tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-12179317532778773092024-02-22T09:01:16.977-08:00Black Dog in White Snow"Since he was capable of observing, he grew fond of observing in silence. ... And if it was necessary to focus the gaze and remain on the lookout for hours and days, even for years, well there was no finer thing that this to do."
-- Amos Oz, "To Know a Woman"
Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.comBlogger97125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-23466992017860374122023-08-19T10:00:00.006-07:002023-08-28T11:51:23.727-07:00When the Light Comes Up Slowly, Slowly<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sMCH4X46lhDATOx5ThxKPz3LA175LrJFbwAecrJw8ihwQALXcYuGxpq2f2nvXMxFdOQTX-rjjoL9AgvnmhWB0NPMMQvVbrpfNYyx9vwTt7TIYPHA4N_UTKjOdxksfp-BlWVxyPRZnGjlxRWcvqLLSigA5K7roZmX-Y2cmr1iA5xsh-SdKSS3BvHjf92a/s3864/SUNRISE%20OVER%20OCEAN.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2576" data-original-width="3864" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9sMCH4X46lhDATOx5ThxKPz3LA175LrJFbwAecrJw8ihwQALXcYuGxpq2f2nvXMxFdOQTX-rjjoL9AgvnmhWB0NPMMQvVbrpfNYyx9vwTt7TIYPHA4N_UTKjOdxksfp-BlWVxyPRZnGjlxRWcvqLLSigA5K7roZmX-Y2cmr1iA5xsh-SdKSS3BvHjf92a/s320/SUNRISE%20OVER%20OCEAN.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><i>He says, “You are very brave.”</i><p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>She lowers the bucket. “What is your name?”<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>He tells her. She says, “When I lost my sight, Werner, people said I was brave. When my father left, people said I was brave. But it is not bravery; I have no choice. I wake up and live my life. Don’t you do the same?”<o:p></o:p></i></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><i>He says, “Not in years. But today. Today maybe I did.” </i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p>Anthony Doerr’s
“All the Light We Cannot See,” published in 2014, had been taunting me from my
bookshelf for quite a few years and I started it and stopped it and started
again more times than I could count. It moves so slowly, so deliberately, with
attention to such fine details of sensory perception, and all of it rendered
more arduous to navigate (for impatient readers like me) by switches in
time, back and forth. The effect approximates what I think it must be like to be blind—to be a
blind young girl whose loving father has built a miniature of her town in Nazi-occupied France so she
might learn to navigate it safely, a girl who learns to live one
step at a time, who wakes each morning and lives her difficult and beautiful life
as it is, tap-tap-tapping along the cobblestone streets with her walking stick,
counting the sewer drains as she goes as markers of her progress. A fiercely resolute girl who as a young teenager will find herself hiding in the attic of her house alone while a Nazi with no good intent is prowling her house below, and she prepares herself at the entrance to the attic with a knife in her hands and thinks to herself: <i>Come and get me</i>. </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">It pays many
times over to persevere with the story of this young girl, Marie Laure, and that
of Werner, conscripted as a teenager from a poor, mining town in Germany, gifted
at mechanics and physics and telemetry--the science of wireless transmission and tracking of data (Doerr includes in the opening page, this dark quote from Goebbels: "It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio."). </p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Marie
Laure loses sight as age six, and she will have to learn to navigate her
blindness and the much darker pitch of the war that envelopes her and
everything she loves when the Nazis occupy France and the Allied forces invade.
Werner, bright blonde but diminutive for his age, is prized for his genius and, after time at a brutal
Nazi youth camp, is attached to a special Army unit assigned to ferret out resistance.</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Marie Laure’s
father is a locksmith employed by the Museum of Natural History in Paris. They
flee the capital when the Nazi occupation is imminent and embark on an arduous
journey to the seaside town of Saint Malo, to the home of Marie Laure’s reclusive
great-uncle Entienne and his housekeeper. There, the father, surreptitiously
aiding the resistance, constructs the miniature of her new town. The chapters
are short—one imagines the blind learn to navigate by living more closely to
the present moment, one short step at a time, a series of discreet sensory
episodes—and these will keep the reader going. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">The same
attention to detail renders viscerally what it is like to live in the eye of
total warfare in a time of siege when the Allied forces invade, the way it
consumes everyone and everything in its path, raining destruction on
everything. I confess to growing frustrated with this story at times (mustn’t
the world be frustrating for the blind, at least when they are young and still
learning to navigate?), especially those scenes of war when Allied bombing is
turning Saint Malo to rubble—so disorienting when Werner and his comrades are
barely staying alive beneath the ruble of a hotel they had been using as a
base. So much darkness, so hard to see. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">But it is love, war’s
opposite, that heralds the light, when Werner, escaped from the rubble, witnesses
Marie Laure treading her way perilously through the streets with her cane. He
has seen so much death and destruction, has stood by silently in the face of
enormous cruelty and crime, a teenager himself still, trapped in a murderous
regime. The story begins to fall into place, all the threads coming together,
the dawning light illuminating slowly everything we couldn’t see. In time, Marie
Laure is left to fend for herself alone in her great uncle’s house, pursued by two
German soldiers with very different aims—Werner, who is in love, and a
corpulent and cancer-stricken officer in search of a diamond (said to be a
blessing or a curse or both) that Marie Laure’s father bequeathed to her. The
narrative of this pursuit is a page-turner. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">This book is
about many things—bravery and its opposite, kindness and its opposite, love and
war, the immense and gorgeous intricacy of the natural world and its durability
in the face of unnatural forces of destruction. The novel is unsparing in its
depiction of the bottomless and savage cruelty of the Nazis, and it does cause
one to contemplate what must have happened to German society in the years
preceding the war. But this is no polemic about fascism and the story’s German
characters are rendered sympathetically; there is not a polemical word in the
novel. Still, whether Doerr intended it or not, the story is also, I believe, a
powerful anti-war narrative. The beauty of the natural world and of the normal,
natural life Doerr depicts before and long after the war seem pitted against
its opposite—the war, so deeply and profoundly unnatural, so abnormal, so destructive
of normalcy. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;">Some of us, maybe most, busy ourselves blindly with coping in a world we assume to be
fundamentally adversarial, one in which we assume we are fundamentally alone. But this work is also, finally, about the
connectedness of all things, of all lives, across time. Like Marie Laure and
Werner, our narratives, all of ours, have crossed at some point or will, though
we may never know it in this lifetime. This beautiful novel gives us a glimpse of
a brilliant light that courses through all of time, through all of our lives, whether
we see it or not. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 150%; margin-bottom: 0in;"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p> </o:p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-28941922175240630212022-03-22T10:33:00.015-07:002022-05-02T16:56:50.447-07:00A Very Lucky Young Lady: The Worst Person in the World<p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjADNpUm2WimsQc0uCOxFztr7JMiLs_O-Fld8rShqFMf-9EoHy_fOBjual9KFdXsPm5pxonvys_R89Jfqu39l3KH03-WPYDL2f1t5KuJnutGop44kZsHek_5Uf71nMfrLTCCyMfNmMqqfPOIVi5TNwIwOEc1HkpXlRUFG1lxrzpDUUaRTzr9c_Dv1OYaA/s480/hqdefault.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="360" data-original-width="480" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjADNpUm2WimsQc0uCOxFztr7JMiLs_O-Fld8rShqFMf-9EoHy_fOBjual9KFdXsPm5pxonvys_R89Jfqu39l3KH03-WPYDL2f1t5KuJnutGop44kZsHek_5Uf71nMfrLTCCyMfNmMqqfPOIVi5TNwIwOEc1HkpXlRUFG1lxrzpDUUaRTzr9c_Dv1OYaA/s320/hqdefault.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><p><span style="font-family: verdana;"> (<i>Reader alert: despite my best efforts I may not have succeeded in disguising certain spoiler alerts</i>)</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">“I feel like I’m playing a supporting role in my own life,”
says Julie the heroine of the Norwegian-language sensation, The Worst Person in
the World, and it struck me later this may be more literally true than is at
first apparent, truer than she means. A movie about a contemporary 20-something turned 30-year-old
woman—beautiful and bright and privileged—as she roves about between romances,
parties and careers might strike you as feather light (and would have struck me
as leadenly boring if you’d described it to me that way). But i</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">n telling the story of an extraordinarily fortunate contemporary young woman, this movie manages to be visually compelling (there is always a lot to look at) and emotionally provocative. G</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">iven some
time I think The Worst Person in the World may be
about the weightiest movie I have seen in a long time. It is never boring. </span><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Julie’s story is told in 12 chapters, a prologue and an
epilogue. Prologue is medical school where she has a promising start but
decides mid-stream that she wants to pursue psychology. That doesn’t last long
at all, and the next thing is photography. She’s working in a bookstore when
her career aspirations seem to take a backseat to her love life. She meets
40-year old Aksel, a graphic novel artist of some renown, at a party and goes
home with him, where he sagely tells her that they should stop before it gets
started because, owing to their difference in age, it isn’t going to last. Leaving
his flat, she decides then and there that she is in love with him, turns back
and tumbles into his bed. During this incarnation of herself she writes an essay, "Oral Sex in the Era of Me-Too" that goes viral. Aksel will turn out to be right, it won’t
last (he is nevertheless stunned and heartbroken when she breaks it to him). In
a chapter entitled “Cheating,” Julie wanders out of a book party for Aksel and
into another party, uninvited, where she meets Eivind, also living with someone
else. They get drunk and have an eccentric erotic encounter that actually involves
no cheating. But it spells the end of Aksel and Julie. She moves in with
Eivind, whose ex has schooled him in all the ways to feel guilty about first
world privilege. (“People die of thirst in Chile because avocados require so
much water.”) Julie and Eivind as a couple will, we learn, also have an
expiration date.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But while Julie and Aksel
are over as an item, the film isn’t done with Aksel whose wrenching post-Julie saga
becomes the pivot-point of a story that turns terminally serious at approximately
the point when Julie ceases to be a 20-something. The weight of Aksel’s
story and his suffering is such that Aksel unavoidably becomes the main
character, and Julie the supporting role. <o:p></o:p></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Not at all incidentally, a</span><span style="font-family: verdana;">longside Aksel’s story is a motif that reveals itself over and over throughout the film. Children. Aksel wanted them, Julie didn’t. They attend a summer overnight party where a guest’s young child throws a tantrum and at night they overhear the parents having a vicious argument about the stresses of child rearing. At that party she crashes where she meets Eivind, she mischievously spoofs a cluster of mothers by pretending to be a pediatrician and claiming that "the latest research" shows hugging and cuddling your children will traumatize them. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Eivind and Julie both forswear children, but later, after their demise as a couple, Julie is pleased to spot him from the window of her apartment on the street, married and blissfully pushing a stroller.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">This meditation on progeny, on regeneration, is reinforced by what I regard as the film's most inspired moment: During a birthday celebration for Julie at her mother's home (where the essay on oral sex is awkwardly received) the camera veers to photographs of family ancestors arranged in frames on a piano. The tepid ambiance of a 21st century birthday party is suspended and the narrative suddenly shifts to tell the stories of five or six women, long since passed on, who were not nearly so lucky. This one died prematurely, that one went blind. None of them had the choices that all of us--women and men--take for granted today, but lived the lives that were granted them, a solemn and bracing reminder of the preeminence of fortune and circumstance, and of the simple, inarguable truth that we owe our lives (whatever they are like) to those who bore us. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Julie is far from the worst person in the world, but the
title is meant to tease out the judgement, the disapproval of the way Julie
lives her life and the choices she does and doesn't make that some of us who see this sly, inventive,
intelligent, frequently funny and finally searing film may be unable to avoid. “I
never follow through on anything,” she tearfully confesses to Aksel, long after
they are history as a couple.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Well, she’s right, she doesn’t and those of us who like to
think we follow through on things might wish she would grow up. More than that,
she is luckier than she deserves to be. A pivotal point in the story arrives
when Julie is confronted with a life-altering choice; many a viewer will feel
certain they know the choice she would probably make if she had her own way.
But then, just like that, out of the blue, the choice is made for her, and she
is relieved of the dilemma or even the difficulty of making a decision. Lucky,
lucky young lady.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">But here is the thing....Julie is neither immature nor lacking in self-awareness. She has seen up close in Aksel what the stakes are in life, how contingent her own good fortune is--and she continues to be more or less pleased with herself and the world. This quality may madden some, but it is also part of what makes this story endearing: Julie is not ashamed to be happy. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">At least one <a href="https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/02/the-worst-person-in-the-world-the-worst-role-model-in-the-movies/">reviewer</a> has fallen it seems for the bait and decided that even if Julie is not the worst person in the world, the
story is the worst sort of celebration of conscienceless privilege. Talk about
missing the point. </span><span style="font-family: verdana;">A smarter “conservative” critical take might have focused on
something other than Julie and her over-lucky life, something else entirely: the
absence of any religious, spiritual or metaphysical response to the starkness
of the story. Scandavian countries are said to be among the least religious in the
world and in the entire course of the movie—in which we see any number of visual
shots (becoming and not-so-becoming) of Oslo—I don’t believe there is so much
as a parting or passing shot of a church or a cross or religious iconography of any kind.
The tangible world is what there is.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: verdana;">Which only sharpens the knife edge that lay (very, very barely) hidden beneath this charming story of a charmed young lady. The Worst Person in
the World is finally a smart, sometimes funny, believable and ultimately solemn meditation
on a question of terminal importance—<i>What will we do with our short-lived
freedom?</i>— whose poignancy is underscored by a young woman who insists on
answering it her own way. </span><o:p></o:p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-89882419906911837012021-12-11T18:10:00.030-08:002021-12-20T17:16:22.687-08:00Prague: A Fairy Tale in Stone<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5p5xYBfg20L83PPd9BZjnWU3ecznI-ZMpTULsbt9kHFTqPqb2-fAFXa2yMLM5xPQGCLO-nwrrJXE_q52gMsCaD9o-9xT9Pb3NpF7LOTJYFBBZ1-GzXuEpHnqUKBzQfyaRt-fb8Be0iZZACHUHuEq9I_JSdcCBY_bIKXl-aAdMI9dCraQVR_fVp02ueg=s900" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="675" data-original-width="900" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi5p5xYBfg20L83PPd9BZjnWU3ecznI-ZMpTULsbt9kHFTqPqb2-fAFXa2yMLM5xPQGCLO-nwrrJXE_q52gMsCaD9o-9xT9Pb3NpF7LOTJYFBBZ1-GzXuEpHnqUKBzQfyaRt-fb8Be0iZZACHUHuEq9I_JSdcCBY_bIKXl-aAdMI9dCraQVR_fVp02ueg=s320" width="320" /></a></div><span style="background-color: black; font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><p></p><span style="font-family: verdana;">Hradcany Castle and the St. Vitus Cathedral enclosed in the castle walls, loom over the city of Prague like its own 24-hour star—luminescent at night, brilliant and brimming during the day—an ever-present reminder of the city’s vast history. The castle, built on a high hill in the 9th century, was home to the princes and kings of Bohemia, the western region of the current Czech Republic, and today houses the offices of the President of the Republic. Construction on the present-day gothic cathedral was begun in the 14th century, but the original church was built in 934 by Prince Wenceslas, the first ruler of Bohemia and (a Christian revered for his devotion to the poor) the “Good King Wenceslas” of the Christmas carol. Wenceslas Square, where stands a statue of the prince, is the site of public gatherings in Prague, including the massive gathering in 1989 to celebrate the “Velvet Revolution” when the communist party was overthrown.</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dwjehSyN7DzSzTf8-Lc_y1EgFtA0s3ykNelxzRl2x3cFYNjw-GvlVi3s5x2EpvyLN_FvTg4HcvXdxhY6n8VSQ' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">As viewed from the Charles Bridge, a stone edifice arching over the city’s Vlatva River, the castle and cathedral and the centuries-old red roof buildings that populate the slope leading up to the castle complex—and the grand buildings that line the bank of the other side of the Vlatva—are a magnificent sight, the object of countless thousands of tourist photographs. The bridge was built by Charles IV, a King of Bohemia, in the 14th century (he chose the name Charles at his confirmation because, as an heir to the House of Luxembourg, he had served in a French court; his mother’s side of the family was Czech). He built churches throughout Prague and founded Charles University, to this day the leading university in the Czech Republic. It was under his rule that Prague became an intellectual center of Europe. The cobble-stone bridge is traversed by many thousands of tourists every year and offers a vista of a city evocative of medieval piety, Old World refinement and enlightenment civilization, and modern turbulence and revolution.<br /><br />For those who live here, the castle complex brooding over the city, and the layers of history everywhere, must exert a civilizing influence—and a sobering one, bearing down with the weight of the centuries. Much of ancient Bohemia’s modern history has been tragic: born as “Czechoslovakia” in 1918, the Czech Republic is a young country buffeted by the tumult of a Europe that—in the words of Hanna P., a lifelong resident of Prague who lectured our tour group—“is too small, has too many people, and too many nationalities.” <br /><br />A riveting account of the modern Czech Republic can be found in Madelyn Albright's Prague Winter. The former secretary of state provides a compelling survey of ancient Bohemia and Prague as a backdrop to the history of her own family and childhood, encompassing some of the most dramatic years in the Republic’s history. She was born in Prague in 1937 and lived there until age 12 when the family emigrated to England after the Nazi invasion. Her father was Josef Korbel, a diplomat who served under Edward Benes in the government-in-exile in London, until the defeat of the Nazis, when the family returned to Prague. Later, Korbel was named ambassador to Yugoslavia, and the family moved to Belgrade. When the Communist Party came to power in Czechoslovakia in 1948, Korbel resigned from the government and the family emigrated to the United States. Korbel founded a prestigious school of international relations at the University of Denver. <br /><br />Czechoslovakia had been founded as a multinational democracy in the aftermath of World War I under the leadership of Thomas Masaryk, who envisioned a democracy aligned with those of western Europe, Great Britain and the United States. But just twenty years after its founding, the country would be at the center of questions that one way or another had convulsed Europe for centuries. Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the borders? An ascendant Adolf Hitler demanded that Czechoslovakia cede the territory of Sudetenland, bordering Germany. He made much of claims that ethnic Germans who had lived in the region for generations were discriminated against, harassed and otherwise treated as second-class citizens. <br /><br />The Sudetenland had been a natural border between Bohemia and Germany since the Middle Ages, the mountainous region serving as a protective buffer. In Albright’s telling the claims of discrimination had some basis in truth but were substantially exaggerated. Moreover, the multinational nature of the Czech state, including Germans, had been inherent in the vision of the country’s birth. Edward Benes, who succeeded Masaryk as president, was relying on a treaty with France for assurance that if Germany attacked, the French would come to their aid. And that England and Russia would follow suit. <br /><br />But in the aftermath of the first World War, no one had an appetite for fighting Hitler’s newly armed Germany. The Munich Agreement of 1938, ceding the Sudetenland to Germany, was concluded among everyone important—Britain, France, Germany—except the Czechs themselves. In the immediate aftermath it was lauded in the west as a victory of peacemaking, avoidance of war. Hungary and Poland, seizing on the precedent established by Munich, also laid claim to portions of the Czechoslovakia envisioned in its 1918 independence. <br /><br />Can Americans imagine such a thing—other countries deciding where our boundaries should be? And this was more than an abrogation of a nation’s sovereignty, it was a negation of the idea of an independent Czech Republic itself, allowing Hitler to claim—when, of course, he later overran the country entirely—that Czechoslovakia was a “made up country.” <br /><br />Is there any country, anywhere, that is not “made up”? <br /><br />Germany occupied Czechoslovakia in March 1939 and created a “protectorate” over the entirety of Bohemia/Moravia. Two years later, in response to a courageous Czech resistance that was beginning to affect the German war effort, Reinhold Heydrich was appointed Acting Reich Protector. Arguably the most sinister figure, outside of Hitler himself, in the entire Third Reich, Heydrich presided over the Wannsee Conference where Nazi leaders, including Adolph Eichmann, planned the logistical details of annihilating European Jews. In occupied Czechoslovakia, he rounded up Jews and dissidents of every stripe, ordering the torture and execution of thousands.</span> <div><br /></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;">XXXXXXXXXXXXX</span>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">I visited Prague with a tour group in the middle of September. At that time, a vaccination card and record of a negative COVID-19 test within 72 hours of entry was required. The fortunes of pandemic have shifted again and on November 15 the State Department advised not travelling to the Czech Republic on the basis of a CDC travel notice indicating a high level of COVID-19 in the country.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dyGFR_iu9wjudNTa32cppyVZsgFX_E37Ig47RQpvCQBIW_CEuZUyk1x7T2Ur59wmcOWajovZbsUuIGVRZ43Xg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />When I was there, I found masking protocols and practices to be roughly similar to my own native Washington, DC—that is to say, a mixed bag. Outdoors, on the busy thoroughfare of the Charles Bridge for instance, masked walkers were in the minority. In shops and coffee houses, masks were more the norm; on the subway and heavily used (and packed) street trams, everyone is masked, and I saw no scofflaws. Who knows what the winter will bring? It is now generally recognized that COVID will be with us, at some level of intensity, indefinitely and the new omicron variant may scatter the cards.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />Prague is a walkable city, though the cobblestones can be hard on the ankles (and on those with vociferous lower-back problems). Our tour group was warned early of an occasional issue with pickpockets on the streets, subways and trams, but I experienced no problems and never felt unsafe when I was out and about on my own, including a time or two after dark. The subways stations are clean, and the above-ground trams are efficient and user-friendly. <br /><br />Lots of people speak English, though a visitor will certainly encounter those who don’t. One Uber driver who landed somewhere other than where I was waiting for him, knew only one English phrase: “I am here!” Since that was more Czech than I knew, we were unable to negotiate a rendezvous and we parted from each other on the phone in the throes of mutual incomprehension. I hopped on a tram and was back to the hotel in no time. <br /><br />XXXXXXXXX <br /><br />“My Praguers understand me,” Mozart is reported to have said of the city where, in 1787, the composer arrived like a modern-day celebrity. In January he premiered what is now known as the Prague Symphony and in October her performed the opera Don Giovanni for the first time. Mozart’s reception in Prague speaks to a reverence for fine music that preceded the composer’s stardom and survives today. The composer’s footprint is prominent in the city; the Estates Theater, not far from the Old Town Square, features Mozart’s work, including weekly performances of Don Giovanni. (Parts of the movie “Amadeus” were filmed in Prague.) <br /><br />Anton Dvorak is the city’s favored son, closely followed by Bedrich Smetana whose work expressed Czech cultural pride. Smetana’s Vlatva River Symphony is a musical poem that follows the flow of the winding river; it is sometimes played on Czech airline planes when they land at Ruyzne Airport. There is a tiny but elegant Dvorak Museum in the old town that houses the composer’s personal piano. </span><br /><br /><br /><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dy4_w5feL_8khHqWdWMYvR_TmrehyxIsjlL_N5RuScyVjCvV1Tz9QrBkwmb6edYTXLXhDE8sVUzCl5UnR6bPA' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">It might be impossible to exhaust all the venues for classical music in Prague (and there is certainly no shortage of western popular music venues and clubs). But there is an extraordinary opportunity that no visitor should pass up in the church and synagogue concerts that take place most nights of the week throughout the city. These are especially good for the non-connoisseur (or anyone not inclined to spend three hours at an opera). For the equivalent of roughly $35 (there are websites offering much cheaper tickets) elite musicians and opera singers from the Prague Symphony Orchestra, the Czech Symphony Orchestra or the Bohemian National Orchestra play one-hour concerts in one or more of the elaborately ornate medieval churches and synagogues of Prague. Masks are mandatory. Concerts are comprised of short excerpts of 12 or 15 pieces from the masters—Dvorak, Smetana, Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Brahams, Vivaldi. The Spanish and Maisel Synagogues of the Jewish quarter also have some more eclectic offerings; the Spanish Synagogue is featuring The Best of Gershwin on December 27.</span><p></p>
<span style="font-family: verdana;">XXXXXXX</span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7HoGTi6Av_SIIrSzoQeYLNf3QcrCtznPW4XVsEu-AVXn4yPxvGr1fpce8k7BaesMEyB9uz6SeJuuQjHf6rccY_jINhubxRcu4lSMyB09Eyzd6Q_s3n2FiG9LtATb10Yb8T10TQcZbPWkCmF2XeASewOjVopSJPJplAszRMVBJHm2DmxfS5RpWTxscXg=s2048" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1536" data-original-width="2048" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7HoGTi6Av_SIIrSzoQeYLNf3QcrCtznPW4XVsEu-AVXn4yPxvGr1fpce8k7BaesMEyB9uz6SeJuuQjHf6rccY_jINhubxRcu4lSMyB09Eyzd6Q_s3n2FiG9LtATb10Yb8T10TQcZbPWkCmF2XeASewOjVopSJPJplAszRMVBJHm2DmxfS5RpWTxscXg=s320" width="320" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">I didn’t know the name of Alphonse Mucha before visiting Prague, but his posters on exhibit at The Municipal Hall were instantly familiar. His distinctive graphic style put a stamp on a genre and an era—Art Nouveau, La Belle Epoque—that high point of enthusiasm in the achievements of European civilization, in the years before the first world war demolished it. In these posters he brought a fine artist’s touch to advertising—for biscuits, liqueurs, tobacco products—and to publicity for theaters and the French actress Sarah Bernhardt. (Mucha also has one of the most stunning stained-glass windows in the St. Vitus Cathedral.) The sexuality in these images seems to project forward to the modern advertising age and there is unforced joie de vivre, a real celebration of civilization and human achievement and human sensuousness. Spend some time with “Amants a Comedy,” one of the posters Mucha created for the Theater of the Renaissance, where Bernhardt was a star attraction; there’s a lot going on in that image.</span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2IAI-Q22oFEb9ieTjHjIZ3w-CX_FxAn9doQ73f_89BeuwI-m8yLwqvOOn8O54dCBQvrpWIICol_b9D7GDtKAmGUHnl6UfpFlQJ8z_p8EH8jvc9oqndIJ-g9n4uzzeSuuaBymIrTfy2-p2RQQuQR8OkfITpgUMb_ZOcswpy4uwc0jGTHmt8VoeINgKQA=s2048" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi2IAI-Q22oFEb9ieTjHjIZ3w-CX_FxAn9doQ73f_89BeuwI-m8yLwqvOOn8O54dCBQvrpWIICol_b9D7GDtKAmGUHnl6UfpFlQJ8z_p8EH8jvc9oqndIJ-g9n4uzzeSuuaBymIrTfy2-p2RQQuQR8OkfITpgUMb_ZOcswpy4uwc0jGTHmt8VoeINgKQA=s320" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7YUqTz42Z5QA_iN7zrdDRet-vQeoK5UEOwGgyfuNs8yYv5JlSvno02OsiXp5iey6G8HUB8ClRmdx8qliTNrrgkw2idbPhngVwvwKL1Ibfm6UZ9QIx_l2NttLqK3-9lRFMLQoZ9T6WcaioykTQj3PHfjNaQfWPMsqzUmcxNWj8eLax-lRgyQHE1F4o1g=s2048" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEg7YUqTz42Z5QA_iN7zrdDRet-vQeoK5UEOwGgyfuNs8yYv5JlSvno02OsiXp5iey6G8HUB8ClRmdx8qliTNrrgkw2idbPhngVwvwKL1Ibfm6UZ9QIx_l2NttLqK3-9lRFMLQoZ9T6WcaioykTQj3PHfjNaQfWPMsqzUmcxNWj8eLax-lRgyQHE1F4o1g=s320" width="240" /></a></div><br /><div class="separator" style="background-color: white; clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiNmj6H_rPn9zWPfbRuT4sqzVL7--ZfLe0U6Qvhk3GWwpeI8uIY5oMMPp0MYV2uUfb_cH8vNzMhFI48U-_n6rTPJPG4klpVamaDNk4qrD_5De94ohBN4FgAun8ePdyZ1tAv3M82bF_R3Xpsa-dv9CwACoKx3TRFKqlU7QKrtn-u6SxcMK82jQfMvXcEsw=s2048" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiNmj6H_rPn9zWPfbRuT4sqzVL7--ZfLe0U6Qvhk3GWwpeI8uIY5oMMPp0MYV2uUfb_cH8vNzMhFI48U-_n6rTPJPG4klpVamaDNk4qrD_5De94ohBN4FgAun8ePdyZ1tAv3M82bF_R3Xpsa-dv9CwACoKx3TRFKqlU7QKrtn-u6SxcMK82jQfMvXcEsw=s320" width="240" /></a></div><br /></span><span style="font-family: verdana;">Some of the posters on exhibit in the Municipal Hall are “enhanced” with digital magic: smoke billows from the cigarette in the advertisement for Job Rolling papers. Doesn’t do a lot for me, but I suppose it makes some sense: Mucha is certainly emblematic of a distinct time and era, but his images also speak to something perennially new, cutting-edge, of the moment. The Municipal Hall is a palatial building where the first Czech Republic was declared in 1918. Today its grand ballrooms and concert halls—many of the rooms and their ceilings are decorated with Mucha’s work—are used for pricey gatherings, wedding, celebrations, and official events and pageants. The posters on exhibit, the largest collection of Mucha’s work anywhere, are owned by the Czech tennis legend Ivan Lendl.<br /><br /> XXXXXXXX</span><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />If Mucha is the visual representative of pre-World War I European civilization at its most confident, the German speaking Czech writer Franz Kafka is the voice of its later disillusionment. Although readers trying to affix to Kafka any label—“post-World War I Writer of Alienation”—have found that nothing quite sticks. Kafka created something wholly original and personal—harrowingly, laceratingly personal—a dream world terrifying and comical, but also bracingly real and specific and rooted. It has invited countless interpretations; he wrote in a style uncannily inviting of the reader’s own personal projections and captured something true about anyone’s night visions. He was born and died in Prague and wrote exclusively in German. His diaries reflect the outside world—the war, Czech independence—only glancingly. For Kafka, the inner world was where the action was. </span><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0IQA_SGB6vSH8mX86EQYcNqej6wA5tp9xqpBksKVlKnUEowWbEXOUO81MBhmM8LMk-fWaqZdB_1-eMRdxcuTolndXF200xENZE_LymgdRL0RXnYxQp6eXdOajKZpTT3OPUgyHnDKokgqU1Fu9bMFpA9tvO6AL8dxBl6HBPCkq6DAUacx-NAeNcg4Hcw=s1280" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEh0IQA_SGB6vSH8mX86EQYcNqej6wA5tp9xqpBksKVlKnUEowWbEXOUO81MBhmM8LMk-fWaqZdB_1-eMRdxcuTolndXF200xENZE_LymgdRL0RXnYxQp6eXdOajKZpTT3OPUgyHnDKokgqU1Fu9bMFpA9tvO6AL8dxBl6HBPCkq6DAUacx-NAeNcg4Hcw=s320" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="background-color: white; font-family: verdana;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both;"><span style="font-family: verdana;">There is a fine Kafka Museum in the “Lesser Town” of Prague. The exhibit is organized, intelligently, around Kafka’s “Letter to My Father,” a remarkable bloodletting (it was never read by his father), along with excerpts of letters to his friend and posthumous publisher Max Brod, diary fragments, and notes and letters to his several women friends. (In his short life of 40 years--he died of tuberculosis--he had several fraught relationships that never resulted in marriage.)<br /><br />For Americans in the 21st century, it can be hard to absorb what a revelatory and searing personal document was the letter to his father; what a dramatic departure from decorum it was for this formal gentleman of Old World courtesies. Franz' father, Hermann Kafka, was a businessman, the owner of a clothing wholesale store, and—by his son’s account—a domineering, emotionally abusive loudmouth, unequipped to understand his son or even recognize that he had an existence outside of his father’s bourgeois expectations. Possibly, this portrait was unfair (children never really see their parents whole, as anyone who has once complained about his parents then gone on to be a parent himself, has learned). But it was from the crucible of his relationship with his father that Kafka extrapolated his vision of an unappeasable authority, a vision he managed through a unique literary genius to translate into something universal. <br /><br />From the testimony of many who read him in the original German, this genius lay in the unique style of Kafka’s prose; even more than most writers, Kafka must lose something crucial in translation. His friends who heard him read his work aloud, and many reviewers and critics, have testified to a striking stateliness, a crystalline formality in his prose. In a 1996 forward to The Complete Stories, first published by Shocken Books in 1971, John Updike writes, “These lucid and fluent translations….can capture only a shadow of what seems to have been a stirring purity.” It is as if when he sat down to write he translated the world around him—and the visions in his head—into some higher linguistic register. As if he were, in the early part of the 20th century, recording scripture. <br /><br />But there is something cult-like or over reverent that has grown up around Kafka and his aura of tortured aesthetic anxiety, something that may inhibit readers from approaching his fantastical stories and novels unburdened. This likely has to do with the veneration with which Brod and at least one early biographer regarded Kafka, as something close to a seer or a holy man. Kafka himself wrote about writing as a kind of sacred calling, a “form of prayer.” And it is surely related as well to the fact that the Nazi and Soviet regimes that followed his death came to make the writer’s visions of a torturous, lethal bureaucracy appear quite literally prophetic. (Kafka’s sisters perished in Nazi death camps.) <br /><br />But something the Kafka Museum nicely illuminates is that he was a man embedded successfully in the world. And embedded in the city. “Prague won’t let you go,” he wrote. “The little mother has claws.” Though the city is never mentioned in his fiction, the labyrinth-like aura of its winding streets and the weight of ancient history is there. Surely, the Castle visible everywhere in the city must have figured in the imagination of his unfinished novel of that name. (He lived with his sister for a period in a tiny house on a slope leading up to the Castle.)</span><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6CEAL8Bzni29fy4hC782hRuf3A6r6_Vqc-bLHohKVernTsxBXq6tEYE60rXCQCrjroMLM6h6keEyzQjnCDb10wR93YbhXdMGdc5geKOlx2g8YQSgSl17RR5jpv3mPaPoZ-OV2OqZWewkt8-tdE-kIE6Q6RlEPgq1_O9VnT5vk-tY4cDNut4Teks_3zw=s2048" style="background-color: white; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEi6CEAL8Bzni29fy4hC782hRuf3A6r6_Vqc-bLHohKVernTsxBXq6tEYE60rXCQCrjroMLM6h6keEyzQjnCDb10wR93YbhXdMGdc5geKOlx2g8YQSgSl17RR5jpv3mPaPoZ-OV2OqZWewkt8-tdE-kIE6Q6RlEPgq1_O9VnT5vk-tY4cDNut4Teks_3zw=s320" width="240" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">House where Kafka lived for a period <br />on a slope leading up to The Castle</td></tr></tbody></table><br /><span style="font-family: verdana;"></span><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div>Even for those with faint interest in the writer, the Kafka Museum offers a compelling glimpse at Prague in the early years of the 20th century, including some vintage film and photography. He trained as a lawyer and rose to some prominence in the Workman’s Accident Insurance Institute of the Kingdom of Bohemia, adjudicating industrial injury claims. He expressed disdain for his job, mainly because it kept him from writing, but the fact is that he was quite good at it. One striking plaque informs us that Kafka and his boss presented a paper on “Organization of Accident Prevention in Austria” at the Second International Congress of the Rescue Sciences and Accident Prevention in Vienna in 1913. His reports on industrial accident prevention were published in professional journals and he might be regarded in hindsight as a pioneer of what we know today as the field of occupational safety. <br /><br />For those of us reading him in translation, it can be hard to see the comedy in Kafka’s writing, but when he read his work aloud to friends he frequently broke out in laughter: if an individual was condemned, in his vision, to forever seek a redemption from which he was forever barred—then the effort was bound to take some outlandish turns. And “real life” certainly offers a harvest of slapstick, which Kafka found in his job, as expressed in a letter to Brod: <br /><br /><i>For I’ve got so much to do! In my four districts—apart from all my other jobs—people fall of the scaffolding as if they were drunk, or fall into the machines, all the beams topple, all embankments give way, all ladders slide, whatever people carry up falls down, whatever they hand down they stumble over. And I have a headache from all these girls in porcelain factories who incessantly throw themselves down the stairs with mounds of dishware. </i><br /><br />Kafka was writing on this side of the great war. Modernism, and all its anxieties, was nascent. The old world and all its comforting verities of caste and community and religious belonging were being cast aside. A man no longer had a craft or a vocation or a calling—he had a job, and he was gone to work in the great grinding engine of capitalism, renting himself out for someone else’s profit. He was on his own now to find such meaning as he could, with no signs or signals from without. Kafka found a refuge of his own in writing about this predicament. <br /><br />XXXXXXXXX</span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="background-color: white;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikvkD6gDV0JXZks2gs9KsFCxmiFQI05UL9ScXYKUIczx1pv9j_jHLKnXdkaP6xslrRS-NT70QfAY9Iuu-WTWZNDKifKYN4KRzvTFHPdIxyg8q_k8xIMYg7Oi6X1en1PbCx2wJ3kcQwLflmspYpg0r0SLhv7jwck1SKSzQ4tDYK9MbjkSYaKnXPgDI9kQ=s2048" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEikvkD6gDV0JXZks2gs9KsFCxmiFQI05UL9ScXYKUIczx1pv9j_jHLKnXdkaP6xslrRS-NT70QfAY9Iuu-WTWZNDKifKYN4KRzvTFHPdIxyg8q_k8xIMYg7Oi6X1en1PbCx2wJ3kcQwLflmspYpg0r0SLhv7jwck1SKSzQ4tDYK9MbjkSYaKnXPgDI9kQ=s320" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Prague Jewish Quarter, an historic ghetto dating back to the 15th century, lies between the Vlatva River and the Old Town Square. Within its boundaries are five magnificently preserved synagogues--four of them built in medieval times and one, the stunningly ornate Spanish Synagogue, built in 1868. The five synagogues comprise The Jewish Museum of Prague; tickets at the Museum office purchase entry to the synagogues and to a Jewish graveyard with 12,000 tombstones, the oldest one dated 1478. Beneath the tombstones are more than 110,000 bodies; Jews were not permitted to be buried elsewhere in the city, so for successive generations earth was piled over the graves and bodies were buried on top of each other. </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><o:p style="background-color: white;"> </o:p></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: verdana; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixn4f1TzTyCgPlemikRpj4x0K5PoefJXni9XbLlug0otus_x_qAbLoHPmTu8DyZI-q9Eb8ohynL42eTNRRt1vzcQp_8JACYU9lMD57XNgLiZF9x16uJk9aksbJY-sDWCmETKycrjEfWrF9f0pu6DNKl_XDazjKK-Ofa12-s5wC1Mfh0QDwoljkrJ646A=s2048" style="background-color: white; margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1536" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEixn4f1TzTyCgPlemikRpj4x0K5PoefJXni9XbLlug0otus_x_qAbLoHPmTu8DyZI-q9Eb8ohynL42eTNRRt1vzcQp_8JACYU9lMD57XNgLiZF9x16uJk9aksbJY-sDWCmETKycrjEfWrF9f0pu6DNKl_XDazjKK-Ofa12-s5wC1Mfh0QDwoljkrJ646A=s320" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: verdana;">The Pinchas Synagogue, now a memorial to Czech’s who died in the Holocaust, includes on its upper floor a permanent exhibit of children’s artwork from the town of Terezin, 60 miles north of Prague, which was transformed during Nazi rule into a separate ghetto for deported Jews. Terezin, portrayed by the Germans as something like a model town, was in fact an overcrowded, disease-ridden concentration camp where more than 15,000 people died. And it served as a waystation for deportees who would be later transported to death camps further east.<br /><br />In the face of this, though, Jewish leaders in the ghetto organized cultural events, lectures, and educational venues for the children, including classes in drawing and art that were led by a woman named Friedl Dicker-Brandeis who was a protégé of the Swiss-German artist Paul Klee. Albright writes, “…the children produced more than four thousand drawings in pencil, crayon and watercolor; the subjects included virtually everything except what was not permitted—life as it truly was inside the ghetto. Many of the illustrations survived; when the ghetto was liberated a pair of suitcases was found in one of the children’s rooms, each crammed with pictures….” <br /><br />Some of the artwork that survived was by Petr Ginz, described by Albright as the "improbably precocious son of a Catholic mother and a Jewish father," a teenager who also edited a weekly magazine of articles written by the young people in Terezin. <br /><br />"Possessed of a boundless appetite for self-improvement, Ginz was to be seen almost every evening sitting cross-legged on his bunk surrounded by writing and painting supplies," Albright writes. He kept a journal "in which he vowed to devote greater effort to drawing, bookbinding, increasing his weight, the study of Buddhism, linocuts, stenography, English, Russian, Plato and Blazac." <br /><br />Petr was deported east in 1944 and died in Auschwitz. His diary was published after the war. <br /><br /> XXXXXXXXXXXX <br /><br />Somewhere near the hotel I was staying with my tour group must have been a grade school. In the morning when I would walk outside for exercise and to look for coffee, I would see parents walking their young children to the school. This made me happy, especially the first day or two I was in Prague, reminding me that while I was thousands of miles from home, I hadn’t left the planet. (I had not travelled outside North America since 1996!) The Moms or dads looked prepared for a workday—whether at an office, or COVID-bound, at home—and wore that slightly harried, or hurried, look of nervous anticipation for whatever lay ahead. Yet, unmistakably, you could see that these few moments, walking their child to school—the child chattering away about whatever loomed ahead for her in school, whatever lunacy passed through his imagination—was the high point, the very happiest part of their day. I passed one day a congregant of teenagers in the afternoon when school was out. Fidgeting with their phones, gossiping and conspiring in Czech, they looked and sounded like American teenagers anywhere—a confederacy of the superior, momentarily under the thumb of their idiot guardians. <br /><br />Permit me, if you will, that most banal of all travel observations: People Are the Same Wherever You Go. So they are, and it can be counted as one of the great virtues of travel outside one’s boundaries to be reminded of it. But back at home here in my colossal country surrounded by two vast oceans and two friendly neighbors, I couldn’t help reflecting on how differently Czechs must look out at the world around them. <br /><br />We are shaped by the history we inherit. No one can say that American history has been serene, but consider what Czechs have experienced in a period still within memory of its oldest citizens: <br /><br />After the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia, a government-in-exile took up residence in London, headed by Benes. In May 1942, in a daring operation planned and approved by the government-in-exile, Heydrich was assassinated. Two members of the Czech army, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, parachuted into the hills surrounding the route Heydrich’s car took from his home to the Prague Castle every day and ambushed him. The attempt nearly went awry, but Heydrich died later in a hospital in Prague. <br /><br />The act was a spectacular assertion of the legitimacy of the government-in-exile, leading to the dissolution of the Munich agreement by the western powers that had endorsed it. It also resulted in a brutal policy of retributive violence by the Nazis. The assassins were falsely linked to the town of Lidice, which was razed and bulldozed. Some 400 men and women were massacred, and more than 80 children were sent to death camps. <br /><br />Albright in her book explores the kind of rearview mirror second guessing that historians can do: Was the assassination worth the collective punishment that was visited upon the Czech people? She comes down, sensibly I think, on the side of the assassins, noting that the act galvanized the war effort, inspiring allied soldiers (including the later arriving Americans), and weakened the Nazi’s in strategic ways. Today, Kubis and Gabcek are revered as heroes of the Czech Republic. <br /><br />In 1945, with the defeat of the Nazis, Edward Benes returned from exile in London to a newly independent Czechoslovakia. In a sad but perhaps predictable irony, the “problem” at the heart of the Munich Agreement boomeranged when the Czech government expelled ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland. The plan had been to transfer only those who had collaborated with the Nazis, but bitterness about the experience under Heydrich, and toward the Germans generally, was everywhere; armed citizens carried out forced expulsions that were frequently violent. Some 15,000 Germans died in the course of the expulsions, and in the end more than 2 million Germans were forcibly removed. Albright writes with great intelligence about this dark and complicated legacy, for which Vaclav Havel, years later, offered a deft apology. <br /><br />In a national election in May 1946, the Czech Communist Party surprised everyone (except perhaps the Communists) by garnering 38 percent of the vote (“Communism sounds very nice when you read about it in a book,” is how Hannah explained it), giving them a majority in the parliament and the right to name a prime minister. It also gave them the power, through a flurry of Bolshevik maneuvering, to snuff out the organs of civil society in the country and put an end to democracy. The country became a Stalinist satellite. Twenty years after that and 30 years after the Munich Agreement, Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to put an end to the “Prague Spring,” the Czech experiment with liberalization. On January 16, 1969, in protest of the Soviet takeover, a Czech student named Jan Palach set himself ablaze at Wenceslas Square in the heart of Prague. <br /><br />Fast forward twenty years again, tens of thousands of people gathered at Wenceslas Square to celebrate the Velvet Revolution and the peaceful overthrow of the Communist Party. In 1993, the Dissolution of Czechoslovakia split the country into the separate Czech Republic and Slovak Republic. This was a peaceful separation--sometimes referred to as the Velvet Divorce--but (if I did not misread the tone of our tour leader's comments) one that was not without some sadness or regret on the part of Czechs.</span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br /></span></div><div><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBXwirl8SWEwN5tS0nb-Ne7gYoLP9rbqi5OAq8xDxuqEkDmmvMketkOna2m-HAEM2jyXCOpY6qJ1jBgk6bgPk5Sk1gzX2_1sDSvJzBSzwkRgxz0uPFZ8a-CWuteBzBckLyeUAMqW-IWH81L2rCRBSyybqYTOEpmFu9DdjV_4g_mHxEVHK3RFRqX63Vng=s800" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="532" data-original-width="800" height="213" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEjBXwirl8SWEwN5tS0nb-Ne7gYoLP9rbqi5OAq8xDxuqEkDmmvMketkOna2m-HAEM2jyXCOpY6qJ1jBgk6bgPk5Sk1gzX2_1sDSvJzBSzwkRgxz0uPFZ8a-CWuteBzBckLyeUAMqW-IWH81L2rCRBSyybqYTOEpmFu9DdjV_4g_mHxEVHK3RFRqX63Vng=s320" width="320" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Wenceslas Square 1989/<br />Time Magazine <br />Credit: Corbis/VCG via Getty Image</td></tr></tbody></table></div><div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"> </div><br /><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-family: verdana; text-align: left;">With all this tumult in mind, I think about those Czech teenagers and wonder what they will bring to the future of their country. What must it be like to grow up as a citizen of a small country in a crowded continent with too many competing nationalities? To live at the crossroads of some of the finest and richest intellectual, musical and artistic currents—and the most disastrous political ideologies? How does it affect one’s consciousness to be surrounded, at nearly every turn, by centuries of history? Or to be taught that powerful friends abandoned your country in a dire time, and that malevolent neighbors twice overran it? What does it mean to live in the tortured crux of the most salient questions of nationality: </span><i style="font-family: verdana; text-align: left;">Who belongs? Who doesn’t belong? Where are the boundaries?</i></div><span style="font-family: verdana;"><br />Czech citizens cannot be watching the drama on the Belarus/Polish border—or for that matter, Vladimir Putin’s designs on Ukraine—without apprehension. On top of these forebodings from without, Czechia has experienced the same wave of populist discontent that has swept the rest of Europe and the United States. (Although they recently gave the heave-ho to the billionaire populist prime minister Andrej Babis, an ally of Hungary’s Victor Orban, after he was caught out in the Pandora Papers expose.) <br /><br />Castles and canals, cobblestone bridges and charming narrow streets winding around ancient synagogues and churches. The Vlatva River flowing in and around it all like music. Prague—so brilliant, beautiful and radiant—is like a fairy tale. But like many a fairy tale, its beauty veils a solemn message or a sad warning, as well—something Franz Kafka, haunting the city’s streets like an open nerve, might have registered. In a striking poem entitled “Memories of Prague,” written at Terezin, young Petr Ginz was, to be sure, expressing his own grief of separation. But I think he captured, too, something of that melancholy in the city’s ancient stones. <br /><br /><i>How long since I last saw <br /><br />The sunk sink low behind Petrin Hill? <br /><br />With tearful eyes I gazed at you Prague <br /><br />Enveloped in your evening shadows <br /><br />How long since I last heard the pleasant rush of water <br /><br />Over the weir in the Vlatva River? <br /><br />I have long since forgotten the bustling life of Wenceslas Square. <br /><br />Those unknown corners in the Old Town, <br /><br />Those shady nooks and sleepy canals, <br /><br />How are they? They cannot be grieving for me <br /><br />As I do for them….. <br /><br />Prague, you fairy tale in stone, how well I remember! </i><br /><br />Czechs know history is no fairy tale. Perhaps so much history, so much tumult, has equipped them with a resilience and a clear-eyed realism that will help them navigate the future’s shoals. In any case, they have seen it all before. <br /></span><br /> </div></div></div></div>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-66418225700403886592021-10-16T04:48:00.005-07:002021-10-16T14:42:37.682-07:00Chimney Swifts and Quarantine (Written January 2021)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiVT-EBpKGY-lmz0IKbGJwYgcH2Jt8lE9RrAwZdIC7dPvj3DXqoNRIzslQ2sleAYLIi0J0g-T7tPdnPOnFagDv5dldY8i94zIkWaTLOtQjBQq_YCxDkzeqFtXiTWFGxfGiyr-tOJoOPOIcJyOdd0CkKQuDCkuIa3vp8xlbbHgLabpByj6GaJOnI5ZFJlA=s1280" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/a/AVvXsEiVT-EBpKGY-lmz0IKbGJwYgcH2Jt8lE9RrAwZdIC7dPvj3DXqoNRIzslQ2sleAYLIi0J0g-T7tPdnPOnFagDv5dldY8i94zIkWaTLOtQjBQq_YCxDkzeqFtXiTWFGxfGiyr-tOJoOPOIcJyOdd0CkKQuDCkuIa3vp8xlbbHgLabpByj6GaJOnI5ZFJlA=s320" width="240" /></a></div><br /><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I was visiting a friend in
B</span><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">altimore, a bird-lover who was taking me to the spot of a seasonal
birdwatching attraction: the roosting of a great flock of Chimney Swifts in an
old industrial chimney, still rising above its repurposed factory. Through some
curious twist of evolution, Swifts roost on vertical surfaces, rather than
upright, and are named because they roost communally in chimneys. Each fall,
the Swifts returned to this industrial area for a few evenings on their
migratory way South. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch was a mother
with her small boy, about five years old.</span><p></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The boy and I struck up a
conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a
telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“No, I haven’t seen that cat,”
I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“I live in Baltimore,” he said.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Oh, well I live in Washington,
D.C. I’m here visiting a friend.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">“Washington?” he said. He
looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then
he exclaimed, “The news!”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Yeah, the news—way, way, way
too much news.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Which was why I was grateful
for this retreat to experience the natural world in the sky. More than seven
months after the beginning of the pandemic, I’d had too many zoom meetings, too
much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much
politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it
enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Mind you, this was October.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">And I am one of the lucky ones.
I work in the “information sector” in a job that can be done from my home with
little disruption. My daughter, now 22, is launched into the world on her own,
and I can wake every morning missing her but grateful I do not have to
supervise remote learning while working. I am reminded of these blessings every
day.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">It turns out that at 60 I may
have something else in my favor—my advancing age. Some recent research looking
at people’s responses to the stresses of the pandemic in the journal JAMA
Psychiatry found that adults aged 65 years or older had much lower rates of
anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or trauma- or a stress-related disorder
than younger generations. The findings mirror those of other high-income
countries, including Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">A couple of important caveats:
these are older adults living in the community, not in nursing homes or
retirement centers; and the data is from early in the first months of the
pandemic. Still, the data suggest something interesting about the way people of
different ages respond to a uniquely stressful event that has affected the
entire human population. The authors surmise that older people may bring to the
stresses and isolation of the pandemic features unique to their age group that
have helped them to cope: the consolation of memories, the perspective that
comes with having been through trials before and survived, a knack for savoring
simple things in everyday life (a walk in the park, a conversation with a friend),
and an appreciation for the quality of a few close relationships over having
many superficial acquaintances.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">These are a form of
intelligence we know colloquially as “wisdom.” But wisdom, by definition, is a
product of time and experience, only in the rarest of circumstances accessible
to young people. While the rates of anxiety, depression and trauma-related
stress were all under 10 percent for older people, the rates for people age
18-24 were staggering: 49%, 52% and 46%. Along with the revelation that 18
teenagers in Las Vegas had died by suicide between March and December last
year, we can surmise that we have been witnessing an adolescent cataclysm in
mental health.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">The return to in-person
schooling has been a fraught subject. I am well aware of the concerns that
teachers and parents bring to the subject (and aware, too, that I speak from a
position of privilege, not having to decide about sending a youngster into a
school building).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">But I fear that our young
people--teenagers especially—are just missing out on too much. Even some
partial return to school will not bring back, until the pandemic subsides, the
ritual celebrations that are landmarks in a young person’s life: graduations,
proms, sporting events that bring together students and the community in
celebration. These are the real, true (as opposed to virtual) stuff of
experience that leads to wisdom.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Which brings me back to the
Swifts. As dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the
compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for
the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney in an ever-growing gathering
as the birds arrived, 500 or more, from every part of the sky.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">Just before the sun dipped
below the horizon, they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into
the chimney where they would roost for the night. As they dove, the circling
flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane, winding its way to a finish
as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p style="-webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-variant-caps: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: start; text-decoration-color: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-thickness: initial; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px;"></p><p><span style="font-size: 13.5pt;">I have never seen anything like
it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of
that terrible year. There is a music, a communal rhythm woven into the fabric
of nature, and into our human nature as well. May this pandemic speedily end
that we might return in person to celebrating birthdays and baptisms, brises
and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings
and funerals. These are own ritual gatherings, evolved over years to correspond
to that music only you and I can hear, the real, true thing, the wisdom of our
species and the only real news you need to know.<o:p></o:p></span></p><span style="color: black; font-size: 13.5pt;"></span><p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-23248085915915864012021-03-02T10:35:00.014-08:002021-03-02T16:51:19.521-08:00Dying in February (or Sometimes It Isn't All Pleasure. Sometimes You Suffer)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtb6FgpmxRCyVNujiV8UnvjSfY-oDc7uAXYL2eyPmxpeaX0ugmsGCPG8vI5UkhGHY1MBHxG818M8NImX40LoBXcfye0X6l3YAb87jVBm2oT8zfjwhCVfSfwy70vIctD-Uqh9N026CT3818/s1280/LOYOLA+ON+THE+POTOMAC.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1280" data-original-width="960" height="347" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhtb6FgpmxRCyVNujiV8UnvjSfY-oDc7uAXYL2eyPmxpeaX0ugmsGCPG8vI5UkhGHY1MBHxG818M8NImX40LoBXcfye0X6l3YAb87jVBm2oT8zfjwhCVfSfwy70vIctD-Uqh9N026CT3818/w297-h347/LOYOLA+ON+THE+POTOMAC.jpg" width="297" /></a></div><br />It seems so quaint now in my memory, a long-ago scandal that nevertheless feels familiar with its stock characters and set pieces, preserved for all time in something like one of those miniature snow-globes. Shake it out and all the predictable pieces are still there: a powerful congressman, unknown to many, but possessed of so
much accumulated power over the years that he was drunk on it; a stripper with
a fun stage name; and a well-known tourist attraction where their alcohol fueled
tryst came to a public conclusion. <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/fanne-foxe-dies/2021/02/24/87c04e6e-5e4c-11ea-b014-4fafa866bb81_story.html">Annabel Battistella</a></b>, aka Fannie Foxx
the Argentine Firecracker, who jumped into the Tidal Basin on the national mall
after a night on the town with her paramour Wilbur Mills, powerful chairman of
the House Ways and Means Committee, died Feb. 10 at age 84.<p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was October 7, 1974, when Annabel ran out of a car being
followed late at night by the police and jumped into the Tidal Basin—the rectangular
pool of water between the Lincoln Monument and the Capitol. In the car was the congressman
with whom she had spent the night partying and arguing at the Silver Slipper
Club where she had performed. (The Silver Slipper, located on 13<sup>th</sup>
Street, closed in 1981.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">There were still just three networks from which everyone got
their news and there was little or nothing to explore about this episode,
nothing to “interpret”; there were no “hot takes” on Twitter, and nothing about
the story “evolved” over time. It was just what it was—a story so familiar it
might have happened in 1874 or 1924 or 1954. Fresh off his 19<sup>th</sup>
election as a representative from Arkansas—that’s 38 years in Congress—Mills,
whose Ways and Means Committee vetted most any piece of legislation that
required tax money, was suddenly on the front pages in a way he had never been before.
Thoroughly soused, he showed up at one of Annabel’s shows and delivered a drunken
monologue to jeering reporters. Shortly thereafter, he was stripped of his chairmanship,
left Congress and the public eye in 1977, and spent the rest of his life
recovering from alcoholism. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As for Annabel, the Post obituary told a desultory story of
a bad marriage to a philandering cabaret pianist after leaving her native Buenos
Aires, and her career as an exotic dancer in Miami and later in D.C., where she
met Wilbur Mills. Of her leap into the Tidal Basin that night, she told the
Post it was a desperate maneuver to disappear in the hopes of shielding Mills
from publicity. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Alas. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">After an arrest for public indecency in Orlando, Fla., in December
of the same year, she gave up dancing. Moved around with her children. Married
again and settled in St. Petersburg. The Post says she earned degrees in marine
science (!!!!) and business administration. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The episode with Mills occurred just two months after Richard
Nixon’s resignation from the Presidency, a melancholy affair on the leeward side
of American decline. Looking back on the incident in 1981, Annabel told the Post,
“What happened, happened, so that cannot be repaired completely. But sometimes
things can be mended enough to allow you to live comfortably and not be
completely ashamed of yourself.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>XXXX</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I recall my first peak at a Hustler Magazine, as a teenager
in the 1970s, and can say without hesitation that it was not in any way
alluring. It wasn’t supposed to be. <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/larry-flynt-porn-king-and-self-styled-first-amendment-champion-dies-at-xxx/2021/02/10/5240626c-6bf0-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html">Larry Flynt</a></b>, the publisher, wasn’t playing
to anything so fundamental as lust—he was an entrepreneur who knew that there
was a market to be exploited in breaking boundaries, pushing the envelope,
trespassing on taboos. It was all about excess. Some people might have regarded
this as essentially sociopathic—it was, it is—but Larry Flynt was a pioneer and
(I believe) a harbinger of the age of Trump. Unapologetic excess, in-your-face
vulgarity, the flaunting of norms and standards, and a kind of malicious, malevolent celebration of crudity masquerading as democratic virtue. He died Feb. 10 at the age of 78. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>XXXX</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have visited San Francisco some six or eight times and
have never—shame on me—gone to the City Lights Bookstore. Its founder and proprietor,
<b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/beat-poet-publisher-lawrence-ferlinghetti-dies-at-101/2021/02/23/b0bdd03c-760d-11eb-9489-8f7dacd51e75_story.html">Lawrence Ferlinghetti</a></b>, died Feb. 22 at the age of 101. His name and his
life were emblematic of the San Francisco that flourished in the decades after
the World War—a beacon to artists and dreamers, beats and hippies and gay
people and activists; the San Francisco now disappearing (heartbreak!) under a
tidal wave of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, astronomical housing prices and
homelessness. Ferlinghetti published Alan Ginsburg’s poem, “Howl,” and a period
piece of his own that was a landmark—“Tentative Description of a Dinner to Promote
the Impeachment of Dwight Eisenhower.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of his move to the City after the war and a stint in Europe,
just as the Beat generation was emerging, Ferlinghetti was matter-of-fact. “I used
to make up all these literary reasons why I came out here. But I realize it was
really because it sounded like a European place to come. There was wine, and it
just seemed more interesting than New York.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>XXXX</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/rennie-davis-dead/2021/02/04/3d3fa8b0-6622-11eb-8c64-9595888caa15_story.html">Rennie Davis</a></b>, one of the “Chicago Seven” tried for
their role in the “unrest” at the 1968 Democratic convention, died Feb. 2 at
the age of 80. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In my teenage years, I was deeply enamored of “the Sixties,”
and as my peer group degenerated into Disco, I lamented being born ten years
too late. One of my earliest “political” memories is of my oldest brother, who
would have been 14 at the time, being outraged at the televised image of Chicago
police beating the crap out of demonstrators in Grant Park outside the ’68 convention.
Two years later, when four students were shot on the campus of Kent State, I recall
an argument my brother was having with our grandfather, who lived in rural Ohio
not an hour from Kent State. (Many years later, the grievance that many locals
felt about the incident, and their vehemence about “outside agitators” who had
created the disturbance, was still fresh.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As a defendant in the trial
following the Convention, he was convicted of conspiracy and later acquitted on
appeal. He had been an early member of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and authored, along with fellow Chicago defendant Tom Hayden, the famous Port Huron Statement.
<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Davis remained an activist but managed to steer clear of the
dubious paths some of his compatriot followed. “I try not
to be reckless,” Davis told the Post in 1971, “and try to avoid confrontation
that can lead to prison or death, but I’ll never stop working…..” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>XXXXXX</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">If Rennie Davis was a symbol of the political 1960s, then
the Supremes—and the Motown sound—represented the cultural 1960s. Or, anyway,
forever more would be a necessary part of the soundtrack to the 60s. <b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/mary-wilson-dead/2021/02/09/6e8f4956-6add-11eb-ba56-d7e2c8defa31_story.html">MaryWilson</a></b>, who died Feb. 8, grew up in a Detroit housing project and as a
teenager hooked up with a vocal group that included Florence Ballard and Diana
Ross. They signed with Barry Gordy’s Motown Records and teamed up with the legendary
songwriting trio of that genre, Holland-Dozier and Holland. Their first number
1 song was “Where Did Our Love Go,” in 1964. I'd venture anyone my age can
hear it in their heads—it had the sound of the city, the church, and the street
corner altogether, smooth and silky and smart. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Mary Wilson was born in Greenville, Mississippi, and moved
to Detroit when he was 3 to live with an aunt and uncle. She absorbed the
grown-ups record collection—jazz and gospel and popular music—as well as
(according to the Post) Doris Day movies. IN elementary school she sang in a
talent show and later began visiting the Motown studio with Ross and Ballard
and singing backup for $2.50 a piece. From 1964 to 1969 the Supremes had 19 top
20 hits, toured the world, and appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b>XXXXXX</b><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><b><a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/lubomir-kavalek-dead/2021/01/19/d5f3f16e-59d5-11eb-b8bd-ee36b1cd18bf_story.html">Lubomir Kavalek</a></b> was an international grandmaster chess
player from Czechoslavakia who died in February (exact date uncertain). As a young
man only recently become an international champion, a fellow countryman summed
up the nature of the game for him when the older man pronounced: “You are now
nailed to the chess board, young man.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I guess that’s the way it is. I went through a chess playing
spell in my 30s, when I lived near Dupont Circle in DC and would take up games
in the circle park, often with homeless men who hung out there (they were often very,
very, very good). I never quite penetrated even the ceiling dividing advanced
beginners from intermediate wanna-be’s, but I played enough to know why it was something
more than a game. Kavalek
was an assistant to Bobby Fischer, the driven American who defeated Boris
Spassky in a Cold War Contest in 1972 (and later, reportedly, spiraled into
mental illness). Kavalek was playing a tournament in Poland when the Soviets
invaded his country in 1968, and he opted not to return but to join his father
in Berlin where the older man had fled following the Communist take-over in
1968, <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In later years, Kavalek wrote about chess for the Washington
Post: <i>Pawn sacrifices in the opening work in mysterious ways</i>. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In an interview with the paper, he said: “Just to think
about it as a game is degrading. It has certain elements of science and art and
some competitive elements that even have to do with sport. It tests your
imagination; it test a lot of things. Sometimes it is not all pleasure.
Sometimes you suffer.” <o:p></o:p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-2592427426202770662021-02-14T05:32:00.003-08:002021-02-14T10:29:17.688-08:00It Will More Than Do: Jamie Raskin, National Hero<p class="MsoNormal"></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTOpepa8j2korwMggg5WS43ojib286HO81VcAUSPjjfEQwbtkIVi-oPD_hJSd_V3TnChnOpFTaY7OBu0Bjmb07r4Lp6N3_fTUIkwVG6eKCRlWCcTARMf0P5XdkgMsrWeQcFPFQWPsnKXrV/s850/raskin-thumb-2.png" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="478" data-original-width="850" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTOpepa8j2korwMggg5WS43ojib286HO81VcAUSPjjfEQwbtkIVi-oPD_hJSd_V3TnChnOpFTaY7OBu0Bjmb07r4Lp6N3_fTUIkwVG6eKCRlWCcTARMf0P5XdkgMsrWeQcFPFQWPsnKXrV/s320/raskin-thumb-2.png" width="320" /></a></div><br />The presentation for the prosecution by Jamie Raskin (D-Md.)
during this past week’s remarkable Senate hearing was very simply magnificent.
It was stunning. It ought to be archived somewhere, prominently, to be replayed
for generations to come so that they will know about the guilt of Donald Trump
in inciting the riot on Capitol Hill on January 6 and about the intellectual
and ideological ruin that is the current Republican Party. <o:p></o:p><p></p><p class="MsoNormal">His <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRAwEmTHkH8&bpctr=1613308725">presentation</a>
was exacting, forensic, logically irrefutable, nearly flawless in execution and
a masterpiece of rhetoric—some of the best of which was more or less extemporaneous,
as when he embraced the “tag” put forward by Trump’s hapless and incompetent
lawyers that the charges against the former president were a new “Raskin Doctrine.”
The video evidence, much of which was new, brought home again the seriousness of
what happened that day. That Raskin performed this brilliant service to his
country in the immediate aftermath of the death of his college-age son by suicide….what
can you say? <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">In the Twitter-sphere and elsewhere a lot of people were disappointed
or furious that Democrats “folded” when they declined Saturday to call
witnesses. This was after a report from a moderate conservative who was with
House minority leader Kevin McCarthy during an angry phone call with Donald
Trump in the middle of the riot, urging the president to call off the rioters.
Trump had (of course) expressed that the rioters were antifa, to which McCarthy
angrily responded that no, they were his supporters. To which Trump reportedly said,
“Well, Kevin, I guess these people care more about the election than you do.” (And
McCarthy reportedly responded, “Who the fuck do you think you are talking to?”)<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">A most damning bit of evidence. But Raskin and colleagues’
presentation was already damning as to Trump’s comportment during the riot.
Their presentation was electrifying and sobering all at once, an effect that would
have been diluted as the trial wore on. And Republicans were going to drag it
out, endangering passage of Biden’s COVID relief and the confirmation of
judges. And all the most damning witnesses imaginable were not going to get a
conviction in this Senate, owing to the moral, intellectual and ideological rot
of the Republican members—a rot that was now recorded, along with Trump’s guilt,
on national television for all of time. Raskin was able to get the report about McCarthy's phone call on
the record, which was enough. Mitch McConnell’s scorching condemnation of Trump
after the acquittal—which may have been part of the bargaining that happened Saturday
morning—underscored that despite the acquittal, this was no victory for Trump
or Trumpism. <o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It was a massive defeat. His lawyers were a humiliated
laughingstock, and everyone who watched it knows it. David Frum wrote a couple of great columns during the trial, <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/the-trump-crews-incompetence-lasted-to-the-very-end/618022/">one</a>
about the incompetent buffoonery that has always seemed to be endemic to anything
Donald Trump touches, and a later <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/02/impeachment-did-not-prevail-trump-still-lost/618026/">one</a>
after the acquittal, titled “It’ll Do.”<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">It will more than do. There is nothing more important than
that the Biden Administration have a successful first year---that means
massive COVID relief and the acceleration of the vaccine rollout. We might,
just possibly, be moving back toward something like normal by September. This
will do more to neutralize Trumpism than all the witnesses that might have been
called. That can happen now because the House managers quickly wrapped up a
searing, brutally winning case against the former president. <o:p></o:p></p><p>
</p><p class="MsoNormal">And Jamie Raskin is a national hero. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><br /><o:p></o:p><p></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-76030222314347273382021-01-30T17:23:00.004-08:002021-02-04T18:52:05.568-08:00The Cesspool that is Political Facebook and The Need to be Heard (or The Only News You Really Need to Know)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dxwLAXiMUVyKFC6iWnsYTm43DCcVVQOxlgnh9WrVRQVlsumiPlIquhMrwl-sbtqzz1P0AXTaMf7Eakql6Degg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p>Didn’t Paul Simon have a song long ago that went, “<i>I get
all the news that I need from the weather report….</i>”?</p><p class="MsoNormal"><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I like that guy, the guy who knows what he needs to know
(namely, should he wear a wool coat or a light spring jacket?) and what he
doesn’t need to know. There used to be a lot of guys like that, I like to
think, guys who picked up the newspaper (the print kind you hold in your hands)
took a look at the weather and the sports page, then chucked the rest. As to
his political opinions, he borrowed those—completely and justifiably without
shame—from his family or peer group or other affiliations: his union, his
church, his softball team. He didn’t live for politics, he didn’t spend hours
arguing with people about it, he certainly didn’t go to “rallies.” He
considered this (when he thought about it at all) to be one of the geniuses of
the exceptional country he lived in—that you might vote every couple of years,
might write to or yell at your congressman everyone once-in-a-while, might
campaign for someone you especially liked, but otherwise you could go about
tending your own private garden of happiness. In this he was a great and wise
political thinker.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">What happened to that guy? Now he’s got a Facebook page and
a Twitter account and is a fucking expert on everything—macroeconomics,
epidemiology, foreign policy. The exceptional documentary flick, The Social Dilemma,
as everyone already knows, is a forensic exploration, led by the young tech
wizards who built these tools, of how the algorithms of social
media—especially Facebook—are designed to both addict its users and manipulate
them. And of how, when the medium is used for political “discussion,” the algorithm invariably divides people into self-reinforcing echo chambers.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Not discussed is what the user brings to this equation, and
what he or she brings, I know from personal experience, is an enormous hunger
to be heard, to have one’s voice amplified into the universe. I can still
remember, long before Facebook, when it first became possible to engage in
online “discussions,” when it first became possible to sit at your PC and send
your opinions out to the world. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Magical!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I think we have never gotten over it. I think I am no
exception. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Growing up in Washington, a culture of over-educated
know-it-alls, I started out early as a wannabe know-it-all. When I was maybe 15
or 16, I was watching a show called “Agronsky and Company,” in which some
D.C.-based journalists would hash out the week’s news. It was so quaint. Martin
Agronsky was an old school press guy who looked typecast to play the reporter
who keeps a bottle of hootch in his desk. (In fact, I think he did smoke a
cigarette on the set; this was the 1970s). He would host some other scribes and
columnists—Peter Lisagor, George Will, Hugh Sidey, Carl Rowan, James
Kilpatrick, Elizabeth Drew—and they would mix it up a bit. Sometimes, someone
might get a wee bit heated, but really it was all very polite and friendly. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I liked it and I think I formed then a wish that I never
quite articulated or said out loud—a wish to be one of those guys on the show.
To be a Serious Guy With Opinions You Should Hear. In retrospect, this now
feels to me like an appalling thing to aspire to but judging from social media
today it seems like it is a desire not exclusive to over-serious teenagers
marinated in D.C. head culture.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">That social media has amplified and exacerbated our
divisions is well known, an argument that has itself been swept up into the
tsunami of argument and division: when Twitter shut down Donald Trump’s account,
the over-weening power of tech companies to control speech became the new
debate, leaving some of us to wonder—how in the world would Abe Lincoln have
ever delivered the Gettysburg Address without his Twitter account? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I can remember when Facebook seemed to be a teenage kid
thing; at some point the kids moved on to Instagram and Snapchat and (later) TikTok,
and Facebook became a middle-age phenomenon. Some people think Zuckerberg is
evil personified, but a wise friend I know thinks he’s just a “deer in the
headlights” and that’s almost certainly true. Although the tech wizards in The
Social Dilemma insist that the algorithm was designed from the beginning to
monetize and manipulate our every online footprint, they may not have known
when it started how it would be exploited politically, how it would be used by
people (like me) as a megaphone, as a tool to quench the thirst for being heard
(not to mention how it would be exploited by “actors” genuinely interested in
sowing chaos).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">For political “discussion,” it was never going to be
anything but a cesspool. Even in “real life,” and under the best conditions,
debate about difficult public issues or controversies is plagued by the “Simple
and Blunt” problem—which is that a simple and blunt answer, or slogan, is
easier to communicate, more memorable, and often more attractive than an answer
that is highly nuanced and strives to contain all the complexities of a complex
problem. (And this problem is compounded by the fact that sometimes—rarely, but
not never!—a simple, blunt answer is the right one.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">On Facebook and Twitter, simple and blunt is all there is. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The architecture of Facebook was built for sharing pictures
of your kids and your vacations and your cat or your dog. It is a truly
remarkable tool for sharing those aspects of your life, for keeping in touch
with far-flung friends. Facebook has brought me together—sometimes in “real
life”—with more than a few old friends from childhood. Consider me conflicted
and addicted. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">XXXXXXXXXX<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It was more than seven months after the beginning
of the pandemic. I’d had too much isolation, too many zoom meetings, too much
time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much
politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it
enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.<o:p></o:p></p><p class="MsoNormal">And mind you, this was only October.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal">So I will always be grateful to remember the night when a birdwatching friend in Baltimore took me to see where a great
flock of Chimney Swifts, migrating south, came to roost for a period of nights
at dusk in the old industrial chimney of a repurposed factory. Unable to roost
upright on branches as most birds do, Chimney Swifts cling instead vertically
to surfaces, and are so=named because they roost communally in the safety of
brick chimneys. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">We arrived about 6:45 and waited around scanning the sky for
more than 30 minutes, wondering if they had migrated further south; the Swifts
had been showing up for several nights already, attracting each night a small
crowd of locals, birdwatchers and others in the know. Among the 15 or 20 people
gathered to watch the night I was there was a mother with her small boy, about
five years old. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The boy and I struck up a conversation when he pointed to a
picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a telephone poll and asked me,
“Have you seen that cat?”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“No, I haven’t seen that cat,” I said. “I don’t live in
Baltimore.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“I live in Baltimore,” he said. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Oh, well I live in Washington, D.C. I’m here visiting a
friend of mine.” <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Washington?” he said. He looked at his mother as if for
confirmation of something, then back at me. Then he exclaimed, “The news!”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Yeah, the news—way, way, way too much news. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Slowly as dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all
points on the compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of
humans—and for the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney, the
gathering ever growing as the birds kept arriving from every part of the sky,
until there were likely more than 500 of them in a great communal flight around
the chimney.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And then at some point—again determined by some innate clock
or communal signaling—they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive
into the chimney where they would roost for the night. (How is it decided who
gets to go to sleep first?) As they dove, the circling flight grew tighter like
the funnel of a hurricane winding and winding its way to a finish as the last
of the birds disappeared for the night. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I have never seen anything like it. The memory of it—and my
pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of that terrible year. Communal
rhythms, a music understood only or best, by the species for whom it is intended,
are woven into the fabric of nature. Into our human nature as well; birthdays,
baptisms and brises and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and
proms, weddings and funerals—may this cursed pandemic speedily pass so that we might return to these . For they are the ritual gatherings we have evolved over
years to correspond to that music that only you and I can hear, and the only news you really need to know. </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.blogger.com/video.g?token=AD6v5dy6QyGnqucw1cSAm0vOHM7BIRMfTzY6hNPgspBTrN4c423xCe_Rlq6sa2xaAQWdzbcMHLo7DGuBGoSvgYSHAg' class='b-hbp-video b-uploaded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-29776340898949220282021-01-20T19:45:00.001-08:002021-01-20T19:45:12.908-08:00Becoming More Yourself As You Descend<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwG3uusCZ0cnfptQEi5VX9mJ_rRnPaeS5vdYRn764Q-_XrCvf4M4BbNYhfHWBtzuAJr0M65Lkt5idGlyPChFK3ODFWnzFdW6Sz1vg8wlBZ9cEHkANGjnRYdHMjCM_vTpjsOgR-6NckXaFg/s960/WINTER+IN+METROPARKS.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="720" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwG3uusCZ0cnfptQEi5VX9mJ_rRnPaeS5vdYRn764Q-_XrCvf4M4BbNYhfHWBtzuAJr0M65Lkt5idGlyPChFK3ODFWnzFdW6Sz1vg8wlBZ9cEHkANGjnRYdHMjCM_vTpjsOgR-6NckXaFg/w430-h320/WINTER+IN+METROPARKS.jpg" width="430" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i>“I wish I had a river I could skate away on…..” <o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Me too, and I have never liked skating (I’m bad at it and it
hurts my ankles) which tells you something about the force of that line from
Joni Mitchell’s long-ago song, <i>River</i>, about Christmas in Los Angeles.
She’d grown up in Saskatchewan, which must have the kind of winters that are
close to unimaginable, and the song is certainly about memory and homesickness,
but also about something more than that (homesickness is curable, after all—you
just go home and when you get there you remember why you left in the first
place). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s also about displacement, about the sense that something
elemental has been left behind by the world—or even that something elemental to
life has left the world. As if, say, we were to wake up one night and find that
the moon had fallen out of the sky and was no more. That, I think, might be
exactly what it is like to spend Christmas in Los Angeles, where (reportedly)
people sometimes spray their lawns with fake snow. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The writer Adam Gopnik seized on this line and this elegiac
song by the great songwriter as the touchstone and coda to the last chapter of
his five-part lecture on “Winter,” which he delivered for the Canadian Massey
Lecture Series at McGill University in 2011. The lectures were collected into a
book the same year, but I didn’t buy it until it was in paperback in 2016. So,
this was a nine-year-old work in a volume that had been staring at me from my
bookshelf, daring me to actually read the goddamn thing, for four years. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Tell me you don’t have such recriminating tomes on your
bookshelves as well. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gopnik is an exceptional intellect and a fine and beautiful
and exacting writer. “Papon’s Paper Trail,” a journalistic account of the trial
of a high French functionary brought to trial by survivors of the Holocaust and
convicted in 1999 for war crimes during the Vichy period, is among my favorite
essays; he managed to capture all the legal complexities of trying a man for what
might be called “bureaucratic” crimes committed four decades previous, while
conveying what was distinctly French about both the trial and Papon’s crimes,
as well as the moral and legal necessity of his conviction. His writing about American
gun culture, gun violence and gun control is as fine an example of journalism
in the service of moral outrage as the best of Christopher Hitchens. The
portrait he drew of his psychotherapist in “Man Goes to a Doctor” is funny and
poignant and admiring while also being thoughtful about the popular cult of
therapy. When he writes about writers and thinkers and artists of all kinds
from many periods of history I always learn things. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">His writing can also seem performative, when he leaves the
earth of real things and real people in the real world and begins to fall down
a rabbit hole of his own abstractions; all that hyper-intellectualism, all
those cultural allusions, can begin to feel like so much spun cotton candy. (I
once heard an interview with Gopnik by Katha Pollitt on the “On Being” podcast
when Pollitt had to stop her guest, who was disappearing down that hole, to
remind him that she was part of the conversation.) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">“Winter” is outstanding and, in the end, moving and
melancholy. And you most certainly learn a lot in this fine mash-up of art,
history, science and philosophy. The subtitle to his lectures is “Five Windows
on a Season,” and the window is important throughout; the author begins and
ends his lectures with a memory of himself as a boy at a window, gazing out at
the Montreal snow: modern winter (meaning winter as we experience it since the
development of indoor heating) is a winter you can admire, fall in love with,
and project your longings onto from a cozy place at your living room window. I
had bought the book, I think because I understood this instinctively myself,
though I would not have been able to articulate it: the <i>idea </i>of winter
is lovely (if the actual experience of it, many winter days, is one of hoping
for spring). <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gopnik explores five different ideas of winter: romantic
winter—the winter in art and music and poetry and metaphor; radical winter—the
quest to experience (if not quite conquer) severest winter, expressed in the
history of 19<sup>th</sup> and 20<sup>th</sup> century attempts to reach the
Poles; recuperative winter—the winter of the spirit, of Dickens and Christmas
carols, and the celebration of Christmas; recreational winter—the winter of
skating and (Gopnik’s passion) hockey; and remembering winter—what winter means
to us now that it may be disappearing.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Of these, recreational winter is the most fun. The author
truly loves hockey, understands the game deeply, and also deeply deplores the
fighting and violence that has become part of the spectacle; personally, I have
never known what to make of those fights. (Are they really mad at each other or
is it a performance for the crowd?) <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But it’s toward the end of that first chapter, on the
romance of winter and the metaphors we have created to express its romantic
meaning, that the author’s brilliance as a writer lifts all those solemn
cultural allusions up to something human and immediate for the reader, rescues
from all that learnedness an insight that for anyone over the age of, say, 50
will feel like looking in a mirror.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">A question for those in that cohort: Have you perhaps experienced,
alongside all the downsides that come with passing the half-century mark, the
sense that you are now more truly yourself than you have ever been and more at
ease with this person you have become? That however much you might wish every
now and again to relive your athletic or occupational or sexual glory days, you
really wouldn’t go back to being the anxious, overwrought 20-something (or
over-compensating 30-something) you once were? The sense that however much has
gone wrong and has seemed, when it hasn’t been tragic, to have been a comedy in
which you are the butt of the joke--still you realize now that it was just the
way life was destined to go and you are less and less interested in carrying
the grudge or having a do-over? <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">The mileage you have travelled has refined you and you are
now more <i>you</i> than you have ever been.<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">It’s the process by which people attain what we call
“wisdom,” and believe it or not there is now an emerging science of wisdom. But
to return to Gopnik, this process of refinement over time appears to be
mirrored in a compelling way in nature as well. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recall the old thing about how “no two
snowflakes are exactly alike”—it’s one of those romantic metaphors that have
grown up around winter. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Well, it turns out that it’s true, but not quite true in the
way we had always thought. Here is how Gopnik explains it: <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i>“…[A]s recently as 1988, a cloud scientist named Nancy
Knight took a plane up into the clouds above Madison, Wisconsin, and there
found two simple but identical snow crystals—hexagonal prisms, each as like the
other as one Olsen twin is like the other. Snowflakes, it seems, are not only
alike, they usually start out more or less the same…..[However] it turns out
that, while It’s true that snowflakes often start out alike, it is their
descent from the clouds into the world that makes them alter.”<o:p></o:p></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Gopnik quotes from an Australian science writer, Karl
Kruszelnicki, who explains that “As a snowflake falls it tumbles through many
different environments. So the snowflake that you see on the ground is deeply
affected by the different temperatures, humidities, velocities, turbulences,
etc., that it has experienced on the way. Their different shapes are all owed
to their different paths downward….”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">And so our author concludes:<i> “…The sign at Starbucks
should read ‘Friends Are Like Snowflakes: More Different and Beautiful Each
Time You Cross Their Path in Our Common Descent.’ For the final truth about
snowflakes is that they become more individual as they fall; that, buffeted by
wind and time, they are translated, as if by magic, into ever stranger and more
complex patterns, until at last they touch the earth. Then, like us, they melt</i>.”<i><o:p></o:p></i></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-23000873685227859862021-01-09T21:02:00.007-08:002021-01-12T18:01:39.420-08:00Daring to Be Hopeful: (Or Maybe the Center Can Hold)<p> </p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz88ruyaxPrSw8GtTDv1UYq66mKgjbGOQeGbQExbrX-p56owafln0CBzK6_-v8i6TPCf5pBGhFrsxdE2AekwTdpEyLCfNzp_RLTHOn0Xw-GdWPXqlDpQ5UULOMV5GjcSS_hSFAnjftCS58/s2048/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_51a2f206-c584-4db6-aca0-5073d7ca900a_4666x2990.jpeg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1312" data-original-width="2048" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiz88ruyaxPrSw8GtTDv1UYq66mKgjbGOQeGbQExbrX-p56owafln0CBzK6_-v8i6TPCf5pBGhFrsxdE2AekwTdpEyLCfNzp_RLTHOn0Xw-GdWPXqlDpQ5UULOMV5GjcSS_hSFAnjftCS58/s320/https___bucketeer-e05bbc84-baa3-437e-9518-adb32be77984.s3.amazonaws.com_public_images_51a2f206-c584-4db6-aca0-5073d7ca900a_4666x2990.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><p class="MsoNormal">What a perilous moment. However, as dark as it is (trust me,
I can normally find a raincloud on the sunniest of days) I want to suggest that
there may, just possibly, be daylight ahead. Not because Joseph Biden will be
the next president—although that is most certainly a good thing—but because what
took place on Wednesday on Capitol Hill this past week is forcing a reckoning
within the Republican Party, and because the very darkness and peril of the
moment is going to force a movement back toward the center. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I’m not kidding. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I am not unaware of the dangers, especially in the very
short term: some number of the insurrectionists on Capitol Hill were apparently
deadly serious and there may be similar uprisings up to and on the day of the
inauguration here in D.C. and in other state capitols. And to be sure, the Republican
party leadership at the national and state level is hopelessly corrupted by the
Cult; this is the team that held a “convention” on the White House grounds
(with no less than six Trump family members as speakers) and passed <i>no
platform at all</i>—behold, a new thing in American politics: a political party
that did not even pretend to have a set of policy ideas, and dedicated only to the
personality at the center of its cult. As an institution, the Republican Party
is now an authoritarian threat to the American project. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But individual Republicans are now having to choose, and
some are abandoning the ship. Back in November, on that Saturday that it became
clear Biden had won, fully ten weeks before the catastrophe this past week, I
sensed that this was an emerging possibility: with Trump finally out of the
picture there had to be Republicans with a very uneasy conscience (Susan Collins,
Lisa Murkowski, Ben Sasse) who would be willing to work with Biden, do a little
damage control to their reputations, lend their names to some real
accomplishments. Not to mention Mitt Romney, the one Republican who can emerge from
four years of Trump with a relatively free conscience. Even without Democratic
control of the Senate, I think this was a possibility. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Now, Jan. 6 has given everyone a glimpse into the abyss and,
however belatedly, for many Trump has crossed a line. Murkowski has demanded
the President resign and has intimated she will leave the Republican Party. These
developments, in tandem with the Democratic victories in Georgia, mean something
extremely important beyond partisan celebration: <i>Joe Biden can have, at the
very least, a successful first six or eight months</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Principally this means getting the vaccine rollout up to
speed and getting relief out to families and businesses. I’m in favor especially
of a huge, targeted bailout of restaurants, the entities most dependent on a
business model—lots of people crowded inside, close together—that has been made
impossible in the pandemic. Deficit anxiety is a thing of the past—we long ago
mortgaged our children’s future and the Republicans have never honestly cared
about it except as a cudgel to wield when they were out of power (they’ll do it
again; look for plenty of editorials by Karl “Deficits Don’t Matter” Rove in
the Wall Street Journal.) Hopefully, there can be a return to something like “normal”
by the fall. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">This is so absolutely essential—not just for all the obvious
reasons, but because it is the surest thing to bank down the fires that are
raging. <i>Joe Biden needs to have a successful first six or eight months in
office, regardless of where things go after that. </i>And I do not believe they
will go anywhere uncharted: Biden is at heart an institutionalist, he’s put together
a centrist, sane and talented cabinet, and he is going to prove the Trump-world
fantasies of a radical socialist agenda just that, a fever dream. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The centripetal forces of this perilous
movement are moving, I am convinced, to the center, away from the extremes. That’s
what I believe; I hope I’m not wrong. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Which leads me to my other point, something I have long believed.
Once we finally have this man—this bitter, twisted, vindictive sociopath—in the
rearview mirror, the process of normalization will accelerate; a great many
cowards and apologists and rationalizers and excuse-makers are suddenly going
to have an enormous case of collective amnesia. He’s going to start to appear
as the tiny, little man-behind-the curtain he has always been. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">In the near term his “movement” remains a grave threat, I
know that. Democrats in the House have prepared articles of impeachment, again,
that they will introduce on Monday if the Vice President does not invoke the 25<sup>th</sup>
amendment, and the debate now is whether it will further stoke the flames. Ten
days from the end of the man’s term, I don’t see how this can be true and it is
simply unacceptable that he should escape consequences for what has happened.
If he stays in office (he’s not going to resign), he’ll pardon himself and his children;
however legally questionable that may be, it can’t be allowed. There should be consequences
as well for Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Kevin McCarthy, and a host of others. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Donald Trump should, at least, spend the rest of days for quite
some time in court—federal court for charges related to his incitement to sedition;
in state and federal court for obstruction and possible suborning of justice
with related to his forced resignation of the Georgia attorney general and for
his hour-long phone call pleading with the Georgia Secretary of State to “find”
the votes necessary to claim he won the state, just the week prior to the insurrection.
I am one of those who believe that his financial entanglements in the Manhattan
real estate industry—he is millions of dollars in debt to Deutsche Bank—are central
to a vast, deep and wide corruption, and to his possible ownership by Russian
mafia and/or other bad actors. Those debts are going to come due and I thought
it mighty interesting that the bank officer who handled Trump’s loans resigned after
the election. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">As to what happened on Wednesday, it is clear—as is always
the case with crowd hysteria—that a great many people were swept up (and swept
into the Capitol) by the force of events that overtook them. But watch this
searing and heartbreaking <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PfiS8MsfSF4">video</a>
before you are tempted to make any excuses; as a warning, it is nearly 40
minutes long, it is extraordinarily frightening, and it ends with the shooting
of a Trump supporter by late-arriving military police; at points during the riot,
the crowd was shouting to “Hang Pence.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Someone
erected a noose outside the Capitol. ) It is also clear from reports that some
of these people meant serious business, bringing plastic handcuffs to take
members hostage. Offices were ransacked and it is reasonable to surmise that
some were savvy enough to be looking for the actual electoral college votes
themselves (it was apparently two young Hill staffers who went into hiding with
the votes; yes, the votes actually physically exist in some form on paper. Who
knew?) Pipe bombs were found at both party headquarters. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Nine months ago, at the beginning of the pandemic, I started
writing a portrait of my father which I entitled, “American Normal.” It was, I hoped,
a small piece of social history as lived by one man in mid-20<sup>th</sup>
century America, the America I and my generation inherited. The title, and the
piece itself, were at least in a part a response to what I saw as the
disappearance of an American normal, the iterative destruction one by one of
norms and protocols under the administration of Donald Trump, and of the America
I thought I knew. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">I had no idea what was coming, but I think we should have. In
what I think will be considered a classic of political literature, Andrew
Sullivan <a href="https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/yes-this-is-the-face-of-a-tyrant">compared</a>
Trump to the Richard III of Shakespeare’s play, and located the hold he has taken
of American life in “the darker folds of the human soul, individual and collective.”<o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Unless he is somehow removed, he is with us for ten more
days and for those ten more days he is dangerous. I’m not unaware of the vast
problems—political and cultural—that lay beneath or behind the Trump
phenomenon, and that will be with us for years, including the contributions of
the Democratic Party, the media and the far-left. There is an enormous amount of
blame to go around. <o:p></o:p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal">But if you have ever woken in a sweat from a nightmare, you
know the relief that comes from seeing, even in the dark, your familiar, normal
surroundings; you are suddenly grateful for the mundane facts of the room you
know. That, I hope, is where we are—awakening with a renewed gratitude for the
mundane normal—and where the politics of the moment, fraught as they are, are
leading us, back to the center. <o:p></o:p></p><br /><p></p>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-73523475690553331892021-01-01T14:58:00.000-08:002021-01-01T14:58:30.889-08:00American Normal: Of Golden Ages and My Father's Swing Dance Story<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZULKpSxZQ6l7oCEJot0TEMei2gOM7OsHNVdYcVVPFcd7yrWvt1bycV1dX6woOzQETzY2a-z49_NAD_94LBJIB1meanwOj3Kl8wTLLYjKUO4l-HVR8T3SfxvAZU66BZgGzutGfr42hivD/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgIZULKpSxZQ6l7oCEJot0TEMei2gOM7OsHNVdYcVVPFcd7yrWvt1bycV1dX6woOzQETzY2a-z49_NAD_94LBJIB1meanwOj3Kl8wTLLYjKUO4l-HVR8T3SfxvAZU66BZgGzutGfr42hivD/s320/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></i></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></i>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
</span></i>
<br />
<div style="text-align: center;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: xx-small; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Image: Sergey Ivanov, 2020</span></i></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></i><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: right;">
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“One of
the sturdiest precepts of the study of human delusion is that every golden age is
either past or in the offing</i>. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
months preceding the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor offer a rare exception to
this axiom. During 1941, in the wake of that outburst of gaudy hopefulness, the
World’s Fair…..the economy was experiencing a renewal not only of sensation but
of perceptive movement in its limbs, Joe DiMaggio hit safely in fifty-six
straight games, and the great big bands reached their suave and ecstatic acme
in the hotel ballrooms and moth-lit summer pavilions of America.”—</i>The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It may have been in that golden 1941 that one
young American, who then would have been twenty years old, might have stood
outside the gates of one of those summer pavilions and danced with his friends
to the big band sound of the Benny Goodman Orchestra--<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sing, Sing, Sing</i>, maybe, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stompin
at the Savoy</i>, or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">One O’Clock Jump</i>.
The sound of which, he would say many years later, would “blow your ears back.”
</span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">To be twenty
years old is a kind of golden age of its own, suffused with the promise of something
momentous in the offing. Out beyond the country’s horizons, dark clouds were
forming over Europe; the 20-year old could not have been wholly oblivious. He
had at an early age already experienced loss, had already learned the stark
lesson that the world you think you know is not permanent. But on that night, I
like to imagine that he was (along, perhaps, with the rest of an America
closing its eyes to the forbidding horizon) having fun; for now, that would be
all that mattered. Whether he’d taught himself or taken lessons I don’t know,
but the man knew how to swing dance, the Lindy Hop, or the Collegiate Shag, the
Jitterbug, or the Lindy Charleston. </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Every story is,
in a sense, a conjuring up of a golden age. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let
me tell you how it was, back in the day. </i>But the real truth about anyone’s
Golden Age, what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">really</i> happened beneath
the scrim that is memory, is liable to be more ambiguous than you or I would
wish. The story of the twenty-year old dancing with his friends to the Goodman
Orchestra, of what preceded and what followed, is illuminative. It was a life that made a forcible impression on my own. And yet I have to confess there
is a lot I have to fill in from scratch or imagination. I only dimly recall him
telling me about attending a concert by Goodman’s band, and I don’t know for certain
if it was really 1941, or earlier when he was in high school. I don’t know if
it was in the nation’s capital, where his family had moved in 1933, or in New
York city where he might have travelled for Goodman’s storied concert at the Paramount
Theater, or somewhere else. </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">How little we know
about the most exalted moments in the lives of the people who matter most to
us. Goodman’s obituary in The New York Times in 1986 described the euphoria
among fans of the bandleader, who in 1935 became the King of Swing when his
band performed an explosive concert at the Palomar Ballroom in Los Angeles. The
stunning roar of that crowd in Hollywood would follow the band throughout the swing
era, which lasted into the 1940s. And it greeted the band in March 1937 in New
York at what came to be known as the Paramount Theater riot. </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“</span><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Teenagers,
who had followed the band on radio and had bought its records but could not
afford the prices of such places as the Manhattan Room of the Hotel Pennsylvania,
where the band usually played, were lined up around the theater at 6 A.M. to
get into the morning show for 35 cents. During that day, more than 21,000
people jammed into the theater to bounce deliriously in the seats or shag in
the aisles and battle ushers as they made desperate lunges toward the stage</span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.”</span></span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Wherever he might
have heard the Goodman band, at whatever theater or moth-lit summer pavilion, I
like to imagine, as the Orchestra reaches a crescendo of delirium, the young
man and his friends scaling the gates or storming the guarded doors, just like
any contemporary music-loving concertgoers. And as a kind of retroactive act of
gratitude for the prudent, cautious and retiring example he set for me, I like
to envision the young man, my father, Robert Thomas (Bud) Moran, ascending the
barrier or breaching the boundary, and then
at the very apex of his personal Golden Age, triumphantly tumbling over or
tumbling in, and crashing the joint. </span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Here is his
American story.</span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">_____________</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSc5xUHiRLsefJqtFvjWAetNkH_pD3fWA-9aV_SdEIARUNd6FAnsILOBiWJsnteglqDxz7Bi2UwmmukFmiE8E3HkQrXgD018EcW9YHCqluuc8CvHc0sirxnTHnmBg60U-PSO7HjfedOAv/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhTSc5xUHiRLsefJqtFvjWAetNkH_pD3fWA-9aV_SdEIARUNd6FAnsILOBiWJsnteglqDxz7Bi2UwmmukFmiE8E3HkQrXgD018EcW9YHCqluuc8CvHc0sirxnTHnmBg60U-PSO7HjfedOAv/s200/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“It’s hard for you to understand what
it’s like to be 13 and to lose everything.”</span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">
</span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">All his years
later he might have recalled the brilliance of the lake down below, would
recall its azure surface as sheer as onion skin, the sailboats lazy in a summer
lull, and the billowed blanket of small green and brown hills around it. Might
have recalled it as a vista spread expressly for a child’s imagination, just
for him, there up above the sailboats on the big wrap-around porch, lounging in
the hammocks with his brothers and sisters. Good or ill, benevolent or
otherwise, the world is received by a child as an intention: <i>this is meant
for me</i>. </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
<br />
</span></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It might have
gathered all the sunlight to itself after it was gone, casting a shadow on all
his remaining years after, the memory of that childhood with the big old
cottage in Skaneateles overlooking the lake, where the family would retreat
from Syracuse in the summer. The earliest picture of Bud is of an uncommonly
sweet and trusting boy. His father, my grandfather, might have been imposing,
intimidating, or he might have been the kind of presence that inspired a sense
of safety and assurance. I knew him only briefly before his death in 1965, when
I was five, knew him only as an old man with a cane and a penchant for giving
overly wet kisses. His obituary in the Washington Post, beneath a headline that
read, “John F. Moran Dead, Aid in Depression,” showed him as he was in his
prime during that period in the 30s, after the move to Washington, when he was
a federal receiver for local banks that had failed after the crash; a
photograph that suggested a man whose tombstone might have read: <i>Very
Substantial Banker. </i></span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Tax records in
the town of Skaneateles from 1932 indicate a lakefront home, listed as a
“cottage,” was owned by John F. Moran with a total assessed value of $5500.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftnref1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span></a>
For years through the 1960s and 70s, a pen and ink drawing of the cottage hung
in the “recreation room” of our house where I grew up. The drawing suggested a
lost life of carefree ease, an impression confirmed by the account left by my
father’s brother Richard. My uncle Dick wrote a lively and informative memoir
of his own life, published in book form by Richard’s wife for their children,
that includes a richly detailed description of the family’s life in Syracuse
and their summers at Skaneateles. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“<i>Every June, the day after school
ended, the family loaded up the car and drove twenty miles to Willow Brook on
Skaneateles Lake. This annual odyssey began in 1926 and ended in 1931. The
cottage had four bedrooms, a sun porch added by John Moran in 1928, a garage
near East Lake Road with a small bedroom for a chauffeur or servant, a bridge
over the brook to a grove of large willow trees on the water. Peonies lined the
driveway; a small formal garden was in back of the house, a rose trellis at the
side door. The brook was about two feet deep maximum. It offered great
opportunities for play with toy boats, crabbing and spearing suckers the came
into it in early summer to spawn.</i>” <a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">To be sure, it
was an idyllic period of leisure and fun—anyone’s happy childhood, however
mythical. That my grandfather was successful and prosperous is certain and John
F. appears to have possessed the determination to rise, to overcome, that is
common to the children of immigrants. He was born in Syracuse in 1889. His
mother Alice was born in Ireland and likely immigrated to the United States
between 1863 and 1883; his father (my father’s grandfather, John J. Moran) was
born in New York, but almost certainly to recently arrived immigrants. The
father appears to have died or otherwise departed the picture around 1898, and
the children were briefly in an orphanage; John F. was in the House of
Providence, a boy’s orphanage, while his sisters were in St. Vincent’s Asylum
for girls. Their mother Alice remarried, and by 1910 census records indicate
John F. and the other children were living with their mother and stepfather.<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftnref3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[3]</span></span></a> </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">John F. began
working as a bookkeeper in the Crouse Grocery Story, in Syracuse, then as a
teller for City Bank. In September 1913, he married Kathryn Handrahan (my
grandmother). He rose steadily through the ranks of City Bank to become a
member of the board of directors. Robert (Bud), my father, was born in May of
1921. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="background: white; color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In late 1929, after the Wall Street
Crash, City Bank Trust merged with First Trust to become the largest commercial
bank between New York and Buffalo. At that time, John and his wife
Kathryn and children were living on Bellevue Avenue in Syracuse. </span><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">By 1932, he was a deputy superintendent of
banks for the state of New York.2</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">What happened
exactly to my grandfather’s fortunes is unknown. Dick’s autobiography records
only that John sold the cottage in Skaneateles in 1932 as the depression was
deepening. Sometime after Roosevelt’s election that year, my grandfather took a
job in Washington, D.C., within the office of the comptroller in the department
of justice—a job that spoke to his resourcefulness and to his connections
within the banking world, but which was also invariably a steep step down in
salary for the banker and in “lifestyle” (a term that was probably unheard of
at the time) for the family. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">It’s difficult
for you to know what it’s like to be 13 and to lose everything</span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">. I might have been 13 myself—that passage of
rawness and awkward discovery coupled with an exhilarating sense of one’s
purchase on the world—when my father said this to me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Whether my grandfather really lost everything
or whether it was simply my father’s recollection of a dramatic and
disorienting shift in his own life and the life of the family, is hard to know.
My father’s remark was in any case a singularly dramatic comment by a man never
given to drama, reflecting the shock of his impression, one that would never
quite leave him, that the ground beneath our feet is never certain. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">My grandfather
took the job sometime in early 1933 and was acting as a receiver for several
failed local banks that year; the family appears to have stayed behind in
Syracuse for a period before moving in October 1934 to Virginia where,
according to Richard’s autobiography, the family moved into a “large frame
house overlooking the Potomac River, the city of Washington and Boeing Field,
which later was expanded to become National Airport.” Their sojourn there
lasted only two months and in December they moved to Bethesda into “a pleasant
two-story brick house on a quiet street in a subdivision known as Battery
Park.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the summer of 1936, according
to my uncle, they would move yet again to a home in the 7000 block of Connecticut
Avenue. My father’s parents must have been renters during these early years,
for their names do not show up in property records as homeowners until 1940. <a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span></a></span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">And so my father and his family arrived in the
nation’s capital and would become Washingtonians. </span></div>
<br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<br /></div>
</div>
</span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">_____________</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s200/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br /></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The village of
Chevy Chase was designed by a couple of entrepreneurs before the turn of the
century as a “home suburb for the nation’s capital,” a bedroom community. A
streetcar made its first run in the 1880s, ferrying residents of Chevy Chase into
the city, and in the earliest months of the family’s arrival in Bethesda in
1935, it may have been a fun novelty for my father and his siblings, a feature in
their social life. But the advent of the personal automobile meant its demise
that same year, and by the time of their arrival in Chevy Chase the next year, the
streetcar had been replaced by bus lines.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My father was a
student at BCC High School, which opened in its current location on East-West
Highway in Bethesda in 1935 (the school had existed since 1926 as a two-room
building on Wilson Lane). My uncle’s autobiography mentions a young man who had
his own car and drove Dick and my father (and perhaps whoever else could pile
in) to school, a young man who would become a lifelong friend of my father’s. This
boy with the car—that American invention of freedom and mobility—must have been
the talk of the campus. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ_VJFJpIC2HagouAyPN949Wm1He7VHVEDkSkW9SVWFeSrT6-fEWS5M8qubLpPWqbVQtFcwV7rFubbUhAHsMSmRZbxpI8RYut8lnZIPsyZIyGDAvKS3_oDrht5mBUhAfYeK8OUf93fLqo2/s1600/JOURNALIST+DAD.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJ_VJFJpIC2HagouAyPN949Wm1He7VHVEDkSkW9SVWFeSrT6-fEWS5M8qubLpPWqbVQtFcwV7rFubbUhAHsMSmRZbxpI8RYut8lnZIPsyZIyGDAvKS3_oDrht5mBUhAfYeK8OUf93fLqo2/s320/JOURNALIST+DAD.jpeg" width="240" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My father. From the Washington </span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Post, circa 1935</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My father wrote
for the high school newspaper and was photographed in the Washington Post
having won an award for “columns.” It shows a handsome if still callow looking
youth, immaculately well-groomed in the jacket and tie that students were
expected to wear—a presentation that was the hallmark of the era that shaped my
father and for which I believe he would always be nostalgic. My father was popular
and a partier, and it was in this period when he came to love Benny Goodman and
the big bands, swing dancing, Fred Astair and Ginger Rodgers. It was the advent
of the entertainment era, of “movie stars” and “show biz.” Years later my
father’s voluminous album collection would serve as background music to the
Sunday afternoons of my childhood when my parents would relax (with cocktails
and cigarettes) in the living room—Goodman, Louis Armstrong, Sinatra, Ella
Fitzgerald. And mid-century Broadway musicals—Carnival, The King and I, Camelot,
Hello Dolly. I am unsure what happened to his album collection; in later years
he acquired a small collection of CDs, a portion of which fell to me after his
death, and I was slightly surprised to find Billie Holiday among his favorites.
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Another, darker
strain was also a feature of my father’s adolescence. His younger sister Alice
had osteomyelitis, a crippling and painful infection of the bones. Penicillin,
discovered in 1928, did not become widely available until after the World War
so I am unsure how her condition was treated. Alice was bedridden for a period
and I believe I recall my father saying there was a time when she was unable to
attend school. He spoke with feeling about her plight which, like the family’s
upheaval from their idyll in Syracuse, may have ingrained in him an awareness
that in the blueprint of our universe, fairness is given no quarter; he
entertained her during her bedridden years reading society news about the stars
and starlets of the period. But Alice was feisty and would grow up to become a
journalist for Time Magazine. (She wrote the cover story in 1949 for the
magazine about Perle Mesta, a Washington socialite and pioneering feminist who
had been appointed by President Truman to be ambassador to Luxembourg).
Remarkably, in the early 1960s the magazine purged its staff of women,
providing my Aunt Alice with an extremely generous compensation on which she
retired. (Her husband, Al Goldsmith, covered Capitol Hill for a newsletter he
published for the insurance industry.) Alice was a voracious reader and spent
her long early retirement consuming books, especially political biographies.
When we visited her house, she would have a waist-high stack of books by the
sofa she was working her way through. She was a staunch and vocal New Deal
Democrat all her life. My father enjoyed baiting her, and one summer night
arguing outside on the porch of our house, after a few drinks, Alice became so
loud and overheated that my parents became alarmed that she was disturbing the
neighbors. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One other event
during this period of my father’s adolescence would make its mark on him, I
believe, when his father became a central player (and I believe a hero) in a
local bank scandal. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The Park Savings
Bank was located at the intersection of Kenyon Street and 14<sup>th</sup>
Street in Mt. Pleasant. It had been opened in 1909, by residents and
businessmen of the neighborhood who wanted a regional bank. It closed in March
1933 with liabilities of nearly $4 million. After the Bank Holiday that year, Park
Savings did not re-open but fell into federal receivership. On July 17, 1934
the front page of the Washington Post reported that 28 directors of the bank
were being sued “by John F. Moran, receiver, in District Supreme Court
yesterday in an effort to recoup the huge losses suffered by the bank.” </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Charging the directors with ten acts
which involved “nonperformance of, malfeasance in the performance of, and the
malfeasance of duties imposed by law,” the action listed liabilities of
$2,595,991.60 which it alleged were traceable to the directors.</span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">This report
appeared on the same day that troops from the National Guard and tanks were
sent into the city of San Francisco to quell riots that occurred in the wake of
a general strike. Also reported by the Post that day was unrest at a University
in Germany by students protesting the Nazi closure of student fraternity
organizations; that article also noted that the national leader of a German
Catholic youth organization was killed, and “a new attack on Jews was
inaugurated by Der Angriff, newspaper of Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In November 1933,
seven months before the suit my grandfather filed in court against the bank
directors, there had been a move in court by a group of depositors to have my
grandfather replaced, presumably by a locally-appointed receiver. Newspaper
reports about this episode are not clarifying; it may have represented a
difference of opinion about how to proceed in recovering depositors’ money, or
it may have been a reflexive distrust of the federal government to act in the
best interests of depositors.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The suit
by the depositors’ group was dismissed and for the remainder of the 1930s my
grandfather proceeded to act in the role of undertaker for the bank and to
strive to retrieve depositors’ money. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The scandal
appears to have involved a principal actor, a director of the bank named Robert
Stunz, and a handful individuals to whom, over a period of years, Stunz made
loans with no collateral, using depositors’ money. Somewhere in between the
lines of the Post reports there is, I believe, a story about what kind of
leverage these individuals may have had over Robert Stunz; the reports are intriguing
but raise more questions than they answer. In addition to the wildcat loans,
several reports cite “hard liquor supplies” that Stunz purchased with
depositors’ money. Shortly after the bank holiday in March 1933, the Post
reported that Stunz died by suicide, leaving behind a note accepting blame for
the bank’s failure and absolving all other employees of any wrongdoing.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My grandfather’s
obituary in 1965 cited four other local failed banks that fell under his
receivership. Some 9000 banks failed during the decade of the 1930s, more than
4000 in 1933 alone. The facts surrounding the Park Savings Bank scandal, as
well as the attention the local press gave to it, suggest a criminal escapade, something
that rose above the standard story of depression era failure; a report in the
Post on May 7, 1937, offering one of the clearest summaries of what happened,
refers to what auditors and investigators were calling “a conspiracy to
embezzle.” Still, the machinations of the bank directors could only have
happened in a time when banks were unregulated to a degree that is unimaginable
today. Although my grandfather’s part in this saga unfolded during the decade
of my father’s adolescence, when the drama of his own life commanded his
attention, it can hardly have escaped my father’s notice when his father’s name
was appearing occasionally on the front page of the local paper. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">On October 20,
1939, a month and half after Hitler’s Germany invaded Poland, the Washington
Post reported that the United States Senate was debating lifting an arms
embargo to European allies. That story shared the front page that day with the
following account that appeared to mark the end of the Park Savings Bank saga: </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br /></span></div>
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">“Directors of the Park Savings Bank yesterday
paid Receiver John F. Moran $500,000, making a total of $793,000 which will be
distributed among 18,000 depositors of the institution before January 1. The
directors’ checks were in settlement of half a dozen suits growing out of the
failure of the bank in 1933.”</span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">By that time my
father was 18. He would go to the University of Maryland and after graduation,
after Pearl Harbor, would enlist in the army. He would be swept up in the
immense events that were to come, World War and Cold War. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">But my father
was, first, a Depression-era child, and the events of that period, including his
father’s role, occurred at the stage of his life when one is possibly most
receptive to the imprint of the larger world. In these two<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>events—the family’s upheaval and my
grandfather’s role in securing the depositors’ money—were illuminated the
central themes that formed the lived experience of an entire generation that
came of age in the Roosevelt years, the men and women who would fight the world
war and later forge the post-war American consensus: the ground beneath your
feet might be ever uncertain (<i>you have no idea what it’s like to be 13 and
to lose everything</i>), yet the government could use its power to secure the
ground, at least minimally, freeing you to flourish as you might. In its best
light, the New Deal was in the service of that high American ideal of freedom;
you could not ever be truly free if you were forever at the mercy of calamitous
circumstance.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Not everyone
bought this, to say the least. There was most certainly a vigorous opposition
to Roosevelt and to his plain-speaking successor from Missouri. (David
McCullough’s epic biography of Truman is consoling, if you need reassurance
that poisonous character assassination in American politics is nothing new). My
father was a lifelong registered Democrat, and I believe the New Deal was for
him formative. But he was by no means an enthusiast, and he was all his life
ambivalent, at best, about politicians in general—all of them. (I do not recall
him expressing great enthusiasm for any politician with the possible exception,
briefly, of Henry Jackson.) In later years, the tumult of American life in the 1960s,
would push him rightward. But his family’s experience, his father’s role in the
Depression, and his sister’s infirmity, fostered an acute awareness of, and a
genuine fellow-feeling for, the regular guy or gal and his or her vulnerability
to wanton and outrageous fortune.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">____________</span></span></span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s200/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My father’s
sojourn at the University of Maryland was unremarkable; he majored in
accounting and joined the Phi Delta Theta fraternity, in whose house he may
have lived during his upper-class years. He graduated in 1942.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Life changed for
everyone that year in December, and sometime after the attack on Pearl Harbor
my father enlisted in the Army. He would be stationed at Ft. Hood in Killeen,
Texas.</span></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisSeuFvK63p7Fdfe7TRk_DEf8wZWFhBfa9ko8tLIIxhAGsRx-mG6iCEd6-tUeMG7V1tNWJ_XXcXYoXAADRZps4K2IQKB8V9wyhstYCT4UxK1zrzv0Lobs_amciK9_DJlKUSNTgn1HqnF2K/s1600/SOLDIER+BUD.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisSeuFvK63p7Fdfe7TRk_DEf8wZWFhBfa9ko8tLIIxhAGsRx-mG6iCEd6-tUeMG7V1tNWJ_XXcXYoXAADRZps4K2IQKB8V9wyhstYCT4UxK1zrzv0Lobs_amciK9_DJlKUSNTgn1HqnF2K/s320/SOLDIER+BUD.jpeg" width="240" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In the Army</span></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Of his time in
the Army my father was memorably sardonic. It was, he said, where he learned a
sense of humor. The truth, I think, was that he already had one, and it was
what helped him survive apprenticeship in a life—the life of a soldier—for
which he did not bring a natural talent. I think he must have appreciated
Joseph Heller’s classic account of the absurdity of military life in <i>Catch-22</i>;
it was a place, he once memorably told me, where you might be told to go dig a
ditch and then ten minutes later be told to fill it back up. You meet the world
when you go in the Army, and my father recalled being platooned with guys from
all over, guys who grew up in the sticks in Tennessee or Arkansas, guys who
couldn’t read or write. My father was sometimes enlisted to write letters home
to parents, wives or girlfriends. <i>“Dear Mom, miss you terribly. Food’s horrible,
but I’m ok. Try not to worry. Love, Joe.”</i> Something like that. He was
discharged in 1946 as a second lieutenant, never having been sent overseas. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">One of my
father’s best, lifelong friends did see combat. He received a medal for taking
out a bunker full of German machine gunners, this friend of his, tossing a hand
grenade into the bunker and killing them all. My father said his friend never
spoke about this episode and did not want to. His friend confided to him only
that it wasn’t heroism, he was terrified. Many years later, with advanced
emphysema, this man—the boy in high school at BCC who had his own car, the talk
of the campus—would die by suicide, a casualty of alcoholism and depression. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Shortly after his
return home to the D.C area, my father would meet my mother—six years his
junior—then a student at the University of Maryland and a roommate of my
father’s sister Mary. My mother, Ellie, was a fun and lively young woman, a bit
of a party girl perhaps, but with cultural and intellectual aspirations as well
that she instilled in me and my brothers. She had grown up in Baltimore. She
had a knack for friendship and was instantly liked by everyone; the fast group
of women friends she made in the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority—and later with their
husbands—would prove the nucleus of my parents’ social lives. Over six decades
from the 1950s to the early 2000s, they shared the arrival of children, many University
of Maryland Terrapin athletic events, vacations together with all of our
families at the eastern shore, the decline and passing of their own parents, as
well as a tragedy or two along the way. All of these passages were punctuated
by countless high-spirited cocktail parties; these men and women were a sturdy
bond of fun and music, camaraderie and celebration that nourished both my
parents to the end of their days.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My father and
mother were married in 1953. They settled first in the Glover Park neighborhood
of the district. My father had a job as a bookkeeper for a local radio station;
later he would become the accountant for Barry Pate Chevrolet, a family owned
car dealership located at 1129<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Connecticut Avenue, with which my father would be associated, through
location and name changes, until his retirement. (At some point in the early or
mid-1960s, the dealership merged with Addison Chevrolet and the new Barry Pate
and Addison would be located—somewhat fatefully, given late events that would
transpire—at Florida and 14<sup>th</sup> Street.) My father was remarkably
reliable; over many years I can count on one hand the number of times he stayed
home sick, and he was awake at the breakfast table every day at 6:20 a.m. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To live for long
in this most self-important city is to begin to see your life against the
backdrop of national and international events. Looking back at the frontpage
headlines at the time of my and brothers’ birthdays, two themes are consistent:
the emerging and burgeoning civil rights movement here at home, and the
confrontation with the Soviet Union. On May 4, 1954 when Michael, my oldest
brother, was born, Post reporter Chalmers Roberts topped the front-page
headlines that day with a report about the collapsing French adventure in a
far-off region few Americans probably gave any thought to—Vietnam. A conference
in Geneva was being worked out to “take up the Indochina problem”; the
agreement at this conference would divide the country, with fateful results, into
a north (supported by the Soviets and the Chinese) and a south supported by the
U.S. Just above the fold, Murrey Marder reported that Democrats and Republicans
were tussling over the scope of the Army-McCarthy hearings, a sordid televised
drama of accusations and counter-accusations, an off-shoot of McCarthy’s red
scare investigations; it was during the Army hearing that the S<span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">enator would be called out—“have you no
shame, sir?”—beginning the end of his prominence</span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">. </b>Thirteen days later the U.S. Supreme Court would rule in <i>Brown
v. Education</i> that public school segregation was unconstitutional. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Michael recalls our father taking him, in
November 1963, to the showroom of the dealership on Connecticut to watch the
funeral motorcade following President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas on its way to
St. Matthew’s Cathedral on Rhode Island Avenue. Nine years old at the time, Michael
remembers seeing the President’s stricken wife, his brothers, French president
Charles De Gaulle, and Ethiopian Emperor Haile Sallesie. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In the December
of the following year, when Robert, my next older brother, was born, the
Montgomery bus boycott would begin in Alabama. Earlier that year, the Pentagon
announced a decision to build inter-continental ballistic missiles armed with
nuclear warheads; Congress authorized President Eisenhower to use force to
protect the island of Formosa against the People’s Republic of China; and the
Soviet Union and seven eastern bloc countries signed the Warsaw Pact. On my
birthday on St. Patrick’s Day in 1960, rain was turning an eight inch snow
storm into the characteristic DC slush festival; that headline shared<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the front page with a story about West German
chancellor Konrad Adenaur who was calling for a plebiscite in West Berlin to
“demonstrate that its citizens `absolutely reject’ Soviet demands on<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>their city,” and an article about plans to
test a 10,000 pound bomb underground in New Mexico. (Slightly lower on the page
was the headline: “Ike Comes Out Publicly for Nixon.” Seems even President
Eisenhower was a tad ambivalent about the vice president, a man who would
dominate the news for much of my later childhood and adolescence, a man described
memorably by the novelist Thomas Mallon as “this darkest of dark horses.”)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To the privileged
children of a prosperous kingdom, news of trouble in the kingdom reaches their
ears as through a scrim; it sounds bad, but what could it mean? The year 1968
was so brimming over with bad news even an eight-year-old couldn’t miss it. I
occasionally helped my brother deliver the <i>Washington Star </i>in my
neighborhood in the afternoon and can still recall the shock of that picture of
Robert Kennedy lying on the kitchen floor of that hotel in Los Angeles. I had
never heard the name Martin Luther King before April 4 of that year; in the
aftermath of his murder in Memphis, the District of Columbia experienced the
most searing episode in the city’s history, when rioting ravaged large sections
in and surrounding the U Street corridor, all the way up to Capitol Hill and in
other discrete areas throughout the city. A car was set afire on a lot at
Belmont and 14<sup>th</sup>, the lot belonging to the dealership my father
worked for, whose store front was a block south at Florida and 14<sup>th</sup>.
The Evening Star reported broken windows at the dealership, which remained closed
during the riot. I recall my father journeying downtown while it was still
raging to check on the state of affairs; for whatever reason—perhaps because the
business had established a reasonably good relationship with the surrounding
community, perhaps because black men and women were employed there—it was
spared the kind of comprehensive damage that destroyed other businesses in the
area. It would re-open and remain in business for a lean years in the now
ravaged neighborhood before relocating. Later that summer I recall attending a
Washington Senators baseball game at D.C. stadium with my family when National
Guardsmen patrolled the bleachers. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">It wasn’t all bad
news. My father was an early joining member of the Edgemoor Club in Bethesda, a
tennis club that had opened in 1920. A prettier picture you can hardly imagine:
a private club “nestled” in a leafy green and well-to-do suburb; its clay
courts are expertly manicured and for years has enjoyed a reputation for
training some of the top tennis players in the region (including Davis Cup
competitors) and for hosting elite competitions. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In fact, it
always seemed to me like a pretty friendly and casual place, untouched by country-club
stuffiness. But Edgemoor was really my father’s thing; he joined in the 1940s
when he returned from the Army. My brothers and I used the pool quite a bit,
but tennis never really took with any of us in a big way. For years, my father
regularly played two sets of tennis on Sunday morning with a leading staff
member for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, chaired at that time by
William Fulbright. (Our mother took us to Methodist church while he played; my
father had been raised with an especially dark and forbidding version of Irish
Catholicism and as soon as he was of age, he left the Catholic Church—an
institution about which he had <i>nothing</i> good to say—and never again
darkened the door of a church.)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">In 1968 he was
president of the club, when the issue of race visited its cozy confines. On
November 3, of that year, a report in the Post on page 3 of the A section of
the paper was headlined: “<i>Edgemoor Won’t Play `Whites Only’ Tennis</i>.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: left;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The Edgemoor Club of Bethesda, long regarded
as the citadel of Washington area tennis, has decided not to participate in
competitions with clubs that refuse to allow Negroes to play. </span></i><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">The decision was made by a “decisive majority”
of the club’s 300 members at a meeting Tuesday, according to Robert T. Moran,
club president. At the same time members also urged the Greater Washington
Tennis Association, the Middle Atlantic Lawn Tennis Association and Country
Club Amateur Swimming Association to adopt similar stances. </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My father was
quoted in the article saying Edgemoor “wanted to go on record as disapproving
of clubs that were arbitrarily not hosting matches because of the presence of
Negroes on visiting teams.” He declined in the article to name those other
institutions, but the Post report did. It also noted that the wife of Carl
Rowan, then a prominent black columnist with the Evening Star (and later the
Post), had joined the Indian Spring Country Club, after which some other area
establishments dropped out of the league in which she would have played. (The
article said the clubs denied that Mrs. Rowan’s race was the reason for their
departure). </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Against the
larger backdrop of what was happening in the country around race at that time,
and of the history of the civil rights movement since its origins in the
aftermath of the world war, this declaration by a private suburban enclave was
assuredly no revolutionary moment (the article noted that the Edgemoor Club
itself had no black members at the time. “There would be nothing preventing a
Negro becoming a member should he apply,” my father was quoted in the Post as
saying.) But within its own rarified sphere it was influential—the club was
described by the Post as the “Forest Hills of Washington tennis”—and I do not
doubt my father’s wholehearted support for this position. He was the farthest
thing from any kind of activist or social justice warrior, but I think he knew
stupid when he saw it. Whatever else the segregationist policies of that era
might have been—immoral, unethical, unjust, untrue to our values, and damaging
to generations of black people and their families—they were also <i>surpassingly
stupid</i>. And the club’s declaration spoke to the momentum of a movement,
seven months after the murder of its leader, that was no longer confined to the
southern regions of the country.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What my father
was (and everything in this narrative stands or falls on this declaration) was <i>decent</i>,
a characteristic that has lost ground, at least in the public sphere, to
flashier traits. His background made him alive to the petty injustices visited
upon everyday people. Closely allied with integrity, decency speaks to a private
accountability, a holding of oneself to a standard. The striking thing about
decency is that in the everyday lives of everyday people—on the ground, so to
speak, where all of the cultural divisions are dissolved in the sober light of
prosaic reality—it is everywhere. People <i>like</i> to be decent. In the
public sphere—in public office, in public pronouncements, in social media and
on cable news shows, and in the online comments
section of articles and opinion pieces—no one is accountable to anything at all, a plague of public indecency. </span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">____________</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s200/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">The following
year in 1969 saw an event that had its genesis in the Cold War confrontation
and the arms race,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but which in its
culmination transcended the Cold War and became—in the minds of many, and in
popular legend—a landmark of American technological wizardry, and human
ingenuity and courage. </span></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQje6pYhlEnxeJQ5neIclkWJvsPxWFE45tyh2XVOrhOMYvvIv6t_bMgcw1GqxJR4BY9WWVWdJLXnMgzZJyDP9629iCOgMabzGJYcpwnvKwJqxO32WpiGONbyU33jSPTBT8Y4QN56cYbZAB/s1600/US+AT+FENWICK+%25282%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1316" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQje6pYhlEnxeJQ5neIclkWJvsPxWFE45tyh2XVOrhOMYvvIv6t_bMgcw1GqxJR4BY9WWVWdJLXnMgzZJyDP9629iCOgMabzGJYcpwnvKwJqxO32WpiGONbyU33jSPTBT8Y4QN56cYbZAB/s320/US+AT+FENWICK+%25282%2529.jpeg" width="262" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My family at a Fenwick Island cottage we </span></i></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>rented, circa 1965</i>.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">My family was on
vacation in Fenwick Island, Delaware on July 20 that year when two Americans
walked on the moon. In prior years we had stayed in rental cottages or in
motels in Fenwick or Bethany, but earlier that year my father had bought a
rustic old beach cabin, across the street from the beachfront, for the grand
sum of $10,000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had been built before or shortly after the second world war, surviving a severe storm that had ravaged much of the
coastline in 1962. The cottage stood on cinder blocks, its water was pumped
from a well in the ground, and the house smelled of pine wood, beach tar, and
sea salt. During a storm the house might shake on its rafters and during one
particularly nasty off-season gale, it trembled so perilously my parents
seriously considered bailing us from the house and finding shelter elsewhere.
Over the years it was the source of many happy, prosaic memories: I read <i>To
Kill a Mockingbird</i> for the first time while holed up in our cottage, huddled
under blankets during an off-season storm. </span><br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF55auZHlUZJhqg4lqjOOkgsEtETsQSpiZCJfPxY6DzDcoltbkIQsh4eC8RPGxNids97vFJALufe02uqgShclDi6hJxcl1SDvM468G2H8bx4W5elZvHd-V9kW_WzG-M8xTme_-CPUy8d44/s1600/BEACH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjF55auZHlUZJhqg4lqjOOkgsEtETsQSpiZCJfPxY6DzDcoltbkIQsh4eC8RPGxNids97vFJALufe02uqgShclDi6hJxcl1SDvM468G2H8bx4W5elZvHd-V9kW_WzG-M8xTme_-CPUy8d44/s320/BEACH.jpg" width="320" /></span></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div>
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The young folks on the beach at Fenwick Island, </span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>circa 1968-70</i>.</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">That day of the
moon landing we played football on the beach with the children of my parents’
friends, a dozen or so teenagers and a handful of us younger ones. I was nine,
a childhood friend from school had joined me and my family for the vacation. I
recall looking up from the game and marveling at the moon, already risen in a
daytime sky: three men were up there, in a little craft, two of whom would get
out and walk around on its surface. It was dreamlike and magical, but then you
looked back down and saw your own feet were planted on the earth and your own
reality—whatever it was—all around you: a crystal blue ocean, its tide coming in
and going out as it had done since the beginning of time, the hot sand, friends
and family, a football game, and over the dunes the ramshackle cottages. It
made you a little giddy to think of it this way: we had made the leap from down
here to up there.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">That night our
three families—parents, children and their invited friends, assorted others that
came together for the event—gathered at the rented cottage of one of our
parents’ friends around a staticky black and white television. Larger than the
one my father had bought, the house was of the same vintage, one of the oldest
standing structures in Fenwick, and it stood just feet from the dunes that
separated it from the beach, so that you could hear the waves cascading against
the shore a hundred yards away in the darkness. The exit by the astronauts from
the lunar module seemed to be delayed interminably; reception on the tiny
television was tenuous (when, say, the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>wind blew), and I fell asleep on the floor to what seemed like a blur of
static and commentary. Someone shook me awake just in time to see Neil Armstrong
step off the ladder and onto the moon. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I think sometimes
of that summer of the moonshot, when I gazed up from the sand at the moon in a
crystal blue sky, as the apex and the end of something. Americans today are
nostalgic for a “golden age” and—political slogans aside—almost everyone in this
strange and troubled time feels that we have left something behind along the
way, that we are off our game. If I could point to a golden age of my own, I
guess that summer would be mine. I grieve now for the loss of what feels like
an American normal my daughter, now in her twenties, will never know; a country
that collectively did great, unimaginable things, that conquered the moon. (It
is astounding, for instance, to recall that the moon shot was pulled off using
computer systems that would be considered antiquated in any office setting
today.)</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">But I know it
must have been only my innocence that was coming to an end, the kind of bubble
that is for lucky children to experience. Outside the picture frame of my
memories there was, of course, <i>an enormous </i>amount of trouble in that
year 1969, although I was only dimly aware of it. (There is, too, an
alternative narrative about the moon shot, one that many Americans held to then
and might ascribe to now, a story of extravagant sums of money wasted on a
technological venture that bore little real tangible benefit for citizens, a
lavish expenditure while our inner-city communities were<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in turmoil and our cities were in flames.) </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I am aware that
my narrative describes an impossibly privileged childhood—a private tennis
club, a cottage at the beach—and I know that in real terms I was extraordinarily
fortunate. All I can tell you though is that it didn’t feel like privilege. My brothers
and I attended public school from kindergarten through high school. We did not take vacations in Europe, but drove three hours to the shore, where
extravagance was a trip to the boardwalk in Ocean City and ice cream at the
Dairy Queen. (We also drove 6 hours the other way, in summers or at Christmas, to
rural Ohio to visit my mother’s parents, a journey that always seemed to me an
exotic and magical trip to the edge of civilization.) When we went as a
family to baseball games we sat in the bleachers. My mother bought my clothes
each new school year at discount department stores. The life of my childhood
and that of my friends seemed to be a life that was available to every
American. Who could blame me for thinking the world, like the Skaneateles of my
father’s youth, was a given? I was safe, protected by a kindliness that seemed
to pervade everything in a benevolent and fair-minded country that (I was
taught to believe) allowed the strong and gifted to flourish while striving to
protect the weak and vulnerable. Over the dunes, those modest, ramshackle
cottages seemed accessible to just about anyone. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">They are gone
now, almost all of them, replaced by multimillion-dollar winterized mansions.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">As my adolescence
progressed, I entered that long, self-absorbed tunnel through which you can
only see your parents as tedious, simpleminded and embarrassing. The most minor
foible becomes an indictment of their entire way of being; my father sometimes
wore so much aftershave it knocked you sideways; we had to tell him to dial it
back. I was not above thinking my father should have been something more than
he was, accomplished more than he did. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Many years later,
when I was myself a father, a friend introduced me to Robert Hayden’s
dagger-to-the-heart retrospective on fatherly devotion and adolescent scorn. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">“No one ever
thanked him</span></i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">,” the poet says
of the man who “<i>got up early/and put his clothes on in the blueblack
cold/then with cracked hands that ached/from weather in the weekday weather
made/banked fires blaze</i>.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Too late, the poet is the wiser now. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“<i>Speaking indifferently to him</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">Who had driven out the cold and polished my
good shoes as well, </span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt;">What did I know, What did I know</span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: normal; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Of love’s austere and lonely offices?” <a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftnref4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></b></span></a></span></span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What did I know? </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">That same summer,
or perhaps the next, an August night in Washington, the air is torpid and wet
with humidity. Summer has dragged on too long, greenery everywhere is limpid,
given up, exhausted by the heat, sagging into the streets. The night is close.
There’s a party of some kind at the Edgemoor Club and a large crowd is
assembled in the clubhouse that separates the pool from the tennis courts. I am
here tonight with my mother and my older brother and there is an air of
anticipation, although for what I can’t yet know. My mother knows for sure and
seems to let on that it will be fun, but she isn’t saying. My brother may have
known as well, though he would be as astonished as I was at what was to
transpire. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">A space is
cleared and the assembled crowd falls back to line the walls around the parquet
floor. My father is at one end of the floor and a dance partner, a neighbor, a
dear friend of my mother’s, is at the other end. There is an announcement and
silence falls. My father is striking a curious, anticipatory pose, as is his
partner, our neighbor, at the other end. I see my father tapping his foot,
counting out a beat. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">And then the
music begins.</span></div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-align: center; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">________________</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s1600/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1379" data-original-width="1600" height="171" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhNRAOqVAr9xkwZBgrbsgNV0mLWjTZdc6zrc7hbu_HYVayAxTZlEuCFtYCF9yOy_x9hjdIxVlyvrKpMEC8l_ISk6ncg2aNQnQqqMJx8qrYMlGlwPjW_GzIM-i2KgPno7uBkB0rvEZ8yDC3g/s200/swing_dance+SMALLER+ICON.jpg" width="200" /></a></span></div>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To watch the
swing dancers at the Spanish Ballroom in Glen Echo is to realize how some of us
come to accommodate our bodies as if it were a jail or small holding cell. For
those of us invested almost entirely in words and ideas as a form of
expression, the only form, it is to realize what a lonely little island that
form is, waving semaphore signals at passing lifeboats in the distance. I came
to the Spanish Ballroom because I didn’t think I could adequately describe from
memory—aside from my own sense of astonishment watching him—what I saw my
father do that on that dance floor fifty years ago. There is nothing lonely
about these dancers; they are <i>connected</i>, even when they spin off from
each other as I do recall my father and his dance partner doing. That was one
thing that stands out from that night—I had<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>seen my father move about on a tennis court with some dexterity, but out
there on the parquet he covered the floor (at least the length and width of one
side of a singles court) with an athletic grace and lightning speed that took
our breath away. The website for <i>GottaSwing</i>, which hosts dances at the
Spanish Ballroom, notes that swing jazz (made famous with white audiences by my
father’s favorites, Benny Goodman, Glen Miller, Artie Shaw and others) and the
distinctive swing dance—the Lindy Hop—grew out of the Harlem Renaissance in the
1920s; the Lindy Hop drew on elements of ballroom, jazz and tap dancing. You
can see that in the dancers at the Ballroom, a seamless mix of precisely
choreographed formal dance steps along with a kind of exuberant, carefree
improvisation that finds its expression in the feet—think of very young
children, utterly unself-conscious, skipping down a street. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">To see our
parents whole when we are young is impossible. What I saw in my father that
night at Edgemoor as he danced was as different from the man I thought I knew—the
man who would be there at the breakfast table at 6:20 a.m. as always, the next
morning—as a hurricane is from the written description of one. The crowd lining
the walls thundered approval when the music stopped, respectful at first of the
dancefloor space still buzzing as if with static electricity from the
exuberance of the dance. But then we stormed the floor engulfing my father
whose white button down shirt was soaked through with perspiration. My mother,
I saw, embraced our neighbor, her friend; my mother was not, alas, a dancer and
the moment must have been a poignant one for her; but she was celebrating my
father’s performance. She had always wanted him to step outside the work-a-day
workaholic role that he, like so many fathers of that generation, assumed; it
was my mother who made him take a week off work one summer to take some classes
at Chautauqua. I forget entirely what I said to my father afterward, stunned as
I was, but I seem to recall he was as disavowing as Atticus Finch was when his
children were awed to see him shoot a rabid dog in the street. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What did I know,
what did I know? </span></i></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUuIYpD1hJU-ETaPQ14oH6ycjRR0GG3yxP2fxrtrslFs0gBDqR_4Jp8Uu_vSZsaT5m7PCSxlGyMCej08qikLBG5PXaDWWi80fxFbLFmbgZW2PYJyN56yQp51IkU37ht1ifxmu5zxfrF3ci/s1600/MOM+AND+DAD+%25282%2529.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1250" data-original-width="1600" height="155" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhUuIYpD1hJU-ETaPQ14oH6ycjRR0GG3yxP2fxrtrslFs0gBDqR_4Jp8Uu_vSZsaT5m7PCSxlGyMCej08qikLBG5PXaDWWi80fxFbLFmbgZW2PYJyN56yQp51IkU37ht1ifxmu5zxfrF3ci/s200/MOM+AND+DAD+%25282%2529.jpeg" width="200" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">Between that
night at the dance and his death many years later in 2007, my father and mother
(who worked for the Board of Education in Montgomery County) put me and my
brothers through private college (with none of us having to take out a loan).
They travelled some, my mother and father, and they partied a lot with their
friends. He retired in 1982 and they lived year-round for a short period in
Fenwick before moving back to Bethesda. </span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Meanwhile the country that had defeated
fascism and faced down the</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Soviet Union, that had </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">enacted a guaranteed income
and publicly funded </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">medical care for elders, that had walked on the </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">moon, experienced a cascade of </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">dispiriting episodes, their fallout engendering a
steady, corrosive rain</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">of recrimination, cynicism and insincerity: Watergate,
Iran-contra, Anita Hill </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">and </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Clarence Thomas, O</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">J Simpson, the LA riots, the Trial of the Central Park 5, </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Monica Lewinsky.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">September 11,
2001. I watched the towers fall just days after I had been laid off from a job,
a casualty of the first dot-com boom (when we were all going to become
millionaires on websites that had no business plan). There was briefly a
revival of purpose, a common sense of the specialness of our country that had
been attacked. But it dissipated amid a growing partisan divide, a heartbreaking
failure.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Iraq and Katrina.<i>
</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Today as I write
this, we are four weeks into a global pandemic that has shut down the American
economy. Amidst an ocean of distress—infected persons dying alone, unable to be
visited by family; businesses that will never recover; unemployed individuals
with children at home they must home-school—a new crop of American heroes have
been discovered, like the husband of my father’s oldest grand-daughter, an emergency
department doctor overseeing a unit of COVID-infected individuals in a hospital
on the Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel. They had been showing up daily at
difficult jobs—all those nurses and doctors and hospital staff—exposing
themselves to disease and death, long before this. Elsewhere as usual people
are finding ways to practice decency in straightened circumstances. A new
generation is learning the lesson that the ground beneath our feet is never
assuredly secure, and no one knows what the future will look like. My videos of
Opening Game at Camden Yards or of the celebration parade for the World
Champion Washington Nationals last year—last year! A year otherwise brimming
over with dissension and public indecency—seem already like fossil remains of a
happier Atlantis we left behind. </span><i></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">What is the
American normal, anyway? Where is that promised land? </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdpfA8yzoGfs-Rd3K4JdvXtwgl-h-tCZZWoM9IfvR2zafeNKnXyKkAAQoWgt6sLLxybAyich9MhE6ceVFKgrVEZdTL9L_pp7Yb8EllU1LC0TgrFJaiUZKTEVdy4yYmOqKdeV5BBfeHQMtF/s1600/LATER+BUD.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjdpfA8yzoGfs-Rd3K4JdvXtwgl-h-tCZZWoM9IfvR2zafeNKnXyKkAAQoWgt6sLLxybAyich9MhE6ceVFKgrVEZdTL9L_pp7Yb8EllU1LC0TgrFJaiUZKTEVdy4yYmOqKdeV5BBfeHQMtF/s320/LATER+BUD.jpg" width="240" /></span></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif; font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 200%;">I think my father
might have been able to tell you that there is no golden age, there never has
been. There is only the current moment, all that we have. The present is always
arduous, the future has always been uncertain. He died in October of his 86<sup>th</sup>
year. In the week or two prior to that morning when my mother found him where
he had gotten up in the middle of the night and collapsed, a jazz pianist named
John Eaton that my parents admired had come to the retirement community where
they lived to play a concert. My father was first in line at the door, and sat
in the front row, moving to the music to the end. </span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<br />
<div style="mso-element: footnote-list;">
<br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<div id="ftn1" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftn1" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn1;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[1]</span></span></a> For information about John F. Moran’s property in Skaneateles, I am indebted to the work of Beth Battlle, researcher at the Skaneateles Historical Society. </div>
<div id="ftn2" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftn2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[2]</span></span></a> My uncle’s memoir also includes important information about the family’s first years in Washington, D.C., on parts of which this account is based. </div>
<div id="ftn3" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftn3" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn3;" title=""></a>3 For all information about the early years of my grandfather, John F. Moran, in Syracuse and the probable roots of his parents, I am indebted to Sarah Kozma, Research Specialist at the Onandaga Historical Association. </div>
<div id="ftn4" style="mso-element: footnote;">
<a href="file:///C:/Users/Mark/Documents/AMERICAN%20NORMAL.docx" name="_ftn4" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn4;" title=""><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span style="font-family: "calibri" , sans-serif; font-size: 10.0pt; line-height: 107%;">[4]</span></span></a> I am indebted to Beth Huffner, director of the Archive and Research Center at Chevy Chase Historical Society, for her research of property records for John F. Moran and Kathryn. </div>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-17158494617154495942020-07-24T07:37:00.002-07:002020-07-24T07:39:51.301-07:00At the Fork Between Two Dead Ends: Slim Hope in the Time of Trumpism and the Woke Cancel Phenomenon<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6UBlXl4FyVEGNsNuYRY7sz5EKhlKcbEwFR52h7HZuPS7n37NuD69yb5ezdMyTDCIPmht8imlQ38jwFRDA4olJzrrfYIlpjR7GLjmWwvxaAmnFeJDbBZbecNeH4k9sRZRS1HECi9G32fOD/s1600/istockphoto-1172218513-2048x2048.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="1600" height="113" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6UBlXl4FyVEGNsNuYRY7sz5EKhlKcbEwFR52h7HZuPS7n37NuD69yb5ezdMyTDCIPmht8imlQ38jwFRDA4olJzrrfYIlpjR7GLjmWwvxaAmnFeJDbBZbecNeH4k9sRZRS1HECi9G32fOD/s320/istockphoto-1172218513-2048x2048.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>"This counter-movement is predictable because the cancel phenomenon is not one that anyone really likes; it is an entirely negative phenomenon, a negative movement: it offers no vision of what should be, only an ever-roving eye for what shouldn’t be, for what must be cancelled. Free speech aside, think about how lame and pointless this little episode involving Pinker is: there are real issues that privileged white people in positions of academic leadership could engage, issues in which black lives really matter, are really at stake—capital punishment, for instance, which is thoroughly racist in practice.</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>But here they are, these professors of linguistics who live nowhere near areas of urban crime, combing through the social media postings of a colleague looking for impurities."</i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>
</i></span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> *****</span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">In an exceptional <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/07/18/call-it-cultural-left-do-not-call-it-liberal/">column</a> this past weekend in the Washington Post, Matt Bai accomplished something more than another take down of cancel culture—he staked out the territory of belief and politics occupied by people like me who fear we no longer have a home: between the reactionary nationalism of Trump and Trump-ism, and More-Woke-Than-Thou Progressivism, what is an old-style New Deal Democrat to do?</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">His subject is a recent “furor” created by some academics who want to strip Steven Pinker of his honors within The Linguistic Society of America. Pinker is an intellectual provocateur and has tweeted some “controversial” things about police, urban violence, and related matters.</span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From Bai: <i>“In one tweet, from 2015, he referred to data suggesting that police might not shoot black citizens disproportionately, compared with the general population. In 2017, he tweeted that the focus on racial disparity might distract from solving the problem of police incompetence.</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i></i><br /></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><i>More recently, again citing research, Pinker had the temerity to suggest that “under-policing” might well be as dangerous to black neighborhoods as “over-policing.” He has also used the terms “urban crime” and “urban violence,” which his incensed brethren denounce as “dogwhistle” terms that reinforce racial stereotypes.”</i></span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Along the way, Bai—who worked as a crime reporter in his early days—acknowledges his sympathy for the importance of policing to minority communities, and scores some first-rate parenthetical shade when he notes that “urban crime” neighborhoods are conspicuous for the scarcity of linguistic professors.<br /><br />(As an aside, I once tried my hand at an essay, long since vanished into the ether, seeking to refute Pinker on the subject of genetics and the influence of environment in child-rearing. It was emblematic, I think, of Pinker to fall on the side of genetic determinism. I was reaching well beyond my level of competence to pretend to argue about genetics, though I think it is safe to say that the ancient debate about “nature-nurture” has only been made more complicated and interesting—not simpler—by the revolution in genomics; and I will add that the durability of this belief, call it a wish, that humans are determined, is a subject all to itself. Why do we want so badly to be relieved of the responsibility for our actions, for the environments we create for children and others? Why do we want to give up so easily on the possibility of change?)<br /><br />But Bai’s concern is less with Pinker—with whom Bai admits to being only “glancingly familiar”—than with how to think about and respond to the purity tests being administered by elite thinkers against others. <br /><br /><i>What struck me most, reading about the coordinated attack on his integrity, is something Pinker said in his own defense. “I have a mind-set that the world is a complex place we are trying to understand,” he said. “There is an inherent value to free speech, because no one knows the solution to problems a priori.”<br />That’s such a familiar sentiment, I thought. Where have I heard it before?<br />And then I remembered: Oh, right, it’s what we used to call liberalism.</i><br />Whatever this thing is that stands opposite to the “mind-set” described by Pinker—whether you call it cancel culture or woke progressivism; Bai calls it the “cultural left”—it isn’t the center-left liberal consensus that built the post-World War II America those of us over the age of 50 inherited. (The America, by the way, that most MAGA people, whether they know it or not, are harkening back to when they talk about making it great again. You want the 1950s? Great—that was when a <i>Republican</i> administration built the interstate highway system, a massive public works program funded by our parents’ tax dollars. And everyone—<i>everyone</i>—was on board. A subject for another day.)<br /><br />I am of two minds about the durability of this new thing, the cultural left, the cancel phenomenon. To be sure, social media gives it an insidious staying power. But it is also, fundamentally, a form of bullying and like all bullying—like all bullies—it is easily shut down when people simply decide to stand up to it. And this is now happening, predictably, in all sorts of ways. There is the letter that appeared in Harpers, signed by notable figures on the left (including Noam Chomsky, no less), and later the resignation of Bari Weiss from the New York Times.<br /><br />Also very hopeful for this slightly-left-of-center man without a country is the return of Andrew Sullivan to The Dish, writing in his last <a href="https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/07/andrew-sullivan-see-you-next-friday.html?fbclid=IwAR0oZAlHOepHbRwFfOCpQgIsTddF_LoCnGGEyWP6CiO_xkRm7M2aMUQqi_c">column </a>that he was no longer welcome at New York Magazine and Vox. Like Christopher Hitchens (with whom he was bosom friends) Sullivan plays for no team, and the team he spurned day-after-day during the first incarnation of The Dish is contemporary American conservativism. Sullivan saw it all coming before anyone else, saw that it was American conservativism that had gone off the grid. Very often he seemed to be jumping up and down, screaming at the top of his lungs, trying to get others to see.<br /><br />If he comes back now principally to be a scourge of woke cancel culture—well, let no one pretend to be surprised.<br /><br />This counter-movement is predictable because the cancel phenomenon is not one that anyone really likes; it is an entirely negative phenomenon, a negative movement: it offers no vision of what should be, only an ever-roving eye for what shouldn’t be, for what must be cancelled. Free speech aside, think about how lame and pointless this little episode involving Pinker is: there are real issues that privileged white people in positions of academic leadership could engage, issues in which black lives really matter, are really at stake—capital punishment, for instance, which is thoroughly racist in practice.<br /><br />But here they are, these professors of linguistics who live nowhere near areas of urban crime, combing through the social media postings of a colleague looking for impurities.<br /><br />I should resist making too much of these counter movements, which have already been through the digital wringer of skepticism, second-guessing, and snide dismissal. The woke cultural left is deeply entrenched in academia and journalism. And Trump-ism—which is an existential threat to the American project—both feeds the movement and feeds on it. <br /><br />We are in a dark, dark place.<br /><br />But I am going to choose to be sanguine and hope, precisely because the moment is so dark, and so many people are scared and worried. Americans despise the woke cancel movement (even if none of them chair departments of history at the nation’s colleges); there is a potent movement of conservatives who are sickened by Trump (even if none of them hold office in Congress, where it’s spineless careerism all down the line).</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Is it possible to hope that the really creative potential of our current moment is the recreation of the center? </span></div>
<div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: x-small;">(Image: Aquir/shutterstock.com)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"></span><span style="font-size: x-small;"></span><br /> </span><br />
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-83851274714146092082020-02-08T10:20:00.002-08:002020-02-08T10:20:57.729-08:00Wrong End of a Telescope: Jigsaw Puzzle, Bonsai Tree, Walking Companion
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">I have a feeling for chaos, and it is not an entirely bad one. In the very beginning, you start with what works, with what fits, and you cannot help but make progress. If you are rebuilding, just start anywhere and you are making an improvement by 100 percent.<br /><br />This isn’t entirely different from how I felt when I opened the box to a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, a reproduction of an illustration by Michael Storrings called “Springtime on 5th Avenue in New York.” I guess you would call it impressionistic, since perspective and realistic proportion give way to the dominant scheme, which is color—bright yellow taxis, buildings pale blue and pink and slate, lush green trees in the park, flower beds of red and pink and blue—and the impression of busyness: traffic, buildings, storefronts, and smart looking people walking smart looking dogs. <br /><br />I had been toying with the idea for a while. I had only recently moved into a new apartment and I had an idea in my head of what I wanted my new place to be like, and this idea included a table where there would always be a jigsaw puzzle in progress. It’s something I remember from childhood summer vacations with family when a puzzle would be started and serve as the nighttime project; I seem to recall it as well from visits to my grandparents’ house where there was always a puzzle in progress. <br /><br />I moved from a small squat building with 12 units in it, moved across the river from Northern Virginia, where I had come three years ago after 16 years of living in Cleveland, into a building along a main corridor of the District of Columbia with more than 500 dwellings. My move over here, back into the city I had lived in as a younger man, happened quickly and although it was a good move, a happy one, the move itself was unsettling in a very specific way: here I was, 58 years old, moving from a one-bedroom apartment to another one-bedroom apartment, and I could pack all my belongings into a 10-foot U-Haul. (The same belongings I had carted from Cleveland two years before.) I had managed to put down, after all this time, no roots at all. I had helped to raise a child, now a beautiful, self-reliant and resilient young woman—and I can go my grave knowing I had done at least this one important thing reasonably well. But the move across the river, into this great cavernous building, seemed to impress upon me my solitariness, and more than that, a palpable lightness of my being in the world. <br /><br />So, starting a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle also possessed a certain metaphorical aptness. There’s a process to it and the first step—finding the straight edges that form the border of your puzzle—forces itself on you because, well, what else is there to do? Where else can you start but the edges of this small-scale model of reality you are trying to conjure from chaos? It turns out to be a chore to do this, and right away what had seemed quaint and cozy now made itself known to me as a project, one that would likely occupy me for weeks or months. Just finding the straight edge pieces is work; they have to be segregated from the rest of the puzzle before you can even think about piecing them together. <br /><br />But as I say, any progress at all is a kind of perfect progress when you are starting from a state of chaos. Before you know it, you have a corner piece, and the beginnings of one side of the border, the windows of the building in that upper right corner of Storrings’ imaginative rendering start to form themselves. It becomes a practical form of meditation on the way things, all things, are accomplished, always—a kind of yoga practice in patience, incrementalism, the long view, starting somewhere and building on a foundation, and the manifest truth that with every choice, you create a very particular shape to your future. <br /><br />XXXXXXXXXX<br /><br />Call it an exercise in building from the edges, starting somewhere, when I formed the idea of soliciting some companions from the building to go walking with me in the morning. I printed up a couple of flyers which I tacked up in the laundry and mail rooms of our building, stating that I had formed the habit of heading out at 5:30 or 6:00 in the morning to go walking in the neighborhood. (This was in fact more aspirational than true—the bit about waking so early—but I figured if someone would take me up on the challenge it would be motivation for both of us.) Would someone care to join me? We could meet in the lobby, walk for an hour on some predetermined path in the neighborhoods behind our building, then finish at the local bakery for coffee and bagels, and be on our way. Perhaps, I wrote on my hopeful flyer, we could start a little walking club. <br /><br />I believe I am being reasonably honest when I say that I had no particular expectations regarding who might become my walking companion in this venture. There are a lot of older folks in the building and I think I envisioned a retired couple, of the 70-is-the-new-50 variety, still vigorous and open to an adventure. <br /><br />In fact, for several weeks no one at all responded, and I was prepared to take my flyers down when someone finally texted me, late in the day on a Saturday, saying they would be pleased to go walking with me that afternoon. The communicant left a name at the end of the message that was entirely opaque to me: it was no American name I had ever heard, but it was unclear what nationality it might represent; neither could I be certain whether it was a male or a female. <br /><br />In any case I was wholly unprepared for the still-young-ish woman, perhaps early 40s, who met me at the elevator. She had large, luminous almond-shaped eyes set within an oval face of an immaculately clear, brown skin, framed by a hijab, a sky-blue silken headscarf that fit tightly over her head, forming a sharp line just above those eyes, and that fell in delicate waves upon her shoulders. I pretended to be unsurprised. We greeted each other with the getting-to-know-you introductory pleasantries of two people meeting on a blind date, then headed for the lobby doors. We agreed that we would walk down to the metro stop in the next neighborhood and back, a distance all together of a mile and a half. <br /><br />All down the avenue my companion kept up a stream of amiable chatter. The native of a near middle eastern country, she worked at that country’s embassy and had three children ranging in age from 9 to 15—a fact she imparted with the ironic weariness of over-taxed soccer moms everywhere: she needed to get out of the apartment and get some air. Her husband worked as a librarian at one of the local universities. <br /><br />(Here I should stop to say that during our stroll down the avenue, and over the few brief but memorable times would we would meet again, my companion attained a brilliant singularity of personhood that deserves to be named. But for a variety of reasons, not least because she hasn’t given me license to write about our encounter, I feel bound to protect her anonymity. I will call her K.)<br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
She was charming, humorous and politely inquisitive about my life, and we were not 25 yards from the building when I felt at once entirely at ease with her, yet also in a state of heightened self-consciousness—charmed, as it were, out of myself by what I regarded as the strangeness of this encounter: a married, Arab woman in a headscarf had opted to go for a walk with a man she did not know. </div>
<br />In relating the facts of my life, it seemed impossible not to mention what was to me most salient—in what now seems like a previous lifetime, I was married and although the marriage did not last long, we had a daughter, now in her third year of college. The trauma of our divorce had long since faded and here in America, where close to half of all marriages ends in divorce, I had long ago ceased to think of it as any kind of scarlet letter. But now this fact, as I shared it with my companion took on an unaccustomed weight. What would she think? In a similar way, she inquired about whether I had ever been to her country (I had not) and where I had travelled in the world. By the standards of cosmopolitan Washington, I have not travelled widely at all, but a place I have been that was most memorable is the State of Israel, and this fact, like my banal divorce, suddenly became alive with nuance.<br /><br />That my companion was articulate and educated was obvious, and I take it as a matter of course that people will swallow all manner of prejudices and strong beliefs in the interest of getting along when you are taking a walk down the avenue on a summer afternoon. So I didn’t seriously think that my tame revelations would upset our casual encounter. What I am talking about are the prejudices and assumptions that Americans have learned in the last two fraught decades to project upon Arabs of the Islamic faith. For a fact that made itself palpable as I was walked with her is that I had never before spoken so much as two words of an intentional conversation with a religious Muslim, or of any kind of conversation with a Muslim female. And now I was strolling with a married woman in a headscarf, one who was lively and funny and ironic, and she was charming me out of my skin. <br /><br />Well, I was lonely, she had answered my ad, and I wanted her to approve of me. I suppose it is noteworthy that when were about halfway to where we had agreed to turn around, her phone rang. She answered in her native language and I was not surprised when she turned to me and said, “My husband says hello.” I returned the greeting. Then in English, she said into the phone, “Mark says hello.” They reverted to their native language to close out the conversation. <br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
As we headed back, I asked her if she had family in her native country and if she returned there ever. She told me the last time was several years ago, and it had cost her and her husband nearly $40,000 in total. “My husband and I have dozens of family members there, and it is expected that you bring every one of them a gift from America,” she told me. “They think because we are in America that we are extremely wealthy. They don’t know that we are living paycheck to paycheck like everyone else.” </div>
<br />If I had been feeling slightly out of my own body up to then, the feeling became amplified when K. surprised me by saying she would like to treat me to a native dish from her country, something simple she would bring up to my apartment sometime. This struck me as an offer so gracious and unexpected that I had no idea how to respond, and I mumbled something barely coherent in response. <br /><br />We talked about the building we shared, and K. said there were holiday parties and get-togethers in the lobby from time to time. “We also have a laughing group that meets on Tuesday nights in the mail room,” she said. “It’s a small group, two or three women other than me and an old man who shows up on his own.”<br /><br />I’d heard about this, I knew this had become a thing—laughing yoga it is sometimes called—and I relished the thought of this small group, including my head-scarfed friend, laughing together in the mail room. “You should join us,” she said. “We get together and do some easy stretches. Then we make laughing sounds.”<br /><br />It was hot that afternoon and by the time we returned to our building I was perspiring. K seemed hardly to have broken a sweat. She was wearing loose fitting, immaculately white slacks and a blouse or tunic of some muted color with a pretty fringe around her neckline, both of which were of the same material as the silken headscarf. She seemed impervious to the steamy heat of the afternoon, and as we said our goodbyes at the elevator, I recall wishing that I could wear her hijab. <br /><br />XXXXXXXXXXXX <br /><br />Many of the apartment buildings that line the avenue where I live were built in the early 1950s—some in the late 40s—the post-war period that saw the enormous expansion of Washington as the seat of a new global presence. Some of these were constructed with a great sense of style, castle-like structures with elaborate brickwork and archways with detailed engravings and gargoyles, designed with the intention that America’s capital should match in style its newfound international influence, and shake off its dowdy, sleepy southern character. As the government grew and the city’s population swelled, these buildings would house the newcomers; it was during this period that the city attained its reputation for transience, a place where people came and went with successive political upheavals. (In fact, there has always been a stable, indigenous, largely African American and—to outside observers—largely invisible population that has outlasted these upheavals over many years.) Although some of the apartments up and down the avenue have been retrofitted in the modern way, quite a few retain their post-war character. Strolling past their lighted windows at night, you have a sense of the generations that have come and gone from these places, a street haunted by the ambitions, intrigues and aspirations, achievements and failures and sexual scandals of 12 presidential administrations. <br /><br />I was drawn to the area by the lively and friendly bookstore in the nearby next neighborhood and its comfortable and inviting café downstairs. I mentioned this to K. as we strolled the avenue that afternoon and she was reminded that her middle-school age daughter was required to read a book that was being stocked in quantity at the store. I seized on an opportunity to do my new friend a favor and offered to pick it up that evening; she could pay me back. She agreed to this arrangement and that evening, after we had parted at the elevator, I bought the book for her. Walking back to the building, I wondered about the propriety of knocking on her apartment door (suppose the husband answered? Or her children?). But she texted me her apartment number and when I knocked on the door, K. answered. It was quiet and dark behind her, and she said almost nothing, but smiled and said thank you and handed me a $20 bill. The book had been $19 and some change, as I had informed her in my text on the way home, and when I asked her if she wanted the balance, she shook her head.<br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I would see her again in less than a week when, as she promised, she texted me ahead of time, then a few minutes later appeared at my door carrying a tray loaded up with two dishes. There was a dinner size plate of rice and ground meat, and a small bowl of what looked like yogurt. </div>
<br />What can I tell you? It was very simple, but the rice and meat affair was spicy and flavorful in a way I had never quite experienced—peppery and very slightly smoky. I believe the meat was lamb and it was ground quite fine and very tender. It was a modest meal, but I finished it feeling entirely and warmly nourished. <br /><br />XXXXXXX<br /><br />The summer progressed and I did not see K. again for some time. (When I had returned the washed tray and dishes on which she had brought me meal the few nights previous, I had left them outside her apartment door as she had instructed; the family was not home.) <br /><br />Slow, laboriously slow, was the progression of my jigsaw puzzle, but it became in time a form of morning meditation, to spend 45 minutes hunched over the table with my coffee, the radio in the background, scanning the pieces and the reproduction of the painting on the box. A jigsaw puzzle of a piece of artwork is a very good way to learn to see—really, really see—the details in a work of art, and it strikes me as a very clever way for an artist to get people to spend far more time studying his or her art than people might normally do under any other conceivable circumstances: divide it up into small pieces, and make people put it back together. <br /><br />Seeing this way is a lesson in how small details make up a whole, how they play into the larger picture, but not as your own mind might predict. For the longest time it seemed, many days, I searched in vain for a puzzle piece that contained the last small fleck of a man’s purple suit. The man occupies a space at the bottom of the illustration, walking the street with the other fashionable types in Storrings’ imagination. From my own vantage point, with the privilege of being able to see the whole illustration I was striving to (as it were) repair, I imagined that it should be easy to find: the purple color stands out, and I believed that I had used up all of the other pieces that had any trace of that color. <br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
But this puzzle piece continued to elude me, and I learned after a while that this is because that single piece, in isolation, when I found it would not look like the piece that I envisioned fitting into the whole. The whole, and the small piece of the whole, relate to each other in a way that I, small piece that I am myself, cannot quite apprehend. </div>
<br />So I would go on searching, confident that the piece would in time reveal itself to me as a surprise. Such is the kind of prosaic discipline I wish I had cultivated more generally, earlier, more earnestly in my life, and I admire those who have--even, or perhaps especially, when their pursuits are eccentric or quixotic. There is a man in New York City who has made it his mission to walk every single street on every block of all five boroughs, a distance of something more than 8,000 miles. When the documentary movie, “The World at Your Feet” was made about this gentleman, he had crossed the 6,000-mile mark and he was still going strong. His dedication has not been without a price, for it seems he has forfeited at least one relationship with a woman who really loved him.<br /><br />Or think of Joseph Grand, a minor character in Camus’ “The Plague.” A good-hearted volunteer in the nearly hopeless effort against the spreading epidemic in Algerian Oran, he has taken upon himself the humble but necessary task of compiling statistics on the dead and dying. In his spare time, Grand is writing a novel, the first sentence of which he insists must be perfect, capturing in cadence and imagery his vision of a woman on horseback, “riding a handsome sorrel mare along the flowery avenues of the Bois de Boulogne.” His new friends Tarrou and Dr. Rieux, the protagonists of Camus’ allegory, join him in their down time between battling plague, helping him perfect the sentence—or trying to, for it seems to be an endeavor without an end, one that will outlive them all. The stoic and clear-eyed Dr. Rieux who narrates the tale, submits that it is Grand, minor figure though he is, who is the story’s real exemplar in the fight against plague, “this insignificant and obscure hero who had to his credit only a little goodness of heart and a seemingly absurd ideal.” <br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It is the absurdity of the ideal that registers a rebuke to the plague that is time, that invisible but ever busy agitator and fellow traveler who frays the threads of your trousers and socks, wearing holes everywhere in your life, fidgeting with your memories until they are dog-eared and yellowed and you wake up one morning in, say, November, look out the into the brittle cold and see your life as some kind of epic, ancient as a pharaoh. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
It is like looking down the wrong end of a telescope; a lot gets crowded into a narrowing space, while seeming further and further away. Imagine a rainy afternoon on, say, a Wednesday, in June, in (let us propose) 1788, a day in a remote countryside of Japan. The sun came up and it went down, although it was hidden all day behind rain clouds. The people who lived there might have been propelled through the day by a sense of fierce urgency—the family needed money, one of the children was sick, the roof of the house needed repair. A thousand miles away, in Paris and other cities of France, a messy revolution was unfolding, and it would be remembered, and it would have an effect and would be written about in books.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Yet something survives from the remote Japanese countryside that could outlast the French Revolution and its consequence. The Yamamoto bonsai tree, first cultivated in the 16th century, survived the atomic blast at Hiroshima and was gifted by the Japanese government in 1976 for the American bicentennial to the United States, where it resides now in the National Botanical Garden, here in my city.</div>
<br />Wandering about the arboretum as I did with a couple of friends one day late in August can relieve you of the sense that you are living in a very insane place. I have seen older artifacts up close—the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other archeological remnants there from the Roman period, and earlier. But these were stone and the Yamamoto bonsai tree is alive. The tree bears witness to that rainy Wednesday and a thousand, thousand, thousand other vanished days. Bonsai encompass the Japanese knack for miniature (although the tree on display in the Arboretum is now on the scale of a sizeable garden tree) and for the quiet, patient, practice of a small, simple thing. How many generations devoted their days to the tending of roots and soil, branches and leaves for four hundred years, day after day after day?<br /><div>
<br /></div>
<div>
XXXXXXXXXXX</div>
<br />For several years now I have fancied that I could feel the tipping of the earth from summer into fall, some subtle change in the air even in the midst of an August heat wave. Perhaps it is just the sublimated awareness of the routine signals of summer’s end—back-to-school sales and the like. In any case, it is a transition I have come to love: September through Christmas is my favorite time of year.<br /><br />It was early in September when I took a long weekend get-a-way to the eastern shore. On the way back I stopped at one of the fruit stands that dot the rural landscape on route 404 and bought some blueberries and chocolate. At home, I texted K.—it would be our last communication—to tell her I wanted to bring her something in return for the fine dinner she had made me weeks before. <br /><br />I had continued to marvel about my encounter with her and shared the story of my walk down the avenue and the modest dinner she brought me, with several friends. By text I ran it past my daughter to ask her what she made of it. She responded in the coded diction of her time: “IDK. Maybe she’s just being friendly. B friendly back. UR good at that.” <br /><br />The night I returned home, back at our building, I knocked on her door. As before, the apartment behind her was dark when she opened the door, but now I had the distinct impression that I had interrupted something implicating the entire family behind her in silence. And K. was now dressed from head to foot in a burka so that only the narrow space of her eyes was unclothed. The burka was not black, however, as I had supposed one to be, but a vivid and penetrating midnight blue—think, perhaps, of the blue of Marc Chagall’s stain glass windows—and it was decorated with something like small stars. <br /><br />Wordlessly, she accepted the blueberries and chocolate. Only her eyes and the merest upward curve of her lips telegraphed across what seemed an unbreachable no-man’s land of culture and belief and politics her gratitude. There was then a moment of silence between us, a moment of mingled awkwardness and attentiveness as I stood outside her door in the hushed and empty hallway. “Wow,” I finally managed to say, in my stunned American guy-ness, “your dress is really beautiful.” <br /><br />With an almost imperceptible nod of her head, K. seemed to absorb this compliment and fold it back into the darkness behind her. And then, very gently, she closed the door.<br /><br />XXXXXXXXXX<br /><br />After leaving the D.C. area in 1997, I spent two years in Chicago, where my daughter was born, then 16 years in Cleveland being a father in a fractured family situation, and working from home, before moving back once again to the DC area, landing first in nearby Virginia. Shortly after our separation, when Tess was four, I had a vivid dream: she and I were walking hand-in-hand through the charred remains of what looked like 9/11 ground zero (this was in fact just a year-and-a-half after the event, and it was still fresh to everyone). What I remember most potently from the dream was this: If not exactly happy, I was hopeful. We would survive, it would be okay. <br /><br />A knack for chaos. We made it work, and I took to fatherhood, imposing as it did a regimen of dutifulness and order on my otherwise disorderly life. When my daughter went off to college, I returned to the capital where my job was located: I would be a commuter again and sit at a desk. Driving a Uhaul with one apartment room’s worth of life, I stopped at a motel in Breezewood for the night with the idea that I would avoid driving into Washington traffic at rush hour, take my time in the morning and plan to arrive mid-day the next day. The motel housed a little bar and grill, and when I stopped in there were two boys in their 20s drinking at the bar; they were still at that place where they were endearingly drunk and not yet obnoxiously so. I took a seat and ordered something. The one fellow nodded my way, “How’s it going Pops?”<br /><br />I said it was going fine. The barmaid gave him a look, though, like that wasn’t cool, calling the nice, polite fellow “Pops.” By way of explanation, the boy said, “He’s old school.” His buddy, wanting to be supportive, wanting to be a bro, chimed in, “His hair is white.”<br /><br />It’s nothing to me, my hair having turned white, to be Pops from the old school, if that’s the way it is now. I had a lot of big ideas on that U-haul journey from Cleveland to the D.C. area, about the new chapter I would write in my life, a bright and shiny life in the city. But I find myself feeling since then as if I am living in the aftermath of an extended encounter with something larger than I knew, a gift more lavish than I had appreciated; as if I am peering down the wrong end of my own telescope at an epic story, now steadily receding, of days and days and days—inspired or insipid or thoroughly mundane, nothing special, the usual fare of parenthood: piano recitals, school talent shows, visits to the doctor, tennis lessons, long drives across Ohio and Michigan and Indiana for summer tennis tournaments, staying in hotels with teams of girls’ softball and volleyball teams traversing the Midwest; arguments; worrying about where she was at night once she had a driver’s license and access to a car (every teenager’s ticket to freedom from the clutches of their keepers); or the time when she was 13 and we took the train from D.C., where we were visiting my brother, to New York to see Billy Elliott on Broadway. We walked all over Manhattan and ate at Applebee’s in Times Square, an experience that must be akin to eating cardboard in a wind tunnel. <br /><br />And the day of her baptism in a gothic northside Chicago Catholic church when Tess was not much more than two months old. It was an occasion I approached dutifully—let’s get this over with—but with no great feeling for the sacrament itself. Yet standing at the altar with the other parents and their babies beneath the fractured light of the church, with Tess cradled in my arm where she fit between the crook of my elbow and the palm of one hand, as the priests circulated, rubbing the fennel-scented chrism on the babies’ foreheads, a scent that mingled with the musk of incense—there at the altar as I gazed at the child on my arm, I began in spite of myself to weep without restraint. <br /><br />I have seen K. only a handful of times in passing since the night I brought the blueberries to her door, and once in the lobby of our building she said something about going walking again. But I sensed she was being polite, and I have never heard from her. Well, she’s as busy as the rest of us, with kids and a job and a home to keep. Maybe she was just being friendly. Maybe her diplomatic mission was complete, having extended some middle eastern hospitality and disabused one American man of his preconceptions about an Arab woman in a hijab. <br /><br />It was nearly October before I finished my puzzle only to find that three pieces had gone lost—missing from the box to begin with or, more likely, disappeared somewhere in my apartment or vanished in the vacuum cleaner. <br /><br />Perhaps I’ll join the laughing group. I like to laugh, and my daughter has told me on more than one occasion I should smile more. She’s right, the world has been far too kind to me not to. Although the future she is inheriting terrifies me, the pensive mien I carry about is mainly a baked-in affectation, borne of a lifelong dread of seeming silly or frivolous, coupled with an authentic observational instinct. When I was a small boy and my parents would have guests to the house, I used to perch at the top of the steps overlooking our living room and just watch the grown-ups who might be there, watching and listening; a grandmother, then in her dotage, confided to my father that I “made her nervous,” the way I was always just watching, watching. <br /><br />I am still on the lookout, although for what exactly I can’t say. Perhaps I’ll know when I see it. A bonsai tree bears witness to an epic. The puzzle piece you hold in your fingers, the present moment, that puzzle piece so troublesome and un-conforming to any visible larger purpose, must sooner or later find its place in a picture that you can only barely imagine. </span>
<b></b><i></i><u></u><sub></sub><sup></sup><strike></strike>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-38455280634021599402019-12-16T06:23:00.001-08:002019-12-16T06:23:59.002-08:00A Fine Fragile Thing Shattered: War and Pieces at Hillwood Estate<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhABxzTjmeuG0A7zs5N77pmAZXQFCHFCmEiUckavm-mWiVsK5_dS_UN-Wbnf2x3QaPYwOZtuydrr3tMG2GZRU3zBuFdNYUVLQluoIA3NGt1vk5MERvn1jPd_9r21b7k3zG6QBMHO8v3oL2v/s1600/HILLWOOD+DINING+TABLE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhABxzTjmeuG0A7zs5N77pmAZXQFCHFCmEiUckavm-mWiVsK5_dS_UN-Wbnf2x3QaPYwOZtuydrr3tMG2GZRU3zBuFdNYUVLQluoIA3NGt1vk5MERvn1jPd_9r21b7k3zG6QBMHO8v3oL2v/s200/HILLWOOD+DINING+TABLE.jpg" width="150" /></a></div>
<br />
<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;">Marjorie Merriweather Post’s Hillwood Estate Museum is a lot of things, but one thing I never thought of it as is a shrine to postmodern conceptual art. So I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it when I encountered Bouke De Vries’ art “installation,” <i>War and Pieces</i>, on the grand table of Marjorie’s sumptuous upstairs dining room at the Hillwood Estate. <br /> My daughter, home from college for Thanksgiving, and I came across it as a curious surprise, entirely unaware of it<i></i>s presence in the museum: a great spread of shattered white porcelain shards, clustering toward the center of the table and rising in a shape that I did not quite recognize at first: the mushroom cloud of an atomic explosion. <br /> As the Hillwood Estate website explains, this is not the first time the dining room table has hosted a contemporary interpretation of classical table centerpieces. “<i>In the seventeenth century, wealthy households decorated their tables with extravagant sugar sculptures that replicated allegorical scenes, architectural follies, or classical figures</i>,” according to the website. “<i>By the eighteenth century, artists augmented or replaced the decorations with porcelain</i>…”<br /> de Vries’ <i>War and Pieces</i> comprises seven sculptural vignettes, created in both sugar and porcelain. Say the curators at Hillwood: “<i>Besides war, chaos, and aggression, the installation also features humor and beauty, undermining classical symbols in a satirical and critical way</i>.”<br /> In fact, the scene on the table registered at first with my daughter and me as whimsical, and my initial instinct was a contemporary one: take a picture of the porcelain chaos on my phone and post it to my Facebook page with a note that I’d hosted a dinner party at my small, cozy apartment the night before, when some of my more rogue friends crashed the affair, drank up all the wine, and got out of hand. <br /> Ha. Ha.<br /> But the presentation stayed with me, as a compelling work of art will do. My interest and curiosity was piqued especially by the kind of statement such an insistently ironic or “provocative” work of art might be making in the mansion home of a wealthy mid-century socialite with a grand sense of style and a classical aesthetic sensibility. <br /> <i>War and Pieces</i> is, first of all, visually appealing, all that porcelain and sugar like a snowfall of perfect white across the table. There is such a thing as “elegant chaos,” and something there is in the human soul that loves to see a fine, fragile thing shattered. War and Pieces appeals to that instinct. To be reminded of it when you are in a place that also houses a “breakfast room” with a chandelier from Catherine the Great, Faberge eggs from the Romanov family, and an 18th-century French rolltop desk inlaid with mother-of-pearl—well, it creates a special kind of resonance. <br /> As a museum-going experience, The Hillwood Estate “works” not because it is a showcase of vast wealth, but because it is a repository of civilization, of a civilized sensibility. Mere wealth is easily (one might say, cheaply) counterfeited, as is evident, say, in the home of a rich man who fills his rooms with a lot of gilded junk. But Marjorie Post’s home is more than a rich woman’s house. The home is reflective of a distinctly mid-20th century American appreciation of civilization at a time when the country was at its most expansive and confident: the collection at Hillwood speaks to a receptiveness to the artistic, architectural and design influences—English, French, German, Russian and Asian—that have shaped the American sensibility. To fill one’s home with such treasures and then to turn it over to the public as a museum also strikes me as deriving from a uniquely American instinct for the democratic. <br /> It’s been said that men and women are biological facts (or, maybe, social constructs as the young might instruct us today), but <i>ladies and gentlemen</i> are artifacts of civilization. What Marjorie was, most certainly, and what her museum home attests to, is a lady in the classical sense. But if what we deem to be civilized behavior is a set of learned habits, suggested and enforced by society, then they are not innate or assured, and they can be unlearned; if all the norms by which ladies and gentlemen assert civility are mere artifacts, then they can shattered, and it need not happen in one cataclysmic event, but one by one, before you are quite aware it is happening, every small act of subversion begetting another. It is a little like that “broken windows” philosophy of crime control: one shattered norm makes it easier to shatter another one, then another, and before you know it the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. The once unthinkable becomes a reality.<br /> To experience the house and gardens at Hillwood engenders the same feeling as does a great work of art, an expertly crafted book, movie or piece of entertainment, or an exceptional athletic performance (such as, for instance, the entire October championship run of our Washington Nationals): <i>It is good to be alive. The human cause is not hopeless</i>. <br /> Not hopeless, but not assured either. At an auspicious moment in American history, Bouke de Vries has crashed the party at Hillwood like a rogue guest to remind us about that something there is in the human soul that wants to see a fine thing destroyed, and to tell us redundantly (since history, if we were paying attention, would never let us forget it) that it is all much more fragile than we may allow ourselves to acknowledge. </span><br /> Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-87838409610903871052019-11-17T04:17:00.003-08:002019-11-18T07:32:46.388-08:00Returning to Normal, or Are We Already Cooked? <br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Listening with even a half-cocked ear to the opening statements of George Kent and William Taylor, career diplomats and public servants who have done more to advance American interests than all the pundits and commentators on both sides ever will, it was possible to entertain a little schadenfreude: surely people like Hannity and Limbaugh, a couple of overpaid loudmouths, and their fellow fantasists must be feeling at least <em>a little</em> twinge of guilty embarrassment: here in front of a national audience were the kind of button-down, old school, dedicated public servants they were maligning as “deep state” traitors. <br /> Silly me. My wishful thinking was quickly overtaken by the usual gloom: Democrats were going to misplay this and the whole thing would, somehow, redound once more to Donald Trump. Part of the problem is the immense damage the President has already done to everyone’s sense of what is normal. Under normal circumstances—does anyone remember what a normal circumstance feels like?—Trump’s behavior in this episode around Ukraine would be nearly universally regarded as shocking, apart from whether it was regarded as an impeachable offence. As it is, though, its just another instance of Trump-being-Trump and redundant evidence that the man doesn’t really understand the nature of the office he holds. I don’t doubt that the President is genuinely baffled by why he is not allowed to make foreign aid contingent on help with his own domestic political future—or why, indeed, he is not allowed to do or say any damn thing he pleases. As Andrew Sullivan has observed, his model and ideal is the conduct of a mob boss, and has been ever since his days with Roy Cohn, one of the most twisted and sinister characters to stalk the American stage. <br /> Then, too, the heart of the charge is a couple of phone calls, a handful of conversations, some of them reported second-hand. What won’t be registered—although it was implicit throughout Kent and Taylor’s testimony and explicit in discrete instances—is an overall pattern of behavior and intention wherever Ukraine is involved (with Russia and Vladimir Putin in the background) that seemed unrelated to American interests, as they had normally been construed, and to transcend normal protocols. <br /> Norms, normative behaviors and protocols, matter, Their destruction is a hallmark of the collapse of any kind of established order; an established democratic, representative form of government, with its reliance on consent to normative protocols reflecting a set of underlying values, is especially vulnerable. It is a little like that "broken windows" philosophy of crime control: one shattered norm makes it easier to shatter another one, then another, and before you know it the whole neighborhood has gone to seed. The once unthinkable becomes a reality. This is why, by the way, those tanks on the monument grounds on July 4 matter. By itself, it probably wasn’t worth the hyperventilation that ensued, a pointless gesture by a man pathetically enamored of strongmen, and a profound missing of the point of Independence Day—a joke in bad taste with an undertone of menace. But as part of a larger pattern the tanks should be alarming, a signal of the sociopath’s refusal to be bound by norms: <em>See? I will do even this</em>.<br /> After the election, there was, even among those of us astonished that this appalling human being with the flashing neon sign over his head—I AM A PHONY--had been elevated to the seat once occupied by Lincoln—there was hope that he might govern normally, that “the office might mold the man.”<br /> Fat chance. He came to town and proceeded to shatter every window in sight. The resulting exhaustion among the people ought to be enough to cost him the election; if Democrats would stop chasing rainbows and unicorns and get real about the center-right country they wish to govern, they could walk away with the election in 2020 by emphasizing three things, day and night, incessantly, like a drumbeat: </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Decency. <br />A return to normal. <br />Why haven’t you released your tax returns?</em><br /> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">(Like their comrades who think Trump and Giuliani were just doing the Lord’s work trying to clean up corruption in Burisima Holdings, those who think Trump is going to such lengths to keep his tax returns hidden for any reason other than that he is hiding something, deserve an honorary BS from Trump University.)<br /> But it may be too late for the return to normal. The disorienting effect of three years of Trump is profound as, one by one, norms have been shattered. The president’s mafia-like behavior with regard to Ukraine, being just one more </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">example. There may be no going back. Like that cliché frog placed in </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">tepid water imperceptibly heated to a boil, we have been, before we know it, </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">already cooked. </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"></span></span>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-32138661204941392192019-08-08T13:19:00.002-07:002019-08-19T04:18:21.624-07:00At Hillwood, get reacquainted with the iconic images of “Mid-Century Master” photographer Alfred EisenstaedtFrom the <a href="https://www.foresthillsconnection.com/">Forest Hills Connection</a><br />
<br />
Photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt straddled a porous boundary between art and journalism, while bridging the understated, black-and-white aesthetic of the pre- and post-World War II generations, and the super-heated, pop celebrity-photojournalism of the baby boomers. For those over the age of, say, 55, at least a few of the photographs on exhibit at the Adirondack House of <a href="https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: #006600;">The Hillwood Estate</span></strong></a> will seem warmly familiar, even if Eisenstaedt’s name is a revelation. For younger types, they will offer a glimpse at a post-war America – the America built by “the greatest generation” – rapidly receding.<br />
<a href="https://www.hillwoodmuseum.org/exhibitions/eisenstaedt" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: #006600;">“Mid-Century Master: The Photography of Alfred Eisenstaedt,”</span></strong></a> is a dense, compact exhibit – you can absorb it in an hour and-a-few – but it is richly informative, especially for those (like me) unfamiliar with Eisenstaedt’s story. Born into a Jewish family in what is now Poland, Eisenstaedt was given an Eastman Kodak folding camera as a boy; a passion was born. After fighting on the German side in World War I, he found his niche capturing on film many of the most important cultural and athletic events of Weimar Germany for the magazine, <em>Der Spiegel</em>.
<style>#fores-grid-105{list-style:none;margin:0;padding:0;overflow:hidden;}#fores-grid-105>li{float:left;width:49%;min-width:250px;list-style:none;margin:0 1% 1% 0;;padding:0;overflow:hidden;}#fores-grid-105>li.last{margin-right:0;}#fores-grid-105>li.last+li{clear:both;}</style>
<br />
He fled Europe and the Nazis in 1935 for New York, where his record earned him the attention of Henry Luce, who hired him to shoot for Life Magazine. Eisenstaedt’s cover photos for the magazine fill an entire wall of the exhibit. Almost all of Eisenstaedt’s photos – at least almost all of those on display – were black and white, taken with a German-made Leica camera. I was pleased to learn that he was responsible for a photograph I remember finding amusing as a child – it depicts a drum major for the University of Michigan Marching Band rehearsing his high-stepping routine while a line of kids behind him are, with obvious hilarity, trying to mimic him. We are informed that Eisenstaedt called it his “ode to joy,” and we can believe it; the photograph is vividly evocative of the pleasure children can take in the ridiculous.<br />
<div class="wp-caption aligncenter" id="attachment_32078" style="height: 393px; width: 499px;">
<a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?ssl=1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-32078" class="size-full wp-image-32078" data-attachment-id="32078" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"1.8","credit":"","camera":"iPhone 7","caption":"","created_timestamp":"1564500834","copyright":"","focal_length":"3.99","iso":"100","shutter_speed":"0.2","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Eisenstaedt LEICA CAMERA" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?fit=800%2C537&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?fit=800%2C537&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?fit=800%2C537&ssl=1" data-orig-size="800,537" data-permalink="https://www.foresthillsconnection.com/news/at-hillwood-get-reacquainted-with-the-iconic-images-of-mid-century-master-photographer-alfred-eisenstaedt/attachment/eisenstaedt-leica-camera/" height="468" scale="1.5625" sizes="(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px" src-orig="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?resize=800%2C537&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?zoom=1.5625&resize=697%2C468&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Eisenstaedt-LEICA-CAMERA.jpg?zoom=1.5625&resize=697%2C468&ssl=1" width="697" /></a>Alfred Eisenstaedt’s favored tool of the trade, a Leica IIIa Rangefinder, is also on display.</div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered<br />
<br />
<br />
There is nothing oblique or cunning or coy about Eisenstadt's work, and you have the sense of a photographer who worked with his subjects to render them they way they wanted to be rendered. <br />
But there are a handful of images in which he captured something striking and spontaneous. These include several photos of children watching a puppet show in The Tuileries Garden in France; Eisenstaedt captures the mesmerized or stunned or triumphant faces of the children (there’s one or two of each) at the instant when a dragon is suddenly killed in the performance.<br />
His most famous photo, certainly, is the V-Day image of the sailor in Times Square planting that bend-over-backward kiss on a nurse. It has become iconic of America’s mood at the end of the war, but after so many years it has a stagy, choreographed feel to it. On display at Hillwood though is another, more genuinely intimate image of a soldier and his woman friend in Penn Station: the soldier’s uniform is visible, but they both are wearing overcoats. The picture has a wintry feel to it and they seem to be seeking some solace, some warmth from each other – an image that tells a truer story about where a soldier has been and what he has seen.<br />
Eisenstaedt was chummy with Marjorie Merriweather Post, and visitors to the exhibit will have a chance to sit (that’s always a plus for this museum-goer) and peruse the edition of <em>Life</em> that featured his color photos of Post’s life at Hillwood. Dozens of America’s post-war celebrities shot by Eisenstaedt (almost entirely in black-and-white) are on display: Ernest Hemingway, Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren, Jackie O, a mustachioed Salvador Dali and his wife. The couple of photos of Marilyn taken in 1953 at her Los Angeles bungalow (including two impromptu color ones) are striking – Eisenstaedt captured something raw about the overflowing sensuality in this doomed woman’s lips and cheekbones and eyes. We are informed that the photo shoot “left the usually even-keeled photographer so flustered and distracted that he mistakenly shot a roll of color film at the speed meant for black-and-white.”<br />
The notation accompanying the photograph of Sophia Loren includes the kind of eyebrow-raising tidbit that pays for the price of admission to the Estate: We are told that “the photographer earned Loren’s trust in part because he resembled and reminded her of her obstetrician.” And we learn that one of Life’s most controversial covers was an Eisenstaedt shot of a scantily clad Loren, who was promoting her film, “Marriage Italian Style.”<br />
Near the exit from the exhibit is an inscription from “Eisenstaedt’s Guide to Photography,” published in 1978: “There are no rules for composition except good judgement and taste.” Beneath the quote is a large black-and-white image of a swimsuit model whose judgement and taste may be debatable. For she is standing with her back to the camera on a beach in Miami, wearing a fur stole that wraps around her torso and ends just where her derriere fills her bathing suit. It was taken in 1940, but it seems to project forward 25 years to the “zany” go-go era of celebrity journalism in the 60s and 70s.<br />
In just this way is it emblematic of this mid-century master, whose images speak of “another era” – one scarcely recognizable anymore – while anticipating and suggesting the new disruptive one that would follow and that would usher us into our own new century.<br />
<strong></strong><br />
<a href="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?ssl=1"><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-32084" data-attachment-id="32084" data-comments-opened="1" data-image-description="" data-image-meta="{"aperture":"0","credit":"","camera":"","caption":"","created_timestamp":"0","copyright":"","focal_length":"0","iso":"0","shutter_speed":"0","title":"","orientation":"1"}" data-image-title="Mark Moran" data-large-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?fit=120%2C140&ssl=1" data-medium-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?fit=120%2C140&ssl=1" data-orig-file="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?fit=120%2C140&ssl=1" data-orig-size="120,140" data-permalink="https://www.foresthillsconnection.com/news/at-hillwood-get-reacquainted-with-the-iconic-images-of-mid-century-master-photographer-alfred-eisenstaedt/attachment/mark-moran/" height="140" scale="1.5625" src-orig="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?resize=120%2C140&ssl=1" src="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?zoom=1.5625&resize=120%2C140&ssl=1" srcset="https://i0.wp.com/www.foresthillsconnection.com/site2/wp-content/upLoadImage2012/2019/08/Mark-Moran.jpg?zoom=1.5625&resize=120%2C140&ssl=1" width="120" /></a><strong>About the writer:</strong> Mark Moran was born and raised in the DC area and has lived in Dupont Circle/Adams Morgan, and later in Cleveland Park. He left for Chicago in 1997, and later moved to the Cleveland area in 2000. There he wrote for the <a href="http://www.lakewoodobserver.com/" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank"><strong><span style="color: #006600;">Lakewood Observer</span></strong></a>, a volunteer hyperlocal news publication. In 2016, he moved back to the DC area and settled into Forest Hills in July 2018. Mark loves the proximity to Rock Creek Park, the lovely neighborhoods east and west of Connecticut Avenue, Bread Furst, Politics and Prose, Little Red Fox, and Comet Pizza. He can often be found in The Den at Politics and Prose. In addition to writing professionally for the American Psychiatric Association, he looks forward to writing for Forest Hills Connection.Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-33428489190493690942019-07-06T20:01:00.004-07:002019-07-08T08:29:32.828-07:00Trump and American Authoritarianism: Rationalization and the Destruction of Norms<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4RZBdxhfgB577wq-SjGgbZyiT-x7hEy3UtKsalASxbEKn0ieMvo6lykFJoLHQMdfjBecQmUGOki4WdKkkd709TovBH6hNKHKkyv_EQ5glPsO-sowAXeSoN4YqqN0rK2cogcRWnORuopty/s1600/IMG_0473.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1200" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj4RZBdxhfgB577wq-SjGgbZyiT-x7hEy3UtKsalASxbEKn0ieMvo6lykFJoLHQMdfjBecQmUGOki4WdKkkd709TovBH6hNKHKkyv_EQ5glPsO-sowAXeSoN4YqqN0rK2cogcRWnORuopty/s320/IMG_0473.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">From the beginning of Donald Trump’s ascent to the deafening, crazy-making presence he has now attained in our lives, there have been voices warning that this was the advent of an American version of fascism or, anyway, of authoritarianism. <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-how-fascism-comes-to-america/2016/05/17/c4e32c58-1c47-11e6-8c7b-6931e66333e7_story.html?utm_term=.e73010cb4304">Robert Kagan</a> was on to this early, as was Madeleine Albright, who wrote, “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Democracies-Die-Steven-Levitsky/dp/1524762946/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_img_0?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=C7B4JVHYSCGHGFHVCZA4">Fascism: A Warning</a>.”<br /> As I write this, tanks are being parked on the mall adjacent to the Lincoln Monument and Trump is hijacking what has been for years in Washington an almost thoroughly nonpartisan Fourth of July event; fireworks on the Mall here in DC has actually been something like a home-town affair—traffic congested, invariably oppressively hot and or threatening rain, yet thoroughly celebratory. In light of these events, the arguments by Kagan and Albright and others are worth considering.<br /> Even among those who loathe Trump, there are reasons to roll one’s eyes. For one thing, Trump is just so pathetically…..<em>pathetic</em>. Silly. There is something clownish and childish about him. “A sad embarrassing wreck of a man,” as George Will put it, one who appears to have stumbled into a job he didn’t really want, in the same way that he lucked into his wealth, then lost it by stumbling into multiple bankruptcies, to be propped up (very probably) by unsavory characters, i.e. Russian mafia, which is said to have enfiladed the Manhattan real estate industry. (Collusion? Who needs collusion? They already own him.) Describing Trump’s thinness of character is a challenge to language—Is it possible to be profoundly shallow?<br /> (Ian Kershaw’s biography of Hitler, “Nemesis,” describes a man who was early in life, also a silly and unlikely dictator. But Hitler possessed also a ferocious single-mindedness that Trump can’t approximate, and was possessed as well, it has to be said, by a certain genius; a negative kind of genius to be sure—a knack for the long game, a willingness to play nice when it suited his purposes, and an unerring eye for people’s weaknesses. (Trump, I would say, has the last two talents but no sense of the first.))<br /> It’s also possible to argue that “it can’t happen here” (bearing in mind that in response to Sinclair Lewis’ tract of the same title, Saul Bellow wrote a short story entitled, “The Hell It Can’t”). One of the reassuring strengths of this country—so goes this argument—is the resilience and robustness and independence of its civil society, its extra-governmental institutions. Churches, professional associations, civic organizations, and cultural institutions continue to nurture democratic culture, however much our political structures degenerate. Two hundred years of this culture combined with a governmental architecture that is institutionally resistant to radical change make authoritarianism improbable.<br /> Those are the contrary responses to Kagan—an aimless, silly man who knows not what he is about, and a durable civil democracy.<br /> But there are reasons to be scared. Everyone—right, left and center—has become entirely too comfortable with executive privilege and power; arguably, Obama was a prime offender in extending this tendency. It is a trend whose roots, I believe, were in the Cold War: the threat of nuclear confrontation made it necessary to give the executive the power to move more quickly and decisively than the 18th century writers of our Constitution could imagine when they gave Congress the power to make war. It was accelerated again after 9/11, so that there are now influential voices—including Attorney General William Barr—who envision an executive with very nearly unchecked, unlimited authority. Add to this that the Republican party is now thoroughly intellectually degenerate and entirely enthralled to the personality cult that is Trump.<br /> The form that politics takes anywhere, at any time, is culture bound. German fascism took the form it did—goose-stepping soldiers, torchlight parades, and poisonous anti-semitism—because of German history and German culture and the particular circumstances of Germany in the early part of the 20th century, and it thrived on peculiarly German weaknesses. <br /> People who expect an American authoritarianism to look like the German National Socialist Party have their head in a bag, even if all the features of reactionary nationalism are the same everywhere, at all times: evocation of a mythical past of national greatness, exaggeration or wholesale fabrication of national defeats or humiliations, and an appeal to racial and class resentment.<br /> Question: What are the most glaring American weaknesses?<br /> Answer: Our love of celebrity and our worship of the wealthy—as if wealth itself were proof of virtue, intelligence, valor and strength. <br /> In Trump we have elevated an American cultural protype: a wealthy (or putatively wealthy) celebrity. Even his silliness and thinness of character is emblematic of a popular culture that has grown increasingly frivolous, lacking in the character required for self-government. Fifty years ago, the Moral Majority made its mark saying the culture was in decline. In this they were not wrong, but their criticism was so diminutively focused on personal, private, sexual behavior; Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. see the fruit of this degradation in abortion and gay men getting married.<br /> I see it in thousands of Americans braying, like middle school girls at a pep rally, for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.<br /> How is it possible with that level of national immaturity to tackle problems like the financing of entitlements when a tsunami of baby boomers retire, or balancing growth and regulation in the face of climate change, or rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, problems that require some measure of self-sacrifice and deferral of immediate gratification—that is to say, that require self-government. Our national helplessness is ripe for a strongman, a peculiarly American one—silly and frivolous and empty-headed, but rich and very, very famous and perfectly willing to do whatever it takes to satisfy an insatiable ego.<br /> Kershaw’s biography of Hitler conveys two important lessons about how authoritarianism happens and that are relevant in thinking about the Trump phenomenon in 21st century America—these are, first, political rationalization, and secondly, the destruction of norms, of normative national practices and protocols.<br /> To the first point, it is not so that everyone in Germany immediately loved Hitler. There were in fact a great many people—especially among the military and the cultured elite—who immediately and very early on saw in Hitler a dangerous crackpot, at once menacing and gauche. Yet too many people found a reason to rationalize him, to make excuses, to let things slide. When this was not simple spinelessness, it very often had to do with a fear—a terror, really—of socialism. It can at least be said for Germans at the time that their fear of socialism was not unfounded—there had been a very messy, very violent, short-lived socialist uprising in November 1918 as the first world war ended (this uprising was the source of the infamous, paranoid “stab in the back” accusation—the claim, widely circulated, that Bolshevik Jews had sabotaged the war effort and caused Germany’s defeat; this claim had no basis in truth—Germany’s war command had been lying for years about winning the war and had in the process beggared the country—but it reverberated all the way to Aushwitz.)<br /> In contrast, the American right’s fear of socialism is a laughable joke. But the rationalization of Trump by people who know better is not. It is an open secret in Washington that many Republicans regard Trump as a buffoon and/or a mental case, yet they are willing to rationalize—either out of political cowardice or because of certain ideological interests (judges, immigration, abortion, lowering taxes).<br /> The second lesson that stands out from Kershaw’s narrative about Germany in the years between 1933 and 1945 is the steady, accelerating destruction of norms. One by one by one, policies and protocols and practices that had been considered normal or normative were knocked over; the dizzying, destabilizing effect of this cannot be over-estimated. The once unthinkable becomes thinkable and then it becomes the reality.<br /> This is the effect that Trump’s behavior on the world stage is having on American culture and politics. And this is why the tanks on the lawn of the Lincoln Memorial matter. </span>
Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-65616690296546512292019-07-03T10:34:00.001-07:002019-07-08T11:59:44.830-07:00Scratch My Chest, You'll Feel Better<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cODjSJnBGbpO3YqGl3Jxrz9J6t-B1g8oeaxdLcCocgk_ueowFVpPn0MC__cI3U64To_r7wW_JREU7lj1L2UCzL32QgoZCuzmCfZ9fmMBnnY7hpAPCOuk5vL92QvmFwO9il-04nXfb-Ef/s1600/IMG_2031.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg3cODjSJnBGbpO3YqGl3Jxrz9J6t-B1g8oeaxdLcCocgk_ueowFVpPn0MC__cI3U64To_r7wW_JREU7lj1L2UCzL32QgoZCuzmCfZ9fmMBnnY7hpAPCOuk5vL92QvmFwO9il-04nXfb-Ef/s320/IMG_2031.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">She walked around the room, a little unstable or a little nervous, looking I believe for a way out, for the way back home—back to the predictable life she knew, that’s what she had been waiting for patiently, submissively for more than a month I think—and chanced upon some chimes hanging low to the floor in the far corner. She nudged the chime just a touch and when the small bright room filled with a rich baritone hum like the meditative “Om”, Kristina looked back at us with an expression that told me she knew within the hour she was going to die.<br /> If I tell you that Kristina was my dog, a nearly constant companion for 11 years since my daughter and I picked her up at the Animal Protection League in Cleveland, a few of you will roll your eyes. I understand the instinct; I grew up with pets, but throughout my early adulthood I was without one for many years and I rolled my eyes a lot at what I considered the flakiness of dog and cat owners who seemed to treat their animals like prescient people.<br /> Truthfully, of course, I can’t know what my sweet black border collie mix was thinking or feeling when she looked back at us—curiosity about the sound of the chime? fear and confusion at being in a strange place? Or perhaps she was just feeling sick and dizzy and lightheaded because she had a bleeding mass in her stomach that required surgery that night and a catheter injection to keep her hydrated.<br /> She died three years ago this week, a month before I was to move back to Washington, D.C., where my job was. (I had spent 13 years working for the same outfit but working from home in Cleveland, where I was helping to raise my daughter. When the daughter went off to college, I went off to D.C.) Kristina and I were staying temporarily with a friend in Shaker Heights, after I abandoned my apartment in Cleveland in preparation for the move. She had collapsed on the pavement—just like that, like air going out of a balloon—while on a walk in the neighborhood in the early evening. She had not been well for some time, I believe. For several years, I had noticed her slowing down, becoming more anxiously attached to me. About a month and a half prior to the night when she collapsed on the pavement, a tic had lodged itself in her scalp. I think I managed to get most of it out, but the scar that was left looked to be infected. I took her to a vet, who said she was fine, but in retrospect I am not convinced. After K and I moved into the friend’s house, I came home one night to find her hiding in an upstairs room, apparently delirious with pain from what turned out to be a raging ear infection. I spent a long night at a veterinarian hospital that night before she was treated with an antibiotic and a painkiller. But I don’t believe she was ever the same.<br /> At the hospital that night she died two or three weeks later, it was after 9 pm. when the nurse came out to talk to me about her condition, informing me that she would need surgery, and that there was no surgeon on call at the time. I would have to drive with her to Akron, 40 minutes away. And there was no real way of knowing what her prognosis might be after surgery, assuming she survived it.<br /> That’s as far as I’ll go in justifying my decision to euthanize my friend, put her “down.” She was given two shots, a painkiller and one that stopped her heart. She died with her head in my lap. <br /> What do our dogs and cats think and feel? Does a dog have a “personality” or a soul? Did Kristina know when she rang the chime at the vet’s office that she was dying, that her life with me was over? Or do we simply project onto household pets our own longings?<br /> The most cursory google search yields a lot research indicating that animals of all kinds display traits of distinct personality, although the science is “bedeviled” by the problem of anthropomorphism, of human bias or projection in the attribution of personality traits, as described by one particularly cogent <a href="https://www.realclearscience.com/articles/2013/12/06/do_animals_have_distinct_personalities_108394.html">report</a> from 2013 in Real Clear Science. </span><br />
<em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span></em><br />
<em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">All animal personality scientists grapple with how to reduce the human bias embedded in their experiments. “Trying to eliminate research bias is what this field is devoted to,” says biologist and coder Alison Bell</span></em> <em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She says that even with coding, measuring a behavior as simple as two fish biting each other includes some level of judgment. What constitutes biting? Do the fish just need to bump mouths or must the researcher see teeth sinking into flesh?<br /> Western culture is quick to attribute qualities like “shy” and “brave” to cats and dogs, says animal ethologist Kristina Horback </span></em><em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">from the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine. Horback says that when the same traits are observed in an experiment looking at dolphins or elephants, for example, researchers steer clear of using adjectives to describe the behaviors. “Shy” and “brave” are risky words in a scientific setting, she says, because they are reputed as subjective and only ever applied to humans.</span></em>
<span style="mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="color: black; font-size: 11.5pt;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Who cares? It might be more useful and interesting to wonder why anyone should doubt that to which virtually everyone who cares for an animal can testify: the almost palpable sense that their companion animals are more human than some of the people they have to deal with at their offices or in their families. <br /><br /> Kristina was almost universally described as “sweet.” Border collies generally are. But she had an inner wolf that came out in certain situations, most vividly when another dog sought affection or recognition from me; that other dog was likely get the what-for, particularly as Kristina grew older and crankier. This inner wolf, by the way, was a trait I found extremely endearing, not because I enjoyed watching her beat up other dogs, but because she expressed it instinctively, without pride, and did not seem to revel in it; after she routed a dog, she went back to business as usual, as if she’d been interrupted while reading the newspaper and smoking a cigarette.<br /><br /> I believe animals suffer a lot at our hands—K. spent entirely too much time alone in my care, which is why I cannot tell people who ask me that I will get another dog. (When someone loses a mother, sister or a brother, no one ever asks, “Will you get another?”). I do relish the memories of our many hours walking and exploring in the MetroParks, enjoying the crisp air off Lake Erie in Lakewood Park, walking the path at Stinchcomb Hill, or Edgewood Park in Rocky River. <br /><br /> And we have a lot to learn from them. Sometimes when my daughter was young and still at home and we would argue (sometimes loudly, sometimes toe-to-toe), Kristina would stand between us, wishing us to be nice to each other. She also had a talent for using her paw to prompt you to scratch her chest. Sometimes when Tess was upset, K. would sit up close to her, paw at her hand as if to say, “Scratch my chest, you’ll feel better.”<br /><br /> It always worked. </span>Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-32329941095130546292018-12-23T12:12:00.001-08:002018-12-29T14:16:03.229-08:00Rubbernecking Brexit<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Like a great many others, it seems, I have become a Brexit rubberneck. It was instantly fascinating when the Brits inflicted this thing on themselves two years ago; it has become all the more so as the deadline approaches and all of the UK’s options for how to move forward are bad or terrible. I have probably read more about Brexit in recent weeks than I have about my own country’s contortions. Everything about the subject—the history out of which the EU grew, the great benefits it has accrued to Europe and individual member countries, the problems and restrictions and cultural displacement that has accompanied those benefits, the politics behind the original referendum, the dynamics of the Leave vote, and the contortions the U.K. is going through in the aftermath—everything, all of it, seems to refract in one national calamity the most urgent questions confronting liberal democracy in the 21st century. The <a href="https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-great-brexit-breakdown-1544215917">Wall Street Journal</a> came the closest (of anything I have read) to capturing this big picture, stating that Brexit encapsulates the tension between the undoubted economic benefits of “neoliberal” globalism and the irreducible need (for such it now appears to be) for democratic nations to assert a national and cultural identity and sovereignty.<br /><br />For a political junkie, there’s just a lot to think and talk about. The fascination is akin, of course, to rubbernecking a roadside accident, with that regrettable human affinity for watching someone else’s disaster (or what seems like someone else’s disaster, because Brexit is really every Western country’s problem, in more ways than one). I should say up front: although I think a great many Britons (including at least some Leave supporters with buyers remorse) must be wishing to God that David Cameron had never held that referendum, and although I continue to believe, in a general way, in what the EU represents, and that when all is tallied up, "Remaining" was the better choice--despite all of that, one of the things one learns after diving deeply into the subject is that there was a powerful and legitimate impulse behind the Leave vote that should not be dismissed <em>only</em> as reactionary nationalist obstinancy; that there are substantive grievances about political disenfranchisement and unaccountable decision-makers in Brussels, and about cultural dissolution through borderless migration that have been seized upon (and taken advantage of) by those more retrograde instincts. For believers in liberal democracy, this makes countering the reactionary nationalist tide more difficult, and a matter of close-range strategy as well as long-range planning and philosophy. <br /><br />For instance....if Brexit has demonstrated one thing for American politics, it is that liberal Democrats who want to contain and ultimately defeat the reactionary nationalist-populist movement need to get serious about immigration, even if we may think that the problem here is entirely different—and far, far, far less existentially threatening than it is in Europe—and that American fears about the southern border are stoked by an enormous amount of horseshit on the political right. The problem on the southern border is just that—a problem; Democrats should make it a priority to solve it and banish all talk of “open borders”.<br /><br />It's worth noting, there’s quite a few highly interesting articles arguing for Leave from the liberal-left perspective. The most important point in the best of these, as I understand the argument, is that a nation is the vessel through which social democracy can thrive; and there is none other. “Democracy needs a demos, a people for whom government is of, by and for,” writes <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/28/opinion/why-brexit-is-best-for-britain-the-left-wing-case.html">Alan Johnson</a> in the New York Times </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">. “Without one, all you have is inter-elite management, treaty law and money grubbing….It has been a colossal error…to think of nation-states as embarrassing anachronisms hostile to democracy. Far from being a threat to democracy, the nation-state is the only stable underpinning we have yet devised to sustain the commitments, sacrifices and levels of social trust that a democracy and a welfare state require.”<br /><br />XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX<br /><br />Between now and the deadline in March 2019 for the final exit, the U.K. is in a truly weird place. As of this writing (on Monday, December 17), Theresa May’s exit deal with the E.U. is expected to be rejected in the British House of Commons. <a href="http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/12/theresa-may-might-be-the-most-important-person-in-the-world.html">Andrew Sullivan</a> wrote a penetrating piece on the next-to-impossible task May has had. She has had to beg Europe’s leaders for concessions to make an exit as painless as possible; Europe has driven a hard bargain—and why shouldn’t it? If leaving the Union can be seen as painless, other nations will follow suit. So the deal May brought back satisfies no one at home—it returns sovereignty over the border to the U.K., but that’s about the only real chit for hardline Brexiteers. Her agreement would keep the U.K. within a single customs market, which allows for commonly agreed upon import charge duties—but that’s not the same as the single market that E.U. member countries enjoy, in which goods move unimpeded across borders. And despite this reduced status as a trade partner, the U.K. would still be subject to rules and regulations from Brussels (which Brexiteers regard as a fundamental betrayal of the Leave vote). Meanwhile, Remain-ers still see the whole thing as a defeat with almost certainly disastrous economic consequences for Britain (every economic analysis, so I have read, expects Brexit to be a net loss, possibly a very bad one, to the U.K.’s economy), and debilitating to young people who will likely face real obstacles to moving to and working in E.U. countries. The best thing that can be said of the agreement is that co-opts the reactionary nationalist movement on its most inflammatory point—immigration—while honoring the Leave vote but containing, to the extent possible, the damage from this very bad decision. <br /><br />As Sullivan points out, May’s gamble is that the other alternatives to her exit bargain will be revealed, “in the cold light of day”, to be worse. Those other options include what’s called a “hard exit”—no deal at all with Europe, the U.K. simply out in the cold on March 18, 2019, facing enormous new tariffs on every imaginable product, hard barriers to travel across European borders, and the need for the U.K. to renegotiate its own bilateral trade deals with every single country in the world that the E.U. trades with now. This option has been described, entertainingly, by one British politician as turning England into a “1950s museum floating in the Atlantic.” <br /><br />The other alternative is a re-vote on the referendum, an option that is gaining some traction (Tony Blair is campaigning for it). There’s a lot of freight behind this idea but it carries enormous risks, and not just because the outcome of the vote would be uncertain. Adding to Theresa May’s problems, so I gather, is that she is generally regarded as, well, not very good at her job—which is sad because there is a great deal of courage and principle and patriotism in what she is doing. She voted Remain, but she is committed to honoring the vote of a democratic state, and to getting an exit that will keep the U.K. from being harmed as much as possible. And she has ruled out a second vote. Can a democratic nation really just call the equivalent of a mulligan—oops, sorry, we fucked up—and re-do a vote? It would be exceptionally divisive and would convince many Leave voters that they are as disregarded and disrespected as they have always felt themselves to be, pouring gasoline on the populist fire. As one Leave supporter put it, “The establishment can’t just keep re-doing the election until they get the result they want.” <br /><br />There is a retort to this and part of it has to do with the shameful conduct of some prominent Brexiteers who floated a lot of bullshit in the campaign leading up to the 2016 referendum—not just about, for example, the millions or billions of pounds that could be reinvested into the British National Health Service, but more generally that leaving the E.U. might be painless, that the U.K. could easily renegotiate its own trade deals as if it were still a global empire. In a routine campaign for political office, this kind of flim-flam might be regarded as standard operating procedure. In a vote as a fateful as Brexit, it amounts to something like political malpractice, for which the guilty parties should be ashamed, if anyone anywhere these days were ashamed of anything, ever. <br /><br />On top of this, there were also reports of people who voted Leave but didn’t really understand what they were voting for, and some who voted Leave for the hell of it, thinking it had no real chance of passing. And then there are the suspicions that Russian misinformation may have played a part. All of this, in a an enormously fateful vote decided by four percentage points, does lend some weight to the idea that the first referendum was a botched and skewered exercise. <br /><br />But the stronger argument against Brexit has to do with the E.U. itself, and where it came from. The European Economic Community, which would later become the E.U., was first forged by the exhausted combatants of World War II out of a kind of cultural despair about whether European countries would ever stop slaughtering each other, which they had been doing since Medieval times, culminating in the trenches of World War I and the cataclysm of the second war; it rested on the slim hope that they might, just possibly, do so if they were economically dependent on each other. <br /><br />Here is the thing: Of the great many idealistic visions that fell by the wayside in the bloody 20th century, this idea cannot be said to be one of them. Is it not, in fact, an unqualified success? Can it not be said that this idea is, in fact, one of the very, very few instances of the human race collectively acting with something approaching common sense?<br /> <br />Perhaps the thing the EEC eventually evolved into is a perversion of the original vision. But was it really impossible to reform and liberalize the E.U. from within, or to register some kind of British protest that was less self-defeating? Was it not possible to formulate a referendum that might have offered more choices or less stark choices, or rules that raised the bar for success so that so radical and far-reaching a decision could not be rendered by the slim majority that carried the day in June 2016? <br /><br />My strongest feeling about this matter, when all is said and done, is that the bitter, reactionary nationalist germ at the heart of Brexit—the same germ that has infected politics in my country—needs to be co-opted, smothered, contained and ultimately defeated, whatever it takes. Leftist supporters of Brexit, on either side of the Atlantic, are being enormously naïve if they underestimate the danger of this infection, this faction with which tyhey are making league. We have seen before where it leads, and however it dresses itself up, and whatever advantage it takes of legitimate grievances, it is, I believe, an enemy of civilization. Believers in liberal democracy need to be wise and crafty and resourceful in figuring out how to contain it. If a re-do of the referendum is impossible—and it may be that that a new vote would only inflame the infection---then it may be that Theresa May’s not-so-very-good deal with Europe may be the next best thing. </span>
Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-35815493814245455292018-10-13T12:03:00.002-07:002018-10-13T12:03:51.502-07:00Liberals Should Let Go of Roe v. Wade<span style="font-family: Verdana, sans-serif;"> The painful Capitol Hill spectacle of the last two weeks must surely have made clear, to anyone on either side of the partisan divide, what has been in plain sight for a long time: the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, the fate of which lay behind the brutal machinations of both parties, is the poison pill at the heart of all that has gone wrong in American politics in the last forty years.<br /> It has also, I believe, been a disaster for the liberal left, permanently alienating a segment of the population from legitimate liberal-left causes: livable wages, a fair tax structure, a strong public education system, and universal healthcare.<br /> I think the procedure should be legal, and if the court had kept its nose out of this subject many states, if not most, might have ratified abortion by now. But I have never been able to understand how the Court construed this to be a constitutional right, or how “due process,” as protected by the 14th amendment, can be extended to include a medical procedure. I wonder how many of the ruling’s defenders can explain it.<br /> It’s a deal that many liberals, wanting to defend the liberation and empowerment of women, have made, I believe, with a bad conscience (I say so because for years I did so). The obstinacy with which Democrats have clung to this tortured reading over the years, has convinced the approximately one-third of Americans who regard abortion as a profoundly moral issue that the left simply does not negotiate in good faith. Roe v. Wade was the primer for a politics that was all about saying what you need to say to satisfy your “base,” regardless of facts, Constitutional principles, or anything else more enduring than winning the day.<br /> Let us stipulate that the other side has learned to play the game. God knows. The Republican party is thoroughly captive to a President who is a fluent liar and who has gone the final logical step and entirely discarded facts or truth as a governing principle. The devolution hardly began with Trump, however; there has been a steady corrosive drip of insincerity. Does anyone even remember the shameless Republican posturing around a private domestic tragedy in the case of Terri Schiavo?<br /> In the long slide to our current depths, Sarah Palin’s “death panels” lie must be regarded as the really, really deep dive. You might remember that “death panels” referred to a provision of the Affordable Care Act that would have established a funding stream and a reimbursement code within the Medicare program to pay doctors to have a conversation with patients about completing an advance directive, living will and other aspects of end-of-life planning. Congress killed the provision in the wake of Palin’s lie. (Six years later, in 2015, Medicare did indeed begin paying physicians to have these discussions with their patients).<br /> Palin’s lie has had legs. Almost a decade later, I know of an individual on Facebook who has posted that Ezekiel Emanuel, the Harvard medical ethicist who was an author and proponent of the provision, did so for the purposes of being able to “euthanize political opponents.” Give that some thought: there is an American out there, and he is not alone, so distrustful of “coastal elites” that he believes (or pretends to believe, in the safe space of social media where fantasies flourish) that they want to kill him.<br /> This is an individual who should be on our side. A decade ago the housing collapse and financial services industry scandal demonstrated that Wall Street can screw over the average American before Washington politicians can get their shoes on; both of those industries are now being de-regulated. Our elected politicians rely on ungodly amounts of money to get elected, much of it coming by hook or by crook, from Wall Street. The Supreme Court has ruled that a corporation is a “person” and the lavishing of extravagant amounts of money on a candidate is a form of free speech. A multi-billion-dollar, investor-driven pharmaceutical industry bears a very large share of responsibility for an opioid epidemic that has exacted extraordinary suffering on every segment of American society. We have the only healthcare system in the developed world where the first question you get asked when you go to the hospital is, “How is this getting paid for?” Private equity firms are buying up cash starved medical practices; by what logic does anyone think they will not dictate the limits of medical care according to their profit demands? For profit colleges. For profit prisons. For profit detention centers for detained immigrants.<br /> But go on any right-wing website, or tune into Hannity or Limbaugh, or look up your Trump-loving Facebook friend (if you have one) and you would think the United States was menaced by……socialism. Meanwhile, the Trump Administration practices the real thing, handing out $12 billion in subsidies to farmers damaged by protectionist policies that run counter to traditional conservative free trade policy, perfectly closing a perfect loop of perfect hypocrisy.<br /> Such is the measure of how badly we have lost the audience we should have. When the issue of abortion is returned to the states, where it should have been all along, at least some of the passion on the pro-life side will have been leaked out, and the political dynamics will favor a measure of choice: voters (including men) will have to live with the prohibitions they impose upon themselves. Then perhaps the liberal left can return to principles and policies aimed at securing the economic ground beneath Americans’ feet so they can thrive and prosper—policies like a publicly funded, single-payer national health insurance system that would be, I believe, restorative of American health in more ways than one. <br /> It should have happened years ago. The passage of Medicaid in 1965, a kind of afterthought to the Medicare program, was believed to presage what would be the next logical step—universal healthcare coverage for every American citizen.<br /> In the interval, the Democratic Party and the liberal-left fatefully lashed itself to the electrified cage of a legal reading that some 30 percent of Americans believe to be morally reprehensible. The shockwaves from that ruling, and the cascade of escalating lies, dissembling, and demagoguery on both sides over the years, have seared our cultural and political fabric and warped our regard for each other. It has also, I believe, done serious damage to much that is good and true and unassailable in the American liberal tradition. </span>
Markhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00248706648606894329noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-43530948861995336482018-08-07T14:51:00.001-07:002018-08-09T13:53:18.503-07:00Rewriting History: Five Historical Novels<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Every story is a form of history,
no? “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Once upon a time…..”</i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Five of my favorite novels,
described below, are historical fiction, a form that inhabits a continuum from
the telling of known historical events using real historical characters but
with a fiction writer’s omniscient consciousness; to the creation of fictional
characters inhabiting an historical period that is front and center (almost,
one might say, where the historical period is the story itself); to the
inversion or scrambling of known historical events to create an “alternative
history.” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">(One could, I suppose, spool out
the concept of historical fiction to encompass just about any story; after all,
anything that happens and that can be told as a story must have taken place at
some point in time. But at that same point, if the historical aspect of a story
disappears into the mists of a writer’s invention, then it is no longer
historical. Historical fiction is, if nothing else,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> about</i> history, even when what is being offered up is “alternative”
to the known facts.)<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Three of these books are by the
same author who has made the retelling of American history in fiction his
vocation. Thomas Mallon has a great gift for getting the inside story. And by
that I very much do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not </i>mean the
Washington journo’s version of the “inside scoop,” though he resides in
Washington and the city is the setting for the novels of his I will attempt to
celebrate below. I mean, instead, that he understands how events on the public
record are driven by the private passions of the men and women who make the
history. This is preeminently on display in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Watergate</i>
which is rendered, in Mallon’s telling, as a story of many private intentions
gone haywire. (Okay, Finale does include quite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a lot</i> of “insider-y” stuff, the sort of narrative gets traded
around among D.C. people-in-the-know in that gossamer middle zone between
gossips and news. But it’s there as atmosphere; the real story he tells of the
Reagan years is on even deeper-background, where only talented novelists
tread.)<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The other two, the best of them,
my favorites, share something else. Libra, by Don Delillo, and The Yiddish
Policeman’s Union by Michael Chabon, are masterpieces of sentence writing. One
brilliant, wickedly funny or penetrating sentence builds upon another, each one
all alone seeming to tell a whole story, each and every sentence wholly
original and unspoiled by cliché. I have read both of them over and over,
sometimes just picking them up and opening anywhere to begin reading sentences.
I should add that they share something else: both of them are, in very, very
different ways (to steal Christopher Hitchen’s description of the novels of
Wodehouse), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">incandescently funny: </i>very
darkly so in Libra and antically, hilariously in Yiddish Policeman, But the
dark is never far away in Chabon’s story either. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">****<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOjQA1nK8t4q66dYlG0D1FbdsbAZxs6v5YKUHgbdjj6tnQalro5HkaVZn_tQ8ohM4a6eZ3rQ9oFDmRCkpLLzBemZpmBPZ_7NLVsPeD68tHAtoGpYSt1fpLDFLgR_DTxio5Onmhv80V5S6D/s1600/LIBRA.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="267" data-original-width="189" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjOjQA1nK8t4q66dYlG0D1FbdsbAZxs6v5YKUHgbdjj6tnQalro5HkaVZn_tQ8ohM4a6eZ3rQ9oFDmRCkpLLzBemZpmBPZ_7NLVsPeD68tHAtoGpYSt1fpLDFLgR_DTxio5Onmhv80V5S6D/s200/LIBRA.png" width="141" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“There’s something they aren’t telling us,”</i> says David Ferrie to
Lee Harvey Oswald in a grim New Orleans bar. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Something we don’t know about. There’s more to it. There’s always more
to it. This is what history consists of. It’s the sum total of all the things
they aren’t telling us</i>.” <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">To appreciate Don Delillo’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Libra</i> you need only be an American, and
to have imbibed the peculiar American political air for any prolonged period as
a sentient adult. For then you will be familiar with the odor of paranoia,
never very far off in American affairs, that “sense of heated exaggeration,
suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy” described by Richard Hofstaeder in
“The Paranoid Style in America Politics” more than 60 years ago. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It helps, too, to have wasted a
fair amount of time reading all sorts of conspiracy junk about the Kennedy
assassination, of which there is no shortage. All of the real-life characters
who have figured in conspiracy narratives—Guy Bannister, David Ferrie, Clay
Shaw—stalk the pages of Libra. Shaw, who also makes an appearance in Fellow
Travelers, has only a walk-on role here, appearing as a shamanistic confidant
of David Ferrie’s, a host of gay sex parties. In real life, he was the lawyer
who was slandered and defamed by the megalomaniac Jim Garrison, the New Orleans
district attorney who was the inspiration for Oliver Stone’s paranoid
blockbuster, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">JFK</i>. Garrison brought
Shaw to trial on charges of conspiracy so paper-thin the jury came back with a
not guilty verdict in a matter of minutes. (One of Garrison’s delusions, along
the way to becoming the hero of Stone’s movie, was that the Kennedy assassination
was a gay “thrill killing” perpetrated by a coterie of New Orleans
homosexuals.) <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Delillo spins a scarily plausible
conspiracy involving embittered CIA and Cuban mercenary veterans of the botched
Bay of Pigs operation, Mafia types, and assorted right wing lowlifes (Bannister
and Ferrie). The plot originates with the aging CIA guys, sidelined now after
the Bay of Pigs, who hope to rekindle the nation’s flagging zeal for toppling
Castro by staging a false flag operation, an attempt on the President’s life that
will fail—the killers are supposed to miss their mark—but will be traced to
Castro. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Oswald appears on the scene in
Dallas and New Orleans where he is discovered by the conspirators, out of a
wretched and dyslexic background in the Bronx, coddled by and bullying his
maudlin, self-pitying mother. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To the
conspirators he is a convenient cut-out, mercurial, with a dizzyingly strange
and eyebrow-raising background—the stint at a U2 base in Atsugi, Japan, the
strangely easy entry into the Soviet Union and the even more strangely easy
exit—the perfect patsy. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Along the way, Delillo conjures up
magically the chilliness of the coldest episodes from the Cold War: his
rendering of a fictional interrogation of Oswald by the KGB after the American
U2 spy plane is shot down and Francis Gary Powers is arrested is very good.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Delillo’s portrayal of Oswald is
exemplary and prescient. He appears both grindingly plain and pitiable in his
grinding poverty, an American everyman, and at the same time surpassingly
weird. For the weird version, here’s one of those sentences I mentioned: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oswald was taking shape in Kirilenko’s mind
as a kind of Chaplinesque figure, skating along the edges of vast and dangerous
events. </i><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">For the plain version, there is this:
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After Oswald, men in America are no
longer required to lead lives of quiet desperation. You apply for a credit
card, buy a handgun, travel through cities, suburbs and shopping malls,
anonymous, anonymous, looking for a chance to take a shot at the first puffy
empty famous face, just to let people know there is someone out there who reads
the papers.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">(Sixty years
on, looking back again at Oswald after so many mass shootings by lonely,
emotionally disturbed, sexually deprived men with access to a gun, would we
today, be so quick to assume a political, rather than a personal motive?) <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The original plot spins out of
control—it is a genius of Delillo’s storytelling to intuit how really
impossible it is to keep a conspiracy contained—and the shooters will assume
their own agenda. The story draws oxygen from the venomous hatred that Kennedy
inspired in certain quarters, a hatred that was nursed into a poison by some of
those who felt betrayed by Kennedy in the Bay of Pigs. (That debacle, one of
the great cock-ups in American history, was itself born of a kind of paranoid
obsession with Castro). But Kennedy hatred took on a life of its own, was
ventilated by the man himself and the primitive feeling of inferiority his own
privileged and rarified upbringing could evoke in the susceptible. Listen to
New Orleans private detective and right-wing gun runner Guy Bannister cursing
the man through his teeth: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">We’re supposed to believe he’s the hero of the age. Did you ever see a
man in such a hurt to be great? He thinks he can make us different kind of
society. He’s trying engineer a shift. We’re not smart enough for him. We’re
not mature, energetic, Harvard, world traveler, rich, handsome, lucky, witty.
Perfect white teeth. It fucking grates on my nerves just to look at him…Do you
know what charisma means to me? It means he holds the secrets….All the danger
is in the White House, from nuclear weapons on down. What’s he plotting with
Castro?....There’s not the slightest doubt in my mind but that a movement
exists in the executive branch of the government which is totally devoted to
furthering the communist cause</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">In just this way is Libra only
superficially, or anyway secondarily, a version of the Kennedy
assassination.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is really about
paranoia itself, how “the truth” becomes a function not of empirical, testable
facts, but of our fears and our wishes. Birthers, truthers, conspiracy
theorists of every stripe thrive in this zone. Delillo wrote Libra 25 years
before Alex Jones came to prominence and another President of the United States
would tell an audience, “what you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not
what’s happening.” Libra a story for our time.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">*************<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRJQ256cNLTfTFbfWcK_9qbPJXFF4xUhNm4S41_b6eXMC3oyGwVIPpPfzBt1WApHmoSVHznGqk89pkXD35nX_ggU0Ci3kdb1fSqOfYPLMqJVvyvbU7mmLSG48iSnZZeRs8fYJQfJatHou7/s1600/YIDDISH.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="344" data-original-width="344" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgRJQ256cNLTfTFbfWcK_9qbPJXFF4xUhNm4S41_b6eXMC3oyGwVIPpPfzBt1WApHmoSVHznGqk89pkXD35nX_ggU0Ci3kdb1fSqOfYPLMqJVvyvbU7mmLSG48iSnZZeRs8fYJQfJatHou7/s200/YIDDISH.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Casting about for how to introduce
The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, I find I can only reproduce for you one or two
of those matchless sentences I mentioned. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“According to doctors, therapists, and his ex-wife, Landsman drinks to
medicate himself, tuning the tubes and crystals of his moods with a crude
hammer of hundred-proof plum brandy. But the truth is that Landsman has only
two moods: working and dead.<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The problem with this approach is
that those are followed by others, only better, only more fun, so I find I have
to keep going. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Meyer Landsman is the most decorated shames in the District of Sitka,
the man who solved the murder of the beautiful Froma Lefkowitz by her furrier
husband, and caught Podolsky the Hospital Killer. His testimony sent Hyman
Tsharny to federal prison for life, the first and last time that criminal
charges against a Verbover wiseguy have ever been made to stick. He has the
memory of a convict, the balls of a fireman, and the eyesight of a
housebreaker. When there is crime to fight, Landsman tears around Sitka like a
man with his pant leg caught on a rocket. It’s like there’s a film score
playing behind him, heavy on the castanets. <o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">If you’re not ready the read the
book already, you may be dead to language. But, okay, maybe what you need is a
story, a plot, so here’s how it is: Meyer Landsman is a cop, a detective and he
is the offspring of a Jewish remnant that settled in Alaska after the Holocaust
and after the fledgling state of Israel was defeated in 1948. A precarious
“interim state” was declared by the United States Congress for the Jews of
Sitka, Alaska—interim because, well, no one wants Jews around permanently—and
it is in this interim state that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Landsman chances upon a murdered Jewish kinsman in the flophouse hotel
in which he lives, and is driven to solve the mystery in the weeks and days
before he and his tribesman will be forced, yet again, to wander the earth in
search of a home. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The young dead Jew, it turns out,
was—before a heroin addiction “turned his brain into a great lapping tongue”—a man
of great promise, the greatest promise actually. The Tzaddik Ha-Dor, the
righteous man of his generation, of whom there is never more than one. As Meyer
Landsman explains to his supervising officer (who just happens to be his
ex-wife): <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">So the story is that these guys, these tzaddiks, they have been showing
up for work, one per generation, for the past couple thousand years, right?
Cooling their heels. Waiting for the time to be right, or the world to be
right, or, some people say, for the time to be wrong and the world to be as
wrong as it can be. Some of them we know about. Most of them kept a pretty low
profile. I guess the idea is that the Tzaddik Ha-Dor could be anyone.<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The unraveling of the murder of
this would-be tzaddik will bring Landsman into contact with a rabbinical Jewish
crime family and a gang of militant zealots bent on rescuing the Jews of Alaska
before “the Reversion” scatters them to the winds again. Along the way the
reader meets chess masters, a husband-wife-and-daughter family famous for
baking pies for pilots and passengers at an obscure airport in the frozen
north, a midget police officer named Willie Dick, a disgraced Irish journalist
with a macroencephalitic head, and a just barely sane dentist who specializes
in recreating the tools and utensils of the ancient Temple rituals described in
the book of Leviticus. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The hallucinogenic imaginativeness
of this set-up allows Landsman to inhabit every single gumshoe
stereotype—drunk, cynical, a fuck-up in every aspect except busting bad
guys—and yet still seem like no detective you have ever, ever read or heard
about. I like to push this novel on people—it’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">so much fun, it’s so funny</i>. Yet it is a high, high game that the
novelist is playing. It rolls along with every convention of the detective
story, but all of those conventions are translated into a higher form of
imagination—a story ultimately about that sense of contingency, of living on
the lip of an abyss, of ever-waiting and hopefulness leavened by a past of
disappointment and disaster that has characterized wanderers of the world
everywhere seeking a home, but has been most quintessentially the story of what
it means to be a Jew.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt; tab-stops: 283.0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“Landsman has no home, no future, not fate but Bina. The land that he
and she were promised was bounded only by the fringes of their wedding canopy,
by the dog-eared corners of their cards of membership in an international
fraternity whose members carry their patrimony in a tote bag, their world on
the tip of the tongue.”<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">XXXXXXXXX<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjvI74GHO3-OZSH8SjGkgjBH8XMiRTAkRUAb_1s1g8bWe6gBg8kiJzK53AjmYz3cTN5ULHzfQ_d3s5xZHLJsGQk12LrngJjxS5Qgq6bfP8FRtt6YBE7CLybBWCGr6WTNRN_u1cHYd7f0j/s1600/WATERGATE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="325" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgUjvI74GHO3-OZSH8SjGkgjBH8XMiRTAkRUAb_1s1g8bWe6gBg8kiJzK53AjmYz3cTN5ULHzfQ_d3s5xZHLJsGQk12LrngJjxS5Qgq6bfP8FRtt6YBE7CLybBWCGr6WTNRN_u1cHYd7f0j/s200/WATERGATE.jpg" width="130" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">The scandal known
as “Watergate” that ended 44 years ago this month with the resignation of
Richard Nixon has had enormous impact, mainly a bad one, on how all Americans
regard politicians, government, and the very calling of public service.
Although it brought down a prominent figure of the right and was regarded at
the time as a victory of the liberal left, the scandal’s most lasting impact
has probably been to implant in millions of American minds a deep distrust of
government and of what has been regarded for most of American history as the
dignity of public service. The seeds of the Trump phenomenon can be found in
Watergate.</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Such are the
ironies of history. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">But the
episode has “already” accumulated the dust of a distant episode most, or
certainly many, Americans can only dimly recall, a quaint relic in the nation’s
attic. To recall the names of the period is like coming upon an old middle
school year book inscribed with wishes from long lost classmates to “have a
great summer!” John Dean. John Ehrlichman. Bob Haldeman. Howard Hunt. Who remembers
Tony Ulasewicz, the bagman who delivered wads of cash as “hush money” to Howard
Hunt’s wife and talked like a Damon Runyon character when testifying before the
Senate investigative committee? </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is a
bittersweet relic for some of us who were just becoming politically aware when
the scandal was making headlines.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I was
fourteen when Nixon resigned, and I grew up outside of Washington in a family
that talked politics at the dinner table. The summer before I had a paper route
delivering the Washington Post, where Woodward and Bernstein were regularly
taking the President to the cleaners.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><br />
<br />
</span><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">Washington at the time had a
lively party circuit, hosted by fashionable Georgetown matrons, that
was chronicled in the Post’s “Style” section. But in many other ways it
was still striving to outgrow John Kennedy’s description of the nation’s
capital as a city of “southern efficiency and northern charm.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was a profoundly segregated city and the
ruins of riots six years prior to the President’s resignation still rendered
vast stretches of real estate east of the Capitol a no-man’s land (at least for
white people). </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Thomas Mallon’s
novel, “Watergate,” brings it all back to life, intelligently and
clairvoyantly. They are all there—the burglars Gordon Liddy and Howard Hunt and
the Cubans, Dean and Haldeman and Jeb Magruder and John and Martha
Mitchell. Nixon and Henry Kissinger. His story is a comedy, or a tragi-comedy
in which a vast national calamity grows out of a complex history of miscues,
crossed signals and half-hearted intentions, a comedy haphazardly propelled by
personal (rather than public) motives, misunderstandings and misconnections. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">It is a tale of
humans in positions of power being hopelessly human, and so his hypothesis--although
wildly imaginative--is entirely plausible. John Mitchell, the attorney
general, is hopelessly distracted by his mentally ill and alcoholic wife Martha
and is depicted as fatally deferring on a decision about whether to fund the
nit-witted Gordon Liddy and his confederates in their plans for subverting the
election. Nixon himself is depicted as more of a fumbling neurotic than a
paranoid calculator. “I listen to myself on the tapes and hear myself
trying to sound like I know more than I really do,” he tells his wife
tearfully, when the gig is up. </span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;">The central
figure in the story is Fred LaRue, a barely recallable figure who nevertheless
was at the heart of the scandal. A top fundraiser among southern conservatives
that Nixon cultivated for their resentment over civil rights, Larue was the one
who scoured up the dough to give to Ulasewicz to give to the burglars to keep
them quiet. But LaRue—in Mallon’s telling—also carries a terrible secret from
his childhood, one that emerges as central to answering an enduring mystery
about the scandal: Why did the burglars wiretap the Democratic National
Committee to begin with, and what were they looking for?</span><span lang="EN" style="font-family: "arial" , sans-serif; mso-ansi-language: EN; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">This is history
from the inside--history written by the random chaos of the human
heart--and the proof of the intelligence of his story is the degree to
which this tall tale is <i>entirely believable</i>. At the end of the novel,
after much chaos has spilled, LaRue ponders the nature of history itself, the
fact that each moment, each event, is preceded by other moments, other events; that
all of them are linked in a chain of causation, so that searching for the
precise origin of any one event becomes an exercise in the absurd. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">No, he wouldn’t do it. Because if he started he
would never stop. He would have to wonder whether Watergate had really begun
fifteen years before, in that Canadian duck blind, and whether it would have
occurred if he’d never made a furtive visit to a lawyer’s office in Jackson,
Mississippi; if he’d never met a secretary named Clarine Lander. He would
eventually rewind things to the point where he’d be asking if Watergate
depended on Fred—or Ike—LaRue’s having been born.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">XXXXXX<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBKCfy9-GTgZw_5PWsxogM8Uy5ETwf3OGuaF7sGVTMa3bFdn0NzPRAdZlXPCwO7CT33qKuP0EzYPWz6SRIioTMjlB4OLMyuH8WhyphenhyphenEaF7JLdHH6vaQys1l1jHlSXjkD_hRFqtFHRY2V6l2e/s1600/FELLOW.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="323" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiBKCfy9-GTgZw_5PWsxogM8Uy5ETwf3OGuaF7sGVTMa3bFdn0NzPRAdZlXPCwO7CT33qKuP0EzYPWz6SRIioTMjlB4OLMyuH8WhyphenhyphenEaF7JLdHH6vaQys1l1jHlSXjkD_hRFqtFHRY2V6l2e/s200/FELLOW.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The paperback cover of <em>Fellow Travelers</em> is a black and white
photograph of a young man in a jacket and tie, the tie only barely loosened,
hoisting a beer stein with a hearty bonhomie at some happy hour bar with his
colleagues. He wears the groomed good look of a stylish young man in the 1950s.
The photo might have been taken anywhere, but it somehow perfectly conjures up
the kind of young men—combining idealism and ambition—who populated the nation’s
capital in the late 1940s and 1950s, the city’s era of enormous postwar expansion.
<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">They sought jobs in the “Situations Wanted” section of the Washington
Post, with advertisements like this:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Young man, 27, B.A.,
Yale, three years experience legislative research. 3 yrs. formal legal
training, desires position with trade assoc. or law office. Box 61-V. Star. <o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Young man, college
education desires a responsible position. Wall WO6-8202.<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Young man, colored,
desires evening or night work of any kind. Phone LI8-5198.</span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It's those kinds of details and countless other period artifacts by which Mallon recreates an era with nearly photographic precision. This noir story of love and betrayal, secrets and blackmail is everything House of Cards would be if it were set in the 50s and better written. Its a gay love story set in the era of <span style="font-family: "calibri";">McCarthy and the “lavender scare” when
government officials suspected of being homosexual were outed and dismissed,
especially in the State Department where they were deemed to be security risks.
<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Tim Laughlin, an earnestly Catholic, earnestly
anti-communist young Capitol Hill staffer falls in love with Hawkins Fuller, an
older, mid-level State Department official who works in the Department’s
congressional liaison office. Fuller goes by the name “Hawk,” a bird of prey, and
he haunts the city’s gay underground with the casual ease of a man who is never
denied, who takes what he wants and discards what he doesn’t. It is an almost
painful mismatch—Tim and Hawk. Their affair is played out against the backdrop
of the Army McCarthy hearings, and a pervasive atmosphere of suspicion and fear
and extortion. McCarthy, Roy Cohn, and David Schine are among the real-life characters brought to life again. We also meet one of Mallon's most inspired creations, Tommy McIntyre, a boisterous Irish Capitol Hill player who, driven by his own rage and vengefulness and sense of betrayal, traffics in a sordid marketplace of secrets, of who has what on whom. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">The novel renders, in a way that no one can miss, how the
closet worked to reinforce the stigma. Not just in the obvious sense (or the
sense that should have been obvious even then) that gay men were only security
risks because they could not be openly gay; that a gay man who is not ashamed
of being gay, and does not care who knows it, <i>automatically ceases to be a
security risk</i>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">It is also that the closet actually mandated the behavior
that confirmed the stigma. Thus: gay men are presumed to be depraved sex fiends; therefore,
they must not be allowed to date or be openly affectionate, let alone have a
“courtship” and marriage. So, what are gay men to do? Well, as Mallon
depicts—as was true in Washington, D.C. in the 1950s, as actually happened—they find an abandoned
brownstone building in Foggy Bottom, haul a mattress up to the attic, and have heated,
surreptitious, late-night trysts there. See? Very depraved. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">Most Americans today regard with a mixture of scorn and
incredulity the fact that there was in America a time when a restaurant would
refuse to serve black people, as if looking back on a people who were slightly
out of their minds. But did you know, as Mallon’s novel recounts, that some
government officials, suspected of being gay, were required to read a portion
of Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage,” as a test? If he read it with too
much ardor—or something, god only knows—then the secret was out. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Young gay men should read Fellow Travelers, for a sense of what it was like before the world changed. Tim desperately wants to believe his love affair is the real thing, a love on which God could smile. But the times won't allow it. When it's over he tries to explain to an uncomprehending priest that he cannot be truly sorry it had happened. </span><br />
<br />
</span><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span style="font-family: "calibri";"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Without Hawk’s love in return, his own love had become unbearable. He had stopped because what they did together could not be sprung from the world of shame and suppressed terror and blackmail, from Tommy McIntyre’s extortive market of secrets. He’d once believed that he and Hawkins had lifted themselves above the wicked earth by doing what they did in bed, but that sense had been replaced by a realization that joining their bodies only chained them to the electrified cage of who had what on whom. </span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "calibri";">
</span><br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 8pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">XXXXXXX<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RIyrDe1lihpdlI8p_L0fiyxhM2bZQwokmrI2aPACxCHGHzYG2k1c_JJ7EtXMi4U2kwg2OUtl6H1X9het_awEux9q9OtnqHZyI0n6T3bGFtggejiG3DLoK6Q-pkMx8kpSM8F0yeJ-B6nL/s1600/FINALE.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="499" data-original-width="324" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg-RIyrDe1lihpdlI8p_L0fiyxhM2bZQwokmrI2aPACxCHGHzYG2k1c_JJ7EtXMi4U2kwg2OUtl6H1X9het_awEux9q9OtnqHZyI0n6T3bGFtggejiG3DLoK6Q-pkMx8kpSM8F0yeJ-B6nL/s200/FINALE.jpg" width="129" /></a></div>
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">In the thick of
Finale, Mallon’s re-telling of the Reagan years, the novelist renders a phone
conversation between Richard Nixon and Jeanne Kirkpatrick. Nixon was, then,
clawing his way back to respectability by playing a deep background advisor and
trader of information to the powerful. Kirkpatrick was the ‘80’s era queen of
neo-conservativism, staunch defender of Israel, Cold Warrior and
anti-communist. They are discussing Reagan’s Reykjavik negotiations with
Gorbachev, which form the heart of Mallon’s drama. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Well,” said Nixon, “Reagan’s got
two sessions to go over there, though only the last one will count. How do you
think he’ll do? You’ve seen him face-to-face more than I have in recent years.”
<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After a pause, Mrs. Kirkpatrick
spoke deliberately. “I told this to my husband when I first met Reagan, all of
six years ago: he doesn’t talk like anybody I’m familiar with. He doesn’t sound
like a politician, or an academic or a journalist. But I can also tell you that
he’s the most impersonally warm man I’ve ever encountered. They won’t know how
to figure him out over there.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Reykjavik. The Iran-Contra
Affair. The AIDS epidemic. Over all of these 80’s era relics hovers the figure
of Reagan himself, whom few it seems, outside of his wife, ever really figured
out. Mallon captures exactly this astral quality of the man, the impersonal
warmth, the sense of a man whom many found to be genuinely there and yet not quite all
there<em>. <o:p></o:p></em></span></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">He captures it through
indirection because Reagan, the man himself, only rarely makes an appearance in
the book. The story of Reagan’s presidency is told instead through the heated
doings of his underlings, the conservative activists who gravitated to Reagan
after their long, long winter in the years of liberal Democratic dominance; the
hangers on and journalists who tried to keep up; and its told through his
ever-anxious, ever watchful wife Nancy. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">There’s more than literary
purpose in this. Joan Didion has observed that the uncanny calm at the eye of
all this activity—the man, Ronald Reagan—created a kind of outward centrifugal
force of enormous energy. It made for a lot of interesting drama. There was,
for instance, the peculiar convergence on the outer rings of the Reagan
presidency of a coterie of closeted gay conservatives, fiercely anti-communist,
some of whom raised money that was funneled through various interesting ways to
the Contras in Nicaragua to fight against the Sandinistas. A few of these men
also would die of AIDS, denying on their death bed that they were gay and only
very tepidly condemning the Reagan administration for its lethally dismal
response to the epidemic. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">One of my favorite writers,
the late Christopher Hitchens has a large role in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finale</i> working (as he did in `real life’) as a fiercely socialist
journalist for The Nation, the Spectator and other leftist journals in the U.K
and the states. Hitchens is pursuing several lines of story—the money to the
Contras, that coterie of gay cold war cowboys, and who has the President’s ear
at Reykjavik (the hardliners, like Kirkpatrick) or those who want him to make
an historic deal to end the threat of nuclear war (Nancy). <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Mallon was friends with
Hitchens and captures the man’s charm, ferocious wit, and terrifying facility
with argument. Here he is interviewing one of those cowboys, a fellow named
Terry Dolan who is dying of a disease he swears is not AIDS. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">“…[I]t wasn’t my intention, but now that I’ve
gotten a look at you, I feel the inclination to ask: What do you think of Mr.
Reagan’s AIDS policy?”</span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Well,
they need to speed up the AZT approval process. Get it out of the FDA
bureaucracy.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Ah, yes,” said Hitchens, “the libertarian view. Let’s
assume that AZT proves a bit more effective than, say, laetrile did against
cancer. And let’s assume that it’s made available to all. How do `all’ afford
it?”</span></span></i><br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Oh,
the market will work that out.”</span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
thought it might. You know, it would be a welcome spectacle to see people on their
deathbeds crying for socialism instead of God. Tell me, Dolan: you’re
expressing this faith in the market as someone who does not have AIDS?”</span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s
right.”</span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“What
do you have?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Anemia,”
answered Dolan. “Complicated by diabetes.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Type
1? Type 2?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Not
sure.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Really? How about
whether or not you’re a homosexual? Sure of that?”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I’m not. A
homosexual, that is. But I have nothing against people who are.”<o:p></o:p></span></span></i><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Hitchens is interviewing
him, mind you, in a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">gay bar</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">And that isn’t even remotely
the weirdest stuff that was going on as the Cold War wound down—take, for
instance, Nancy’s consultations with an astrologer named Joan Quigley. </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“…in a moment
of weakness, ten minutes before boarding the helicopter, she had called Joan Quigley,
who’d warned her that Uranus, the planet that had caused Watergate (she’d never
mentioned that before!) was now fully in league with Saturn in its operations
against Ronnie. Uranus was `a throne toppler,’ said Joan, using this term for
the first time, while warning that there wasn’t just impeachment to worry about
but new threats to Ronnie safety as well.” <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">There’s a lot of satire in Finale, but it is in the end an admiring
portrait of a presidency. Mallon is a Republican, of the sort that must be now
be considered outmoded. (I met the author once, on a Metro train in D.C. He
writes on occasion for The New Yorker where, he told me, he is considered “the
house Tory.” But then he rolled his eyes and shook his head. “This
stuff”—meaning Trump—“I don’t know.”)<o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">Approaching forty years
after Reagan was first elected, liberals must be wishing now they had not been
so dismissive. (Although I think they—we—can be certain that Reagan would be
contemptuous of current White House occupant, and his enablers.) <o:p></o:p></span></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";">It seems impossible not to
recognize now that Reagan was the right man for the moment, when a wicked
regime would finally fall. In the epilogue, Reagan does appear, dying of
Alzheimer’s. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><span style="font-family: "calibri";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“…he begins to
touch and examine some of the pictures and souvenirs, all of them laid out so
carefully, everything recently dusted….He knows that these things are
beautiful, clever. They have been brought to him as gifts, and he has sensed
the happiness in the givers. Picture after picture, object after object, all of
them infused with good feeling, except for the one thing just past the end of
the table, the one object that always displeases and perplexes him: a jagged
block of concrete, ripped from something immense, smeared with paint and pocked
with hammers, bearing the numbers 1961-1989 and placed on a wooden stand all
its own. Whatever it may be, this object, too, has been brought here to make
him happy, but it is something cruel, different from everything else in the
room, and often, when he stands before it, he feels an impulse to knock it
down.” <o:p></o:p></i></span></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span lang="EN" style="mso-ansi-language: EN;"><o:p><span style="font-family: "calibri";"> </span></o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-71906170013394915592018-07-04T11:23:00.004-07:002018-07-04T11:43:49.027-07:00American Story: Thirty Days by Greyhound and a Meditation on Patriotism<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; margin: 0in 0in 0pt; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikWQE050XruE_8SMTNddhufO1G5DoWqltvuglf0qu_3nlJP9n_CHLgaAblcfgFj8YFwsS2DPnc2SHw83KYTQnybbGqlaFxetnzERvWL6gEgVQc-W4kN8H5n5onHuK5Oz4rYTDB2lnYGIok/s1600/desert.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="900" data-original-width="1600" height="112" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikWQE050XruE_8SMTNddhufO1G5DoWqltvuglf0qu_3nlJP9n_CHLgaAblcfgFj8YFwsS2DPnc2SHw83KYTQnybbGqlaFxetnzERvWL6gEgVQc-W4kN8H5n5onHuK5Oz4rYTDB2lnYGIok/s200/desert.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I’d done a year and a half of college, done okay, sort of, but must have felt that it was a path that was being mapped out by someone else, so that summer in 1980 I mapped out my own course, a bus trip across the country by Greyhound, staying at youth hostels, and lit out. I was 20 years old.<br /> I remember plotting it out over a map of the United States spread out before me on the floor of my bedroom in the suburban home I grew up in. I would go to New Orleans, then up to St. Louis, out across the Rockies to Colorado, then to Salt Lake, then to San Francisco. Id turn back east stopping at the Grand Canyon; make a stop in Ohio to see my grandparents. And then I would come home. That’s how I decided it, just like that, sitting on the floor and looking at a map. I would do this using a Greyhound Bus Ameripass, which in 1980 allowed you to travel for 30 days, wherever and as much as you needed to, for $300, staying in youth hostels along the way.<br /> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was a humidity-sodden day in July—the kind of day in D.C. when everyone seems to be somewhere else; the kind of day that feels like you could lose it like so much soggy lint in your pocket—that I boarded a bus at the depot in Silver Spring, Maryland, the neighboring town to my own Bethesda, Maryland. Silver Spring, then, was (at least in my memory) a smoggy, congested concrete attachment to the nation’s capital, surfeited with carry-out joints and failing strip malls. This was just how I remember my departure on this adventure of mine across the country—humid, non-descript, a lost little day in mid-summer. The bus depot manager was a moon-faced fellow in a baseball cap from whom I bought the Ameripass that same day, but I told him I was headed to my first stop in New Orleans. I’d be taking the regular bus south to Richmond—it left two or three times a day—and all of the dozen or so other passengers waiting in the dingy little station were heading either to Richmond or to points north of there along the way. I would be switching buses several times in several stations in the old confederacy before reaching my destination; it was early afternoon when the bus departed and the plan was for me to arrive in New Orleans mid- or late-afternoon of the next day, something more than a 24-hour journey. But when the bus was ready to board the moon-faced manager called out “New Orleans” as if I was heading, maybe, across town or across state. I was in gym shorts, sneakers, and a T-shirt carrying one large grimy yellow knapsack stuffed with clothes, a smaller pack with books, a camera, snack food and the like, and a waist pack where I carried cash and my packet of bus tickets.<br /> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was a young man’s adventure, the kind of thing undertaken with not much more forethought or cautionary planning than I have just described. I had tried the college thing—both my brothers had gone off to schools before and were now graduated into the world—and while I hadn’t done badly, it hadn’t been a good experience. I had taken the second semester of my sophomore year off, come home to live with my parents, and worked at a drug store (a local DC chain then called “People’s Drug Store,” that would be bought out later by CVS). There was a plan in the works for me to attend a different school in the fall, but truthfully I wasn’t much focused on that; what I wanted to do was get out from under what felt like everyone else’s script and scout around the great world of my own country.<br /> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">It was an idea born of books I had read—especially, as a teenager John Steinbeck’s "Travels With Charley," "Grapes of Wrath," "Tortilla Flats" and "Cannery Row"—and an ethos I had absorbed from other writers and poets and singers and songwriters, the idea that to discover the country you had to go out and visit it, and in visiting it you would be transformed yourself. So that your own self-discovery was intimately linked with your discovery of what it meant—or some small piece of what it meant—to be an American.<br /> Something like that. Sounds a tad melodramatic, perhaps, but it’s a theme that runs deep in American literature. I’ll confess up front, though, that while there are some highlights, viewed from a certain vantage point it can look mostly like a kid in sneakers and a t-shirt on a bus, drinking a shitload of beer wherever he was able. (And I should add that the reader will have to trust me; I have no documentary evidence of this adventure, neither pictures nor the diary I carried have survived, and some pockets of this excursion have blurred with time.)<br /> And yet…I have today, more than 35 years later, a great affection and respect for my younger, adventurous self, and it was a journey that has stayed with me. I go over these recollections every now and again, trying to polish and make shine what it was that stays with me, what it is that seems significant today. It did change me, and it was one in which I did come to know my amazing country more intimately. This is an American story.<br /> <br /> ************<br /> It went mostly as planned. I toured the French Quarter in New Orleans, then stayed two nights in a dormitory at Tulane and rode the streetcar up and down the Garden District; spent one night in a homeless shelter in sweltering St. Louis (it was something like 111 degrees) because I arrived on a Sunday and the hostel was closed (so that didn’t go quite as planned); spent four nights in Boulder, Colorado, trying to absorb the fact that people there casually walked around doing their business with those mountains in their backyard; spent a couple of nights in Salt Lake, treating myself to a Holiday Inn (what I mostly remember is how clean the city was, and my amazement that there were non-Mormon churches, plenty of them, there.) From San Francisco, I hitchhiked north to the wine country, and south down the coast to Carmel (receiving a ride in a pick-up truck I will never forget). Turning back east, I stayed in Flagstaff, Arizona where the youth hostel at the time was atop a bar-café called Charlies; because of its proximity to the Canyon, it attracted young people from all over the world as well as students from Arizona State, and folks from the town--it was a lively place at night and in the morning you could hitch a ride to the Canyon, 90 miles north.<br /> </span><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">I learned a lot that summer and I wonder why it feels slightly embarrassing to say that one of the things l learned was to love my country. Certainly, I thought I loved my country before, or would have said so if someone had asked me—after all, I had said the Pledge of Allegiance in grade school and sung (or lipsynced) the National Anthem at ballgames and had been told through twelve-plus years of American public school that I had everything to be grateful for being born here. But getting to see the colossal land of my birth or a fraction of it, gave me a physical, sensual sense of the country I hadn’t had before. I suppose it may have first come to me with my first glimpse of the Rockies; it was a breathtaking source of wonder to awaken in Boulder, Colorado and step outside and see a mountain—not the little green hills we call mountains back east, but a great, jagged-tooth eruption of God’s earth tipped at the top with snow—looming over you. It will humble anyone’s provincialism. Standing on the grounds of the youth hostel in San Francisco at Fort Mason on Fisherman’s Wharf at night, looking out at the twinkling lights of the city, I marveled at the distance I had travelled, and at the vastness of the country, aware for the first time and in a way that has stayed with me, that we are part of something that is larger than our own narrow ideas about it.<br /> (There are times, I confess, when I sometimes don’t feel very American and think I might “fit in” better in, say, England or some chilly Scandanavian place, where everyone’s emotional temperature is lower. I can’t quite master the habit of sunny optimism, the idea that the trend is always up, that it is always morning in America and I think, in fact, American culture would benefit from a better apprehension of the tragic sense of life. But this is a matter of temperment. The truth is, I couldn’t live anywhere else.)<br /> Probably, people like me—by which I mean people who identify, with varying degrees of allegiance, with the political left of center—should be less shy about expressing profound feelings of patriotism; that reticence has allowed others, who have the most anemic and emaciated counterfeit of love for their country, to portray us as enemies of a most fundamental sort. It’s an easily manipulated (and easily counterfeited) thing, patriotism. “The last refuge of scoundrels,” an Englishman said of it four centuries ago. More recently, Joan Didion wrote in an essay, “On Morality” that she distrusted the word “morality,” distrusted it’s use in any but the most irreducible sense—as when (this is just how irreducible she meant the only sense in which it was trustable) you vow not to leave a dead body out on the desert, because the buzzards and coyotes will feed it on it. That’s “immoral.” Anything more abstract, or symbolic than that, than vowing not to leave dead bodies on the desert floor, is horseshit. </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Well, I feel just about exactly the same way about patriotism. To me it means something real, that awareness that struck me when I first saw the Rockies or looked back across the country from the wharf in San Francisco, of the vastness of the country, its variety, its neon-lit gaudiness, the realization that it is larger than my, or anyone’s, imagining. This sense of the whole—derived from a little bit of reading, a little bit of travel, a little bit of education, and, okay, maybe, a little bit of hearsay—is fused inseparably with my own personal experience of <em>being an American</em>: childhood summers in rural Ohio or on the eastern shore, watching the moon landing late at night on a scratchy and crackling television set on the eastern shore, the riotous American abundance at county fairs on warm summer nights. I carry it around with me, this awareness—just as I carry around with me the awareness of my name (though I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about my name, or boasting to others, “I am Mark!”).<br /> The problem, maybe, is that patriotism is easily identified with its symbols—a flag, an anthem—which are then easily fetishized. Consider: some black athletes take a knee during the national anthem; okay, you might say with reason, it’s an act that requires no great courage from young people earning millions of dollars to play a game six months of the year. But it does stem from something real, at least as real as the experiences I have described (if not a lot more so) the felt experience among black Americans that they are more liable to die or be roughly and unfairly treated at the hands of the police. (The game they play, by the way, despite the millions of dollars, is going to discard them when they are not yet out of their youth, and when they may be significantly brain damaged for the rest of their lives). <br /> But mark the response from the Vice President of the United States who flies to a football game with the express purpose of walking out of the game when the players kneel. Now here is an act that approximates almost perfectly the exact juncture of cynicism, phoniness, opportunism and infantalism. Call this nearly mythical place, Horseshit Central. Here is an act that requires exactly zero courage, costs exactly nothing (to the Vice President; the rest of us foot the bill for the plane ride); it may have leant some thin, short-lived symbolic support to police officers who may feel themselves aggrieved—maybe—but the audience the Vice President was really playing to wasn’t cops, but people whose purchase on ersatz patriotism becomes tighter once they’ve sunk into the barcolounger and started in on that first six-pack. Oh, look! He’s walking out! Look at him go! Yep, there is he, walking out! You can almost hear one of those nameless, brainless “color” commentators who litter the professional football airwaves, saying, “There he goes, Joe, walking out! Is that some integrity? Or What?”<br /> The tacky and sinister phoniness of this repellent charade is enough to make you read the last rites over American self-government; to borrow a phrase from Christopher Hitchens, you can’t eat enough to vomit enough. For the record, I think I would prefer the players stood during the anthem, if only because their protest contributes to the pervasive sense of entropy everywhere, the sense that things are falling apart. I like patriotic songs and think it is a sweet thing to sing them at sporting events, although—forgive me—the Star Spangled Banner is just a song, not a great one. It's difficult to sing and the lyrics are grammatically a little weird. I prefer God Bless America or America the Beautiful or My Country Tis of Thee. <br /> It was probably inevitable—given the bad shape professional football is in and its dubious future—that the owners would give in to the President and enact their little ban on freedom of speech. The President’s supporters are free to hail this as some kind of victory, but if mandatory political rituals are your idea of patriotism, you might want to try North Korea. You can stand at attention all the live long day.<br /> Not every topic of discussion about patriotism, or that evokes declarations of patriotism, is so frivilous and dumb. The debate about immigration engages fundamental questions—What is an American? Who is an American? What does it mean to be an American?—and things real rather than only symbolic. A border is a very real thing—I can show you where it is on a map—and the liberal left (never failing to seize on an opportunity to miss an opportunity) makes a big mistake when it speaks of open borders, or in platitudes such as “no human being is illegal.” <br /> `But an immigrant (and her child) is also quite real, and the immigrant—almost always throughout American history derided as dirty, disease-carrying, or criminal—is in the realest sense just exactly what America is about. (Want to engage in an act of patriotism? Visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum in New York.)<br /> The conservative writer Brett Stephens recently made the </span><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/21/opinion/trump-immigration-reform.html"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">interesting case</span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> that the United States <em>needs more</em> immigration. And he had this to say:</span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>“Immigrants — legal or otherwise — make better citizens than native-born Americans. </em></span><a href="https://research.newamericaneconomy.org/report/open-for-business-how-immigrants-are-driving-small-business-creation-in-the-united-states-2/"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>More entrepreneurial</em></span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>. </em></span><a href="http://www.pewforum.org/2013/05/17/the-religious-affiliation-of-us-immigrants/"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>More church-going</em></span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>. Less likely to have </em></span><a href="http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2016/10/26/births-outside-of-marriage-decline-for-immigrant-women/"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>kids out of wedlock</em></span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>. </em></span><a href="https://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/pubs/pdf/immigration_brief-1.pdf"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>Far less likely to commit crime</em></span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>. These are the kind of attributes Republicans claim to admire.<br /> Or at least they used to, before they became the party of Trump — of his nativism, demagoguery, and penchant for capricious cruelty. It was nice to hear Republican legislators decry the family separation policy. But there’s no sugarcoating the fact that a plurality of Republicans, 46 percent, </em></span><a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/poll-republicans-approve-of-trumps-family-separation-policy"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>favored it</em></span></a><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em>, while only 32 percent were opposed, according to an Ipsos poll commissioned by the Daily Beast.<br /> This isn’t a party that’s merely losing its policy bearings. It’s one that’s losing its moral sense. If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then opposition to immigration is the conservatism of morons. It mistakes identity for virtue, entitlement for merit, geographic place for moral value. In a nation of immigrants, it’s un-American.”</em></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><em></em><br /> Then, too, there is this: It occurred to me that anyone seeking a picture of our possibly bleak future should contemplate not the “illegals” coming over our border, but the face of a white man legally born in the United States—the 21-year old gunman who two years ago shot nine Charleston, South Carolina churchgoers at a Bible study. I suppose this young man might be able to name the author of The Declaration of the Independence, and possibly “Huckleberry Finn.” But I doubt seriously he could say who wrote “The Scarlet Letter,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Leaves of Grass,” or “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Eve”; doubt seriously he could say the historical significance of Plymouth Rock, Jamestown, or Williamsburg, let alone Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Pearl Harbor, or Selma, Alabama; doubt seriously he had ever visited a National Park, or could even name the state where the Grand Canyon is.<br /> Illiterate, or anyway sub-literate, bereft of any knowledge of our history, literature or geography, he is only nominally American. Jobless, mentally ill, vaguely aware that he is somehow falling behind, he does not have a high school education, but he does have enough information, gleaned from surfing the Internet, to determine that it is someone else who is the cause of his troubles. And he does have access to a gun.<br /> To carry your country around with you--that is the beginning and end of patriotism. Two of my favorite writers and thinkers are Andrew Sullivan and the late Christopher Hitchens—both of them Anglo-immigrant writers who never declined to extol the virtues of America (they can also be acidly critical of this country). Hitchens had this to say on an interview show when a caller asked him to say whether he thought America is the greatest country on earth:<br /> "<em>I think I like America most on all the days when people are not going around `USA! USA! We're number one! We're the greatest!' I prefer the days when they don't do that. It's a matter of `always think of it, never speak of it.’"</em><br /> But then Hitchens reflected and added, <em>"Of course, objectively as well as subjectively, the American Revolution is now the only revolution with a fighting chance of survival and success: the idea that you could create a multicultural democracy over a vast expanse of the earth's surface that could possibly be emulated by other people.”</em> </span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">*****</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> I was on my way back from the Canyon, my last day there, hitching south back to Flagstaff, and I had gotten started late because I had lingered in the Canyon for a few hours before heading back up and by the time I got to the lip and began hitchhiking back it was late afternoon. The traffic going south from the Canyon is on interstate 180, which breaks southeast toward Flagstaff about 45 minutes in, at a little spot on the map called Valle; but some of the traffic continues due south to Williams, and my first ride dropped me at the intersection with Flagstaff still the better part of an hour away.<br /> The traffic had seemed to slow—most of the families had headed back to wherever they were going earlier in the afternoon—and I looked around at a vast desert around me as the sun began to set. There was, I think I remember, a building of some kind in the middle distance, but it was pretty lonely out there and a sense of foreboding began to build as I scanned the empty highway for southbound traffic. Darkness was not far off.<br /> It’s a moment that has stayed with me, as defining as any of the other more dramatic points along this journey—arriving at night in New Orleans, seeing the Rockies for the first time, the ride in the pick-up along the Big Sur, the Canyon, looking out at San Francisco at night from the Wharf—but to anyone viewing the scene they would see only a guy with a knapsack and his thumb out over an empty highway. It was an entirely interior moment, but I have never forgotten it, and have come to believe in it as a kind of hinge in my life.<br /> It was, simply, a decision not to panic, a determination not to be scared—although I was. That’s all I can tell you. I had come this far, I had charted this journey on my own, I had staked a claim of sorts on a vast, vast country, and now I felt myself to be a different, older person than when I had left—and somehow I would work this out. (In truth, I’m not sure what I could have done had the situation really gotten desperate; there was, maybe, that building in the distance—it might have been a post-office or some such thing—and there may have been a payphone there; maybe I thought I would stand on the highway and force someone, or a truck, to stop. Who knows? ) Anyway, I stuck my thumb out and waited. It did start to darken, but of course in time a ride came and I arrived back at Charlie’s well before nightfall.<br /> Maybe a lot of the most important moments in our life are like that moment of mine on the desert highway—private, interior transitions and epiphanies that can scarcely be conveyed to any others. A few weeks after returning home, I was off to a new school experience, a little bit more mature, more confident that I was capable of writing my own script. I had changed.<br /> Someday, I would like to recapitulate this adventure (although now I’m not sure I could deal with 30 days on a bus!). I’d like to travel a northern route, through the Great Lakes region, the iron range of Minnesota, the Dakotas, the great Northwest. I’d like to visit my country again.<br /> At the conclusion of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” Chief Broom, newly escaped from the institution to which he had been harnessed his adult life, contemplates the open road and the continent that surrounds him. </span><em><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">“I might go to Canada eventually, but I think I’ll stop along the Columbia on the way. I’d like to check around Portland and Hood River and The Dalles to see if there’s any of the guys I used to know back in the village….Mostly, I’d just like to look over the country around the gorge again, just to bring some of it clear in my mind again.<br /><br />“I been away too long.” </span></em><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><br /><span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> Me too.</span> </span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-84844339708594836722018-04-05T07:20:00.001-07:002018-04-05T12:57:13.381-07:00Piano Lesson<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">Her back is turned to me<br />A small Asian beauty in black<br />Straddling the bench at the ominous grand,<br />A concentrate of my daughter’s face<br />Behind her in a shiver of light.<br />Alone, it is just the two of them now,<br />And they work.<br /><br />Well, it is I that brought her here,<br />I say to myself,<br />Sinking in the sofa in a darkening room,<br />Apart, and pay the monstrous fee.<br />I have been undone by small chores<br />I think, as if dishes were not done too<br />By elites of discipline I never could muster<br />And now on the outside looking in, never will.<br />They work.<br /><br />Not just piano but pianissimo<br />Through the hour made long<br />By the early winter dark<br />And the repetitions of “softer, softer….”<br />She is learning, my daughter, from the heir<br />Of an ancient dynasty, the world is nuanced,<br />Infinite in believable interpretations<br />If only you are trained to summon them,<br />And having summoned, can believe in them,<br />And by belief give reason to believe.<br />But that, I suppose, is for the advanced.<br />We once saw the teacher in a recital hall<br />Seduce the Brandenburg from a harpsichord<br />So that we thought it might get up—<br />I mean the music itself!—climb into the seats<br />And shake hands with us.<br /><br /> They work until the hour winds down<br />And the teacher releases her back to me<br />We look alike, it’s said, and I do bear<br />The ghost in my face of the child </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">My daughter will soon cease to be.<br />Cease, for I know now in that hour<br />One of the ways of becoming<br />Someone other than who she might<br />Have to be, has been slipped<br />Into her fingers like a code.<br />And already as we head to the door<br />She has become less mine, more her own,<br />Than she was before.</span><br />
<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-55649449915170534752018-04-03T14:20:00.001-07:002018-06-30T13:16:11.161-07:00Reflections at the Lorraine Hotel<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhspue-Xzr1IVEVyy8y3C_2TyTT7Z3cXYBvjUoRhscsrD7SFjpshTVVQKTMJj1OfX_zlrpyDp51ThslLMWj5AwJsFTvHlvQlwMo-q6Y7gs-wZ-WTqCEmRTGtU32v8CQUqwj7wfgyQ4EjUa9/s1600/hotel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="640" data-original-width="480" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhspue-Xzr1IVEVyy8y3C_2TyTT7Z3cXYBvjUoRhscsrD7SFjpshTVVQKTMJj1OfX_zlrpyDp51ThslLMWj5AwJsFTvHlvQlwMo-q6Y7gs-wZ-WTqCEmRTGtU32v8CQUqwj7wfgyQ4EjUa9/s200/hotel.jpg" width="150" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The modesty, almost the meanness, is what strikes you when you see it, the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel—so familiar from the photo everyone has seen of Dr. King’s friends standing over his body and pointing across the street at the boarding house where the shooter had made his lair—and that room with the thin carpet and the shabby curtains where he stayed. Memphis, is a modest city, Beale street notwithstanding, an American southern city; in the center of town, in the courthouse square—a sweet quiet little green space—a plaque commemorates the first mayor of the town, who proclaimed that his most cherished accomplishment was being able to look out over this little park and watch the birds. The streets around the Lorraine Hotel are modest, too, crooked little streets with grass overgrown in the cracks in the pavement, tumbledown houses and burnt red brick buildings in need of some repair. Millions of people have by now passed this way, through these streets, but it does not have the feel of a tourist destination—at least not as Washington or New York or Chicago would conceive of one.<br /> Maybe only someone from Washington could be struck by the modesty of the place. How did one suppose an entourage of black men might have been travelling in Tennessee, in 1968, when they weren’t entirely welcome? Or maybe it is the immodesty of our time, when our “leaders” and “spokespersons” are bloated, gorgon egos riding on digital airwaves, tweets, disconnected entirely from the real, deteriorating American landscape they claim to speak for. The hotel, that balcony, the humble room—room 306—preserved as the culminating exhibit in the National Civil Rights Museum to which the hotel is attached, resonate with the street-level realness of the time. King and his friends were there in Memphis, not to attend a conference or to christen a monument or a new building or to receive an award or enunciate a new social theory of race relations. He was there to support a sanitation workers’ strike.<br /> It’s been said that 1968 was the worst year in American history (I think our time may now make that claim obsolete) but there is a compelling sense of the real, the particular, about the battles of that year and the years leading up to it, as if the period exhales the breath of its excited, hyperventilating participants. Christian theology speaks of a “scandal of particularity”—the outrageousness, the unacceptability of the idea that the divine would make itself manifest into an unwashed human being, in a time and place, dusty backward ancient Palestine. The Bible is repetitive throughout in its assertion that God works in just this way; the arc of salvation history is bent not by people making the loudest noise.<br /> Writing in Harpers in 1961 James Baldwin said of MLK that “he has succeeded, in a way no Nero before him has managed to do, to carry the battle into the individual heart and make its resolution the province of the individual will. He has made it a matter, on both sides of the racial fence, of self-examination.”<br /> Baldwin’s writing from the period, too, exhales that breath of the real, like steam coming off the hot summer pavements. I first read his magisterial essay, “The Fire Next Time”—actually published as two separate tracks (“My Dungeon Shook” and “Down at the Cross”)—as a teenager in the 1970s when so much about that period seems to have exhausted itself. How I came across his work I don’t know—it may have been my mother’s influence. Or it may have been simply because I was, at the time, deeply enamored of everything about “the sixties” and felt that I had been born ten years too late; one book may have led to another and to Baldwin.<br /> If King insisted the “race problem” was a problem of the human heart, Baldwin in his writing took it further to say that it was more explicitly a problem for white people to overcome; it was for white people to liberate themselves—and for black people to insist that they do so—from what Baldwin called “the racial nightmare” of white supremacy. What Baldwin couldn't tolerate was the notion that white people could comfort themselves with the idea that they--we--had done some great deed by letting <em>them</em> eat at the lunch counter, as if it were a privilege, ours to confer. (Contemplate this--something I learned from George Will: when Jackie Robinson made his appearance in the major leagues, and the Dodgers would eat at a restaurant or tavern, some places would throw away all of the plates and silverware on which Robinson might have eaten after the team left. There is a great essay to be written, if it hasn't already been, about the relationship between prejudice and the enormous human fear of germs, of bacteria and of disease) . Anyway, the liberation that Baldwin wrote about (and King testified to) was something more far reaching than than integrated school or lunch counter.<br /> I have uttered in my time some embarrassingly callow, shallow and fatuous things about race from my protected status—I argued in my twenties in the 1980s that institutional systemic racism was over—so I’ll resist it now, except to observer that perhaps it was too much to expect. I don’t know. Or perhaps the wheels are still turning. It is very hard to stand in front of that hotel, that balcony, in those humble streets of Memphis and not think sadly of the distance that has been travelled, or not, since that time to ours—Black Lives Matter, Tamir Rice, Freddie Grey, school shootings, Charlottesville, Donald Trump. Baldwin asked us in Down at the Cross to consider the face and eyes of a southern sheriff (and he must have had Alabama’s notorious Jim Clark in mind) for a glimpse at the spiritual bankruptcy that results from the white American grip on its delusion. I shudder to think what Baldwin would make of the men and women who stand in vast throngs at Donald Trump’s rallies braying for a wall, to be paid for by Mexico.<br /> What will become of us? “Here we are,” Baldwin wrote in the thunderous conclusion to Down at the Cross, “at the center of the arc, trapped in the gaudiest, most valuable, and most improbable water wheel the world has ever seen. Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise….If we do not falter in our duty now, we be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world. If we do not now dare everything, the fulfillment of the prophecy, recreated from the Bible in song by a slave, is upon us: <em>God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time</em>!”</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-17399391898485886392018-03-20T04:31:00.000-07:002018-03-21T02:47:46.575-07:00"7 Days in Entebbe": I Fight So You Can Dance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQkjNTF7y3fCMe4uSuh2Q9Vmp3hxOCihvaXlRs0D-QkINGH9j9v" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQkjNTF7y3fCMe4uSuh2Q9Vmp3hxOCihvaXlRs0D-QkINGH9j9v" data-original-height="774" data-original-width="516" height="200" width="133" /></a></div>
<span style="font-family: "verdana" , sans-serif;">The opening scene of "7 Days in Entebbe" introduces us to Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company in rehearsal of an electrically weird choreography. I thought: <em>this is going to be different, this is going to be good.</em><br /> Alas. The movie was just about sort of okay. "7 Days in Entebbe" turns out to be a fairly conventional “thriller” about the famous Israeli rescue raid in 1976, but the dance number and the film’s none-too-original meditation on the endlessness of the Israeli-Palestinian war over a twice-promised land aspire to give the film some higher calling it doesn’t really live up to.<br /> The dance itself—apart from whether it works within the structure of this otherwise conventional popular movie—is inspired and the choreography is remarkable. Alongside the narrative of the hijacking of an Air France passenger jet by a Palestinian and West German radical left group, and the planning in Israel of a military operation to rescue the hostages, we witness the dance company, one of whose performers is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, polishing its work. Twenty some performers are seated on chairs in an arc and begin, in shadows, to throw their limbs about in sharp synchrony; it has the feel of something disturbingly unnatural, like the ritualized movements of an autistic child, and conveys the sense of being captive to an exhausting, unnatural, and repetitive exercise, one that will never end. But it is at the same time beautiful in its precision—a violent precision, if that is possible, a marvel of synchronized execution, (just like the raid itself, carried out by a unit of Israel’s most fearsome fighters). And over and over, as they rehearse, one of the dancers always falls out, pitches forward from the chair, collapses on the floor.<br /> One soldier, Jonathan Netanyahu (whose letters I first read in my 20s) was killed in the operation. The raid has become legendary, a model for heroic planning and lethal precision. In fact, it did not go off perfectly as planned, and a lot could have gone wrong. The narrative of the preparation for the raid revolves around the endlessness of the war and its inescapability. Like the dancers, one of whom is the girlfriend of a soldier who will take part in the rescue raid, the combatants on both sides are trapped in a repetitive and profoundly unnatural exercise. “I fight so you can dance,” the soldier tells his girlfriend.<br /> Compelling as the choreography is, its juxtaposition with—or its insertion into—a relatively workaday narrative feels slightly forced. The rest of the movie (that’s how distinct these two mechanisms feel; there is the dance and there is the rest of the movie) is a mixed bag. There is at least one really fine performance by Lior Ashkenazi who plays Rabin—cautious, tortured, a former fighter and general who knows the realities of war and is reluctant to commit 200 of his very best men to a mission that might have been calamitous. His military underlings, too, play their part with a plausible verisimilitude.<br /> What is distinctly weird and off-putting, though, is the depiction of Shimon Peres. Played by Eddie Marsan, he looks, first of all, just plain bizarre—over made-up, maybe, or shot at angles that seem to emphasize an odd shape to his head and face. The character is played with an unsmiling, shifty-eyed calculation, meant to convey the sometimes Machiavellian political maneuvering for which Peres was known. (His rivalry with Rabin, who regarded him as an inveterate conniver, is legend among Israelis of that generation.) The effect though is, again, weird; he comes off more like some drugged Manchurian candidate.<br /> A little better is the depiction of the two German terrorists, Bridgette Kuhlman and Wilfred Bose, deluded idealists sidelined in the operation by their Palestinian counterparts who don’t harbor any illusions about the Israeli’s willingness to negotiate. They are plagued by their German-ness, and aware of “how it looks”—Germans singling out Jews for death when it comes time to separate the Israeli passengers of the Air France flight from the others. The portrayal of Kuhlman, especially, hints at the thin border that divides radical idealism and mental illness. For a really electric dissection of that border go see, "The Bader-Meinhof Complex," about the Red Army, the West German underground group of which Kuhlman and Bose’s Revolutionary Cells, was an off-shoot.<br /> The makers of "7 Days in Entebbe" want to tell us something more than a story about a daring rescue mission. It doesn’t really come off. But it did make me want to go learn more about the Batsheva Dance Company. </span>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1217931753277877309.post-29183239643956237022018-03-05T13:23:00.002-08:002018-03-05T13:23:35.734-08:00A Conference in Hawaii
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A
conspiracy of intention brought the delegates together</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">To the
mirrored halls of these meeting rooms</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">And the
marble lobby with its water falls and stone statues <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Of
Island gargoyles designed to invoke<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A colonial
benevolence no one recalls.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">It
began in the conventional way.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
heat grew desperate in the rooms<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Amid a panic
of commitment,<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Opposing
positions took on a flesh<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">That
seemed to walk among us,<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">And for
a while it became possible to think<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">That
our sullen flesh might soon be shorn <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">For a new
and unimaginably brilliant habitation.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">But then
from the 23<sup>rd</sup> floor<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">A stick
figure in black like a doodle by Kafka<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Lofted
a dove from its hands<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">That
fluttered a while before it fell <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Through
a shaft of Hawaiian light,<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Turning
as it dropped into a clutter of littering confetti. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">And
when I looked up again<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">The
earnest delegates and their forbearing wives,<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Their
motions and resolutions, <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">Were
gone.<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: normal; margin: 0in 0in 0pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Verdana",sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;"><o:p> </o:p></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0