February 2015 - Page 4 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Presidents Day 2015

Q: Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family?

President Calvin Coolidge was designated Chief Leading Eagle of the Sioux tribe when he was adopted as the first white chief of the tribe at the celebration of the 51st anniversary of the settlement of Deadwood, South Dakota, August 9, 1927. This designation came as a result of Coolidge signing the Indian Citizen Act on June 2, 1924, which granted “full U.S. citizenship to America’s indigenous peoples.”

The bill happened in part as a result of World War I when “The Indian, though a man without a country…, threw himself into the struggle to help throttle the unthinkable tyranny of the Hun.”

I was unfamiliar with this picture until I saw it on the news around Christmas 2014, when it mentioned the risk of Chief Executives wearing things on their heads other than hats, and cited the headdress that the current President was wearing recently, pictured below.
***
Speaking of World War I, from Now I Know:

One of the more positive aspects of American presidential politics is the relatively orderly, entirely peaceful succession process. Every four years, on the Tuesday after the first Monday of November, voters across the nation go to the polls and cast their ballots. Those votes are translated into votes for… electors, and a few weeks later, those electors cast the votes which actually determine who is going to be inaugurated into the office of the President… Even though the campaign can be acrimonious, to date at least, no sitting president has ever attempted to disrupt this process.

But there was, almost, an exception. In 1916, incumbent President Woodrow Wilson faced a challenge from Republican Charles Evans Hughes…

Which US presidents have won the Nobel Peace Prize?

Secretaries of State who became President:

Thomas Jefferson (3) under George Washington (1)
James Madison (4) under Jefferson (3)
James Monroe (5) under Madison (4)
John Quincy Adams (6) under Monroe (5)
Martin Van Buren (8) under Andrew Jackson (7)
James Buchanan (15) under James K. Polk (11)

And none since unless Hillary gets elected President.

From The Weird, Embarrassing, Fascinating Things People Asked Librarians Before the Internet:
Q: Has the gun with which Oswald shot President Kennedy been returned to the family?
A: No. It’s at the National Archives and Records Administration building in College Park, Maryland.

Lyndon Johnson was a civil rights hero. But also a racist.
***
I’ve wondered why Bill Clinton, only the second President in American history to be impeached, got to be so popular by the end of his second term. I think Dan Savage of Savage Love hit upon it:

Here’s the takeaway from the Bill and Monica story: An out-of-control special prosecutor appointed to investigate the suicide of a White House aide wound up “exposing” a series of [sex acts] that President Bill Clinton got from a White House intern. Problematic power differential, yes, but consenting adults just the same. Politicians and pundits and editorial boards called on Clinton to resign after the affair was made public, because the American people, they insisted, had lost all respect for Clinton. He couldn’t possibly govern after the [detailed sex acts], and the denials (“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”). Clinton refused to resign and wound up getting impeached by an out-of-control GOP-controlled Congress…

But guess what? The American people weren’t [ticked] at Clinton. Clinton’s approval ratings shot up. People looked at what was being done to Clinton — a special prosecutor with subpoena powers and an unlimited budget asking Clinton under oath about his sex life—and thought, “…I would hate to have my privacy invaded like that.” People’s sympathies were with Clinton, not with the special prosecutor, not with the GOP-controlled/out-of-control Congress.

Presidential Libraries and Museums for every President from Herbert Hoover through George W. Bush

Handsome Franklin Pierce by Nik Durga

Behind the Presidents: at Mount Rushmore

The youngest Presidents: 26, 35, 42, 18, 44, 22, 14, 20, 11, 13
***
Lots of different “worst” lists:

Indian-Killer Andrew Jackson Deserves Top Spot on List of Worst U.S. Presidents

10 reasons why Ronald Reagan was the worst president of our lifetime

The Worst Presidents, which includes all the Presidents between #9 and #18, except #11 and #16; plus three 20th century picks

The song Strange Fruit, and lynching in America

My near-relative Arnold linked to several versions of Strange Fruit, including one by Billie Holiday,

I groaned when an Austin, TX public relations firm used “Strange Fruit” as part of its name before changing it last year. The headline said that “some say” was was “racially insensitive.” I’d say so.

As Wikipedia notes, the song Strange Fruit “protested American racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans.”

The Equal Justice Institute (EJI) released a report in February 2015 about lynching in the United States between 1877 to 1950.

Their research indicates that “hundreds more of African American men, women, and children were lynched during that time period than previously thought, bringing the number of victims to nearly 4,000.”

At some point, I may have linked to this 2012 story of the man behind the song. Here are the lyrics.

Annie Lennox did a cover of Strange Fruit which caused some controversy in 2014, though I was not bothered personally.

My near-relative Arnold linked to several versions, including one by Billie Holiday, with whom the song may be most associated. Listen also to Cassandra Wilson’s take.

Surely, the song The Hanging Tree, from the movie The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, borrows thematically from Strange Fruit.
***

The EJI data fueled this New York Times map of 73 Years of Lynchings from 1877 to 1950 in 12 Southern states.

From the EJI report:

Lynching was a form of terrorism used against Blacks during that time period, where mobs of Whites would hang, burn, shoot, and beat Blacks to death as a form of intimidation and control.

One of those who lost their lives was soldier William Little.

An excerpt:

“The year 1919 was a time of resurgence by the Ku Klux Klan. Seventy-six Blacks lost their lives to mob violence in southern states that year. One of them, Private William Little of Blakely, Ga., was apparently lynched precisely because he was wearing his uniform.

“The accounts of the time state that a few days after being mustered out, he took a train home and was beaten by local Whites for wearing his uniform around town.

“The mob made him remove it.

“A couple of days later, he was caught wearing it again — Little protested that he had no other clothes — and was beaten to death and left at the end of town.”

The lynching and torture of blacks in the Jim Crow South weren’t just acts of racism. “They were religious rituals.”

A Black Mississippi Judge’s Breathtaking Speech To 3 White Murderers. The murder of “a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in a parking lot in Jackson, Miss., one night in 2011. They were part of a group that beat Anderson and then killed him by running over his body with a truck, yelling “white power” as they drove off.”

A tree-killing Valentine’s Day

No, I’m not sending The Wife an electronic card.

Last year at this time, New Republic published an article called Valentine’s Day Is an Environmental Travesty. It noted:

Sure, you could criticize on environmental grounds all manner of small pleasures, such as eating burgers, or driving gasoline-powered cars, or drinking frostily refrigerated beer… Yet sending a greeting card is worse as an example of personal carelessness, because its greener alternative is so painless and, indeed, so much more convenient. I don’t like veggie burgers, I can’t afford a Tesla, and I hate warm beer. But forsaking a paper greeting card for an emailed Valentine? I’m pretty sure I— as well as my family and you— could live with that.

Reason is no match for emotion, of course, so it’s no surprise that the dead-tree greeting-card industry continues to thrive.

Sentimental sap am I – guilty as charged. No, I’m not sending The Wife an electronic card. It feels too ephemeral. And if you’ve ever seen The Wife’s e-mail inbox – it had been over 1000 unread messages for a time, and is still over 800 – you might conclude that she might not even SEE my e-card.

So it’s the dead tree, carbon footprint Valentine. At least I walk to the store.

And NOT this.

Oh, I was reading the magazine Redbook in a waiting room. There’s an article in the December 2014 issue, “Things that (mostly) happy couples know” by Lisa Miller. LESSON #1: “Go looking for signs of relationship trouble in a self-help book and you’ll find them.” Makes sense to me.

Here are Top 50 ‘Love’ Songs of All Time, from Billboard magazine.

Here’s a 12-minute film Encore un Hiver.

Truth in movies

I’m not looking for documentaries in my biopics.

If you’re a big movie fan, you’ve noticed the wealth of movies that based on real-life events, including Foxcatcher, The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything, Unbroken, and Wild.

Someone named Penelope Puddlisms wrote: “I read your interesting review about the Selma movie and the issue about its accuracy. It makes me wonder why anyone would risk fudging even a small bit of the facts when every other aspect tries so painfully hard to be carefully spot on and provide a documentary feel. This happens in lots of similar movies.”

That is a reasonable question. One could ask “why” of the novelist who fictionalizes real events. A lot of the real things that happen are not very dramatic. Movies often combine characters, and tighten time frames, because the absolute, unedited factual events are often BORING.

Of course, the further from the present one is, or events that took place in remote locations, not documented by camera. Inevitably, one has to extrapolate dialogue, at least.

Beyond that, and I’m neither a novelist nor a filmmaker, I suppose, it is to make a greater point about the situation.

For example, in American Sniper, a movie I have not seen, Chris Hedges writes:

Enter The Butcher—a fictional Iraqi character created for the film. Here we get the most evil of the evildoers. He is dressed in a long black leather jacket and dispatches his victims with an electric drill. He mutilates children—we see a child’s arm he amputated. A local sheik offers to betray The Butcher for $100,000. The Butcher kills the sheik. He murders the sheik’s small son in front of his mother with his electric drill. The Butcher shouts: “You talk to them, you die with them.”

I surmise, and I’m just spitballing here, that by making the bad guy more villainous, it makes the killing of “savage, despicable evil” more justifiable, even palatable.

The Imitation Game, which I liked quite a bit, nevertheless took great liberties with many characters, as you can read in Slate. For instance:

[Christopher] Hodges [author of the book Alan Turing: The Enigma] paints Turing as shy, eccentric, and impatient with irrationality, but Cumberbatch’s narcissistic, detached Alan has more in common with the actor’s title character in Sherlock than with the Turing of Hodges’ biography. One of Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park later recalled him as “a very easily approachable man” and said “we were very very fond of him”; none of this is reflected in the film.

Why the character alteration? Perhaps because it made a more interesting story, more of a contrast with some of the other participants.

Time magazine analyzed Big Eyes, another film I appreciated. While some parts were deemed as true:

In the film, next to nobody is allowed in the Keane house for fear that they will discover Margaret’s studio and therefore the Keane secret. Though it is true that nobody—including Margaret’s daughter and their staff—was allowed in Margaret’s studio, Walter Keane would invite socialites and celebrities to their home.

I surmise that the fiction made her seem even more isolated, since “Margaret rarely met these celebs since she was painting 16 hours per day. Even when Walter left the house, he would call Margaret every hour to ensure that she hadn’t left.”

Entertainment Weekly fact-checked Theory of Everything. Stephen Hawking deemed the movie about his life with his ex-wife, “broadly true.” I liked it, but maybe if it were less true to its source, it might have been a more exciting film.

I’m not looking for documentaries in my biopics. It may be useful to check to see how much the story varies from the facts, but I certainly never felt the need to do so before seeing any film, only after the fact.

Talking “white”

“There are many anecdotes and stories of black teenagers disparaging one another for using Standard English or ‘talking white,’ which also tends to come with accusations of ‘acting white.'”

There’s an interview with Larry Wilmore, former Daily Show with Jon Stewart “senior black correspondent,” who is now hosting “The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore,” on Comedy Central, taking the slot vacated by The Colbert Show when Steve Colbert agreed to replace David Letterman on CBS later this year.

The bits that jumped out at me were these:

Growing up mainly in a white environment, I knew I was always different, too…

One of my early stand-up bits was called “Black Away.” A friend of mine was on the phone trying to rent an apartment. If you hear him talking, you know he’s a brother, and all he got was, “No, no, no.” Then I called the same place, using my nonbrother voice, and suddenly there were vacancies. So I wrote a bit called “Black Away,” where if you buy this product that takes the black out of your voice, you can do all these things. I wrote that in 1984.

One of the things I had to deal with A LOT when growing up was the notion that I didn’t sound “black enough,” whatever that meant. In the First Ward in Binghamton, NY, which was predominately Slavic, my sister Leslie and I knew every black kid in K-6, mostly because there were only about a half dozen of us: Connie and Lauren, and their cousin Walter; Philip; Bonnie; Robert; maybe one or two others who came and went.

The grief I got was mostly from young black people, most from the parts of town with a greater African-American concentration. Though occasionally, I’d run into a white dude who wanted to show how cool he was, at my expense. (These were sometimes the same guys who wanted to show me how much darker their skin was than mine when they had a tan.)

I’m hardly the only one. In the article ‘Talking white’ at home vs. ‘talking white’ at the office, a pertinent section: “There are many anecdotes and stories of black teenagers disparaging one another for using Standard English or ‘talking white,’ which also tends to come with accusations of ‘acting white.'”

For the first six years in my current job, we dealt with business advisers from all over the country, taking their questions on the phone. Then many of us would go to the annual conference. I could quickly tell when people saw me and realized that their mental picture of me was, let’s say, faulty.

In general, white people struggled to act cool, trying badly to stifle their shock, as though it were no big deal. Black people were surprised too, but in general, in a pleased way: “Hey, Roger’s a BROTHER. Who knew?”

Sometimes, I wonder if my lack of ebonic lingo made some white people of my acquaintance feel more…comfortable. “He’s black, but he doesn’t ‘talk’ black.” Trust me, this was, and occasionally still is a double-edged sword.

I came across this listing for a book, Talking “White”, which “is a collection of lyric poetry that takes a hard look at the intra-cultural bullying that takes place within the African American community. With poems like ‘Ostracized’ ‘Keeping it Real’ and ‘The Post-Black Manifesto’ Maria James-Thiaw skillfully brings cultural identity politics to light.”

Sounds like a book I would definitely relate to.