Trump, Kennedy, Kemp and Les Miz (and Maybe Paris)

Donald_Trump_Laconia smDonald Trump is important.  Maybe he’s channeling Huey Long, maybe Lonesome Rhodes, maybe just “the Donald,” but despite his xenophobia and thinly veiled racist take on immigrants, he has spun a new American dream and captured those who have been without one for a long time.

Despite those excluded, whom Ta-Nehesi Coates describes so well, the belief that the dream exists is a gigantic part of the American story even though, for many, it’s faded from view. Today, in the shadow of the attacks in Paris, I wonder whether his message will thrive or wither in the face of such horror and fear.

Jack KempTeddy Kennedy smWith all that in mind, what does Trump have to do with John Valjean? What did the story mean to Jack Kemp (there’s a new biography ) and Teddy Kennedy (there’s a new book about him, too) both of whom, from opposite parties and ideologies, saw Les Miz multiple times? Can what spoke to them teach or maybe comfort us as we recoil from another bloody revolution in the streets of Paris?  Tell me that this* is not what they – and we – are feeling today.

dan kidThis little boy is now a father, but when he was six, we took him, along with his brother, to see Les Miz. At the end, he dissolved in my lap in tears, a wise child who understood, as so many do, especiallu today, what we may have lost and must struggle to recover? Listen and then, you decide.

*When Les Miz opened in New York, both Teddy Kennedy and Jack Kemp saw it multiple times. It might have been about a revolution, but it was everyone’s revolution:

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!

Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?

Then join in the fight that will give you
The right to be free!

Artists for Obama: A Few of the Many

Obama Graphic hope
I’ve been kind of out of it all week.  Post-Inaugural ennui, worries, lots of appointments… whatever it was, it really sort of shut me up.  But when I saw the Obama video I’ve posted just below here, I started thinking about all the creativity that the campaign, and this presidency, seem to have engendered.

Then a friend sent me this.  I admit I’m a sucker for this kind of music, but it really is a combination of politics and joy that only such a campaign could have inspired.

We all remember Wil.i.am’s Yes We Can.  And Ron Howard as Opie. And Sarah Silverman.  And even Paris Hilton

And this, one of my favorites, just for the discipline.


I guess Les Miz must really resonate, because here’s another one.

Obama-mosaic
Of course these are only examples; there are dozens, probably hundreds more – and if you count the images, posters and paintings, many many more. If this kind of creativity goes toward solving our problems, we’re in good hands. Either way, it’s exciting (at least to me) to realize how many vocabularies came together to speak for this new president in the long journey that got him here.