aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Monday, December 10, 2007

Young: “I don’t really think about words”

Political Insider has the story on how Andy Young’s comments on Obama came to light. They were recorded on Sept. 5, but only “took the Internet by storm” over the weekend.

Of course, that storm was created with only 36,000 views of the full clip, and another 5,000 or so of its YouTube variant. AP, CNN and the blogosphere steered the storm.

I was taken by his recollections of Martin Luther King, knowing he was there with King on that fatal day in 1968 in Memphis, knowing he was in Selma when the police turned the dogs and fire hoses on women and children, knowing what he’d seen and been through and fought for.

Earlier in the talk he said that he could get “most anything” through the UN without a Chinese veto because he brought them up to his “house” on the 42nd floor Waldorf Astoria for his mother-in-law’s real southern cooking. And that the Palestinians and Moshe Dyan wanted him to broker piece in the Middle East.

He was clearly enjoying telling his tales, and I enjoyed listening…

“I don’t really think about words. Now Martin was an orator. Martin Luther King thought about words. He was an English major at Morehouse. He had memorized long passages of Shakespeare and W.H. Auden and all the poets. Knew the Bible. Almost had a photographic memory. So for him, the oratory was important. I just never was into it that much.

“I started out very early figuring that I had to say what was in my heart. And I didn’t really worry about how it came out. That’s the reason I get in trouble every now and then. That quite often people will misunderstand or misinterpret what’s in my heart. Because I don’t censor myself.”

His words were a blip in the weekend’s political news, drowned out by The OPRAH WINFREY Show.

Bill Clinton - who really might have been a better president had he waited 8 years - was asked about Young’s comments on The Early Show this morning. Now Bill Clinton, there’s a man with a gift for words:

Mr. Clinton chuckled [said] he and young had “been friends a long time, and you know, my (current) office (being) in Harlem, I’ve always been close to the African-American community. I think we’re trying to build an America where we’re all pulling in the same direction. And you know, Hillary and I have been working on a lot of these issues together that are very important to African-Americans now.”

Later, the former president added, “I think that there are a lot of people across the color line now that want to give all our children a chance and all our people a chance, and that’s the kind of America we’ve got to build.”