Marking the 70th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, today The Oklahoman had a story — front page — about the evolution of the term “Okie” from slur (intentional or perceived) to proud label of strength against adversity. A sidebar story looked at reactions to the book through history.

Quoted in the article (and this really impressed me, so credit where it’s due), was Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a native “Okie” who now lives in San Francisco. They mentioned her book, Red Dirt: Growing Up Okie, which is certainly appropriate for the topic at hand, but she’s a radical lefty (the subtitle of her site is “feminist, revolutionary, historian”), so getting a plug in The Oklahoman was unexpected (by me, anyway).

OPUBCO also produced a video about the how residents of Sallisaw, Oklahoma — where Steinbeck’s fictional Joad family was from — feel about the use of their town in the book (see below). The Dust Bowl didn’t hit Sallisaw much, and I suspect the town was used because of the emotional resonance of its name. Anyway, many of them are still miffed about it, and profess not to like the book or film, though it’s doubtful they’ve read it since a teacher in the video seems to indicate that they are not made to read the iconic novel, and can substitute another Steinbeck work. That way it’s much easier to continue to perpetrate the myth that Steinbeck was maligning poor folk from Oklahoma.

Anyway, it’s worth a look at the graphically enhanced online feature that expands the sidebar story from the dead tree edition into somewhat broader overview of the book’s history of controversy and acclaim.

Later today, I plan to head down to Grandfield Oklahoma, just this side of the Texas border, to join some students in a counter demo against the Phelps/Westboro Baptist/Gods Hates Fags nutjobs from Kansas.

A week ago I had never even heard of Grandfield, Oklahoma, and maybe you hadn’t either, but some bad (in my opinion) decisions by school officials have brought more than a little attention to the small town south of Lawton.

The short version: A teacher was using The Laramie Project, a play about the murder of Matthew Shepherd for the “crime” of being gay, in her Ethics and Street Law class (how cool to have such a class!). A few parents decided to complain, the teacher was told to stop using the play, but because the students were upset about that, she wanted to help them deal with the issue and did a kind of funeral for the production. The school superintendent, who is apparently a huge authoritarian (to put it kindly), decided the teacher was being insubordinate and eventually got her to resign.

The Phelps connection comes from their mission to protest whenever this play is mentioned.

Here are some links to state and national news stories.

USA Today
RHRealityCheck.org
Truthdig
Feministing
And, of course, The Oklahoman finally did get around to it on Thursday, long after the Internet was buzzing with the story, and national publications had picked it up.

I missed joining another counter demo during the recent appearance of the Phelps in Oklahoma City (after gay pastor Scott Jones led a prayer in the state legislature), so I really appreciate them coming back down to our state. I’m really beginning to think that in a way they are doing those who believe in tolerance, love and equality a real service by showing the full extreme of what anti-gay bigotry is all about. I hope those who cloak their fear and bigotry behind more “respectable” veneer really take a look at their side of the fence and see if that’s really where they want to be.

I think Sean Penn addressed those people best when accepting the Oscar for his performance as Harvey Milk, another murdered gay man:

… sit and reflect and anticipate their great shame and the shame in their grandchildren’s eyes if they continue that way of support.

Thanks to James Branum at jmbzine.com for organizing statewide participation in the student led demo in Grandfield. I feel privileged to be able to support the courageous young people who are showing compassion and solidarity — the real “Christian” values — in the very difficult circumstances present at this time for the open-minded in Grandfield.

I learn from Sinister that Tulsa World covered the Join the Impact! event there with a pretty decent article. No shocker: it was a not insignificant news event in the city (300 in attendance) and the city’s NEWSpaper did a little writeup about it.

But the 300 that attended the corresponding rally in Oklahoma City (not to mention the thousands across the country) were ignored by the city’s paper — I no longer will incorrectly call it a “newspaper” but it is printed on paper, so at least that part’s true. Again, no surprise, because the Oklahoman habitually refuses to cover the news and events that come from the liberal or progressive end of the political spectrum. “Habitually refuses” is a nice way of saying they have conspired and are conspiring to erase our existence from their pages. It is the largest paper in the state (though shrinking rapidly! Yay!) and it still has a lot of influence in political and cultural arenas (again, less and less so thanks to the internet) so the conspiracy is not piddling, even as their overall status is being reduced.

The OKC event did get covered by a couple of local TV news teams, which is great, but that doesn’t lessen the harm done by being erased from history time and again by the Oklahoman.

Frankly, I’m fed up with it and am resolved to do something about it. I’m exploring several options — including boycotts, petitions, demonstrations. A meeting with the paper’s management is a good place to start, but without some kind of threat to their revenue, I wouldn’t expect such a meeting to have any effect — those people are ideological and have to be moved by other forces than an appeal to simple fairness.

I lived in Waco, Texas, for a while, and I guarantee you that that area is politically and culturally more conservative overall than Central Oklahoma, yet the newspaper there covered peace and justice events — and not just during the nearby Camp Casey action in August 2005, but before that and well after. We might have liked more expansive and positive coverage, and they didn’t cover every single thing we did — no one expects that. But we regularly got a photo of an action — even if only four or five people participated. But they didn’t ignore our press releases, or refuse to send a camera person and/or reporter when they had one available, or keep the fact of our existence and work hidden from their readers. They covered the fucking news that was happening in their community!

Thankfully, the Web gives citizens the opportunity to participate in a new kind of journalism that is rising from the grassroots. Old media is losing this battle because they don’t or can’t adjust to new realities. They are making attempts to use the Internet, but struggling to find a successful method to make it profitable.

So if the Oklahoman wants to continue their march to obsolecence, they can continue to alienate a significant portion of their community by being ideological and reactionary beyond all reason. I’ll dance on their grave, but in the meantime, I expect them to function as the newspaper they purport to be and once in a while cover events their owners and editorial board don’t necessarily endorse.

Oh, and the effing letters to the editor situation is also now on the table. Enough! We’re not going to take it anymore!

I know that we all complain about the Oklahoman and that those who’ve lived here a lot longer than I have maybe just become resigned to the status quo. I hope that we can all band together at this vulnerable moment for the Oklahoman’s bottom line, and make the changes we need happen. Yes, we can!

Stay tuned, I will elaborate about some action steps on this in the near future.

There was an article in Sunday’s Oklahoman about this family of five brothers and sisters who play piano and are reportedly making classical music cool for kids.

The 5 Browns will perform in Edmond on the 17th and Stillwater the 18th.

Nov 17, Edmond  Armstrong Cultural Foundation
Nov 17, Edmond  Herbert W Armstrong College
Nov 18, Stillwater  Oklahoma State

But let’s not let any appearance in the Angie and Dave Daily prejudice our expectations, okay; these young men and women seem talented to my untrained ears. I actually liked “Flight of the Bumble-Bee” better, but it wasn’t available for embed, so here’s “Rhapsody in Blue” for five pianos.

Thanks to the comedians in the Oklahoman’s editorial board, their “Scissortails” collection is becoming my Saturday morning laugh track.

Today it was this gem:

If you click on the image you’ll get a larger version, where the joke will be more obvious — if you are at all familiar with Oklahoma City’s lovely Union Station. Because you won’t recognize the place.

That’s because the drawing is of Kansas City’s “Union Station” — another lovely building, to be sure. New York City also has a nice place they call Union Station — as do dozens if not hundreds of other American cities. See, there used to be this train company called … ah, never mind, let’s get back to the comedy.

Here’s a close up of the big fat stupid error from the brain trust at OPubCo:
Finally, here’s a photo of the actual Union Station in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, which sits just blocks from the building housing the Oklahoma Publishing Company.

 

And a close up of the building’s historic site plaque.

 

Thanks to Tom Elmore for providing the location of the station in the Oklahoman’s drawing.

The shame of western Oklahoma, The Oklahoman newspaper, has a semi-regular feature called "Monday Morning Quarterbacks," which mostly just reviews conservative voices. The only time they quote liberals or progressives is to mock or refute them. Like today:

CURDLE YOUR YERDLE
The Left Wing is playing for keeps this election cycle. The king of liberal/progressive blogging, Markos Moulitsas rallies the troops at dailykos.com with his own adaptation of Knute Rockne. Libs must "do everything necessary allowable under the law to win because elections have consequences," he writes. "This isn’t about who is most pure, but about taking the fight to the enemy ... and fighting fire with fire." Later Kos writes about having the "killer instinct," rubbing salt in conservatives’ wounds and forcing them to go into debt. What’s next, burning their villages?

Umm...project much?

This is precious. Today, in “Scissortails” a hodge-podge board editorial — usually good for a laugh anyway — the Oklahoman takes issue with something that happened on MSNBC during the Democratic Convention in Denver. (Now you know none of them were watching MSNBC, I’m sure they got this news of the on-air dustup between Keith Olbermann and Joe Scarborough from Little Green Footballs or something.)

Get the shovel!
When MSNBC host/commentator Joe Scarborough was discussing positive developments in the John McCain campaign, fellow commentator Keith Olbermann was heard to say, “Jesus, Joe, why don’t you get a shovel?” When Olbermann opens his mouth, more than a shovel is needed — a backhoe, perhaps, or a front-end loader. Executives at NBC News/MSNBC finally came to their senses and yanked Olbermann and Chris Matthews as co-anchors of political coverage. The commentators were posing as newsmen on election nights and during the national political conventions. Fox News Network, which Olbermann frequently blasts, never used Bill O’Reilly in that capacity. In our view, Olbermann, Matthews and O’Reilly are all Cat 3 blowhards. They have their own shows and they shouldn’t be anchoring the news alongside Tom Brokaw or Brit Hume. With Olbermann on stage, NBC had become the “Nasty Broadcasting Network.” What took the execs so long to figure out it wasn’t appropriate for him to be an anchor?

Now, notice they didn’t mention exactly what it was that Joe was saying when Keith called him on it (inadvertently on mic or not). So let me help them, and you, out with this little video.

As usual, Joe Scarborough was reeling off the GOP talking points, which I guess is why the Oklahoman’s editorial board felt so at home with his commentary.

May I also point out again, that Joe Scarborough admitted to being a Republican tool with rare candor just the other day, which I diaried here.

MATTHEWS: [...] Two days from now — I want to ask you, what will we talk about two days from now?
SCARBOROUGH: Whatever the McCain campaign wants us to talk about, because the McCain campaign is assertive. [...]

I’m sure we won’t be reading about that MSNBC dustup in the Oklahoman, ever.

And as for calling MSNBC the “Nasty Broadcasting Network” because of Keith. (Catchy phrase, no?) Though they were careful to lump Fox’s O’Reilly in their list of “Cat 3 blowhards,” they never called Fox “nasty” or anything approximate, despite years of dispicable behavior. No, the name calling is reserved for all things liberal — that’s the one constant from all Republicans ever since Nixon got pardoned and (Fox News owner) Rupert Murdoch dumped journalism in the toilet.

In today’s Oklahoman, in an AP story about President Bush’s new ethics guidelines for White House employees, the name of the Deputy Chief of Staff, which hasn’t exactly been scarce in the news lately, is misspelled. It’s only eight letters long in its entirety; how hard can it be to get it right?

In the online AP version, oddly, only the last name “Rove” is used in its first use in the story, which is bad form for AP. So, evidently papers using the story needed to fill in the first name. I checked at another paper that ran it, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (selected at random), and they have it spelled correctly.

So whatever editor “corrected” the copy for the Oklahoman, performed the ultimate editorial faux pas: making an even worse error than the one they were trying to fix. I’m sure that person will be moving right on up the Gaylord express career ladder!

Amazing letter to the editor in today’s Oklahoman. (Not the usual uninformed anti-liberal rant, which in itself is notable.)

Volunteer force is floundering

Having served in the military recently, I believe I can shed some light on the questions posed by William R. Melton (Your Views, July 10). He wonders if our fighting men can maintain good morale and continue to fight under these conditions. They can’t. The morale of our enlisted men is already low. Most of the young enlisted men who do the majority of the fighting are tired of the lies from this administration. They know they are not defending America’s freedom; instead, they are wrapped up in a personal vendetta gone bad.

Will the volunteer force crash and burn? It already has! I would never allow one of my children or other family members to volunteer to serve in the military under its current leadership. I’d try to talk anyone out of volunteering to serve in an organization that’s governed recklessly and based on fiction.

Michael Marsh, Oklahoma City

BTW, Oklahoman editors: I think you mean “foundering.”