Month: February 2015

“Like the Latin for fingernails”: Remembering Hesburgh

Students walked out on Pence’s commencement speech today at Notre Dame. Good. I’m reposting this piece from a few years ago because readers might be interested in the other time ND students protested a commencement speaker, Ronald Reagan in 1981.

We, the class of ’81, didn’t walk out. This year’s students look to be braver than we were….

See below.

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When it comes to the Catholic Church and the priesthood, to say that I am deeply conflicted does not begin to get at it. But reading this morning about the death, and the legacy, of Father Ted Hesburgh brought me to tears, and not for just a few seconds. I am still wiping them away.

There are two good appreciations at the Post and the Times, and I am sure hundreds more to come.

Hesburgh was outspokenly liberal and a man of ideas, who was at ease with the powerful but never a panderer to power. The Post piece ends with something of a shot at the current breed of academic CEOs:

In 2001, Father Hesburgh lamented that university presidents had become distant from public affairs.

“Once upon a time chief executives in higher education talked to the press about military policy in the same breath as the Constitutional amendment for the 18-year-old vote, but I wonder whether we’d hear them taking stands on similar topics now,” he wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

“Where we once had a fellowship of public intellectuals,” Father Hesburgh asked, “do we now have insulated chief executives intent on keeping the complicated machinery of American higher education running smoothly?”

***

I loved the “fishing, steaks and martinis” story, also from the Post piece:

President Dwight D. Eisenhower named Father Hesburgh to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission at its inception in 1957, a position he held for 15 years, immersing him in confrontations over racial discrimination.

In one of its first actions, the commission held hearings in Southern states to investigate the suppression of the black vote. When it came time to write a report to Congress, Father Hesburgh brought the commission in 1959 to Notre Dame’s Land O’Lakes retreat in Wisconsin for a day of fishing, steaks and martinis — and votes on recommendations that later influenced civil rights legislation.

Eleven proposals won unanimous support from the six commissioners, and a 12th won approval from five. The degree of consensus shocked Eisenhower.

“I told Ike that he had not appointed just Republicans and Democrats or Northerners and Southerners, he had appointed six fishermen,” Father Hesburgh recounted in “God, Country, Notre Dame,” a 1999 memoir written with Jerry Reedy. Eisenhower replied that more federal commissions should be sent to Land O’Lakes to resolve disputes.

***

What’s the difference between God and Father Hesburgh? God is everywhere. Father Hesburgh is everywhere but Notre Dame.

***

Hesburgh was an almost mythic presence at ND when I was there. My memory of my four years Under the Golden Dome, from 1977 to 1981, are pretty hazy, but I’m fairly sure I only stood face to face with the great man on two occasions.

The first time was on the very last day of the 1980 spring term. A friend and I had to drop off our housing election forms for senior year. We were stoked about going off-campus and maybe a little panicked we would be forced to pay for on-campus housing if we missed the deadline, so we trudged over to the Administration Building with our forms. It was Saturday and the building was locked up tight. For some reason we banged on the basement door. Nothing. We turned to leave. Then, footsteps. And yes, Father Ted himself threw open the door.

We yammered something about our housing forms and he was all, “Yes, yes, of course. I’ll take them,” and he invited us to introduce ourselves. My friend Chris stuck out his hand and it turned out Hesburgh was on a first-name basis with Chris’ older brother and father, both alums. Chris and Father Ted shot the breeze for a few more minutes and then a lull came and it was my turn to say something.

I blurted out: “Uh, um, I’m Tim Ungs, from Minneapolis.”

He paused a beat, then gazed down at the back of his hand, and said pensively, “Ah, Ungs… like the Latin for fingernails….”

***

My second face-to-face was when Father Ted handed me my diploma at commencement.

Like maybe a couple hundred other students I had white tape on my graduation cap in tepid protest of Ronald Reagan’s being invited as the commencement speaker (also on hand were Pat O’Brien and Kurt Waldheim).

Reagan’s being chosen as speaker was, in retrospect, not at all unusual. If Hesburgh’s status as America’s preeminent Catholic gave him the sway to have every president come to campus  when he calls them, well, why not Reagan?

gippnolip

But I think people forget how polarizing Reagan was in his day, and his being guest of honor at commencement (his first public appearance since the attempted assassination) divided the campus. That polarization even made it into this history of commencement ceremonies from the Notre Dame alumni magazine.

 Vocal protests against Reagan’s presence at Notre Dame created an especially tense atmosphere. “Every liberal advocacy group, including many from the Catholic left, had been waiting for an opportunity to protest what they considered Reagan’s lack of concern for society’s marginalized members,” [Richard] Conklin [former University spokesman] recalls. More than 1,500 protesters marched outside the Joyce Center while Reagan spoke. Inside, a few students reportedly wore white arm bands and covered their mortar boards with white paper.

Reportedly? I was one of them and we were more than a few.

I remember fairly vividly one gathering at the end of April protesting the savagery of Reagan’s policies, many of which, sadly, have since become mainstream. What made the rally stand out in my memory was that a group of student counter-demonstrators came forward, shouted, and pelted the speakers with eggs. I remember one student was reading poetry in her father’s Notre Dame letter sweater when the eggs rained down. English professor Joseph Buttigieg (whose son is now mayor of South Bend) was treated especially badly as I remember. He contrasted the decorous manifesto of the Students Concerned about Commencement with the counter-protesters’ “Don’t Give the Gipp No Lipp” banner (“a poster made up of mono-syllabids”).

openletterreagan

protest-hilites

That’s a distillation of my memory of Notre Dame. A small core of passionate progressive people in a generally reactionary environment. That Hesburgh managed to make the university as open-minded as it has become is a testament largely to his energy and powerful personality. Hesburgh didn’t have to embrace civil rights, didn’t have to transfer university governance to a board of lay trustees, didn’t have to be first to admit women undergraduates, didn’t have to battle the Vatican and assert the “Catholic university must have a true autonomy and academic freedom in the face of authority of whatever kind, lay or clerical, external to the academic community itself.”

He didn’t have to. But he did. RIP Father Ted.

 

The book of laughter and forgetting

***

At 7:31, I looked up and said, “It’s 7:31” at the same time Lila ran in from the kitchen, shouting, “It’s 7:31.” Heather popped her head out of the bedroom: “7:31, everybody.” It was 7:31.

 ***
Call me shallow but I really enjoyed this. Christina’s impressions of Britney and Cher were spot-on. Jimmy Fallons’s Bowie wasn’t bad either. And the Roots are the Roots. I would totally watch a weekly series in which celeb singers mimic one another. I watch the Voice with the family most Mondays, and have to admit to enjoying the bickering among the judges more than the performances of the contestants. It brings up warm memories of watching the Match Game with my mom on a little black and white tv.
***

I was writing yesterday about how the basic assumption of a U.S. official in a press conference is that there is no history. So, for example, any suggestion that the U.S. is involved, directly or indirectly, in trying to overthrow the Maduro government in Venezuela is outrageous on its face. The ability of reporters or the general public to search for Venezuela Coup 2002 — well, let’s pretend that’s impossible.

Another egregious example of this History Starts Now, or At Least When I Say was John Kerry yesterday baldly stating, without an iota of self-awareness, that Bibi Netanyahu can’t be trusted because of his support for the 2002 invasion of Iraq.

“The prime minister was profoundly forward-leaning and outspoken about the importance of invading Iraq under George W. Bush,” Kerry replied. “We all know what happened with that decision.”

It was a peculiar decision on the part of TPM writer Catherine Thompson not to mention a fairly obvious bit of context:

Of course, Kerry voted for the war in Iraq in 2002 and said he was for the invasion during his presidential campaign against George W. Bush in 2004.

I’m beginning to think the war on AP History in Kansas is not an idea from the fringe. This hatred of history is simply a core part of what makes American thought American.

That “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards”

Yesterday’s pronouncement from the New York Times editorial board on “Conspiracy Claims in Venezuela”:

Listening to embattled President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela ramble for hours about an international right-wing conspiracy to oust him, it’s clear that he would use any fabricated pretext to jail opposition leaders and crack down on dissent.

The language is pretty remarkable. I find it amazing that, when it comes to officially designated enemies of the U.S., the usually measured tones of the editorial board give way to open contempt, more fitting for Hush Hush, the lurid tabloid published by the Danny DeVito character in L.A. Confidential. Or at any rate the New York Post.

Let’s just look at a few of the words the Times uses to describe Maduro’s government and recent actions.

  • government’s claims … outlandish repression of critics even more vicious
  • Delcy Rodríguez, the country’s foreign minister, weighed in with an absurd detail
  • Mr. Maduro’s fears of a coup appear to be a diversion strategy by a maniacal statesman
  • In contrast, Mr. “Ledezma, a democratically elected official [insinuating that Maduro isn’t!? what?] who has, so far, responded with remarkable stoicism

In Counterpunch, Chris Gilbert, professor of political science at the Universidad Bolivariana de Venezuela, paints a rather different picture of Ledezma:

… regardless of how the question is resolved, the Venezuelan masses are highly satisfied with Ledezma’s arrest, as any reasonable person should be, since the mayor is responsible for huge human rights crimes in the past: most recently as a participant in the 2002 coup attempt that led to considerable bloodshed and earlier as the Federal District Governor who directed state troops which assassinated as many as 4000 civilians during the Caracazo uprising of 1989.

The Times editorial dutifully submits this incredulous statement from the State Department:

“We regret that the Venezuelan government continues to blame the United States or other members of the international community for events inside Venezuela…”

This takes disingenuousness to dizzying heights. It’s as if there is no such thing as history, as if the United States would never dream of intervening in a Latin American country, as if Operation Condor never happened… as if 9/11 never happened…. to Chile!

All states are coercive and thuggish, especially, as appears to be the case in Venezuela, when their very existence is threatened. I’m not defending what the Maduro government is doing, although it seems possible the repression is exaggerated. But I would be more impressed with the Times editorial board if once in a while it used some of those harsh pejorative words to describe the actions of U.S. allies, some of whom have even been known to misbehave from time to time. Say, an Egypt, an Israel, a Saudi Arabia, a Guatemala….

***

Or, you may say, yes, we were brutal in Latin America back in the day, but … you know … ancient history. In Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card at Tomdispatch, Alfred W. McCoy offers a vivid and sweeping picture of the United States’ “do as I say, not as I do” approach to sovereignty and human rights, which is stronger today than it has ever been. And thanks to improvements in drone technology, lethal meddling in the affairs of previously sovereign nations is a major growth industry!

“The sovereign is he who decides on the exception,” said conservative thinker Carl Schmitt in 1922, meaning that a nation’s leader can defy the law to serve the greater good. Though Schmitt’s service as Nazi Germany’s chief jurist and his unwavering support for Hitler from the night of the long knives to Kristallnacht and beyond damaged his reputation for decades, today his ideas have achieved unimagined influence. They have, in fact, shaped the neo-conservative view of presidential power that has become broadly bipartisan since 9/11. Indeed, Schmitt has influenced American politics directly through his intellectual protégé Leo Strauss who, as an émigré professor at the University of Chicago, trained Bush administration architects of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz and Abram Shulsky.

All that should be impressive enough for a discredited, long dead authoritarian thinker. But Schmitt’s dictum also became a philosophical foundation for the exercise of American global power in the quarter century that followed the end of the Cold War. Washington, more than any other power, created the modern international community of laws and treaties, yet it now reserves the right to defy those same laws with impunity. A sovereign ruler should, said Schmitt, discard laws in times of national emergency. So the United States, as the planet’s last superpower or, in Schmitt’s terms, its global sovereign, has in these years repeatedly ignored international law, following instead its own unwritten rules of the road for the exercise of world power.

Just as Schmitt’s sovereign preferred to rule in a state of endless exception without a constitution for his Reich, so Washington is now well into the second decade of an endless War on Terror that seems the sum of its exceptions to international law: endless incarceration, extrajudicial killing, pervasive surveillance, drone strikes in defiance of national boundaries, torture on demand, and immunity for all of the above on the grounds of state secrecy. Yet these many American exceptions are just surface manifestations of the ever-expanding clandestine dimension of the American state. Created at the cost of more than a trillion dollars since 9/11, the purpose of this vast apparatus is to control a covert domain that is fast becoming the main arena for geopolitical contestation in the twenty-first century.

Read the whole thing. Really, it’s quite terrific.

***

The title of this piece comes from the McCoy essay. I quite liked the phrase:

All of the exceptions [to its own rules] that really matter spring from America’s decision to join what former spy John Le Carré called that “squalid procession of vain fools, traitors… sadists, and drunkards,” and embrace espionage in a big way after World War II.

Winter and bovine burden blues

Was on a streak of virtuous activity there but my blogging ground to a halt when we got whacked by the weather the past couple of weeks. First, a blizzard, then bitter cold, then a slushy “wintry mix” from the nasty weather salad bar. Next, locusts, probably.

We live out in the country, and our driveway is nearly a quarter mile long. Getting in and out to the road is never a given. I have a herd of 35 cattle and I have no way to check on them with snow on the ground (and there is still quite a bit) other than trudging out there. But they seem fine, and I have an indispensable neighbor who has moved in my hay when needed, back scraped the driveway, and pulled my stuck 2-wheel drive station wagon out of snowbanks I’d driven into.

I’m not complaining too much. It COULD have been worse. Touch wood, we have not had any issues with pipes bursting. So there’s that.

During the coldest nights I thought it best to pack the wife and kids off to town, where the kids could hang out with their friends and Heather could get some quiet time. She is much more prone to stir-crazy than I. It was my job to keep firewood stacked and drying inside, and to monitor all the faucet dripping configurations.  I’m well stocked with food, beer and bourbon, and the Internet and satellite TV are operational, so this SHOULD be a good time for someone like me, but for the burden of a two-week old calf I’ve brought into the house.

Cow whispering at the Henson-Ungs.

A video posted by Heather Henson (@hensonbooks) on

The gentle big red cow with the horns–for it is from she this problem calf comes–has become a very troublesome animal. Twice in the past two years we had to trailer her in to the vet to fix (temporarily) her problematic hooves. I would have been happy just to sell her when she got lame the second time, but for the fact that she had a calf in her. My thinking was to let her have the calf, and sell the cow after it’s weaned. Finally, she calved nearly three weeks ago, but couldn’t or wouldn’t feed it.

We had just lost a calf to a similar situation. The mother had mastitis or poorly formed udders, or irritable udders, or something, but we found this calf a bit sooner, so were able to get it to the vet in time to save its life. On day one the vet fed the second calf electrolytes through an esophageal tube, and sent her home and told me to do the same, and to follow up the electrolytes with milk replacer, three times a day.

I had no experience with the tube and was terrified to use it myself. Among the things that can go wrong: 1. sticking the tube into the windpipe and killing the calf immediately and 2. killing it gradually via pneumonia. The first time I fed successfully I was pretty sure I had killed her, but she is still kicking after four days of thrice-daily tubings. On the fifth day, she started to lap up milk replacer from a bowl. She did this messily, something between splashing milk around randomly and actually ingesting it, but it became clear she is getting some down into her, and I could let up with the tube….

The problem is that she is feeding incredibly slowly. The first quart of the morning takes two hours or more for her to consume, and we’re lucky to get her to take another pint after that. She isn’t getting what she should but is strengthening, and becoming willful. Yesterday, I had the dubious notion that she needed exercise and a chance to keep contact with the herd, so I set her outside and she immediately ran to mama.

The calf went straight for the udders, and … mama continued to pull away. She was in other respects quite attentive and motherly to the calf, just failing in the crucial category of KEEPING HER CHILD ALIVE. After half an hour of re-bonding I gathered the calf up and brought her inside again but she was now determined to get back to her mother. I’m pretty sure her sleeping outside in 6-degree weather would kill her, so I’m just putting up with the incessant bawling for mama. Also, putting up with Heather’s slowly building simmer. (I had originally said we’d have the calf inside for a couple of nights. We are now on night 6)….

I don’t know where this ends. It’s by no means clear that this calf will survive. If she does, though, I don’t know when and how it will work. The ideal thing would be for her to join the herd and find a cow that lets her feed along with her own calf. If not, I’ll be having to feed the calf morning and night. Knowing now what kinds of labor saving this calf requires, I wonder if I would do it over again. But having started, it’s impossible to keep from doing everything in my power to keep the little monster alive.

Merle or Bob, Marcia or Laurie

hag_brady_bunch

Apparently, Bob Dylan gave a speech the other night that was generally well received, but made headlines for a couple of digs Mr. Zimmerman directed at some of his musical peers. Dylan said some condescending things about Leiber & Stoller and Tom T. Hall and had this to say about Merle Haggard:

“[He] didn’t even think much of my songs. I know he didn’t. He didn’t say that to me, but I know way back when he didn’t. Buck Owens did, and he recorded some of my early songs,” Dylan said. “Together Again, that’s Buck Owens. And that trumps anything else out of Bakersfield. Buck Owens or Merle Haggard, if you had to have somebody’s blessing, you can figure it out.”

This is a pretty juvenile thing, if you ask me. But who doesn’t like a good manufactured controversy? Alas, Merle did not take the bait.

Growing up in the 60s and 70s I remember all the false binaries of the day. The great fault lines: Beatles or Stones, Lennon or McCartney, Ginger or Mary Anne, MARCIA BRADY or LAURIE PARTRIDGE!!!! Was this kind of thinking symptomatic of adolescence or did it have something to do with the era itself? Maybe it is something in Boomer DNA?

One can only speculate what went through Dylan’s mind when he chose to call out the only living songwriter whose body of work eclipses his (and hey, maybe that’s the reason right there).  Here’s my blinding glimpse of the obvious for everybody: You don’t have to choose one or the other.  You can have your Haggard and Dylan too! Still, it’s a little saddening to have any kind of harsh words between these two Giants of American Song.

Allow me to imagine this dream scenario: Dylan, seeing his words in print and realizing they were a bit harsh, reaches out to Haggard and they make a record together. I see an opportunity here.

***

While we’re on the subject of the Merle, want to share this fascinating find from a 1972 documentary (terrible quality, alas) featuring Haggard wandering through an abandoned labor camp. What swagger the dude had back then!

“You should just do what’s right”: Dean Smith, the death penalty and desegregation

Dean Smith was more than simply a basketball coach.

The great basketball coach Dean Smith died this weekend. His coaching prowess was legendary. Less widely known was the fact that Smith was also a committed and vocal advocate of progressive causes.

Writing in the Nation, Dave Zirin celebrates Smith’s passionate opposition to the death penalty:

Current approval of the death penalty in the US is at its lowest level in 40 years, but is still favored by 63% of the population. Dean Smith opposed capital punishment publicly his entire life, even when support for it nationally was over 80% and even in a state where the death penalty was a matter of bipartisan consensus. Smith often invoked his religious beliefs to explain his opposition to capital punishment, but he had to go beyond the realm of the religious to explain his opposition in North Carolina, where pro-death row politicians have never been shy about using the Bible as justification for the noose. Therefore, Dean Smith also spoke about the racism that infests death row cases. He spoke about his fears that the innocent could be killed. He spoke about the system of capital punishment being, in his words, “barbaric.” As he once said, “If it’s a deterrent, as some people say, why don’t they hold the execution in a shopping mall so everyone can attend?”

He also never hesitated speaking truth to power. This was never clearer than in 2003 when Coach Smith was part of a delegation visiting North Carolina’s governor Jim Hunt, pleading for the life of a mentally ill death row prisoner named John Noland. Smith had met Noland on one of his trips to “the row.” As reported by Bonnie DeSimone of The Chicago Tribune, Smith erupted at Hunt, saying, “You’re a murderer!” He then stuck out his finger at Hunt’s apparatchiks saying, “And you’re a murderer—and I’m a murderer. The death penalty makes us all murderers.”

In Mother Jones, Ian Gordon cites a passage from a Washington Post piece, written by John Feinstein, on how Smith more or less single-handedly desegregated Chapel Hill restaurants:

One of the people I interviewed for the story was Rev. Robert Seymour, who had been Smith’s pastor at the Binkley Baptist Church since 1958, when he first arrived in Chapel Hill. Seymour told me a story about how upset Smith was to learn that Chapel Hill’s restaurants were still segregated. He and Seymour came up with an idea: Smith would walk into a restaurant with a black member of the church.

“You have to remember,” Reverend Seymour said. “Back then, he wasn’t Dean Smith. He was an assistant coach. Nothing more.” [emphasis mine.]

Smith agreed and went to a restaurant where management knew him. He and his companion sat down and were served. That was the beginning of desegregation in Chapel Hill.

When I circled back to Smith and asked him to tell me more about that night, he shot me an angry look. “Who told you about that?” he asked.

“Reverend Seymour,” I said.

“I wish he hadn’t done that.”

“Why? You should be proud of doing something like that.”

He leaned forward in his chair and in a very quiet voice said something I’ve never forgotten: “You should never be proud of doing what’s right. You should just do what’s right.”

 ***

 By way of context, there is this 2009 remembrance from Tim Bassett, who played basketball for Georgia in the late 60s and early 70s, describing his interaction with one of Smith’s coaching contemporaries:

The first time Bassett and the Bulldogs played Kentucky was a home game on Jan. 17, 1972. Georgia won that game, 85-73. Bassett had 27 points and 13 rebounds. After the game, the legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp approached Bassett.

“He said I didn’t belong in the Southeast Conference, and he said, ‘We’ll get you back when you come to Lexington,’ ” Bassett said.

When the Bulldogs went to Lexington a month later, they entered the gym to find Bassett hanging in effigy from the ceiling. Stunned, Bassett’s teammates offered not to play the game if Bassett were too uncomfortable there. A motivated Bassett played anyway and had 17 points and 17 rebounds, but Georgia lost, 87-63.

After the game, Bassett wanted to let Rupp know just how he felt about Rupp’s allowing the effigy in Kentucky’s gym. He went searching for Rupp’s office but was stopped before he could get there.

“I just wanted to let him know that I was a man, and I was just trying to figure why he felt it was O.K. to disrespect anybody in that way,” Bassett said. “What was his mind-set? This is a leader of men, you know, all these years, and for him to allow that, it just didn’t make sense.”

Bassett never had the chance to speak his mind to Rupp. That was the final time Bassett faced Rupp’s Wildcats. Rupp retired after that season.

A good place to remember that, to this day, the Kentucky Wildcats still play their games in Rupp Arena.

Friday: Apollonia van Ravenstein, Joe Tex, cows and dogs

For no good reason, I’m determined to update dowackado more or less daily, until I decide not to.

I’ve decided not to be outraged by anything in the news today.

This morning dawned pretty crisp. 15 degrees when I got up to stoke the wood stove. I helped a neighbor farmer move, tag, deworm and vaccinate his heifers. I enjoy that kind of work, but a couple of times, I started to think about all the things that could go wrong standing ankle-deep in muck in a small pen with 13 slightly wild-eyed 1,300-pound aurochs. Working cattle with three seems infinitely easier than with two. Someones you stand around for a bit and wish you had warmer footwear, but other times the third man just makes the operation smoother, less stressful, less dangerous. There’s also plenty of time to compare notes, and to argue. Sammy said he had just read it was a bad idea to de-worm this time of year. Dave said he had read that article but thought the article was about de-lousing, and not de-worming. They agreed to disagree and Dave went ahead and de-wormed anyway.

Got home, had a bite, and went for a walk with the two dogs out to where the cows were, which turned out to be a hike of a couple miles, there and back and not exactly in a straight line. It had warmed up a fair bit by noon so the walk was a pleasant one. The puppy even behaved herself among the cows, and for the first time a majority of the cows didn’t get up when she sniffed among them, tail wagging. (Usually, she obeys her herding instinct in clumsy and aggressive ways.)  The dogs enjoy a long walk like nothing else, and their joy rubs off on their master. I think of the Peanuts cartoon when Charlie  Brown quits school and wants to devote his life to making his dog happy. That makes sense to me on long walks.

Here are a couple of randomly groovy images I stumbled upon today.

The Small Faces in 1966.

Here Come The Nice Book 12_sm

And keeping retro, two images of Apollonia van Ravenstein, who is the most perfectly named human being in the history of the planet.

appolonia2appoloniaAnd three musical interludes, one from the year of my birth, the Fleetwoods with a kind of anachronistically minimalist and haunting Come Softly to Me:

And then there’s this one from Jewel, who was, I believe, just 16 when she recorded this. There has to be a name for the kind of song that was ubiquitous in its day, but a decade or two later is all but forgotten. This is a wonderful song and performance, with a terrible music video. Kind of dated, but kind of wow as well…

and finally, this Joe Tex jam. Is it a curiosity or a classic? Can it be both? “You got Mississippi written all over you…”

New York, City of my dreams

Did any filmmaker do dreams better than Bunuel?

***

Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories.
Calvino, Invisible Cities

***

I loved this piece about Joe Franklin. In 1988 I was a bicycle messenger in New York. Once, I had to make a delivery to his surreal office. It was in a different building then (West 42nd Street, I believe), but this description is spot on:

It had actually been closer to ten, but not much had changed to alter this magazine’s assessment, in 1971, of Franklin’s then office: “If it were a person, it would be a bum.” The new space had no windows and was filled with ephemera: a “Legally Blonde 2” DVD, six empty shipping boxes, two Christmas stockings, a bar of soap in the shape of a hot dog, two stuffed animals (rabbit, Dalmatian), and a healthy portion of Franklin’s collection of a hundred thousand vaudeville records. Stacks of 16-mm. film reels began on the floor and stopped near the ceiling. “Know who had a desk like mine?” Franklin asked, seated behind several piles that seemed like they might conceal a desk. “Albert Einstein.”

 ***

The family and I will be returning to visit New York at the end of the month. Last night, I dreamed I was already there. I was alone on the subway with not a dime in my pocket. The train pulled into DeKalb Avenue and I had a choice of dozens of transfers, none of which went where I wanted to go. I scurried over the overpass and back a few times, and finally gave up on catching a train. Once on the surface a couple of kids tried to sell me pot. I shouted something vulgar at them and ran. They gave chase, and one of them caught up and ripped my pink plaid scarf (actually, Heather’s) off my neck. I jumped into a cab that already had three passengers. Every building in downtown Brooklyn was a high rise gilded in neon like Tokyo or Hong Kong. There were ferris wheels as tall as skyscrapers on every block. Fifth Avenue was all restaurants and bars open to the street, like Broadway in Nashville. I made it home, to our old apartment, a top-floor of a brownstone on Seventh Avenue. The place had not changed. Heather was home but I couldn’t see her, and we conversed through the walls.

“so that you can’t tell cattle from human”

This is the kind of thing I expected to read this morning.

I also expected this from Glenn Greenwald. I happen to agree there is value in describing the horror and brutality, on a much larger scale, of the grotesque (intended) effects of our superior body-charring and -exploding technology. (Fire and/or ice, we have it covered.) First surprise was that the conversation surrounding Greenwald’s linking tweet was, as of 9:23 a.m. ET, surprisingly civil. There were the predictable howls of “false equivalence” but all in all a mild substantive conversation. This is not a twitter I recognize. (But the day is young.)

I will paste in a brief excerpt from the Greenwald piece, itself an excerpt from the Stanford/NYU “Living Under Drones” report.

The most immediate consequence of drone strikes is, of course, death and injury to those targeted or near a strike. The missiles fired from drones kill or injure in several ways, including through incineration[3], shrapnel, and the release of powerful blast waves capable of crushing internal organs. Those who do survive drone strikes often suffer disfiguring burns and shrapnel wounds, limb amputations, as well as vision and hearing loss. . . .

In addition, because the Hellfire missiles fired from drones often incinerate the victims’ bodies, and leave them in pieces and unidentifiable, traditional burial processes are rendered impossible. As Firoz Ali Khan, a shopkeeper whose father-in-law’s home was struck, graphically described, “These missiles are very powerful. They destroy human beings . . .There is nobody left and small pieces left behind. Pieces. Whatever is left is just little pieces of bodies and cloth.” A doctor who has treated drone victims described how “[s]kin is burned so that you can’t tell cattle from human.” When another interviewee came upon the site of the strike that killed his father, “[t]he entire place looked as if it was burned completely, so much so that even [the victims’] own clothes had burnt. All the stones in the vicinity had become black.”

Also read with  a deep sigh that King Abdullah puffed up his feathers, quoted a Clint Eastwood movie (not specified), and said “The only problem we’re going to have is running out of fuel and bullets.” Apparently “nobody” Sajida al-Rishawi, has already been hanged.

“She was seen as a dupe, even if she showed no remorse, it’s not like she exuded a lot of ideological energy, none at all, in fact,” said Joost Hiltermann, who is in charge of the Middle East for the International Crisis Group. “People see her as a very lesser person.”

The cycle of executions and reprisals is just getting started, it would appear. Last night I read, for the umpteenth time, Frank O’Connor’s short story, “Guests of the Nation,” in which a small group of rebels in a rural backwater hold a pair of British prisoners during the Irish Civil War. The rebels and the prisoners get along famously, play cards and argue religion, and then word comes down the prisoners are to be shot. The narrator Bonaparte does the deed. The final paragraphs destroy me every time I read them:

oconnor

 

 

Sentimentality and mean tweets

Wanted to share this snippet from Chris Hedges’ Killing Ragheads for Jesus, mainly because of the counterintuitive but brilliant James Baldwin definition of sentimentality:

Kyle was able to cling to childish myth rather than examine the darkness of his own soul and his contribution to the war crimes we carried out in Iraq. He justified his killing with a cloying sentimentality about his family, his Christian faith, his fellow SEALs and his nation. But sentimentality is not love. It is not empathy. It is, at its core, about self-pity and self-adulation. That the film, like the book, swings between cruelty and sentimentality is not accidental.

“Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” James Baldwin reminded us. “The wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.”

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Trying to crank out a post every day, but can’t get a handle on the news today. My twitter feed is still full of ruminations on the Super Bowl and anti-vaxxers. I got nothin’ really, but this Jimmy Kimmel bit with celebs reading mean tweets about themselves is actually really good….

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