Yes, I went on another movie-watching binge. Big Fish was first. Ewan MacGregor has to have the most earnest smile in film history. Helena Bonham Carter, one of my favorite actresses (and the granddaughter of Winston Churchill’s one-time flame, Violet, and, later, his trusted political advisor) appeared as a blonde and carried it off, Southern accent included. Alas, she lost MacGregor to Alison Lohman/Jessica Lange, as MacGregor’s wife in younger and older versions. I guess that’s understandable.
Then Elizabeth and I watched—believe it or not, for the first time— Almost Famous. We were enchanted. I guess that’s the right word. Kate Hudson’s eyes are amazing; they are small and slightly hooded, but the directness of their look is fierce. Her eyes, in that look, are brilliant green torpedoes. I’ve seen that look once before, in the eyes of a girl I dated more than fifty years ago. She had a pet raccoon who detested everyone except for her. She had long blonde hair, Rapunzelian, when girls ironed their hair to straighten it, and rode her Quarter horse in the Upper Valley bareback and barefoot. I was a bedazzled oaf, one on the small side. Maybe a bedazzled Hobbit.
The impossibly handsome Billy Crudup was in Almost Famous and in Big Fish, too. I had a hard time at the end of Big Fish, when Crudup’s estranged son reconciles with his father—Ewan MacGregor is by now Albert Finney—and, in the son’s mind, he carries his dying father, who is insufferably delighted to see all his old friends and lovers, down to the river to die. When Crudup lets his father slip beneath the surface, he suddenly becomes the legendary, immense catfish he’d always said he was.
When you’re seventy, a moment like that is vivid and real. My time, in a relative and so indeterminate sense, is running short.
So, thank goodness for youth and for Almost Famous, which included Jason Miller (My Name is Earl). And Jimmy Fallon. And Ryan Reynolds. And Anna Paquin. And Jann Wenner. And Zooey Deschanel (I still miss New Girl. I wrote an essay about that show, which New Times, perhaps when the staff was gloriously drunk, actually published.) And Rainn Wilson. And Philip Seymour Hoffman.
I missed somebody, I’m sure. Had he been alive, Abraham Lincoln might’ve been in it. (In the credits: “Tall and Immensely Strong Roadie/Philosopher.”)
I admit that the very idea of a fifteen-year-old getting the go-ahead from Ben Fong-Torres for a 5,000 word Rolling Stone piece made me insanely jealous. And then, when the fifteen-year-old, Cameron Crowe, grew up, he got to write and direct the film about Cameron Crowe. Then it became a Broadway musical.
Something not that deep inside me hopes that a seagull poops on Cameron Crowe’s head tomorrow.
I did get a letter into Rolling Stone once, about Michael Douglas and the film China Syndrome. I think it was maybe 125 words. After reading an excellent piece about Bonnie Raitt, my letter to her was unanswered. Alas.
If a Hunter Thompson piece was in Rolling Stone, there went, except for the record and film reviews and the advertising space, the whole issue. We had jalapeño poppers wrapped in bacon as part of dinner tonight. If a Hunter Thompson piece was in Rolling Stone, I pretty much devoured it the way I do jalapeño poppers wrapped in bacon.
The same went for other “New Journalists” like Gay Talese or Tom Wolfe or Joan Didion or Jimmy Breslin. Or even (The Executioner’s Song), Norman Mailer. Or, before they’d invented the term “New Journalism,” Truman Capote–In Cold Blood was, to me, a supreme accomplishment, given, and perhaps because of, the density of Capote’s emotional freight, as heavy as Marley’s chains. My tastes now run to popular historians who also happen to be women: Laura Hillenbrand, Elizabeth Letts, Lynne Olson.
Then it was Bridget Jones’s Diary, because I could even watch Colin Firth do something as mundane as prepare a meal, which he did. It reminded me of another favorite actor, Michael Caine, breaking an egg with one hand in The Ipcress File, a marvelous 1965 spy film. (Alas, it turns out that the real cook was Len Deighton, the novelist who wrote the book on which the film was based. He had to break the egg for Caine on camera, so it’s Len Deighton’s hand you see in the film.)
And I enjoy the fight between Firth and Hugh Grant. And I like Bridget’s dad, too.
A sniper (and former lover) shot Colin Firth dead with a rifle bullet placed squarely in his forehead in a later spy film, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. There were a tragic few seconds, thanks to masterful direction, from the rifle shot being fired, with a silencer’s cough, the entrance wound appearing, a small and precisely round red dot, to Firth, his eyes widening slightly, realizing something was wrong in the last moment of realization granted him, to his collapse.
Even though Firth was a thorough bastard in the film, I was bummed for a day or two after. That film was based on the John LeCarre novels, and my friend John Porter and I are LeCarre devotees. They are so thickly plotted that I understand about 58% of them, but the protagonist, the British espionage bureaucrat, George Smiley, (below, played by Gary Oldman, with Benedict Cumberbatch as his neophyte) is brilliant and reserved. What he reserves is his venom, injected without passion, for those who deserve it. Like several modern American Congressmen. Or Colin Firth.
(Incidentally, Firth was Darcy in BOTH Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones. So there.)
I am posting about none of them especially. What amazed me about Big Fish is that I’d forgotten that Steve Buscemi appears in it, when he recruits MacGregor as an unwilling accomplice in a bank robbery.
I would just like to state, for the record, how much I admire Steve Buscemi. I think almost any film he’s in exceeds its expectations.
Frances McDormand co-stars with Crudup in Almost Famous and with Buscemi in Fargo, one of my all-time favorite films. And her Marge Gunderson is one of my all-time favorite characters. Don’t EVEN get me started on her.
Anyway, I hope you get some time to watch movies over Christmas. The turkey’s starting to defrost, we’ve got wassail and egg nog, our little tree with white lights, four dogs (Cousin Rocky is visiting) and we have Rick, Sally and Rebecca over for Friday and Saturday. We might even watch a movie together. (Or a football game.)
Shoot howdy, I just might invite Steve Buscemi over, too. I have a hunch he’d like my mashed potatoes. Oh, and I’d be careful, given the opening scene in Reservoir Dogs, to turn down any tips.
These GI’s are members of the 104th Infantry Division, the “Timberwolves.” The division had done part of its training at Camp San Luis Obispo. Now, six months after they’d arrived in Europe, these GI’s take a smoke break during the Battle of the Bulge, the horrific weeks-long battle fought in the Ardennes. The photo was taken just inside Germany, but the Bulge crossed several borders. The heaviest fighting for men like these would last into late January and it would come in the mountains and dense forest that mark the Ardennes.
It was the coldest winter in Europe in thirty years.
I’ve never seen a starker contrast in borders than the one between Holland and Belgium. Holland is flat enough to roll a tennis ball for miles, and the roads help. They’re smooth and noiseless. In the pastures that flank Dutch roads, the happiest cows I’ve ever seen would placidly watch the tennis ball roll by.
Then you see the Belgian border. The Ardennes, mountains and forests, rise so suddenly that I was reminded of that terrific animation of Paris rising in the film Inception.
And so the Ardennes is where Americans like these GIs in the 104th were essentially inhaled by the urgency of the the Battle of the Bulge, which had caught the Allied high command, suddenly desperate for riflemen, flat-footed.
Because they were mostly replacements, rookies, the high command hadn’t listened before the battle opened to the reports of tank engines and trembling trees shedding snow beyond the American lines. Sherman hadn’t listened to the reports of movement in the trees near Shiloh Church, either.
Then the Panzers came, followed by the infantry who were, along with Caesar’s Third Gallica and Thomas Jackson’s Confederate “foot cavalry,” possibly the finest soldiers in history.
Art Youman of Arroyo Grande, of Easy Company, was there, too, in Bastogne. So was James Pearson of Templeton, lost with his B-26 crew—their plane, “Mission Belle,” is seen here with an earlier crew (they look young, don’t they?)—shot down over a Belgian town, Houffalize, the day after Christmas. So was Manuel Gularte of Arroyo Grande, a crewman on a 155-mm “Long Tom” cannon whose work had helped to delay the German advance on a Belgian town, St. Vith.
Once again, I am stunned by a “cow county” so small—33,000 people in the 1940 census—soon to be outnumbered by 96,000 servicemen from Camp Roberts in the north to Camp Cooke, near Lompoc–that contributed so significantly to World War II.
I heard a war story I did not want to hear a few days ago. It was a guy about my age, maybe with the tread worn down a bit more than mine, but his Dad was a member of an Army cavalry scout unit during the Battle of the Bulge.
They were among the units that found the bodies of more than eighty GIs who’d been machine-gunned—murdered—by a Waffen-SS unit in Malmedy, Belgium on December 17. They had surrendered and were unarmed.
Three Americans on patrol, Luxembourg, during The Bulge.
His father’s unit stopped taking prisoners after that, the man told me. And so the Germans they murdered for the next six months became some of the fifty million casualties this war produced, in a war that demonstrated that humans were as efficient at killing as the Spanish Flu, with its fifty million victims, had been in 1918.
It was a horrific war in which Americans were not blameless. In writing Central Coast Aviators in World War II, I noted that airmen could never completely rid themselves of the memory of burning human flesh that came to them in updrafts over cities like Dresden or Tokyo. The Army executed 102 GIs for crimes against civilians during World War II, so we were capable of much more personal brutality, too.
But it’s a telling statistic that, in nation fighting to preserve democracy and destroy the racism fundamental to National Socialism and to Japanese chauvinism, that 83% of the soldiers executed for rape were Black Americans. The irony would’ve have escaped us then and would probably escape 30% of voting Americans today.
A Marine, a member of the First Marine Division, fires a burst from his Thompson submachine gun on Okinawa. John Loomis of Arroyo Grande was at Okinawa as a member of the First.
And, as to the debasement that war can confer, even on Americans: in Eugene Sledge’s masterful With the Old Breed at Peleliu and Okinawa, he remembered a fellow Marine absently tossing pieces of coral, like basketball free throws, into the skull of a dead Japanese soldier; the top of the man’s skull had been neatly sheared off by machine-gun bullet or a shell fragment. Even Sledge, who was not a blameless man—war debases all in mostly equal measures—was sickened.
Fifty thousand Americans grew sickened by the war and deserted. For a time, a gang of them took control of Paris and tried to run the place the way Capone had run Chicago.
The miracle, one author has noted, is that only fifty thousand GIs deserted.The vast majority didn’t. Here, they were farm boys and Poly students (usually one and the same) and store clerks, farm laborers and high-school football heroes, even the guys with Coke-bottle glasses whom nobody took seriously–not until they proved to be someone different altogether in places like the Ardennes.
They constantly amaze me. I keep returning to them because the debasement of recent history compels me to. I have learned that the cruelty of war, a cruelty some of them practiced, is always overwhelmed by other, more important, American traits: generosity, humanity and courage. We must not forget that.
An Army Quartermaster truck driver makes a friend, 1944.
An elderly French couple honors an American paratrooper, killed in Carentan, Normandy, on D-Day.
These Marines “adopted” this little boy, orphaned by the terrible fighting on Okinawa.
Please allow me a history teacher moment. It’s John Donne’s fault: “Any man’s death diminishes me.” This is about two women.
This is Clara Jurado, Mothers of the Disappeared (Desaparecidos), during a protest in Buenos Aires in 1983.
While I am happy for the Argentine football team, victors in Sunday’s World Cup, what is happening in Iran today happened in Argentina in 1976. When a military dictatorship came to power, a wave of arrests and extrajudicial killings followed.
30,000 Argentines, overwhelmingly young people, were “disappeared.” Pregnant detainees were executed soon after they had given birth.
I hope that the World Cup victory somehow brings healing—and much joy— to Argentina this year.
But last year, the Argentine government issued thousands of DNA kits to help identify the human remains still being unearthed. Because the two nations are so close, some of the DNA samples match living Italians.
There are still mass graves from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War that remain undisturbed; previous generations knew where they were but did not talk about them. Young Spaniards talk about them but they have now passed into myth.
The writer Adam Hochschild wrote of the Russian River Ob changing course in 1976, exposing sandbanks packed densely with human bodies. Permafrost had preserved some so completely that relatives could recognize the man or woman who had gone missing in the 1930s. What the Ob revealed lay below what was the headquarters of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, in a town called Kolpashevo.
And now people are being “disappeared” in Iran.
This week actress Taraneh Alidoosti was arrested. She committed two crimes: protesting the brutal repression of protestors and posting this photograph. Her hair is uncovered.
In the 1880s, Erastus Fouch farmed along was is today Lopez Drive. As a sixteen-year-old he’d fought in the Shenandoah Valleywhere he saw his brother killed in action. He later fought at Chancellorsville and Gettysburg. Here he wears his Grand Army of the Republic badge. Jack English photo.
Nearly sixty Civil War veterans are buried in the Arroyo Grande District Cemetery. This excerpt from the book Patriot Graves describes the forces that drove them here.
…A soldier who had endured the third day of Gettysburg and emerged unhurt, and who had then seen his own boys in their counterattack destroy Pickett’s Charge…had already passed the zenith of his life. Nothing like this would ever happen to him again, and what had happened to them brought them, ironically, great joy.
So, for a generation enmeshed in the ethical web spun tightly by mid-Victorian Protestantism—these were Christian soldiers who fought in armies, on both sides, marked by intense waves of wartime revivalism within their camps—the excitement of battle generated a profound moral contradiction. In This Republic of Suffering, a superb account of coming to terms with the scale of death the Civil War generated, Harvard president and historian Drew Gilpin Faust describes the experience of a stunned Confederate who, during a firefight, came to the aid of a shrieking comrade, only to find out that he was “executing a species of war dance,” exulting over the body of the Union soldier he’d just killed. In another battle in 1862, Union soldiers on the firing line called their shots, as if combat were billiards: “Watch me drop that fellow,” one said to his comrades; battle was, indeed, like a game.[1]
The killing didn’t end when the war did. Violent crime rose at three times the rate of population growth in the decades following the war, and perhaps as many as two-thirds of the nation’s convicted felons were veterans.[2] Soldiers understood, on some level, that combat had changed them irrevocably and some worried about it. Society, one Vermont soldier wrote his sister, “will not own the rude soldier when he comes back, but turn a cold shoulder to him, because he has become hardened by scenes of bloodshed and carnage.”[3] He was, in many respects, right: some of the soldiers who came home to Vermont, New Jersey or Iowa brought with them a measure of fear—they had become, in the Civil War novelist Michael Shaara’s term, “Killer Angels.”
Many Union soldiers had demonized themselves and by extension all of their comrades by celebrating their mustering out with epic alcohol binges and episodic violence throughout the demobilization summer of 1865.[4] A Chicago civilian’s insulting comment about William Sherman set off a saloon brawl that cascaded into a riot that police were helpless to put down. Only the fortuitous appearance of the legendarily hard-drinking Gen. Joseph Hooker, who had the credibility to intervene with combat veterans, brought the violence to an end.
The Grand Review of the Armies at war’s end, Washington D.C., May 1865. Arroyo Grande settler Morris Denham marched with this unit, Francis Blair’s XVII Corps, Sherman’s army.
But for even the most sober of veterans that was precisely the problem with homecoming: it brought them little peace. Professor Jordan describes a sense of what, at its mildest, could be called disorientation. Home wasn’t home anymore. Even little farm towns had changed so much in four years that, for some veterans, they didn’t feel like home at all. Soldiers from the hard-fighting regiments of the Old Northwest, states like Iowa and Minnesota, couldn’t reconcile themselves to the cold winters they’d forgotten while fighting in Mississippi or Georgia. There was a more sinister change to which they couldn’t adjust: Union veterans resembled the little boys who’d survived the 1918 influenza epidemic and were finally let out to play, only to find there was no playmate on their city block left alive. The survivors of “Pals” Battalions who’d joined the Great War’s British Army together went home to neighborhoods empty of the young men with whom they’d grown up. Their pals were gone, swallowed up by the Western Front.
Gone too, in 1865, were whole towns of young men in New York or Vermont or Indiana, dead and buried on Southern farmland that had been poisoned by violence, land still studded with spent bullets. Other young men had vanished without a trace in dark, dense woodlots or fetid swamps. Soldiers came home, then, ostensibly alive and whole and strong but with unseen dead spaces inside where their comrades had once lived. Missing them, or the trauma of seeing them killed, figured in the chronic depression with which so many veterans struggled. Now that the war was done, they still were caught in its aftermath like swimmers in an undertow, struggling to break surface, to find light and cool air, to breathe again.
They recognized, too, that what they had fought for—for the rededication of the democracy Lincoln had described at Gettysburg in November 1863—was fast slipping away. Union veterans remained intensely suspicious of and hostile toward the defeated South; Lincoln’s assassination had been one impetus for their rancor but their anger only intensified when they read the newspaper accounts of the postwar emergence of the old Slave Codes, now called Black Codes. They read, too, of the defiance and the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan, co-founded by a cavalryman, Nathan Bedford Forrest, who had bedeviled some of them in the Deep South. When Reconstruction ended in 1877, Jim Crow laws revived white supremacy in a way that rivaled the days of slavery. The Union veterans’ hostility was exacerbated because the other side refused to admit—significantly, on a moral level—that they’d lost the war. Typical, in 1894, were the dedicatory remarks that accompanied the unveiling of a Confederate memorial in Richmond, when newspapers noted that the clouds parted and the sun emerged when the speaker, the Rev. R.C. Cave, began an oration that included passages like this:
But brute force cannot settle questions of right and wrong. Thinking men do not judge the merits of a cause by the measure of its success; and I believe
The world shall yet decide
In truth’s clear, far-off light,
that the South was in the right; that her cause was just; that the men who took up arms in her defence were patriots who had even better reason for what they did than had the men who fought at Concord, Lexington, and Bunker Hill; and that her coercion, whatever good may have resulted or may hereafter result from it, was an outrage on liberty.[5]
White supremacy triumphant, Birth of a Nation.
Similar remarks by Southern speakers invited to a Gettysburg reunion in 1913, Professor Jordan notes, rankled the same Union veterans who had protested another unveiling, in 1909, in the Capitol’s Statuary Hall: a sculpture of Robert E. Lee. No matter how chivalrous Lee had been (He never, for example, uttered the word “Yankees,” using instead, in his verbal orders to his subordinates, the term “those people.”), he was a killer, and he had harvested thousands of solders’ lives. The survivors of what they saw as Lee’s war would protest again at the rapturous reception, one that included the Southern-bred President Woodrow Wilson, awarded the 1915 D.W. Griffith film Birth of a Nation, which depicts Klansmen, too, as chivalric heroes who reassert Southern white supremacy over rapacious carpetbaggers and predatory African Americans. “It is like writing history with lightning,” the president said, “and my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.”[6] The most enduring image of the 1913 Gettysburg reunion is that of Confederate survivors of Pickett’s Charge reaching across the stone wall–fifty years before, it had been their objective–to shake the hands of Pennsylvania veterans. What goes unmentioned is the fistfight at the same event that sent seven aged Yankees and Confederates to the hospital.[7]
Two Gettysburg veterans, seemingly reconciled at the 1913 Reunion.
Even as Southern whites reasserted their social and political primacy, American democracy in the North was no tribute to the sacrifice of Civil War veterans, either. The Radical Republican Congress and Andrew Johnson finished what should have been Lincoln’s second term in what resembled the political equivalent of a Western range war. Johnson escaped conviction on impeachment charges by one Senate vote. Grant’s relentlessness and drive had served him well in the struggle against Lee, but another aspect of his personal character—an almost childlike credulity—ate his presidency alive in a series of scandals perpetrated by subordinates who betrayed Grant as surely as Warren G. Harding would be betrayed by his “Ohio Gang” in the 1920s.
The corruption penetrated to state houses, where the lobbyist for the Santa Fe Railroad kept a slush fund in his office safe for the frequent lubrication of Kansas legislators about to vote on regulatory bills; the monopoly that railroads enjoyed in their American fiefdoms and the freight rates they demanded were so egregious that it cost a farmer more to ship a bushel of wheat from Topeka to Chicago, by rail, than it did to ship that bushel from Chicago to Liverpool, mostly by water. Machine politics dominated cities from New York to San Francisco, where Irish-American voters really did vote early and often, and deceased. In New York, the most famous political machine was Tammany Hall, and it was Tammany Hall’s Boss Tweed who disbursed the equivalent of $4 million to a Tammany-contracted plasterer for two days’ work on City Hall.
The 1889 cartoon “Bosses of the Senate” exemplifies the corruption of Gilded Age America.
In both their disillusionment and in their restlessness, the Civil War generation seems to resemble the generation that came of age during the First World War. After that war, they would become expatriates–Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos among them—young men, many of them veterans, and young women, who no longer recognized or understood the America they’d known as children. They were among the members of Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation.”
…[Like}the young people of the 1920s, Civil War veterans were members of a generation on the move. In postwar America, veterans, according to a 2010 study by Seoul University economist Chulhee Lee, were 54% more likely to move to a different state and 36% more likely to move to a different region than non-veterans.[8] Lee posits several reasons for this phenomenon: a central one is the idea that veterans had been exposed to the concept of a wider nation, one beyond their rural farms or row tenements, by campaigns in the South. Westerners, too, fought along the Atlantic seaboard, and some Easterners saw combat or garrison duty during the 1860s Indian Wars on the frontier.
Lee’s point is a key one: Americans had been so isolated and disparate before the war that an outbreak of measles that would make a New York regiment sick would kill soldiers in the Iowa regiment bivouacked alongside, soldiers that, before the war, were so geographically isolated that they lacked the immunity to that particular strain of measles–measles, in fact, killed 11,000 soldiers during the war.[9] The war had begun to break that isolation down, and the troop movements necessary to fighting it had opened young soldiers’ minds to the vastness of their nation and to the possibility of starting over somewhere else.
Among the area’s crops were flowers grown for seed. Here, a Waller Farms worker and his team are sowing a field. Photo courtesy Richard Waller
This pattern of increased mobility was a key factor in the lives of Arroyo Grande’s Union veterans. Over fifty would settle the Arroyo Grande Valley and nearby Nipomo. Enough census data exists to follow twenty-three of them, in the course of their lives. After the war, seven of them moved once from the state they’d served as soldiers; seven moved twice. Nine moved three times or more before they came to the Arroyo Grande area. So the men who came here had come as far as they could—like Jody’s grandfather in the Steinbeck novella The Red Pony, they had to stop because they’d arrived at the Pacific: their days of “Westering” were over.
Santa Fe Ad, 1898. The fare from Chicago to Los Angeles was only $25 during the 1880s competition between the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific for California-bound passengers.
[1] Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Vintage Books: New York, 2008, pp. 37-38.
[2] Michael C.C. Adams, Living Hell: The Dark Side of the Civil War, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore: 2014, p. 198.
An impassioned Facebook post I saw today demanded that local school board spend more on campus security and less on junk like CRT (Critical Race Theory) and Gender Studies. So, yes, it’s election time, and factuality is irritating and inconvenient at important times like this one.
But let me make a few points:
1. CRT is taught at places like Berkeley Law. It is not taught in Lucia Mar. When I taught U.S. History, I did teach my AGHS students about the 54th Massachusetts, about the Harlem Renaissance, about Rosa Parks and Mamie Till. I also showed them Bull Connor’s firehoses knocking down Black teenagers in Birmingham.
The damndest thing happened. Seeing those Black kids in Birmingham getting knocked down and helping each other up again made my White kids in Arroyo Grande and Grover Beach proud to be Americans. Prouder. So did the gravity of the Little Rock coed walking through a dense crowd of White abusers, their faces contorted, or the obvious enjoyment of White boys with butch haircuts and D.A.’s as they poured creamer and sugar and ketchup over the impassive Black boys who had merely come to the Woolworth’s counter for service.
The assessment at the end of the unit had them planning, writing and publishing, using computer software, a 1920s newspaper about what they’d learned. Invariably, every newspaper–every newspaper–had an article about Louis Armstrong. Watching him perform and listening to him talk about his life–the son of a New Orleans prostitute who’d learned to play a battered cornet in juvenile hall- had enchanted my students.
If that’s what the Facebook poster meant by Critical Race Theory, then I guess I’m for it.
2. I know of no such course called “Gender Studies” in Lucia Mar. I could be wrong. But if you removed the theme of “gender studies” from the AP European History course I taught at AGHS for nineteen years, then you’ve also removed about eight percent of the course content.
(My students would never learn, for example, that there were almost no illegitimate births in rural Tudor England. There were many, many marriages recorded in parish registers that were followed, with rapidity, by christenings. It wasn’t that young people were virtuous; it was that food was such a scarcity that community pressure forced the marriage so that responsibility would be taken for the extra mouth to feed.
(They would never about Victorian mourning customs, when middle-class widows wore black crape, highly flammable, for a year. They lived in homes lit by open gas jets.
(They’d never learn that the safety bicycle–coaster brakes–liberated Edwardian women from the whalebone corset; bicycles in turn threatened men so much that they threw rocks at parties of women cycling in the countryside. They’d never see the grainy, choppy moment of Edwardian film that shows the suffragist Emily Wilding Davison throwing herself under the King’s horse at the Derby.
(They’d never learn that the Russians whom the Nazi invaders feared the most were actually Ukrainian. They were snipers. They were women.)
But maybe studying the lives of women isn’t that important, after all.
3. As to campus security, maybe we do need a higher profile. But, God forbid, in the event of a shooting event on a local campus, you’re condemning those new district hires to death. Unless they, too, are armed with assault rifles, they don’t stand a chance against the shooter. At Uvalde, where police were armed with assault rifles, they didn’t take the chance to stop the shooter.
At any rate, I’m not sure I want my Alma Mater (AGHS ’70) to look like downtown Tijuana, where sixteen-year-olds in cheap security guard uniforms reflexively rub the trigger guards of their assault rifles. The place is crawling with them.
And there were 1,972 murders in Tijuana in 2021. So far this year, 1,500 have gone missing in Tijuana. Only some of them are Americans.
So, now that I think about it–maybe there’s another way to stop mass-casualty shooters, but we just haven’t hit on it yet– maybe I’ll move security guards a little lower down on my list of school priorities.
I keep coming back to what I taught, lessons that are embedded in some way in every discipline in every school curriculum in America.
School are places where we have the chance to teach values like these: We belong to each other, so we need to learn to cooperate with each other. Human life has value, so every human should be treated with dignity. Life has meaning, so there is reason for hope.
And, as infuriating as it can be, our system of democracy belongs to us; it, too, has value and dignity and meaning. And, God willing, it has hope.
Schools are places to learn lessons like these. They are places, too, where boys and girls have the chance, in the confines of a little second-grade classroom, to build friendships that last for life. The two little boys below were second-grade friends at Arroyo Grande Grammar School in 1926.
Good friendships build good nations.
Fifteen years later, on battleship Arizona, both were killed in action. The last day of their friendship had meaning, because losing them drove an entire generation of schoolroom friends into the war that saved democracy.
I think we owe these two little boys something. The lessons of their lives, of duty and selflessness and sacrifice, need to be woven into the lives of our children– and of children yet born, to whom we owe just as much.
In only her second day of oral arguments, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson is, to put it bluntly, dazzling.
The case in question is called Merrill v. Milligan. Bearing in mind that I am no Constitutional lawyer, this is what I understand.
The background: Alabama redrew its seven Congressional districts. Only one of the seven (as a percentage, 14% of the districts) has a Black majority. Twenty-seven percent of Alabama’s citizens are African American.
An appeals court that included two Trump appointees agreed that this deprived Black Alabamians of fair representation. The court threw out the new map, opining that an additional Black-majority Congressional district was appropriate.
Alabama appealed, arguing that 1) It cannot be proven that Alabama legislators were considering race in their redistricting and 2) the constitutionality of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which prohibits any effort to discriminate against voters of color, is in question.
In fact, they argue, because it is explicitly considers race, Section 2 violates the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment itself.
In fact, the traditional states’ rights argument has been this: The Constitution was and is meant to be color-blind, so any law that is specifically formulated on the basis of race is inherently unconstitutional.
Of course, this argument is a new one. It wouldn’t have been popular in Jim Crow Days.
So, in short, if Alabama wins its appeal, the Voting Rights Act is diluted even more than it has been..
Enter Justice Jackson. She’s addressing herself and her fellow justices, but formally her remarks are intended for Alabama’s Solicitor General. I’ll let her take over, in quotes taken from an article by journalist Travis Gettys:
“I don’t think that we can assume that just because race is taken into account that that necessarily creates an equal protection problem, Jackson began, “because I understood that we looked at the history and traditions of the Constitution and what the framers and the founders thought about, and when I drilled down to that level of analysis, it became clear to me that the framers themselves adopted the Equal Protection Clause, the 14th Amendment, the 15th Amendment, in a race-conscious way. That they were, in fact, trying to ensure that people who had been discriminated against, the freedmen, during the Reconstruction period, were actually brought equal to everyone else in society.
“Those post-Civil War amendments were explicitly drawn up and ratified to expand and protect the rights of the Black citizens who had been enslaved in Confederate states,” Jackson argued, and she backed her claims with statements made by the legislators who wrote and voted on those bills.
“I looked in the report that was submitted by the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, which drafted the 14th Amendment, and that report says that the entire point of the amendment was to secure rights of the freed former slaves,” Jackson argued. “The legislator who introduced that amendment said that, quote, ‘Unless the Constitution should restrain them, those states will all, I fear, keep up this discrimination and crush to death the hated freedmen.’
“That’s not a race-neutral or race-blind idea, in terms of the remedy, and even more than that, I don’t think that the historical record establishes that the founders believed that race neutrality or race blindness was required, right?” she continued. “They drafted the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which specifically stated that citizens would have the same civil rights as enjoyed by white citizens. That’s the point of that act, to make sure that the other citizens, the Black citizens, would have the same as the white citizens.
“They recognized that there was unequal treatment,” Jackson added. “People based on their race were being treated unequally and, importantly, when there was a concern that the Civil Rights Act wouldn’t have a constitutional foundation, that’s when the 14th Amendment came into play. It was drafted to give a constitutional foundation for a piece of legislation that was designed to make people who had less opportunity and less rights equal to white citizens.
“So with that as the framing and the background, I’m trying to understand your position that Section 2, which by its plain text is doing that same thing, is saying you need to identify people in this community who have less opportunity and less ability to participate and ensure that that’s remedied, right? It’s a race-conscious effort, as you have indicated. I’m trying to understand why that violates the Fourteenth Amendment, given the history and –and background of the Fourteenth Amendment?“
* * *
You are next on the tee, Mr. Alabama Solicitor General, sir.
I am just old enough and just prudish enough to have been repelled by Miley Cyrus’s more outlandish pranks–maybe stuff like that is now in the rearview mirror of her life.
But I am just smart enough, if a little slow, to realize that she has one of the greatest voices of her generation. Her range is incredible (contrast “Zombie” with “Jolene,” both below.)
Beyond that, there’s an intelligence and sense of empathy there. Cyrus understands what she’s singing, whether the deep grief of “Zombie” or, listen as her accent changes, faintly Appalachian, and the timber of her voice rises, sweeter and higher inside her body, in “Jolene.”
I am an older man but it still took me a moment to get past the shortness of her skirt in “Roadhouse Blues”–it was a short moment, too–to understand that she understands the Blues, including Jim Morrison’s song.
She understood, too, how to dial herself down just enough to provide the background, in David Bowie’s “Heroes,” for a moving public service ad aired during the 2021 Super Bowl.
On this day in history, in 1985, Rock Hudson died.
Ironically, I think my favorite Rock Hudson scene comes near the end of the George Stevens classic “Giant.” Hudson, as an impossibly wealthy Texas rancher, gets the living crap beat out of himself in a roadside cafe.
His character, Bick Benedict, is pigheaded, arrogant, dismissive of women and bigoted.
But in this scene–one of his grandchildren is Mexican American-he comes to the defense of a family when the cafe’s cook, Sarge, starts to throw them out. They’re Mexican.
The result is one of the most epic fight scenes, brilliantly accompanied by “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” in Hollywood history, and one that changes your opinion of Bick Benedict.
A young Mexican American poet, Tino Villanueva, wrote about that scene. Here’s an excerpt:
…how quickly [Sarge] plopped the Hat heavily askew once more on the old Man’s head, seized two fistsful of shirt and Coat and lifted his slight body like nothing,
A no-thing, who could have been any of us, Weightless nobodies bronzed by real-time far Off somewhere, not here, but in another
Country, yet here, where Rock Hudson’s face Deepens; where in one motion, swift as a Miracle, he catches Sarge off guard, grabs His arm somehow, tumbles him back against
The counter and draws fire from Sarge to Begin the fight up and down the wide screen Of memory, ablaze in Warner-color light.
A Work in Progress 