Small in stature and large in heart, Baron Wolman (25 June 1937 – 2 November 2020) died yesterday, 3 November 2000, at the age of 83.
Tho born years apart we both hailed from “The Great Midwest” and were born near each other. Lest you wonder if you ever saw his pictures let me write – ‘Yes! You most certainly have – even tho you may not have known it!’ He was at Woodstock with cameras in hand and was the first photographer at Rolling Stone Magazine (1967-1970) where Jan Wenner has said Baron set the look for the magazine. Photographing The Grateful Dead band was Baron’s job for the first issue of the magazine. Not too shabby!
Baron sold his first photo, the construction of the Berlin Wall, to The Columbus Dispatch Newspaper for $50, a pic from a gig not many probably knew he had: counterintelligence in Berlin for Uncle Sam as a volunteer in the U.S. Army!
His last post to Facebook in October was typically self-effacing:
“Just as the sun sets over the Pacific, so, too, is it about to set over my life. A few of you know that a year ago I was give[n] the formal diagnosis of ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), a disease for which there is no cure. Sad to say I’m now in the final sprint to the end. I go forward with a huge amount of gratitude for the many blessings bestowed upon me (family, friends, travels and more), with no regrets and appreciation for how my photographs – my life’s work – have been received. Leave comments if you wish, but please don’t ask any questions or expect any further words from me – I am very, very weak. Because of Covid, like thousands of others, I will pass quietly and with very few people around me. It’s been a great life, with Love being my salvation always… #fotobaron#thefotobaron#vote#voteblue2020“
Baron was a class act to the end and I trust he will be surrounded by the same sentiments he wrote to me in one of his books: “Peace, Love & Music!”
Between 2008 and 2010 Taos Pueblo released 33 North American River Otters (Lontra canadensis) on the banks of the Rio Pueblo de Taos near its confluence with the Rio Grande. Otters were driven to extinction here thru trapping, pollution and habitat destruction. The last ones were seen in 1953.
Road Looking North Along the River in the Rio Grande Gorge
We went out today to find out if the bighorn sheep rut had begun in the canyon of the Rio Grande. Big rams facing off, rearing up and charging at full speed to butt heads for the privilege of mating with females is an all-time big thrill. Another photographer heard one head butt echoing down the canyon but saw no sheep. It’s still a bit early in the season.
‘Mackerel’ Clouds Above the West Rim of the Rio Grande Gorge (Bighorn Sheep Habitat)
But!… we accidentally found a bevy of otters and followed them up-river as best we could. A group of otters is also called a “romp” and adequately describes the behavior of this most mischievous member of the weasel family!
Cliffs & Clouds – East Rim of the Rio Grande Gorge
The photo is not great but I was happy to even get it. I use a manual-everything Leica-M camera, in this case mated to a Leica-R 280mm f4 lens with an R-to-M adapter and an Apo 1.4x extender. This was shot wide-open so the depth-of-field was only a few feet deep.
After a 3-day occupation of the Santa Fe Plaza in observance of Indigenous Peoples Day (we no longer celebrate October 12 as Columbus Day here in New Mexico) the monument holding center stage on the Plaza has been brought down by a largely-white mob of protestors as police backed off and vacated the Plaza.
The obelisk was originally put up in 1867 to honor Civil War Union soldiers who stopped the advance of the Confederacy in the West but had a plaque added later, on one side, that read, ‘To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the territory of New Mexico.’ The word ‘savages’ was chiseled off in 1974.
The mayor earlier this year had announced there would be a decision on the future of the monument but he and the city have dragged their feet on any decision-making, in part, no doubt, over causing offense to the large population of people of Spanish descent here who revere their conquistador roots and feel theirs is THE heritage that matters in this state.
It would be great if the city decided now to have an international competition to replace the obelisk with something that embraces all New Mexicans in this the oldest capital city in the United States.
I actually liked the obelisk and thought the addition of the plaque (done a few generations ago) was itself a defacing of the monument’s original Civil War reason for being. But, there is and was, no denying that many of the northern heroes of that war went on to become principal actors in the genocide enacted upon the Indians.
Chief among this group were generals Sherman and Sheridan, both born in 1831 and who both grew up not too far from where I was born; as local heroes they were valorized with prominent statues. Both were also capable of incredible brutality to the ‘enemy’. (Sheridan was one of the first men to use what we call ‘scorched-earth’ tactics when he razed the Shenandoah Valley and Sherman is well-noted for his March Through Georgia).
It is easy for the mob to forget (if it ever knew), that history is not changed by smashing the signposts of history. Rather, it is amplified and extended by its wider unveiling from the shadows – something that was not undertaken on a large scale until universities began graduating those who would research and write our stories from a far different perspective from that which we learned in our 5th grade reader in the early 1960s. That formal and institutionalized history was one of the consequences of promoting a national identity linked to an ignorance and purposeful ‘white-washing’ of our treatment of Indigenous people and all other people of color in the United States.
Many argue this was all in the past and it is time to move on. It is, of course, easy to move on when one is part of the dominant social structure; as far as such people are concerned, there has never been any noticeable problem.
Despite being born in the second half of the 20th century I actually traveled from Philadelphia to Florida to interview a man who had been born in Africa, captured by slavers as a child with other children (lured to a ship by corn fritters dipped in honey) and sold into slavery in the American South. To know that I met and spoke to a man who lived under the regimen of the United States’ ‘peculiar institution ‘ shows how recent, in historical terms, the wide disenfranchisement of a large swath of our countrymen really has been.
The destruction of our local Plaza monument shows that not every crowd chanting ‘progressive’ slogans and carrying placards with the ‘right’ words is necessarily going to do the ‘right’ thing. Nor does being on the wrong side of the law in civil disobedience necessarily mean one is on the right side of moral history.
I don’t have answers, only questions. Like all human interaction – it’s complicated.
The Notorious R.B.G. (15 March 1933 – 18 September 2020)
I have sent three Tweets in my life and one of them was to Justice Ginsburg. It was an inquiry asking if she was going to make the season at our great Opera here in Santa Fe. She visited in the summers and could be seen with her omnipresent Secret Service detail headed to her seat in the lower central section of the open air house.
The first time we met her, however, was a big surprise. It was September 27, 2000 and we were at a conference in Ottawa, Canada with a group from The World Bank Ethics Office. Being interested in circumpolar artifacts, Donna and I took some time to visit a shop that specialized in Inuit art. While browsing the great wares a guy with an ear bud attached to a spiraling line came in, stopped and gave a slow survey to the store. He reminded me of the Secret Service executive protection guys we would always see around Washington, DC and it made sense as we were in the capital of Canada. Just the day before I had taken a really atmospheric portrait of Joseph Jacques Jean Chrétien, 20th Prime Minister of Canada.
Suddenly a second ear-bud guy came in. Then in walked a diminutive woman who was unmistakably Ruth Bader Ginsburg followed by yet another agent. My first impulse was to go to her and simply say how I admired her and the work she had always done. So, of course, I stepped toward her. Immediately the Secret Service guys took alert positions and the front one moved to block my advance. I quickly realized how stupid I was to make such a sudden move so made an apology and had my say from where I stood. She graciously acknowledged my fandom and we all went about looking at the art in the shop.
“She had this uncanny ability to be very much in the weeds, if you will, of the intellectual legal arguments and yet never lose sight of the human impact of her decisions,” was a description Former President Clinton used to describe Ginsburg.
No doubt part of her common-sense nature came from being a mother before she went to law school and having a difficult time getting a job with a top-flight firm even after graduating first (shared with another graduate) in her class. My wife has reminded me that when she was a young woman she needed a man’s signature to open a bank account and it was also impossible for most unmarried women to get a home mortgage. The Dean of Harvard Law reportedly invited the female law students (only 9 in a class of nearly 500) to dinner at his family home and asked the female law students, including Ginsburg, “Why are you at Harvard Law School, taking the place of a man?
We have Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, along with a host of other talented and determined women, to thank for leading the way to necessary and long-overdue changes in the way we men handle affairs that affect everyone. Alas, we are just not that good at sharing.
Glass pendant by Jodie McDougall using the ancient technique of fusing glass ‘canes’.
The Notorious R.G.B.* will be sorely missed.
* a law student bestowed this moniker on Ginsburg that is take-off on the nickname of the late (also) Brooklyn-born rapper The Notorious B.I.G.
Last autumn I posted a photograph on
Facebook of two adult women from a Sing-Sing in Papua New Guinea. They were
wearing grass skirts and necklaces. Within a couple hours it disappeared and I
received a notice that the photograph “violated community standards”.
Evidently, Facebook trolls their platform with algorithms looking for the
breasts that half (or more) of homo sapiens sapiens possess and that many
display as part of either ordinary living or reenactments and continuation of
traditions dating back millennia.
Hmm…Hmm…Hmmm. Now That’s One I’d Go Out With! Two Women Dancers Admiring A Male Dancer
If I had, instead, posted some vitriolic, racist bullshit about exterminating people of color, starting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, all would have been hunky-dory. No problema, I would have been simply a righteous asshole expressing my First Amendment rights and espousing violence like many another red-blooded white man with below-average self-esteem; poor work skills; poorer general social skills; a skepticism of science and book-learnin’; a knack for receiving a world view from Fox ‘News’ and, if I am a teen, an inability to get laid (young girls have radar that, almost immediately with few mistakes, can spot weirdos.)
In other words, a white guy who,
along with his white male ancestors has enjoyed the prosperity and unearned
status that has been their lot for the last few hundred years. When such a
status is jeopardized by anyone, including their ‘natural’ soul mates, white
women, it is time to pull the plug on the veneer of ‘live and let live’ and
fight to keep – and extend, the privilege that exists. So what I dropped out of
school in the 8th grade and would love to have lived in Roman times. I could
have gone to those gladiatorial contests to give the thumbs down on the
barbarians from the provinces? Yeh, I would have loved to join the military to
bear arms if I could have passed the rudimentary skills test. And doin’ it for
the USA would have been a bonus ‘cause I love this country, especially back
when it enforced racial separation. Hoo-rah!
But, carrying a semi-automatic gun… er… weapon, in public is the next best thing. Hell, better: I don’t have to follow orders from some jerk with a ‘high & tight’. (And, too, it really makes me feel like a man, you know. A whole lot. I know the chicks dig it!)
Who you callin’ deplorable!
To be more fair, there are fellow
travelers who are not functionally stupid. As I have no known close
acquaintances in this category I have not been able to ask whether such
individuals actually believe all the clap-trap of white supremacists or whether
they are just along for the ride because they stand to benefit from any
extension of ole’ white boy power.
So… what this rant is really about
is whether I will continue to use Facebook for posts or dump it and return to
just writing on my Blog. As Facebook is 110% dollar driven I don’t think it
will change much, despite Zucker-face buying time by mouthing the right code
words at congressional hearings about the company having to do better.
What WILL amend Facebook’s corporate
behavior is when they are sued and saddled with billions of dollars in legal
claims similar to those that were faced by Big Tobacco. When a corporation
knows it operates in an area that is a detriment to society it is culpable. I’m
sure they will holler they are a news outlet letting their users enjoy the full
extent of their First Amendments rights but we all know that, in truth,
Facebook is a private business that is, in fact, in business to make money, not
engage in the public good.
I have two more postings I am
contemplating. One on evolutionary biology and one on Trumpism and capital.
Then, I think I will bow out. It’s been a good, if uneasy, ride!
The oldest living, and earliest surviving, Academy Award winner (until her death July 26, 2020).
Below: Daniel Martinez Owns One of Errol Flynn’s 1930s Tunics (From a Movie With De Havilland) and Wears It With Panache! Photo Copyright Wilbur Norman 2017.
[NOTE: I thought I had published this at the same time as I posted it on Facebook, but it did not… So, herewith… a little late!]
Some people really do lead storied lives – long ones at that. When I read the de Havilland died three weeks ago at the age of 104 I began to recall those eight great movies she did with Errol Flynn in the 1930s and 40s. And, she was perfectly cogent the last time we saw her when she was interviewed at her 100 mark.
I thought about writing something when she passed but did not. Then today I was reminded that her daughter has a home here, as does her niece – the daughter of another legend: the actress Joan Fontaine. De Havilland and Fontaine were the only sisters to win Best Actress Academy Awards.
The de Havillands were quite a family: cousin Captain Sir Geoffrey was an aviation pioneer along with his brothers Hereward and Ivon. Some of my favorite aircraft were/are de Havillands and I have flown in many over the years, especially the Beaver and Twin Otter. Take-off and landing on water is such a thrill! And, I’ve always thought the Comet one of the most beautiful planes ever, tho I’ve not had the pleasure of flying in one.
When I was a kid I was totally enthralled by those early swashbuckling movies she did with that Tasmanian devil of an actor, Errol Flynn, especially 1938’s The Adventures of Robin Hood, the most expensive film Warner Bros. had made at the time (it took a lot of 25-cents-per-entry movie-goers to re-coup the budget of $2 million – altho my father was pretty sure it was only 10 cents in his hometown in Malta!) The ensemble cast were great actors all: Basil Rathbone, Claude Rains, Alan Hale, Sr. and, yes! the horse ‘Golden Cloud’ who so impressed Roy Rogers (born Leonard Franklin Slye in Cincinnati, Ohio) that he bought him and renamed him ‘Trigger’!
I still remember the initial meeting between Sir Guy of Gisbourne (Rathbone) and SIr Robin of Locksley (Flynn) in Sherwood Forest. It went something like,
Sir Guy: “You know the penalty for poaching deer in the King’s forest is death!”
Sir Robin (mounting an arrow and aiming at Sir Guy’s chest): “Are there are no exceptions?” (As one of Norman descent I suppose I ought to have been on the side of smarmy Prince John (Claude Rains) but the Saxon underdogs were more sympathetic!)
In real life South African born Philip St. John Basil Rathbone was one of the best, if not the best, swordsman in Hollywood, having twice been the British Army Fencing Champion in WWI where he served in the London Scottish Regiment with Claude Rains and Ronald Colman. Those sword-fighting scenes are terrific, tho Rathbone, as a superior fencer, had to tone it down.
In 1940 de Havilland and Flynn made their sixth movie together, ‘Santa Fe Trail’, also starring Ronald Reagan. The world premier was here at our beautifully restored Lensic Theater and saw 60,000 fans hanging out around the theater striving to catch a look at the stars. I cannot imagine the chaos: even today we have less than 85,000 folks in this, the oldest and highest (2,194 meters/7,199 feet) state capital city in the U.S. (Founded by the Spanish in 1610 as ‘La Villa Real de la Santa Fe de San Francisco de Asís’ but occupied for at least the last several thousand years by indigenous Tanoan peoples.)
One of de Havilland’s most significant coups was her successful 1943 lawsuit against Warner Bros., known now as the ‘De Havilland Law’, a challenge to actor’s labor contracts with studios (it had been previously challenged by Bette Davis who lost.) When de Havilland won her suit it freed up actors tied to the Hollywood studio system but got her blackballed from any studio’s roles for two years (but allowed her to do WWII USO tours, including to the South Pacific.)
Despite having been cast with many leading men and having relationships with some: Howard Hughes, Jimmy Stewart and John Huston, she never, she said, had an affair with leading man Errol, ‘in like Flynn’!
De Havilland’s achievements and honors were many: her role in the classic ‘Gone With the Wind’, bestselling author, first female president of the Cannes Film Festival, Academy awards, National Medal of Arts, Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur (lived outside Paris since 1953(?), Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (she was born in the UK) and many others.
What I will always remember her for, however, are her roles in those classic movies of Hollywood’s Golden Years that brought entertainment and joy to people of my parent’s generation during The Great Depression and WWII and then, later, Boomers like me!
Viewing life from a tunnel provides a very limited view.
There has always been Big Money in U.S. politics. It is just that, now, it is Huge Money.
You do not have to consider the needs and desires of working people if your power base is Huge Money. Especially if that worker base is composed largely of one-issue voters you can keep in the fold by spouting code words every now and then: guns, abortion, immigration, etc. Besides, the poor will just spend federal largesse on groceries, rents and mortgages, car payments, church tithes, etc. Few, if any, are giving money to political causes. And you can still tout Free Speech, even if you do not countenance it, because those one-issue voters are mostly concerned with free speech in their own lanes, those particular, narrow issues. (But do not forget, if you ever knew it, you one-issue revolutionaries: over time most revolutions tend to eat their own.)
A ton of the money given to large business for Covid-19
relief will end up in the coffers of the Republican Party as donations and
funding for PACs. Why not dole out those dollars if some eventually comes back
to assist your campaign? The decision is eazy-peazy, no?
A comparison one could use of the change from an individuals-based outlook to a grifting, corporatized one is the example of the National Rifle Association. The NRA was once powered by individual gun owners sending in their membership monies. Throw in the manufacturers and you had a tidy sum to use for lobbying. Now the NRA has morphed, essentially, into an extension of the manufacturers’ lobby, it’s just based in northern Virginia instead of on ‘K’ Street in DC. The NRA Board has been pliable enough that in 2018 CEO Wayne LaPierre (2015 compensation $5,110,985 and $2.15 million in 2018) was said to be involved with the NRA’s ad agency, Ackerman McQueen (they have since separated acrimoniously) in the non-profit, tax-exempt NRA (501(c)(4)) being asked to buy him and his wife a $6 million gated-community, lakefront mansion near Dallas, Texas because… if you can believe it, LaPierre – with little expressed concern over school shootings, was reportedly worried about his own security after the mass shooting in Parkland, Florida! The request was not fulfilled, perhaps because then-president Oliver North and LaPierre had a tiff combined with the fact that the home-buying scheme came to light and that in 2018 the organization ended the year with a $2.7 million shortfall, a $17.8 million shortfall in 2017 and a $45.8 million one in 2016. None of this stopped LaPierre from reportedly spending $500,000 on ‘luxury clothes and travel’. This style of executive compensation when companies are running deficits or performing poorly is not a rare one these days.
Another example. People have complained about U.S. Foreign Aid but the reason it persists is because the money sent out always stipulates the work be performed by American companies with American products, the food from American farmers, the transport on America transport (even if ‘flagged’ under another nation) and so on. A whopping amount of those government dollars – or, rather, our tax dollars, ends up back in American pockets. Deep pockets. Illegal immigration is similar. Big industries like building, service (lodging and food) and manufacturing have enormous labor needs – and cheap labor, at that. Who you gonna call? Are you, dear reader, hiring low-wage, relatively ‘unskilled’ Mexicans? Where do all these folks crossing the border look for work? Are they knocking on the doors of our homes?
These examples of self-dealing are visible to anyone with an
eighth grade education who will take a moment to read newspapers and think critically
about their lives, the lives of their fellows and their country. Such
comprehension is one, maybe, THE, essential element of a functioning democracy
(along with exercising one’s franchise.) Apparently, the numbers of such citizens
are getting fewer and fewer. It’s easier to get our ‘important’ news via
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other Internet-only sources and to shrug off
voting as ‘not making a difference”.
I think a big reason McConnell and bedfellows don’t want an extension of the $600 per week is that he and his cronies realize the only way, today, to force people to work in dicey, dangerous, unhealthy workplaces is to cut off federal support money so that many people are forced to return to work, ignoring safety issues because, oddly enough, most of us have a priority of putting food on the table.
Forcing people to work in unhealthy, dangerous jobs has
always been a problem for rulers. Slavery is the obvious example. But, others
have found superbly ingenious ways to make people work. Great Britain’s
colonial administration in East Africa used a tax on salt. When native workers would
earn enough money for their immediate needs they simply stopped showing up
until they needed money again. How to force them to continue coming to work?
Ah…. levy a burdensome tax on salt, a necessary ingredient for a healthy life
in a climate where one sweats it out and needs to daily replenish. (Salt tax
earned early Chinese civilization half its tax revenue and remember it was the
righteous purpose of The Salt March that made Mohandas Gandhi famous outside
his immediate circle.)
Obviously, people working is what keeps a country’s economy bumping along and accounts for whatever level of financial prosperity a nation enjoys. But, must we force people, before the proper time, to return to jobs that are very likely going to be nurseries for Covid-19?? When is the proper time?
Personal prejudice is a powerful guide to action – or inaction. We have all heard or read phrases that come from nebulous, unsubstantiated beliefs: ‘the undeserving poor’, ‘the idle rich’, etc.
When Jeffrey Epstein was arrested his story was covered
extensively locally because he owned a large property here. One interesting
tidbit I saw was an incident that took place at a symposium on his private
island in the Caribbean. Epstein told one attendee he was voting Harvard
professor Steven Pinker ‘off the island’ because Pinker openly disagreed (using
fact-based science) with a comment Epstein had made. At a round-table Epstein had
said he would never fund projects for the alleviation of poverty because the
poor would just go out and breed, making more children. Pinker spoke up,
differing with this assessment, saying this belief has been shown to be untrue:
the more solid people become in their personal economies, the fewer children
they have.
We all need to do our research, think creatively and not
cast aside an open mind and the scientific method when acting on ‘facts’. Following
a ‘party line’ is one of the surest roads toward a poverty of imagination and
the narrowing of choices.
The rule of money or the rule of democracy? Like a garden,
Democracy must be tended and nurtured, its soil must be tilled and overturned
to keep it alive, active and strong. It is not a given that it will always prevail
after only a couple hundred years of existence.
OK, the innermost desires of the current occupant of the White House
are never secret too long. He has an innate inability to contain
himself in any manner whatsoever. Kind of like little boys in their
‘terrible teens’.
I recently heard someone use the word “Fascism”
and it reminded me that just like the word ‘racist’, it does have a
specific meaning, tho it has been prefixed to many modifiers in its
historically short, modern history.
(To be a racist, by the by,
is to also have the position and societal power to enact and enforce
your beliefs. Otherwise you are, simply, ‘prejudiced’. I dislike
pineapple on pizza is a prejudice, for example. If I wrote that I do not
like folks of the Caucasian persuasion that would be a prejudice, as
well: as a person of color I have no societal power over them. All I
could do is on a personal level, like not hiring them, not publishing
their photography, etc. As such, my actions would be prejudicial ones,
not racist ones.)
So, to fascism.
The great novelist and thinker in semiotics, Umberto Eco, was born into fascist Italy. To help clarify people’s thinking on just what the word means, he published an essay in 1995 for The New York Review of Books titled “Ur-Fascism“. While I am not certain his list is the last word, he offers 14 typical features that, like a tiny speck of atmospheric ice crystal that permits the formation of hail, allows fascism to coalesce into a state we can identify.
*****
Openculture.com
(via a refinment from someone named “Kottke” and then blogger Paul
Bausch) published these as the following comprehensible list:
1. The cult of tradition. “One has only to look at the syllabus of
every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The
Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult
elements.”
2. The rejection of modernism. “The Enlightenment, the
Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this
sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”
3. The cult of
action for action’s sake. “Action being beautiful in itself, it must be
taken before, or without, any previous reflection. Thinking is a form
of emasculation.”
4. Disagreement is treason. “The critical
spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In
modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way
to improve knowledge.”
5. Fear of difference. “The first appeal
of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the
intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.”
6. Appeal to
social frustration. “One of the most typical features of the historical
fascism was the appeal to a frustrated middle class, a class suffering
from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and
frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”
7. The
obsession with a plot. “The followers must feel besieged. The easiest
way to solve the plot is the appeal to xenophobia.”
8. The enemy
is both strong and weak. “By a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus,
the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak.”
9.
Pacifism is trafficking with the enemy. “For Ur-Fascism there is no
struggle for life but, rather, life is lived for struggle.”
10. Contempt for the weak. “Elitism is a typical aspect of any reactionary ideology.”
11. Everybody is educated to become a hero. “In Ur-Fascist ideology,
heroism is the norm. This cult of heroism is strictly linked with the
cult of death.”
12. Machismo and weaponry. “Machismo implies both
disdain for women and intolerance and condemnation of nonstandard
sexual habits, from chastity to homosexuality.”
13. Selective
populism. “There is in our future a TV or Internet populism, in which
the emotional response of a selected group of citizens can be presented
and accepted as the Voice of the People.”
14. Ur-Fascism speaks Newspeak. “All the Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning.”
Thoughts on watching the body of Civil Rights and Justice Warrior,
Representative John Lewis, being ferried in a horse-drawn wagon across the
Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama.
*******
“And before I’d be a slave I’ll be
buried to my grave”
‘Oh Freedom’, an African American freedom song associated with the U.S. Civil Rights movement but actually written after the U.S. Civil War (12 April 1860 – 9 April 1865). A version was first recorded by Earl R. Nance (with Clarence Dooley, Tenor Vocal & Guitar; Madie Nance, Soprano Vocal; Helen Nance, Alto Vocal & Mandolin) August 26, 1931 in Richmond, Indiana. (video, above)
Most of us are more familiar with the Odetta (1957), Harry Belafonte (1960)
or Joan Baez (1963 March on Washington) versions but the original recording
takes me to an earlier place in our country’s history.
*****
“get out there and get in the way, get
in good trouble, necessary trouble, and be yourself.”
– John Lewis, on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, March 1, 2020 (a
motivator to the end!)
John Lewis also spoke similar words to young people at the Children’s
Defense Fund Freedom Schools National Training in June 2014. Marion Wright
Edelman, founder of the Fund wrote, “As he spoke to today’s young Freedom
Schools leaders John Lewis told them that when he was their age getting into
“necessary trouble” shaped his life’s mission. As he explained, he grew up poor
in rural Troy, Alabama, where his father, a former tenant farmer, had saved
enough money to buy his own land. He worked on the farm alongside the rest of
his family but was always desperate to get an education. A teacher encouraged
him over and over to read all he could. Although he wasn’t allowed in his
segregated county library like so many of our generation, he did his best: “I
tried to read everything, the few books we had at home, the magazines. We were
too poor to have a subscription to the local newspaper, but my grandfather had
one, and when he would finish reading his newspaper each day, I would get that
newspaper and read it.” He also listened to the radio to learn more about the
news outside his small community, and eventually started hearing about new
events that would change his life: “In 1955, 15 years old in the 10th grade, I
heard of Rosa Parks. I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. I heard his voice on an
old radio, and it seemed like he was saying, “John Lewis, you, too, can do
something . . . You can make a contribution.”
John Lewis decided then that was exactly what he would do. He started with
the library: “So in 1956, 16 years old, some of my brothers and sisters and
cousins, we went down to the public library in the little town of Troy,
Alabama, trying to get a library card, trying to check out some books, and we
were told by the librarian that the library is for Whites only and not for
coloreds.” A year later, as a high school senior he decided to apply to Troy State
College (now Troy University), a White college close to his home—but his
application was ignored and unanswered. John Lewis was stopped temporarily—but
he was not finished.
He told the very rapt audience that getting into necessary trouble in order
to stand up for what is right is required of us all: “If we fail to do it,
history will not be kind to us.” And he reminded us that this is true even when
there is a terrible cost, as with the murders of the three Freedom Summer
volunteers in Philadelphia, Mississippi: “Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and
James Chaney. I knew these three young men. On the night of June 21st, 1964,
almost 50 years ago, these three young men were detained, taken to jail, taken
out, turned over to the Klan, where they were beaten and shot and killed. They
didn’t die in the Middle East or Eastern Europe or Vietnam or in Central or
South America. They died right here in our own country, and they must be looked
upon as the founding fathers of the new America, a new way of doing things, a
new way of life.””
*****
Looking across the aisle, I also found this interesting scene on the morning TV show The View (transcript from The Decider):
“[Meghan] McCain offered her own reflection on Lewis’ legacy with a personal
story about meeting him at her father’s office when she was 14. “It was
important to [her father] that I heard this man’s story and knew who he was,”
said the co-host. “I can remember when I was 14 not really ever seeing my dad
deferential or in awe of anyone, and that was one of the first times.”
McCain added that while Lewis and her father “ended up having a political
disagreement” when Sen. McCain ran for president — “I have no interest in
rehashing it right now,” she said — but they were able to squash it. “When my
dad passed, John Lewis put out one of the more beautiful statements of anyone,”
she recalled.”
James Madison (1751-1836) at the College of New Jersey (Class of 1771) in Princeton. Portrait by James Sharples (British, 1752-1811)
The Executive Branch current morphing of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security into what some other countries call their Interior Ministry has been, in a way, a no-brainer. Of the 80-odd federal law enforcement agencies in the United States, Customs and Border Protection Agents may be the most ‘physical’ with apprehended suspects as they conduct operations along a largely deserted southern border without the prying eyes of the greater public. They routinely hold people who they suspect are entering the country illegally without offering up specific charges. (Separate and incarcerate children apart from their parents? OK, no problem! They have also arrested U.S. citizens who leave gallon jugs of water in the desert for immigrants because such actions are seen as aiding those attempting to enter the U.S. without papers.)
In many countries
Interior Ministries are anything but people-friendly: these departments are not
populated by employees guiding their populace on ranger-led interpretive nature
hikes through spectacular natural scenery. They are heads-of-state directed agencies
who operate as a secret police, whose employees are feared by their own people
and rightly so. The tactics employed by such ministries include warrantless
search and seizures, arrests without stated cause, indeterminate detention,
torture and other popular acts of authoritarian governments. They are internal
police forces answering to the whims of the supreme leader, not the directives
of local officials. Portland was simply a warm-up exercise incorporating agents from Customs and Border Protection, the
Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard, and Immigration and
Customs Enforcement.
Chicago is slated to be next as what we in the past called Gestapo Tactics is
rolled out across the country’s big cities using whatever federal manpower is
available. The Trump administration has learned another valuable lesson from
Russia’s playbook by customizing its own anonymous armed officers, our version
of the “Little Green Men” who invaded and occupied eastern Ukraine in 2014.
Yale historian Timothy Snyder (On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the
Twentieth Century. Tim Duggan Books; 2017) spoke with Michelle Goldberg
for her New York Times July 21st column, “This is a classic way that
violence happens in authoritarian regimes, whether it’s Franco’s Spain or
whether it’s the Russian Empire. The people who are getting used to committing
violence on the border are then brought in to commit violence against people in
the interior.” “
Typical of right-winger’s flip-flops, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was rabid in 1995 with a flip warning of the seizure of American’s guns under Congress’s ‘Assault Weapons Ban’: “In Clinton’s administration, if you have a badge, you have the government’s go-ahead to harass, intimidate, even murder law-abiding citizens.” Now, however, the NRA endorses Trump for a second term (July 16 announcement) and, with a thudding flop, lauds his actions in Portland for “stand[ing] tall for the constitutional freedoms in which our members believe.” Where o’ where are my conservative friends who used to uphold the rights of individuals at all costs against Big Government? Perhaps they are all busy praising the powers of plutocracy and the all-controlling Spy State: all citizens are equal but some are more equal than others.
In an article in today’s The
Atlantic magazine David A. Graham writes, “Chad Wolf, the [acting head
of] DHS amid the crackdown, is also accountable only to the president: Trump,
who loves circumventing the Constitution’s requirement of Senate confirmation
for some positions, has often chosen to leave acting heads in charge of
agencies so that they are more pliable and dependent on him.”
As if anonymous federal police throwing people into unmarked rental cars is not enough, Trump has bought in John Yoo, seeking advice from the lawyer who wrote Bush 43’s 2002 legal justification for Guantanamo ‘enhanced interrogations’, the so-called ‘torture memos’. Yoo has publicly confirmed he’s helping the Trump administration find ways to skirt Congress and impose his (Trump’s) own policies without congressional approval, even if such policies violate laws – that is, the democratic principles of citizen protection upon which this country was founded.
Yoo’s thinking on this was detailed in an article in the magazine National Review (June 22) arguing the Supreme Court’s ruling to uphold President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) provides a back door to implement policies by the Chief Executive without regard to legality: the ruling “makes it easy for presidents to violate the law, but reversing such violations difficult — especially for their successors.” In Yoo’s recent interview with the British newspaper The Guardian he says, “And why can’t the Trump administration do something similar with immigration – create its own … program, but it could do it in areas beyond that, like healthcare, tax policy, criminal justice, inner city policy. I talked to them a fair amount about cities, because of the disorder.” And with regard to Portland’s unidentified, masked agents: “It has to be really reasonably related to protecting federal buildings … If it’s just graffiti, that’s not enough. It really depends on what the facts are.”
But… facts, of
course, never get in the way of life in Trump-ville.
I am again and again struck by our country’s
Founders who were so often uncannily prescient in setting up roadblocks for
undesirable outcomes and on-ramps for desirable ones. They could not possibly
plan for every exigency but certainly covered a lot of ground in their attempt.
For all its social faults the Age of Enlightenment bred people – men and women
– of brilliance and forethought to whom expertise, science and knowledge were
things of beauty to combat ignorance, popular befuddlement and the rule of the
rabble.
I end here with a small quote from the transcript of the James Madison
Debates of the Constitutional Convention, delivered by the man himself, on
Friday, June 29, 1787. As was usual, the written record contains abbreviations
commonly used in such recorded work in the 18th century (the italics are mine).
“In time of actual war, great discretionary powers are constantly given to the Executive Magistrate. Constant apprehension of war, has the same tendency to render the head too large for the body. A standing military force, with an overgrown Executive will not long be safe companions to liberty. The means of defence agst. foreign danger, have been always the instruments of tyranny at home. Among the Romans it was a standing maxim to excite a war, whenever a revolt was apprehended. Throughout all Europe, the armies kept up under the pretext of defending, have enslaved the people. It is perhaps questionable, whether the best concerted system of absolute power in Europe cd. maintain itself, in a situation, where no alarms of external danger cd. tame the people to the domestic yoke.” Further, “He [Madison] entreated the gentlemen representing the small States to renounce a principle [the rank of the States as political societies, for example] wch. was confessedly unjust, which cd. never be admitted, & if admitted must infuse mortality into a Constitution which we wished to last forever.”
There are myriad qualities that make us human but few, other than the wide bailiwick of ‘culture’, have tentacles that reach – or should reach, as far into our psyches as the pursuit of justice.
All the qualities are evolutionarily useful, of course, and some are shared with other species: tool use for example. Plus we have the category of emotions – but we have no lock on exclusivity there, either; witness your dog jumping for joy when you return to your home (even after being gone for only 10 minutes!) or elephants grieving their dead. Then there is the neurological brain and unfathomed mind terrain of morality, ethics, mutuality, competition and the like.
I, and millions of others on this hunk of rock speeding through the universe, think the historical Buddha was onto something when he hit upon desire as a main cause of human misery. And, again, when he taught that wisdom and compassion were two primary keys to the alleviation of much that passes for our distress in this world. Notice that I used the past-tense ‘taught’ (teach) and not ‘preach’, a signal difference between Eastern and Western approaches to the divine. Preaching is an activity wherein someone with a supposed special insight and connection to the spiritual expounds to a (mostly) passive audience. Other than the “call-and-response” in traditional black churches there is precious little two-way communication going on.
Teaching in the active sense is a whole other endeavor altogether. It is what Doris Lessing (“Introduction” to the Grove Press edition of Ecclesiastes) identifies as the “experiential Path” vs. the “passive” one. When we hear and learn of concepts like “Justice” in our schools and places of worship we internalize, if we do at all, an intellectual concept. When we grow up in an environment with parents and a community that teaches us about “Justice” we internalize it in our hearts. It is closely linked to compassion for the Other. To see a black citizen beaten or killed on an anonymous video stream causes every right-thinking person unease. To walk out of the house knowing that this treatment might be your own lot brings on another level of apprehension altogether.
In many ways ordinary, middle-class white people in our society are privileged not so much by what has happened in their lives as by what has not happened.
The last time I drove cross-country from Ohio, then to Chicago for a Leica meeting and then home to New Mexico I was stopped not once, but twice by states highway patrol. In Illinois the trooper was right behind me as we drove 70+ mph along the Interstate. I decided to move back to the right lanes after passing a car and in a few seconds saw the flashing lights go on in the patrol car. I dutifully pulled over and awaited the standard visit from the cop at my Mercedes Sprinter van window.
When he finally came up I asked what was the problem. He said that in Illinois there is a law that a driver cannot change lanes on an Interstate within 275 feet of signaling a lane change. I asked him to repeat the statement as I was trying to internalize his comment (which was not as succinct as my version of it.) Then I did a quick calculation and said that at the speeds we were driving, 275 feet go by in less than three seconds. I added that I did not have a stop-watch but was pretty certain the legal time had transpired and I had, after all, signaled my intentions. He said, yes, I had signaled but he was pretty certain I had moved into the right lane too early. When I let out an exasperated breath (I was trying to get to my meeting hotel before nightfall) he added that he was not going to give me a ticket, only a ‘Warning’, and that I should leave my van and get into his patrol car. I responded with, “Really!” He said, “Yes, you need to comply, sir.” As I opened the door and stepped out he suddenly said, “Are you armed?” I looked at him with incredulity and said, “Are you serious? No, of course not!”m
As I approached his car I reached for the back door handle but he said, “No, get in the front passenger seat.”
“Okay, cool, I can look at all the toys!”
I did not get much done by way of inspection because there was a police major in the back seat who grilled me on fly-fishing in New Mexico when he saw the Catch & Release sticker in my rear window. I got the idea he was trying to ferret out whether I knew anything about the great art of casting with a fly or had stolen an expensive vehicle.
After several days in Chicago I headed back to the Interstate toward New Mexico. That evening late, just west of St. Louis, a car kept tail-gating me closely for miles. Rather than hit the brakes, which I would have done in my youth, I simply slowed down. Who wants to get the driver behind alarmed and pissed-off enough that he/she pulls up and sends a bullet thru the driver side window?
As I slowed those flashing lights came on! He kept me waiting for a long time before coming up to the window. Tired and (again) exasperated as I was trying to reach my usual hotel, I asked what took so damn long. He said he saw I had an old arrest record at the White House but could not find that it had ever been settled. It took him a long time to find it had been adjudicated (‘don’t return to DC and cause trouble for at least 6 months.’)
Then, I got the only laugh I have ever received from a state cop during the many times I have been stopped: “Officer, first things first. I am very proud of that arrest. It is a sterling moment of civil disobedience from my youth. I made national TV and got a televised comment from my state senator, John Glenn! Second, why did you stop me in the first place?”
“I could not read your license plate or see a sticker to see
if it is current.“
“My date sticker is right there for all to see.”
“Yes, I see it now, but in Missouri it is illegal to drive
with a license plate that is hard for an officer to read. Now, I’m not going to
give you a ticket, but….”
Another ‘Warning’ ticket in my pocket after a stop that
lasted ninety minutes.
Many of you will laugh at these stories, and I can, too,
now. But, the significance of them is that any ‘untoward’ action or displayed
anger on my part could have ended badly for me. Driving while brown can be a
risky practice in many places in the United States. What proved to be
remarkable was that the very next week the NAACP issued a notice that read, “if
you are black you should avoid driving through Missouri if at all possible.”
This is an incredible piece of advice in 21st century America.
These examples of state police action would be simply idiosyncratic stories if not for the fact that they are repeated across this nation every day. I am lucky in that I am sure the officers’ calculus of behavior was influenced by my educated flat, mid-Western speech, my demeanor and my expensive set of wheels (both officers were impressed by my great Mercedes vehicle), i.e. ‘he can probably afford an expensive lawyer’.
To sum, dear Reader, do not assume that your peaceful and secure daily existence is the norm for everyone in this country. Do not assume that those who are executed with impunity by state actors had it coming. Do not assume that after we have conquered Covid-19 everyone will return to a life of beauty and personal empowerment. Do not assume we must all color within the lines as dictated by the mandates of the 1%. Yes, applaud those officers who “take a knee” in solidarity with the people they have sworn to serve and protect but remember that real change is not a cosmetic application of soothing words and easy actions. True justice requires vigilance and perseverance – the hard work of all people of good will.
“History teaches that grave threats to liberty often come in times of urgency, when constitutional rights seem too extravagant to endure.” – Justice Thurgood Marshall
“Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” – John Stuart Mill, 1867
“Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are people who want crops without ploughing the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning; they want the ocean without the roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, or it may be both. But it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” ― Frederick Douglass
Poster for a Little Richard Concert in Baltimore, circa 1956. Photograph of poster from liveauctioneers.
Almost 70 years on it is difficult, unless you possessed young ears in the middle of the 1950s, to understand the enormous impact a song like Tutti Frutti had on its listeners.
Everything about Little Richard shouted ‘DIFFERENT!’ Just look at that hairdo – remember this is the staid hung-up 1950s. Our parents, our schools and the ‘establishment’ were still decrying our hair in the last years of the Nixon administration in the early 1970s. Imagine the public outrage (not too strong a word) in the 50s. Of course, the disapprobation of our elders only made sporting the coiffures more fun!
Although I have not looked at the stats I cannot imagine anyone (other than, perhaps, the Beatles – who actually opened some European concerts for Little Richard in 1962), besting his record of 17 hit singles in about four years circa 1955-1959. The man rocked and everyone into the new rock and roll knew it!
Penniman learned his chops in a manner similar to how many African American polymath performers learned theirs in the first half of the 20th century: first in church, then in vaudeville or traveling troups of performers. In his case it was Dr. Hudson’s Medicine Show. He joined in 1949 rather than enter 10th grade. Here he performed a variety of skits, sometimes in drag as Princess LaVonne, and learned to play what church-folk called ‘devil music’. He once said that Louis Jordan’s Caldonia was the first secular piece he ever played (“Caldonia! Caldonia! What makes your big head so hard?”) HISTORIC NOTE: The second(?) recording of this song was where the term “Rock and Roll” originated. It appeared in a Billboard Magazine review of Erskine Hawkins 1945 record: “right rhythmic rock and roll music”.) A year later Penniman joined Buster Brown’s Orchestra where his childhood nickname of Lil’ Richard was modified (he was quite small and had one leg shorter than the other.)
After a couple recording contracts with his records becoming popular in Georgia but not reaching a larger audience, Little Richard returned to his hometown of Macon, Georgia doing menial labor and performing on the side. In 1955 the musician Lloyd Price (with whom my father worked) recommended Specialty Records, the label he recorded for, and Little Richard sent them a demo tape. Months passed with no call. Eventually Specialty’s producer heard Richard sing Tutti Fruiti during an impromtu set at a club – but had to hire another songwriter to clean up the sexual lyrics Little Richard had put to the song. Three takes in September led to a November release and the rest, as they say, is history!In June of 2007 the British music magazine Mojo, based on a survey of music artists (Björk, Tori Amos, Tom Waits, Brian Wilson, Pete Wentz, Steve Earle and others), listed Tutti Frutti as Number 1 in their “The Top 100 Records That Changed The World”.
SIDE NOTE: I almost did not include this mention as a decade ago Mojo moved to take over ownership of copyright of their writers and photographers work AND, at the same time, laid liability for libel and copyright infringement onto those same writers and photographers.
I just learned that Denis Goldberg, one of the last two survivors of South Africa’s infamous Rivonia Trial (1963-1964), died on April 29th of cancer with Covid-19 complications.
Denis Goldberg, a civil engineer and an anti-apartheid
activist, spent 22 years in prison. He was arrested during a meeting of
activists and commanders of the MK (uMkhonto
we Sizwe) the armed wing of the ANC (African Nation Congress) on a farm in
Rivonia. The defendants in the sabotage and treason trial were Nelson Mandela
(already in prison under a “citing workers to strike” charge), Walter Sisulu, Lionel
Bernstein, Denis Goldberg, Arthur Goldreich, Bob Hepple, Abdulhay Jassat, Ahmed
Kathrada, Govan Mbeki, Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Moosa Moolla, Elias
Motsoaledi and Harold Wolpe. (Goldreich and Wolpe escaped from prison, after
beatings and torture, before beginning their sentence; Hepple fled the country
when charges were withdrawn; and Lionel Bernstein was acquitted, rearrested and
placed under house arrest before escaping from the country.) The rest beat a de facto death sentence thru what was
probably a private treaty with the judge. Goldberg received release in 1985 largely
through the work of his daughter and members of her kibbutz and the U.S. and Israeli
governments (for many years both close allies of apartheid South Africa.)
Many Americans think the fight for democracy in South Africa
was a monolithic black vs. white struggle. This arrest list shows how wrong
this view is: those arrested were English, Indian Muslim, Jewish, Xhosa, Pedi
and Coloured.
The Rivonia Trial (Rivonia is a suburb of Johannesburg)
contained what is considered a founding moment in the attempts to create a
democracy in South Africa – 31 years before it became a reality. The ‘moment’
was , in fact, a three hour defense opening statement by Nelson Mandela, his
famous “I Am Prepared To Die” speech. Here is the closing paragraph:
“During
my lifetime I have dedicated my life to this struggle of the African people. I
have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black
domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in
which all persons will live together in harmony and with equal opportunities.
It is an ideal for which I hope to live for and to see realised. But, my Lord,
if it needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.”
As the only remaining white found
guilty, Denis Goldberg was taken to Pretoria Central Prison to serve 22 years.
The others served in various prisons with most doing extended time on Robben
Island off the coast. Mandela served almost 28 years (18 of which were at
Robben), Walter Sisulu served 26 years (most at Robben), Ahmed Kathrada
served 26 years (18 at Robben) with the balance at Pollsmoor Maximum Security
Prison (along with Raymond Mhlaba, Andrew Mlangeni, Elias Motsoaledi and Walter
Sisulu.) Many, perhaps all, of those convicted worked on interesting college
degrees while incarcerated. Some may remember that it was Ahmed Kathrada who
showed President Obama and the First Family around Robben Island in 2013.
In 2017 the three remaining survivors
of the Rivonia trial – Denis Goldberg, Andrew Mlangeni and Kathrada, along with
the three surviving defense attorneys, Joel Joffe, George Bizos and Denis Kuny
– appeared in a documentary film entitled “Life
is Wonderful”, directed by Sir Nicholas Stadlen. These were the words
Goldberg’s mother, Annie, is said to have uttered when she learned that he and
his comrades had been spared the death sentence. (Annie must have been quite a
mom: in 1960 she was arrested with him for supporting strikers after the
Sharpeville massacre and they both spent four months in jail.)
“Mary Ann Vecchio [a 14-year old runaway, as the world later learned] gestures and screams as she kneels by the body of a student, Jeffrey Miller, lying face down on the campus of Kent State University, in Kent, Ohio. On publication, the image was retouched to remove the fence post above Vecchio’s head.” The protest was against President Nixon’s illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam War. Reacting to mass demonstrations on May 1st, Nixon he had called anti-war protestors ‘bums’.
Four students were killed and 9 wounded by the 67 shots fired by the Ohio National Guard that day. Two of the four killed were bystanders and none of the four was closer to the Guard than about a football field in distance. The Guard had been dispatched to Kent State by Governor James Rhodes, at the request of the town of Kent’s mayor, after an arson attack burned down the ROTC building on May 2.
Four million students (college and high school) went out on strike after the news of the shootings became public.
In New Mexico, where I now live, eleven people were bayonetted at the University of New Mexico by the New Mexico National Guard in a confrontation with student protesters on May 8th. The demonstrations in Washington, DC were so combative that Nixon was removed to Camp David for his safety and the 82nd Airborne was lodged in the basement of the Executive Office Building next to the White House. At Jackson State University, a historically black college, in Jackson, Mississippi, two students were killed (and 12 wounded) by police during a demonstration on May 14 – an event that did not receive the same attention as the shootings at Kent State.
I was in high school in Ohio and vividly remember those times – especially when my Draft Number turned out to be 99. For many years thereafter I never ate at Wendy’s because Ohio Governor Big Jim Rhodes (“part P.T. Barnum, part Elmer Gantry, part Norman Vincent Peale” – Dayton Daily News) was one of Wendy’s investors. There are memorial events at Kent State on May 4th every year and I have managed to make it to one (the 30th, I believe.)
There are still unanswered questions about the timing and personnel involved in the Kent State massacre. A prominent one involves the university- and FBI-informant Terrence Brooks Norman (no relation!), a student who appeared to be the only non-Guardsman individual who was armed at the demonstration.
The great Irish poet Eavan Boland (1944-2020) has gone beyond to the Irish pre-Christian Otherworld of Mag Mell (the Plain of Delight) or, perhaps, Tír-na-hÓige (land of the [ever-] youthful) where worthies engage in poetry, music, entertainment, and the feast of Goibniu that grants immortality to those taking part.
If Americans know Eavan Boland it is
most likely for her poem Quarantine
from her 2001 book Code, reproduced, below, courtesy of Carcanet Press, All Rights
Reserved.
Boland lived in New York from 1956 to 1960 when her diplomat father had a posting. Though the poem Quarantine is about Irish history, she often wrote poetry reflecting the lives of those who live in Dublin’s contemporary suburbia.
Boland said she wrote this poem after reading an anecdote in an early 20th century memoir of the famine, Mo Scéal Féin by An tAthair Peadar Ó Laoghaire. It has been estimated that more than a million Irish died from starvation and disease in the period 1845 to 1852 and a million others emigrated, a period we know as the Irish Potato Famine. Although almost documentary in nature, I prefer to read Quarantine as a love poem and admire the use of repetition (‘worst’, ‘last heat’, ‘last gift’), the phrase ‘freezing stars’ and a reference to the horrible British administration of the country during the famine where tenant farmers actually grew enough wheat to feed people but had to ship it off for English tables (‘Of the toxins of a whole history’.) The next to last stanza brings to my mind the phrase, ‘Never Again!’ but, of course, we humans are slow to learn and even slower to react.
Quarantine
In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with
his
wife.
He was walking—they were both walking —
north.
She was sick with famine fever and
could not
keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and
north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars
they
arrived.
In the morning they were both found
dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole
history.
But her feet were held against his
breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.
Adon Olam (אֲדוֹן עוֹלָם; “Eternal Master/Sovereign Who Reigns Supreme”) from traditional Jewish liturgy. It is usually attributed to Solomon ibn Gabirol (1021-1058, the Golden Age of La Convivencia) but the actual pronunciation of the words points to a much earlier origin. The music in the video below is to the tune of “Happy” written by Pharrell Williams.
This joyful rendition provides an uplift at a time when memorial services are not possible amidst the dying from Covid-19. Tho I am secular now, it still spirits me to my youth when we were made to recite a version of the last stanza before bedtime: Into his hand I commit my spirit when I sleep and I awake and with my spirit, my body, The Lord is with me, I will not fear.
Many will have encountered Adon Olam in Ashkenazi services during Rosh Hashana, Yom Kippur and Kol Nidre. When I lived in London it was, for me, a highlight of Sephardim services sung antiphonally to an old Spanish melody.
Adon Olam may also be read in a room of the dying and in some synagogues as a means of relaying a death in the community (spoken without the musical aid of a cantor.)
Given its ready universality and application throughout the centuries, many have created their own tune to accompany Adon Olam. In 1976 Uzi Hitman wrote what has become a quite popular secular version but the most common melody is probably the one attributed to Russian cantor Eliezar Mordecai ben Yitschak Gerovitsch (1844-1914). Dudu Fisher does a nice job with this as does the singer Fortuna. The group Sabbathsong, below, performs the tune with verve and an unbeatable clarinet!
My rockin’ friends may laugh and poke fun accusing me of
loving schmaltz with this post (“On the
day you were born the angels made a dream come true.”) but I don’t care
– and neither will those of you who listen to the music on this CD and the
other music listed, below.
In 2003 Ronald Isley and Burt Bachrach teamed for the album Here I Am, a collection of Bachrach’s (mostly) 1960s tunes with Bachrach on piano led by Isley’s poignant, signature falsetto. Both Ronald Isley (Cincinnati, May 21, 1941) and Burt Freeman Bacharach (Kansas City, May 12, 1928) are American mid-westerners (yeh!)
Album: Here I Am: Isley Presents Bachrach.
Artists: Ron Isley & Burt Bachrach (with many others in the orchestra)
Like most musicians who people believe pop out of nowhere,
both Isley and Bachrach had a lot of road behind them when they entered mainstream
consciousness. Bachrach studied with famed Darius Milhaud and was a music
director for Marlene Dietrich from the mid-to-late 1950s to the early 1960s, touring
worldwide and writing songs. When he had an office at the famed Brill Building
in New York City he met the lyricist Hal David. Together they wrote many of the
greatest popular songs of the 1960s and 1970s, performed to perfection by
Dionne Warwick, one of the best selling female vocalist of all time, after
Aretha. (And, oh… we all laughed but Warwick made US$3 million from plugging
the Psychic Friends Network on late night TV for 7 years!) The Brill is still
there and worth a visit if you’ve not passed by. It was home to music
publishers and song-smiths including Bobby Darin, Gerry Goffin and Carole King,
Barry Mann, Gene Pitney, Johnny Mercer, Laura Nyro, Neil Diamond, Billy Rose,
Neil Sadaka and others who worked in small offices with upright pianos
(according to my father.)
“Breaking up is so hard to do”
Ron Isley and brothers (variously O’Kelly, Ernie, Marvin,
Rudolph) formed The Isley Brothers, an R&B group nonpareil. They made a hit
of ‘Twist and Shout’ in 1962, beating the Beatles to the line (1963).
If you are a mid-period baby boomer you most certainly remember the 1971 album ‘Givin’ It Back’ featuring the songs ‘Ohio/Machine Gun’ (by Neil Young /Jimi Hendrix), ‘Fire and Rain’ (James Taylor), ‘Lay Lady Lay’ (Bob Dylan), ‘Spill the Wine’ (Miller, Scott and 5 others) and ‘Love the One You’re With’ (Stephen Stills). The recently deceased Bill Withers played guitar on that album!
Then in 1973 they released the album ‘3+3’ (‘1001 Albums You Must
Hear Before You Die’) with ‘That Lady’ (Isley Bros.), ‘Don’t Let me Be
Lonely Tonight’ (James Taylor), and more.
When I was in grad school in London the parties the Africans threw were the most fun (check out Osibisa, the first ‘World Music’ group) but for atmosphere and romance one could pull the Isley Brothers in for tactical support. If you could not keep company for the dreary autumn nights with the assistance of the Isley Brothers you were beyond helping!
‘Be mine tonight, let this be just the start
of so many nights like this… then
seal it with a kiss.’
But I digress.
The CD ‘Here I Am’ with
Bachrach will touch a chord with those of us who survived Vietnam, the war of
our generation, and the drug- and alcohol-fueled gatherings that took so many
of our peers. It is like listening with new (mature) ears.
Full orchestration is not always successful on pop and jazz
recordings, think 1955’s ‘Clifford Brown
with Strings’ with Brown, Richie Powell, George Morrow and Max Roach
– reviewed as “lush settings by some and muzak by others”. However, ‘Here I Am: Isley Presents Bachrach” is, to me, simply gorgeous; Bachrach
did not lose his touch with his 1960s work with Warwick. Isley’s
interpretations drop his ‘Mr. Biggs’ persona (much in evidence in his
collaborations with R. Kelly) and meld tenderness, love, poignant loss,
humility and romance all in one grand slow-motion sweep that will steam the
bedroom windows.
Listening to ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’ we are no longer in B.J. Thomas territory riding that bicycle with Katherin Ross in 1969’s ‘Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid’ (the American Film Institute’s 73rd-greatest American film on its “100 Years…100 Movies”, 10th Anniversary Edition and 7th greatest Western (2008). Jack Lemmon, Warren Beatty and Steve McQueen were all offered the role of Sundance by the by!)
(Ah… another recent loss: illustrator Mort Drucker (1929 – April 9, 2020) who drew movie parodies for MAD Magazine from 1956 to 2008 and did the pics for MAD Magazine’s ‘Botch Casually and the Somedunce Kid’, Issue No. 136, July 1970.)
For the more visual among you, there was a PBS Special of these performances, too, that I have not seen.
Listen to this CD and you will be booking a site for a post Covid-19 renewal of your wedding vows!
P.S. For a great read on the relationship between the Isley family and Jimi Hendrix see: “Ernie Isley remembers Jimi Hendrix”. If I recall correctly, The Seattle Times article omits to report that the Isleys bought Jimi a new white Strat because they thought his (which was in hock, sans strings, at a pawn shop) was too tatty for their stage shows.
P.P.S. Dionne Warwick’s extended family is chock-a-block full of the musically and athletically talented. Blood relatives include Dee Dee Warwick, Cissy Houston, Whitney Houston, Gary Garland, Bobbi Kristina Brown and Leontyne Price.
In my post about The
Aeneid last week I did not include a photo of the actual shelves with books
from early authors (Aeneid, Gilgamesh, Dante’s Inferno, The Iliad, etc.)
because I had already included two overall images and I thought those enough.
Below is the photo I took but did not use.
Books of the classics and Elmore Leonard
One of the reasons, aside from having already included two pics
for my Aeneid post, was that the books of Elmore Leonard intrude onto these
shelves. This is the inevitable result of owning more books than shelves – tho
it is certainly a lesser evil than books stacked and strewn around the house
higgledy-piggledy.
The volumes of Leonard sit below those of Dick Francis, Carl Hiaasen, Robert Parker and Walter Mosley in the vertical stack of this shelf unit. It is the case with my guilty pleasure: mystery novels. Like the shelves with William Boyd, Bruce Chatwin, Robertson Davies, Peter Matthiessen, Thomas McGuane, V.S. & Shiva Naipaul, Salmon Rushdie and a few others whose work I collect, most of the books are autographed to me. Leonard had a long career and began by writing Westerns including Three-Ten to Yuma (3:10 to Yuma). I cannot recollect another writer who had as many of his novels turned into movies, sometimes twice!
For the smart-assed among you, the early writers grouping
(‘early’ as in Herodotus) does not contain signed books (well, aside from a few
modern editors of these works). Likewise my collections of anthropology and
evolution are bereft of signatures except for a few letters.
Getting authors to autograph one’s books or a sheet of paper is an interesting custom. I used to have a nice little letter from Darwin’s son, Francis, answering a fan who wanted Darwin’s signature. Francis lamented he had already given away all those he had inherited. I sold the letter to the great scientist, writer and collector Stephen Jay Gould.
The act of collecting has been the subject of those writing both fiction and non-fiction; Sigmund Freud tackled the subject. He believed it sprang from the conflict of unresolved toilet training. (What a shit that shrink was, altho he did collect antiquities.) Balzac, John Fowles and Bruce Chatwin covered the conflict zone. Mozart continues to entertain us with his opera Don Giovanni and collecting of a different sort: sexual conquest. The psychoanalyst Werner Muensterberger in his engaging work Unruly Passion was onto something and he ought to have known: he collected African art as a youth but lost everything to the Germans in WWII, coming to America with $100 and a mask he sold to Rockefeller. He was an example of people who cannot be held down and his practice came to include patients like Danny Kaye, Laurence Olivier, James Dean and Marlon Brando. Muensterberger maintained a correspondence with many of the great names of the century: Thomas Mann, Mary Wigman, Pablo Picasso, Sigmund Freud, Constantin Brancusi, Walt Disney, Albert Einstein and others.
The list of those exploring the psyche of collecting goes on and on but I love John Steinbeck’s simple explanation: “I guess the truth is that I simply like junk.” Which brings up hoarding – but that is another foible altogether.
One of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of
text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules
to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank
You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know
about – or authorize.
of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know about – or authorize.One of the favorite items on my shelves is this sheet of
text sent to me by Elmore Leonard, ‘Rules
to write by’. He originally published it in The New York Times. It is a hoot to read and he gave it to me as a Thank
You for showing him a published bibliography of his works that he did not know
about – or authorize.
Elmore Leonard Advice On Writing
I have had many spectacular books, letters, manuscripts and signatures through the years. I am looking for a great photograph to go with the the signature, below. It is Teddy Roosevelt’s and is special because, prior to his presidency, The White House was called The Executive Mansion. Here he has signed a ‘White House’ card!
The Aeneid is the story of how a refugee from beaten and destroyed ancient Troy preserved his people, via divine authority, by founding Rome, with his descendants going on to establish an empire.
In 19BC the Roman poet Publius Vergilius Maro left Greece, where he had been conducting research for The Aeneid, to return to his home in Rome. He shipped out on a vessel with the Emperor Augustus, as one does. They stopped at Megara where Virgil contracted fever (or heatstroke) and he died as the ship docked in the southern Italian trading port of Brundisium. Among his last thoughts was his dissatisfaction with a 10-year long writing project, this book, The Aeneid. Rather than let an unfinished work see the light of day, he asked his executors to burn the manuscript. Augustus, who knew something of the book as Virgil had read him three chapters, stepped in and ordered the work to be published ‘as is’.
The Aeneidis an acknowledged cornerstone of Western literature and by two centuries after his death was a prerequisite in Latin education, which is to say, any western education above the rudimentary. Even in the 19th century it was often a requirement of students to memorize the whole of it! Its 9,896 lines have been printed in hundreds of editions in both its original Latin dactylic hexameter and in poetic and prose translation. Its opening line was even found in excavation as graffiti in Pompeii: Arma virumque cano, “Of arms and a man I sing.”
In 1680 Henry Purcell published the music for one of my favorite operas, Dido and Aeneas with Nahum Tate writing the libretto. (Tate is today mostly remembered, when he is remembered art all, for rewriting Shakespeare’s plays so that every scene would be “full of respect to Majesty and the dignity of courts”. Yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same!) I have many versions of The Aeneid shelved in several libraries around the house. My current favorite is the translation by Robert Fitzgerald (1983). I own four copies of this translation: one (trade paperback) in the sunroom library, one (mass market paper) in the research area for my work on wine in life and literature and two in the bedroom (first edition hardcover and a trade paper to share my enthusiasm by lending to friends.) Hmmm…. maybe this is why I have more than 5,000 books!
Virgil was a talented writer and superb stylist who cleverly knew his way around alliteration, onomatopoeia and other wordplay. His poetic lines are of a grand and stately solemn nature, very foreign to our modern ears attuned as we are to formulations of unstructured free-style verse and sentences. His goal in The Aeneid was to create a work that would glorify Rome and rival Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. There are twelve books (what we might call chapters) in The Aeneid, written using the same syllabic and metrical line as used by Homer. The first six chapters play on the Odyssey and the last six the war and battles in the Iliad.
Though a great work, The Aeneid has not been free of issues. Yes, there are literary ones (it is a bear to translate as it is composed in what the Germans call kunstsprache, an artificial or invented artful language; I never truly mastered it in my school Latin.)
But, the problems I address here are political in nature. The work was ‘co-opted’ right from the beginning by Augustus. The emperor is kindly mentioned by name in scenes where Aeneas is gifted sight into the future when he enters the Underworld to visit his late father, Anchises. Augustus’ reign came after decades of instability (the Roman Civil Wars) following Julius Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon in 49BC, taking his legions into Rome and eventually becoming Dictator. Augustus was seen by many as savior and last hope of the Roman people for peace after the civil turmoil. Likewise it has been used through the centuries as a support for the aggrandizing and subjugating nature of colonization, a classical ‘white man’s burden’ made flesh.
But, to be fair, The Aeneid has also been interpreted as an anti-war poem and it is this tack I take. The language and potent imagery is second to none – cinematic even. The battle scenes do not require a very active imagination to visualize. It is sad that Virgil is no longer on the required reading list of our schools. It still has a lot to teach us about myriad human qualities like devotion, piety, hubris, rage, fate, courage and love in all its incarnations. Stop in and borrow a copy or buy your own if you are unfamiliar with the joy of reading this fine story.
Below, a section from “The World Below”, where Aeneas, led by the Sibyl, travels to the Underworld to see his father. She is carrying, under her dress, their entry ticket: the golden bough. It had been torn off a tree by Aeneas who was foretold it was needed as a presentation to Charon to get him to ferry them across Cocytus, the Stygian river leading to Hades. At the other side of the river there is another obstacle, the huge three-headed dog, Cerberus, but he enters the picture some lines later.
(If the words ‘golden bough’ seem familiar look up J.M.W. Turner’s painting of the same name and, also, the early anthropologist Sir James George Frazier whose work greatly influenced a generation, including Freud and Jung; Aleister Crowley; T.S. Elliot and William Carlos Williams; Hemingway, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Robert Graves and Yeats; and the man who founded anthropology ‘off the verandah’, the founder of my university’s department, Bronislaw Malinowski, who was prompted to lay out the first statement of the aims of ethnography in his ground-breaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922). Though now superseded in scholarship, for many years The Golden Bough exerted a profound influence upon literature, anthropology and intellectual thinking.)
Selection, below, courtesy of Vintage Books, A Division of Random House, NY. The Aeneid Translated by Robert Fitzgerald, Book VI, lines 331-402. Copyright 1980, 1982, 1983.
Bedroom Library
Book VI, “The World Below”, lines 331-402
The cavern was profound, wide-mouthed and huge,
Rough underfoot, defended by dark pool
And gloomy forest. Overhead, flying
things
Could never safely take their way, such
deathly
Exhalations rose from the black gorge
Into the dome of heaven. …
“Away,
away,”
The Sibyl cried, “All those unblest, away!”
Depart from the grove! But you, Aeneas,
Enter the path here, and unsheathe your
sword.
There’s need of gall and resolution now.”
She flung herself wildly into the cave mouth,
Leading, and he strode boldly at her heels.
Gods who rule the ghosts; all silent
shades;
And Chaos and infernal Fiery Stream,
And regions of wide night without a
sound,
May it be right to tell of what I have
heard,
May it be right, and fitting, by your
will,
That I describe the deep world sunk in
darkness
Under the earth.
Now
dim to one another
In desolate night they walked on through
the gloom,
Through Dis’s homes all void, and empty
realms,
As one goes through a wood by a faint moon’s
Treacherous light, when Jupiter veils
the sky
And black night blots the colors of the world.
Before the entrance, in the jaws of Orcus,
Grief and avenging Cares have made
their beds,
And pale diseases and sad Age are there,
And Dread, and Hunger that sways men to
crime,
And sordid Want – in shapes to
affright the eyes –
And Death and Toil and Death’s own
brother, Sleep,
And the mind’s evil joys; on the door
sill
Death-bringing War, and iron cubicles
Of the Eumenides, and raving Discord,
Viperish hair bound up in gory bands.
In the courtyard a shadowy elm
Spreads ancient boughs, her ancient
arms where dreams,
False dreams, the old tale goes,
beneath each leaf
