ICH BIN EIN LATINAMERICANO-- AND AN ALIEN FROM MARS

Wednesday nights I help John Amato out with his Late Nite Music Club over at Crooks And Liars. My pick tonight was "Trailways Bus" by Paul Simon, the hit from his 1997 release SONGS FROM THE CAPEMAN, a kind of sountrack for the play he wrote, The Capeman.

My grandpa had died 3 decades before the song was released but when I heard it for the first time I felt like I was in his presence. He has always been an important person in my life, more than just the patriarch of the family. My idea of running away from home when I was a little kid was to take the bus across town to my grandparents' house where I could eat my grandmother's delicious homecooking and hear my grandfather's exciting tales. He used to tell me about how he would hide from the Cossacks in Russia when he was my age and there was a pogrom in his little town. And he told me how his whole family fled from their homeland, determined to start a new life where people didn't want to kill you because of your ethnicity or religion.

He was 12 when he came to New York. He and one brother were permitted to disembark. The rest of his family weren't. They wound up in Bahia in Brazil. My grandfather had nothing at all but he worked hard and did well for himself and thanked God for America every day of his life. He taught me about the dignity of work and he taught me about the importance of labor unions and he taught me to respect other people and their endeavors and their dreams. The first time I heard the word "socialist" was when grandfather explained what it meant to me. By that time he owned his own factory and he also explained to me about the duties of an employer to his employees. I was so lucky to have such a wonderful grandpa.

I have "Trailways Bus" on my iPod. My eyes well up every time I hear it. Remember how I said I was too imbued with empathy not to react deeply, drastically deeply, to the news about the 2 American soldiers tortured to death in Iraq yesterday? Well, the stories of immigrants to this country, like the childhood stories my gramps used to tell me, also always find a heartstring pulled inside me.

"Trailways Bus" is a series of these little stories and Simon's words and his voice-- even with the tone of his guitar-- powerfully convey the loneliness, despair, excitement, hopefulness, humanity of the immigrant experience. This is Paul Simon at his most masterful, his most poignant, his most relevant.


UPDATE: WILLIAM FISHER HAS AN EVEN BETTER STORY ABOUT HIS MOM

William Fisher at TRUTHOUT has a similar story to tell, except about his mother, Esther, a Polish immigrant. Besides the inspirational story, he points out that passing the "Stay in America" test for immigrants will be next to very difficult, though probably not more difficult than it would be for American-born citizens.

Recent tests of American point to dismal results:
"Just 22% of high school seniors had a 'proficient' understanding of how the American government works. And only one in 25 scored at the 'advanced' level. Just one in four seniors could think of just two ways the US system of government prevents the exercise of 'absolute arbitrary power.' (Among the 14 possible answers were such basics as the Bill of Rights, an independent judiciary, civilian control of the military - and the right to vote.) A third of high school seniors didn't know the Bill of Rights was written to limit the power of the federal government. Not one in ten seniors could identify two ways a democracy benefits from the active participation of its citizens. Just over a third knew that the Supreme Court pointed to the Constitution's 14th Amendment when it began to overturn segregation laws. Nearly three of every four students don't think about the First Amendment or say they take its rights for granted. Seventy-five percent of students said they thought flag burning was illegal, nearly 50 percent believed the government could censor the Internet, and many students didn't think newspapers should publish freely. In other tests, an obscene proportion of high school seniors couldn't find Iraq on a map, and only a slightly smaller group couldn't locate Mexico. College seniors-- from such schools as Yale, Northwestern, Smith and Bowdoin-- don't fare any better. For example, only 23 percent of this college group was able to correctly identify James Madison as the 'Father of the Constitution,' while 98 percent knew that Snoop Doggy Dog is a rapper and the same percentage correctly identified Beavis and Butthead!"

Fisher isn't advocating the elimination of tests for prospective new citizens. His main point is to urge that all Americans be educated. Pretty radical-- and not something Republicans, who depend of ignorance for their very existence, will ever permit.