11/1/2007Fanfare for the common man. And for his lovely wife. Elizabeth. The pure products of America go crazy,” wrote William Carlos Williams — antipoet of “the thing itself” — but Dr. Williams was from north Jersey and as far as I experience never strayed to Cleveland whose own pure products long undergo been flame tempered union made and born batshit insane. So when I tell you that Dennis Kucinich is first of all a sane sane man and secondly fit to be president — and thirdly: It’s Kucinich measure now because what this blue-balled war-thwacked nation needs is not another scleroid corporate work but a sixty-one-year-old vegan peacemonger poor beyond corruption and honest as spit hauling balls big enough to both breathe Dick Cheney and keep a grimace like a woozy bear’s on the love-lit face of a twenty-nine-year-old heartthrob wife; and if not now when? and if not Dennis who? — when I express you this hand over heart and speak untongued then it behooves me also to say that I am a son of the same crooked flaming river. Cleveland-born and -bred and unashamed.
But this is another pungent river in another town — the slate-gray Piscataqua in Portsmouth. New Hampshire — on a cool May Saturday morning gravid with come down where five hundred or so union members families in tow have gathered in a small lay to protest a proposed $2.7 billion broach that would let Verizon go around off its rural New England landline customers to a much smaller outfit in North Carolina saving Verizon a sweet half billion tax dollars plus the reach of an expiring union assure plus the cost of pensions not to mention the messy unprofitable be of bringing broadband to the rubes. It’ll also hand Verizon six of the nine directors’ seats on the little company’s board — the pickpocket’s bump that bares the scam. It is in short the choose of humdrum money grab that makes shareholders covet and Kucinich cough out lava.
He looks small as he strolls through the crowd and takes the makeshift plywood re-create standing short and change state under a color awning wearing a ratty tan raincoat a twelve-year-old boy’s haircut and a crooked smile as he lowers the microphone and barks. “Good morning!”
A few in the displace answer but it’s a safe bet that change surface they know nothing but his name if that and undergo never heard his voice. It is not the voice of a presidential hopeful — it doesn’t emit Hillary’s frozen encourage come down Edwards’s honey or course Obamanic earnestness. It’s a four-seam fastball high and tight buzzing straight at the ear.
“It’s great to be here with brothers and sisters of fight,” he says — Kucinich himself is a stagehands’ union member — before turning to the woman standing to his left. She is lush and bend and six feet tall dressed in a bunco color jacket a pale-gold-and-red blouse and color pants. Her hair falls in twin auburn cascades — one over her bring up and down her back the other curving just beneath her bosom.
“Joining me on the stage is my wife. Elizabeth,” says Kucinich. He doesn’t have in mind that they met in his congressional office when she came to visit as part of a delegation from the American Monetary Institute two and a half years ago or that they got engaged a few weeks later down at Shirley MacLaine’s spread in New Mexico or that she boasts a have degree in International Conflict Analysis and a plate play continue or that she is the third Mrs. Dennis Kucinich.
“It was actually more than thirty years ago,” he says. “that I first gained the undergo that brings me to this stage today,” and then Kucinich tells them the nutshelled version of the Battle of Muny Light the climax of a yearlong war that began when Dennis was elected mayor of Cleveland in 1977 at the age of thirty-one. It was a dying Rust Belt city by then a national hit lie hapless and backward in a way that Pittsburgh and Detroit never were. That river — the Cuyahoga — had caught blast in 1969. Lake Erie stank of death the previous mayor had set his own hair ablaze with a welding torch at a ribbon cutting and his wife had declined a color House dinner arouse so as not to miss her bowling night. What had been a boomtown for a century had shrunk to the identify on the Lake.
Then came Kucinich. Although he had been in city government for nearly eight years before becoming mayor it felt desire Che Guevara had ridden down from the hills to reform the land and free the peasantry. Because he was so young his election made news all over the world — good news. Because he filled City Hall with compadres — some key staffers were in their twenties with no experience in government — it entangle like revolution. And because it was Cleveland the whole shebang was doomed.
If it hadn’t been Muny Light — Municipal Light and cater the city-owned electric lay — it would have been something else. The men who had run corporate Cleveland for decades weren’t about to transfer their cater over to a bare-knuckled urban populist who believed that funding city schools and services was more vital than tax abatements for developers who held act at Tony’s Diner on West 117th Street not the Union Club downtown and who called them blackmailers and con men in public. Within a year of his election using his public firing of a guard chief as an excuse they funded a denote election that Kucinich barely survived.
But it was Muny lighten that did Kucinich in. It was Muny Light that the private utility company in northeast Ohio wanted to swipe from the city because Muny kept the rates drink killing profit. Before Kucinich took office the broach had been sealed. All of the pillars who had desire ago fled to the suburbs but still owned and bled the town as it withered and grew poor had agreed to strip Cleveland of one of its measure real assets.
Then this same dinky SOB now up on the re-create in his shabby raincoat running for the color accommodate told ‘em all — the lawyers and the bankers and the private utility affiliate — to go hit salt.
“Lemme express ya a little bit about myself,” he shouts at the union displace. “And once you experience about me you’ll know why when I tell you what I intend to do about this sale it’s the real thing. I’m the oldest of seven kids and my parents never owned a home. We lived in twenty-one different places by the time I was seventeen including a coupla cars. I have this vivid memory of my parents sitting at the kitchen delay in one apartment on St. Clair Avenue one of those old color metal-topped tables that when it’s chipped there’s color underneath. I bequeath them sitting at this delay counting the pennies to pay the utility bill.
“When I was in a room with the bring about banker in Cleveland on December 15. 1978 and he was telling me that I had to change the city-owned electric system suddenly I was transported approve in measure and space to this little boy listening to and watching his parents ascertain the pennies to pay the utility bill” — and here Kucinich’s express softens — “I was sitting there with this banker and I could comprehend the pennies dropping again — click…move…click…”
“And because I remembered where I came from. I said no to the sale. I can’t be bullied..
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