Why You Should See “The Mountaintop” by Ron Malzer

“I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. … Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.” 

–Dr. Martin Luther King, speaking at an April 3, 1968 rally in Memphis, less than 24 hours before he was murdered. –

Fifty-three years later, it’s still bone-chilling to recall these words spoken by Dr. King. Why did he decide, at age  39, and while standing on the apex of the civil rights/anti-war/anti-poverty movement, to prepare his followers to carry on after his death? 

Acclaimed playwright Katori Hall takes on this question in “The Mountaintop”, an artistic imagining of King’s last night, firmly grounded in historical research. Hall’s script puts Dr. King in front of us with his human weaknesses in full display. 

Weary, pained to be away from his wife and children, under attack from many quarters, and with the FBI bugging his rooms and waging psychological warfare against him, King seeks comfort from cigarettes. And when Camae, the maid on her first day on the job enters Room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, King’s longing for comfort in other forms is clear.

“My decision at the beginning was that I wasn’t going to pull any punches” says Emily Ware, who directed the play. “The public figures and the people we idolize were people at the core,” she added. 

Maid Camae is sexy, and she knows it.  What she lacks in formal education, she more than makes up for with her lived experience and cleverness. In cutting words, she puts Dr. King in his place; she is well-suited to take on the 20th century’s most powerful orator.

Gender and class tensions crackle between these two characters. And there is much humor, remarkably, in a play centering on a man facing his mortality. Challenged to give a description of her work, Camae snaps back “I clean up other people’s messes.” 

Camae also gives voice to  the  challenge from Malcolm X that King’s approach of marching for nonviolence is doomed to failure. King, meanwhile, is feeling deep remorse that a recent march he called ended in the death of a youth at the hands of police.

We feel the currents churning in King’s mind on the eve of his killing. Claps of thunder are striking on that fateful night, triggering in him breath-choking panic attacks, much in the way that a combat veteran gets triggered by a sudden noise. 

The play will draw you in to the torment and anguish this great man faced in his efforts to point us toward the Promised Land. You will also feel the deep ache in his heart as he sensed, correctly, that he would be killed well before we would reach Canaan. 

The handling of Dr. King’s death is one unlike any treatment you have seen before, and the connections between 1968 and our current time are made clear by a director-written postscript unique to this production. Director Ware says she wants audiences to come away from this play feeling Dr. King’s “love for his work and his belief in what he was doing, and that contagious passion.”

The poet Nikita Gill has written “Heroes are never born fearless. They become heroes by facing their fears, by meeting them head on and saying, ‘You do not control me, or own me anymore’.” King is shown to be far from fearless as his life is under attack from many places, high and low. Yet he is unyielding in his fight for the dignity, worth, fair pay, and safe working conditions for the sanitation workers of Memphis, and his quest for an end to poverty and war in our world.

The Mountaintop brings home Dr. King’s suffering, while giving a window into his unique ability to transform human suffering into a divine vision, that of a world where peace and justice reign. 

La Crosse Community Theatre’s “The Mountaintop” stars Shaundel Spivey as Preacher King, Darrell Ferguson as his understudy, and Katrina Sletten  in the role of Camae. You can see it at the Weber Center this coming weekend, Thursday through Sunday. (An additional weekend may be added). For ticket information: https://lacrossetheatre.org/, or (608) 784-9292 (3-5 PM weekdays).

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Take away Ron Johnson’s death-promoting megaphone on Election Day By Ron Malzer

As published in The Cap Times. 

On Jan. 9 Ron Johnson announced, shamelessly, that he is asking for yet another term. After 12 years in Washington, he’s refusing to let go of his global megaphone.

Never mind that six years ago, he promised that if given a second term it would be his last. His “I am not a career politician” and his no-third-term pledge turned out to be deceit, self-serving declarations to be broken when convenient.

Johnson’s global megaphone and deceitfulness can be shut down, but only with a strong pro-democracy turnout on Nov. 8.

Johnson is a self-proclaimed believer in Ayn Rand and the worldview she laid out in “Atlas Shrugged.” It’s simple: Billions of people on Earth are of no value and just take up space. A few geniuses move civilization forward. Government is evil, because all it does is get in the way of the geniuses.

The 2019 onset of the pandemic gave Johnson the perfect opportunity to showcase his malignant worldview. He wasted no time, advocating pushing workers back on the job prematurely and hazardously. To that end was his “Death is a part of life” USA Today editorial early in the pandemic.

Two days later, Johnson took to Real Clear Politics to publish this deadly piece of disinformation: “COVID-19 is transmitted primarily from the hands to the face. … (Workers), train yourself NOT TO TOUCH YOUR FACE.”

How convenient. Business owners were handed Johnson’s life-threatening false information that empowered them to ignore social distancing minimums in their plants and offices. Johnson’s dangerous medical quackery enabled them to blame their workers for resulting illnesses and deaths. Within a month of Johnson’s cruel campaign, more than 4,000 COVID cases and 20 COVID-related deaths were reported among American meatpacking plants alone.

Johnson also raged very publicly against vaccination and used his Senate committee chair powers to promote the pseudo science-backed deworming agent ivermectin.

The climax to Johnson’s war against health and medical science came on Dec. 1, World AIDS day, when, astoundingly, he went after Dr. Anthony Fauci for having “overhyped” the more than 32 million deaths worldwide from COVID-19 and AIDS.

Johnson’s lack of shame allows him to call himself “pro-life” and to post on his website, “As a compassionate society we have an obligation to protect life, especially the life of the most vulnerable among us.”

Imagine this future scenario: It’s January 2023. Sen. Mandela Barnes rises to the U.S. Senate floor declaring that America needs to overhaul its badly broken health care system. Or Sen. Sarah Godlewski is drafting federal tax code changes transferring the tax burden from middle- and working-class voters to those of high income.

Or even: Ron Johnson has been ousted, once and for all, and succeeded by any of the people now campaigning for the Aug. 9 Democratic U.S. Senate nomination on pro-health care, pro-environment, and pro-democracy platforms: Wausau physician Gillian Battino, Milwaukee Bucks executive Alex Lasry, Appleton restaurant owner Kou Lee, Milwaukee Alderwoman Chantia Lewis, or consultant Adam Murphy.

Or that one of these progressives has taken Johnson’s seat: Outagamie County Executive Tom Nelson, Millennial Action Project founder Steven Olikara, legal, security, and technology consultant Peter Peckarsky, developmentally disabled community advocate Jeff Rumbaugh, or Wisconsin Department of Military Affairs emergency management administrator Darrell Williams.

The blueprint for victory is clear, but it will require energy and a lot of person-to-person networking to carry out. The messaging: If you want America to keep from descending into an autocracy with single-party rule, vote on Nov. 8, and insist that your family members and friends vote.

Republicans will be tossing out red meat to the resentful, using baseless tropes such as, “They’re teaching our kids to hate America.” Wisconsin’s Republican legislators are also working to create burdensome obstacles to voting for any geographic area or demographic group that votes progressive.

Wisconsin has three pre-November elections in 2022 — February, April and August — and they are all valuable opportunities to get ready for the pivotal Nov. 8 races and to foil the Republicans’ anti-democracy campaign.

Johnson is an apologist for the Jan. 6 violent coup, and a spreader of deadly falsehoods about COVID. We can hold him accountable for promoting death in the COVID era, and his pro-violence stance regarding the violent coup last January.

America is not alone in facing the threat of brutal autocracy. In the Philippines, vigilantes receive government blessing to shoot people on sight. In Vladimir Putin’s Russia, jailings and killings are used to silence opposition. We must not go down that path.

Let’s make a firm commitment: Come what may, we and those we know who value democracy will march to the polls on Nov. 8, and we will defeat Ron Johnson and his right-wing wrecking crew.

Ron Malzer: The La Crosse public school district, envisioning a brighter future

La Crosse Tribune, Sunday January 9, 2022:  Editorial Link at https://lacrossetribune.com/opinion/columnists/ron-malzer-the-la-crosse-public-school-district-envisioning-a-brighter-future/article_6872e088-ae08-5d0f-a02c-42c0d6e0f07d.html

How does a community bounce back from a calamity? Many losses must be grieved, ongoing challenges must be met, and the needs of the future must be envisioned.

The coronavirus pandemic now engulfs America. COVID-19 has persisted for two years; it’s a tough time to be forward-looking. Yet it can be done.

On December 30, I spoke with Dr. Aaron Engel, superintendent of the La Crosse Public School District, and Dr. Juan Jimenez, who is both associate dean at Western Technical College, and president of the La Crosse School Board. I asked them to tell us how the pandemic has impacted public education, and how they see the future of public education in La Crosse.

Dr. Jimenez began by saying “Education had to adapt much quicker than it ever anticipated,” with major shifts in K-12 education delivery needed, in some cases literally overnight. With in-person contact not possible at first, school systems had to figure out how to support families having special needs, he reported. Currently, teachers of entering high school freshmen now need to teach ninth-grade content, and, at the same time, find ways to enhance education to make up for lost time.

Dr. Engel estimated that students on average lost 10% of academic skills compared to what is seen historically, with some signs of catching up in place. During the period of virtual instruction, he said, “we saw a social/emotional loss in terms of how to interact with others.” Teachers were pressed, he added, to be informal counselors seeking to address mental health needs.

Educational and career pathways are diverse, Dr. Engel added. He spoke enthusiastically about the school district’s addition of Britta Rotering, Supervisor of Career and Technical Education. She serves as the district’s point person for assuring that our high schools are providing students a springboard for multiple future careers, including work demanding highly technical skills, and apprenticeship-based career development.

The district is in active dialogue with the La Crosse community about the possibility of having a single state-of-the-art building to serve all La Crosse public high school students. One option would have our three current middle schools transitioning into the two current high school buildings.

Dr. Engel walked me through the economics of longer-term school financing. With a facility footprint that is 20 or 30 years old, he indicated, building maintenance costs are resource-draining. “Consolidating … would allow us to save maybe $3 to $5 million a year, which would allow us to invest in kids, instead of investing in old infrastructure.”

Dr. Jimenez, who holds a doctoral degree in developmental education administration, authored a dissertation on developing effective learning center spaces in postsecondary education. He told me that there are examples to draw on where far-sighted construction planning put in high capacity that anticipated longer-term needs, and was ready for future leaps forward in technology and education.

Chicago re-built after its great fire of 1871, which took the lives of nearly 300, burned 17,000 buildings, and left about 100,000 people homeless. Sadly, their first reaction was to blame without evidence an Irish immigrant woman, Mrs. O’Leary. But the city then picked itself back up, and revitalized. Visionary architects and city planners did their part. “The Great Fire transformed lives in Chicago and gave the city [a reputation as] a place of renewal, progress, and great possibilities,” declares D. Bradford Hunt, chair of the history department at Chicago’s Loyola University.

We, too, can build a brighter future for the La Crosse community.

Six months after COVID-19 first struck America, Columbia University educator and researcher Dr. Radhika Iyengar published an essay online. Titled “Education as a path to a sustainable recovery from COVID-19”, her essay brings home this point: “COVID-19 has disrupted education for millions of children across the globe. The education community is re-imagining and re-designing to build back better.”

Thinking and acting locally, we need to be in active dialogue with our educators, co-creating educational structures and planning models to address challenges of the 21st Century. As we digest the impact of the last two years, and manage day-to-day survival, we also need to take responsibility for building a positive future, for the sake of our kids, and our grandchildren.