LIghting Up: Fort Worth, Voter ID Law, and Willie

      The new Texas Voter ID law had one effect with which neither side can quibble. It got Fort Worth in the national news for something besides our mind-numbingly long summers, our sometimes-killer tornadoes, or being forever and famously known as the place where former-Baptist Sunday School teacher Willie Nelson lit up his first of countless joints.

      Before the November 5^th election, Fort Worth was ground zero for Voter ID law news. Gubernatorial candidate Wendy Davis' signing of an affidavit when she voted early and former Speaker of the House Jim Wright's problems getting a state-issued personal identification card both made national news.

      Besides getting Fort Worth in the news, the above stories are illustrative of the consequences of Texas' new voter ID law that was concocted in the same ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council) mad science laboratories that gave us those brilliant stand your ground laws.

      The law's supporters argue that requiring ID ensures the integrity of elections by stopping voter fraud, but according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a non-partisan public policy and law institute, “photo ID laws are effective only in preventing individuals from impersonating other voters at the polls — an occurrence more rare than getting struck by lightning.”

If the state legislature had to follow truth-in-packaging laws, the Voter ID law would be rightly named “The Let's Keep Texas Red a Few More Years Law,” since its real raison d'être is to hold back the inevitable demographic change in Texas as long as possible and keep Texas from turning purple or, bite your tongue, blue.

      In an op-ed written last year, Attorney General Abbott voiced the frequent Republican talking point, “Opponents of voter ID” are “unable to produce a single Texan who would be unable to vote because of the voter ID law.” While it's difficult to figure out an unknown, namely, those who didn't show up at the polls, it's not impossible.

      As statistician and uber-nerd Nate Silver has pointed out on his FiveThirtyEight blog, “The stricter laws, like those that require photo identification, seem to decrease turnout by about 2 percent as a share of the registered voter population.”

      And according to the League of Women Voter of Texas President Linda Krefting, “anywhere from 500,000 to 800,000 voters” would “not be able to present the proper identification. The concern we have is that all this flap in the news” about the voter ID law “may” end up “discourag[ing] people from turning out at the polls.”

      Though while the law affects Democrats more than Republicans, since minorities and the poor, more likely Democratic voters, are disproportionately less likely to have the necessary ID, it also suppresses some likely Republican votes, as well. If former Speaker Jim Wright was not a lifelong Democrat, his demographic – an elderly white male living in Tarrant County – trust me, absolutely screams Republican voter.

      That obvious fact was lost on some hereabouts who accused Speaker Wright of faking his problems getting proper ID for the election identification certificate or EIC. These conspiracy theorists are undoubtedly unschooled in the EIC's rather stringent requirements. Texas Observer columnist Cindy Casares joked that “the list of documentation needed for an EIC is less complicated than the tax code but not by much.”

      First you have to prove you're a US citizen, then you have to prove your identity by toting a grab bag of ID's, and of course, if your name on any these documents doesn't exactly match, you have to bring your marriage license, court order, or a divorce decree. I don't know about you, but having been married for 28 years, I couldn't put my hands on my marriage license if my life depended on it.

      And while the certificate is free, all that documentation isn't and can cost beaucoups of time, too. A certified copy of your birth certificate runs you $23 in Harris County, while marriage licenses or divorce decrees will run you $20 each. Plus, the EIC's are available at DPS offices in only thirteen of 254 counties in our sprawling state. Little wonder that The New York Times reported that “by Election Day, only 121 voter identification documents had been issued statewide” in a state with 26 million people.

      But to top it off, here in the Fort the law's implementation wasn't quite ready for prime-time. One election judge in a precinct near downtown, trying to school me on the ins and outs of the law, while he was attempting to finish his KFC take-out lunch, told me that if a voter showed up with an ID with a name that was “substantially similar” to what appeared on the voting rolls but the addresses were the same on both the ID and the registration card, he could decide whether to have him initial on the affidavit. WRONG!

      The next day Tarrant County Election Administrator Steve Raborn confirmed that the judge was in error. The similar addresses have nothing to do with whether to initial the affidavit. And it is not up to the judge to decide. If the names are similar, the voter still needs to initial to affirm his or her identity. PERIOD.

      When I went to vote at my regular polling place, a Knights of Columbus Hall, my driver's license read Kenneth Pardue, but my voter registration card had me as Kenneth Wheatcroft-Pardue, sort of a textbook example of someone with “substantially similar” names who needed to initial the affidavit. But inexplicably, I wasn't asked to initial anything, even when the Election Judge showed me a paper copy of the PowerPoint that Raborn had used to train them which showed as clear as day that voters with “substantially similar” names needed to initial the affidavits.

      My own admittedly unscientific checking of polling places near where I live found a range of 0 to 2% initialing the affidavits. For comparison, it was reported that in San Antonio one-third of voters had to initial the affidavits and in Fort Bend County 40%.

      Now while I oppose the ID law, its half-ass and inconsistent implementation just shows how unserious we are about elections and voting in this country. Instead of this patchwork system plagued by partisan politics and incompetence we should take elections out of the hands of partisan legislators and make it professional, modern, and non-partisan.

      But regardless of the Keystone Kops implementation of the law, the real question is this: does Texas which ranks last or close to last in voter participation really need more impediments to voting? As the Brennan Center study pointed out, “The voter fraud phantom . . . disenfranchises actual legitimate voters, without a corresponding actual benefit.”

      Little wonder that the Department of Justice is challenging this law. When the state allows a voter to use a concealed handgun permit but doesn't allow university ID, it's obvious to any impartial observer that this game is rigged and who it's rigged in favor of.

      One-not-so-famous citizen hereabouts, Kendall McCook, made a splash in the local news by tearing up his voter registration card in protest of the law, and promising not to vote again until the law was repealed. Who knows, maybe more citizens will get fed up and tear up their voter registration card a la Kendall McCook? Stranger things have been known to happen hereabouts. Just ask Willie.

   

October 15, 1963

           “Daddy, you even listening to me?” Homer Junior asked.

            Homer Senior was not listening. He was looking out the front plate glass window of his auto parts store. It was a clear fall day.          

        Across the street at the Stop & Wink Drive-In, the waitresses in their skin-tight black uniforms were just beginning to traipse out to the cars under the green and white striped canvas awnings. Next door to them at Stubbs’ Car Wash, young black men in cherry red coveralls were horsing around, popping each other with newly wetted towels.

Everywhere he looked, the cars, the trucks, the buses, even the people who had all just been ciphers to him before, seemed imbued with something, some God-stuff that made them come alive with meaning.

“Daddy?” Homer Junior asked again.

            “Yeah, yeah, I hear you. I ain’t deaf yet.”

            “But Daddy, are you listening to what I’m saying? You don’t go helping people because you heard something on the radio. Daddy, we aren’t in Maypearl anymore. We’re in the big city.”

          “Son, I know exactly where I’m at. I’m at Homer’s Auto Supply on Beakley Avenue in the heart of Oak Cliff. It is Tuesday, October 15, 1963. Fellow traveler John Fitzgerald Kennedy is President, Landslide Lyndon, the most popular politician among the dead, is Vice-President, and old what’s-his-name, the egghead, is in the U.N.

          “Stevenson, Daddy. Adlai Stevenson.”

          “I knew that, and I know I’m not in Maypearl either. But son, I listened to the radio this morning, and KJCG had this preacher, and I swear, he was filled with the Holy Spirit. Your mother knew I could divine that, remember?”

        “Yes, Daddy, I remember,” Homer Junior said as he leaned his angly-frame against the counter making check marks on an invoice for cork gaskets.

        “He said . . . now, son, I want you to hear this, so get your head up. Thank you. He said, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself, and do something good for some poor soul today before it’s too late.’”

       “Daddy, I’ve heard those sayings before and so have you. Why do they mean so much to you today?”

       “I don’t know, son. I guess it’s because I’m getting old. I know I haven’t been a good person. I’ve spent all my life running after stinking, filthy lucre, but you can’t worship mammon and God at the same time. I know that now, so I’m going out today to find one person and be good to him. It’s the Lord’s will.”

        “Daddy, do what you have to do. I know I’m too busy to argue with you. I’ve got to find some of that filthy lucre and pay some bills, plus I got a couple boxes of stocking to do. You go out and do a good deed if it makes you feel better, but be careful. This isn’t . . .”

       “Maypearl. I know, son. Now I’ll see you later. Don’t worry about me. The Lord has taken me into His hands.”

       Once outside Homer Senior surveyed the street. A lone black woman waiting for a bus caught his eye. Her white dress told him right away she was somebody’s maid, a poor soul just ripe for his compassion.

“Howdy, ma’am,” Homer said.

            Startled, the black woman didn’t know what to do, whether to speak or not, so she studied Homer, all the while wondering what the old cracker was up to.

           “What you want?” she finally asked.

           “I was wondering if I might give you a ride. I’d be right happy to do that, ma’am.”

          The woman’s dark eyes examined Homer, then shook her head and snorted, “You get away from me. The last woman in my family who took a ride from some old white man found herself in the family way.”

         “No, no ma’am, that’s not my intention.”

         “Yeah, he said the same thing. Now you leave me alone. I got work to do. I got to clean the Lennox’s toilets and wash their linens.”

          “All right, all right,” Homer said, then retreated to the front of the auto parts store. He tried to ignore his son standing behind the counter shaking his head, but what bothered him more was the woman at the bus stop was still eying him like he was some kind of pervert.

          But fortunately for Homer, in less than a minute, a city bus butted up against the curb and swallowed her whole. But just as Homer was fixing to breathe a sigh of relief, he spotted a man chasing the departing bus, his pencil-thin arms waving trying to get the driver’s attention. But to no avail.

        The bus, leaving a parting cloud of diesel smoke, puttered on as if the man didn’t exist. The thin man, however, didn’t take that lying down. He saluted the back of the bus with a clenched fist and a right arm at a 90-degree angle. Then for good measure hit the bus stop sign with his fist.

          Homer Junior saw all this from his stool, then watched as his daddy strode across the parking lot toward the man. While Daddy talked, the thin man spent most of his time concentrating on his bleeding knuckles.

          Homer Junior didn’t like it. Something about the man didn’t seem right. Sure, he was dressed nice enough in dark slacks, a button-down shirt with a black tie, and a white pullover sweater, but to Homer Junior he looked suspiciously like someone who’d gone to seed.

After a few minutes, the thin man followed Homer Senior to the latter’s black Buick Electra parked in front of the door. After Homer Senior let the man in the car, he stuck his head into the store.

“Son, I’m going to give this man a ride.”

Homer Junior shook his head and heaved a heavy sigh.

            “Now son, don’t be that way. This old boy’s had a whole passel of bad luck. He’s a veteran, an ex-Marine. He and his wife got one child and another one on the way. He doesn’t have any hope of getting a job unless I take him downtown for an interview.”

           “But, Daddy,” Homer Junior started to say, but his father was already out the door. Homer Junior, breaking out in a thick sweat of panic, rushed around the counter and sped out the door.

          “Daddy,” he called.

          Already in his seat, Homer Senior smiled beatifically up at his son.

         “Thanks for seeing me off, but we'll be okay,” he said.

         “All right, Daddy,” Homer Junior nodded.

         Then Homer Senior turned to the stranger, who instead of staring at his bleeding knuckles was now busy biting his nails.

“Don’t you worry,” Homer Senior said, bestowing a smile filled with the holy spirit on the poor wretch God had surely meant for him to save. “I’ll get you to the Texas School Book Depository in plenty of time for your interview, Mr. Oswald. It’s the Lord’s will.”

(Author's note: This story first appeared in scrivenerspen.org a few years ago. October 15, 1963 is the actual day Oswald got his job at the Texas School Book Depository.)

Those Old Fans of My Youth

I like light poetry but rarely write any that's any good. It all comes out as bad Ogden Nash, but this poem is about as close to being light as I ever get. It got an honorable mention in a Dallas Poetry Community poetry contest. Enjoy! Those Old Fans of My Youth . . . and just as sure, all our female relatives--the oddest assortment of married and spinster aunts, grandmas and cousins twice removed--would faint at the sight of our fingerless hands.

Fire in Galveston

From The Texas Observer, "Today we offer Ken Wheatcroft-Pardue’s “Fire in Galveston,” a three-part narrative about fires in the Oleander City—some literal, some metaphorical, and some still burning." I'm real happy about this. Somehow, I've pulled off a hat trick. In the late 80's, I had a political essay in The Texas Observer; in 2008 a couple of poems thanks to their wonderful poetry editor Naomi Shihab Nye; and now a short story on their website thanks to the contest's judge and my new hero, Dagoberto Gilb. Enjoy!

August Angst

I’m outside my portable classroom with my brand-spanking-new students to review the material we’ve just gone over. It’s a good lesson, creative, because it gets the kids up and about, but having to do with the task at hand. That’s how I roll: Reach them, teach them. http://www.fwweekly.com/2013/08/29/august-angst/

Before Boredom was Invented

 (Blogger's note: This is the original version of what the FW Weekly published last week.)

   

     When I was a child back in the sixties, summer in Houston's suburbs was endless and sometimes dangerous. Boredom, you see, had not yet been invented. We did not have the ability then to store thousands of songs or have inventions that regurgitated those songs with all the clarity of a gramophone. We did not yet have at our fingertips hundreds of TV stations playing nonstop reruns. And we did not possess cellphones that took really, really bad pictures. Yet our lives were still worth living, believe it or not.

      One languid summer afternoon, when my father was at work and my mother had taken to bed for the duration, as we used to say, with strict instructions that we not wake her unless we were pretty damn sure St. John of Patmos' Revelation was being fulfilled and Jesus Christ himself was returning robed in clouds of glory to separate the sheep from the goats, I got an idea.

      I made up my mind to wire some old radios together. We had a pile of them, rectangular, Bauhaus-like, boxy white, black, or brown clock radios with knobs and clock hands, total anachronisms now. Today's high-tech whizzes wouldn't be able to turn one on, let alone tell time.

      Being an “imaginative” child, which meant that I had already spun a huge number of tall tales to get me out or, more often, into of all sorts of jams, I thought maybe if I could wire all the radios together I could listen in on a conversation between some of Houston's Finest chasing beer-bellied robbers with raccoon masks and stripped tees or perhaps the Secret Service with their cool sunglasses and pockets brimming with Man from U.N.C.L.E. gadgets was even now eying balconies for hidden assassins nearby, or maybe some Martians were orbiting right above sprawling Houston, searching in vain for leaders to be taken to who would not be nonplussed by their green skin, multiple antennae, and oddly-shaped heads.

      I found the requisite number of old radios, took out the backs of them, and after finding some spare wire and wire cutters, I wired them all together. Then came the moment of truth. I plugged one in, and immediately all the electricity in the house went out.

      Now you need to remember that this was summer in Texas, well, in Houston, Texas, where life as we know it was impossible before freon was invented. Before freon made air-conditioned life possible only a few could survive Houston's subtropical sauna-bath-like annual summer meltdowns.

As far as I knew, the whole city had gone dark and all that wonderful life-giving cool air had stopped, too.

      At the Astrodome, the Eighth Wonder of the World, the National League's perennial doormats, the (Dis)Astros, playing a day game with no natural light, were totally blacked out right after Don Wilson threw a strikeout and radio announcer Loel Passe had only time to say, “He breeeeezed him, one more . . .”      

     At the Medical Center, Michael DeBakey was stopped in mid-cut, his sharpened scalpel frozen above someone's sternum; Mission Control, just a few miles to the south, was going dark just as a Gemini astronaut was floating into space; and all over the city technicolor movies were stopped in mid-scenes.      

     For all I knew, all because of my foolishness, riots in cinemas were now occurring, angry patrons with slick backed hair and tight Levis were throwing spare Milk Duds, popcorn, and Goobers at ducking ushers while white screens were being ripped apart by a colorful fusillade of Dots as hard as rocks.

      Since I had been raised the right way, incredible spasms of guilt began to shoot through my very soul. But suddenly all my guilt disappeared to be replaced by my second most common emotion, fear. I heard my father's footsteps outside my door. I knew it was his steps. His heavy patent leather footfalls of his Florshiem wingtips were by then etched into my young brain.

      I also knew that I was or soon would be dead because his belt and I would become one. But something truly amazing happened before I was read my last rites. My dad came in my room still dressed for work, though his tie now was loose and his suit rumpled. He didn't say anything. He didn't need to. He just looked at me askance, his thick eyebrows making two question marks, my signal that I needed to answer and PDQ.

      I'm ashamed to say it, but I hadn't the time for an elaborate lie, so I was forced against my usual practice to stick with the truth. I told him everything, and the truly weird thing was that he thought it was just hilarious. He kept asking me over and over to tell him why I wanted to wire the radios together. He loved the part about the Martians.

      I looked at my dad's face turning red from laughter and wondered if the scorching Houston sun had baked his brains or maybe being stuck in the endless traffic of the Gulf Freeway had made any diversion funny, even his only son causing a massive blackout.

      Whatever the reason was for his unusual forbearance, he escorted me out to the backyard to show me the fuse box. He then educated me on the ins and out of fuses, an important lesson, but more importantly I learned that day a bit about patience and compassion.

      At 56, I am all-too aware of my own failings – that I have not always measured up to my father's example. Even so, that day he left me an important standard. That though I had done something potentially dangerous and certainly dumb as a box of rocks, my father took pity on my young self as I confessed to him the honest truth. Truly it's a wonder he could hear me; my knees were knocking so much.

   

Dad from Uncle

http://www.fwweekly.com/2013/06/19/dad-from-u-n-c-l-e/

When I was young back in Houston in the ’60s, summer was endless and sometimes dangerous. Boredom hadn’t been invented yet. We didn’t have devices to store thousands of songs and regurgitate them with all the clarity of a gramophone. We didn’t have cell phones that took really, really bad pictures. Yet somehow our lives were still worth living.

2 poems at Blue Lake Review

http://bluelakereview.weebly.com/2-by-ken-wheatcroft-pardue.html

The Blue Guitarist
 
He's a singer without a song.
Last night his notes
just packed up and flew
under the metal door . . .

 . . .   and . . .

It is What it is

I've worn down an even half dozen of carpets
to threadbare, church mouse thickness,
proctoring, urging, mentoring, cajoling
my charges . . .