unbought and unbossed

     Shirley Chisholm, as long as we are on the subject, wrote a book in 1970, Unbought And Unbossed.
     A rather "boss" title, I thought.


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"The areas that lost their manufacturing industries were ignored."

"The areas that lost their manufacturing industries were ignored."

"The areas that lost their manufacturing industries were ignored."


------------- I wonder, if Shirley Chisholm were alive today, if she might say, "What part of 'the areas that lost their manufacturing industries were ignored' do this Congress and president not understand?!"




     I mean, I'm afraid we've got a whole generation of U.S. senators and representatives that doesn't even know what its job is, besides showing up with plastic-looking hair, saying someone else is wrong, and flying in planes a lot at taxpayers' expense.

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     The next song on Mississippi John Hurt- The Best of is the 8th song on the upload, "Avalon" -- it has a running, rolling beat, with some syncopated ragtime rhythms, and rock-and-roll spirit.  

     If I were being sent to a desert island and was being allowed only one Mississippi John Hurt song to bring with me, it would be "Avalon Blues."

You can type in on You Tube,

Mississippi John Hurt, Avalon Blues,

and listen.

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George McGovern, right, campaigning in Boston, 1972.



{Fear and Loathing:  On The Campaign Trail '72.  Hunter S. Thompson.  Simon & Schuster.  1973.}

------------------ [excerpt] --------------- There is nothing in McGovern's campaign, so far, to suggest that he understands this kind of thing.  For all his integrity, he is still talking to the Politics of the Past.  He is still naive enough to assume that anybody who is honest & intelligent -- with a good voting record on "the issues" -- is a natural man for the White House.

     But this is stone bullshit.  There are only two ways to make it in big-time politics today:  One is to come on like a mean dinosaur, with a high-powered machine that scares the shit out of your entrenched opposition (like Daley or Nixon) . . . and the other is to tap the massive frustrated energies of a mainly young, disillusioned electorate that has long since abandoned the idea that we all have a duty to vote.  This is like being told you have a duty to buy a new car, but you have to choose immediately between a Ford and a Chevy.

     McGovern's failure to understand this is what brought people like Lindsay and McCarthy and Shirley Chisholm into the campaign.  They all sense an untouched constituency.  Chisholm's campaign manager, a sleek young pol from Kansas named Jerry Robinson, calls it the "Sleeping Giant vote."

     "Nobody's reaching them," he said.  We got a lot of people out there with nobody they think they can vote for."

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