veteran actor Gerald C. Rivers, a five-time NAACP Theater Award winner, Bynum holds a staff and can bind people together; he can heal us and guide us, like Kanchha Sherpa with the mountaineers, helping us hear our own songs, songs that we may have forgotten.
Each one of us probably has a song, though not perhaps the wannabe dictator, who has no music in him. As I pointed out a few months ago in my Substack post, “We Need Music and Love,” Trump resembles Shylock, the very character he did not recognize earlier this year, when he used the name of Shakespeare’s villain from The Merchant of Venice, without knowing anything about him.
Trump may snap his fingers to the Village People at rallies, but Trump, like Shylock, has no music in his soul.
He is also like Joe Turner, a possibly apocryphal figure, who roughly a century ago, at the time of the Supreme Court’s hideous ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson, chased after Blacks who were fleeing the South, put them in chain gangs and forced them to become indentured servants, like one of the characters, Herald Loomis, in August Wilson’s play.
At the end of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone, which is set in the early 1900s, during Jim Crow, Herald Loomis, a mysterious stranger, essayed with haunting intensity by the actor Kai Early, has re-discovered his song, although not without a struggle and not without more than a bit of irony.
We all have to struggle at times on this planet if we are to gain meaning in our lives and if we are to achieve a greater good.
For those of us, who don’t give up, who push ourselves beyond what may seem to be the limits of our abilities and our strength, for those of us who persevere even when subjected to evil and treachery of an unfathomable nature, we can do great things.
Right now, many of us, in this country and in the world, might feel a little like Job, a character from the Bible, who suffers almost unbearable pain.
But we must not give up hope.
Let us recall that at the end of the Book of Job, God wins His bet with the devil.
And Job, who has borne all kinds of afflictions, the loss of his property and family and so-called friends, prevails.
Job is released from a seeming curse, and his wealth, spiritual or otherwise, is doubled due to his persistence, humility and wisdom.
Not one of us is as “perfect” or “upright” as Job, but we can all accomplish great things as part of a team, not unlike Shohei Ohtani and Kanchha Sherpa and Jackie and Mack Robinson and August Wilson.
Sometimes, we need a little guidance from an angel, a Muse, who helps us summon the love within us, a fierce love that channels peace, so that we can hear our song anew and enlighten the world with truth.