September 2016 - Page 4 of 6 - Ramblin' with Roger

Tommy Lee Jones turns 70

The Fugitive (1993) – One of my favorite movie trailers ever.

On these Facebook ads I see often, one of the questions is which actor was former Vice-President Al Gore’s roommate in college. Yes, it’s the guy from Texas, Tommy Lee Jones.

In fact, “in 1970 he landed his first film role, coincidentally playing a Harvard student in Love Story (Erich Segal, the author of Love Story, said that he based the lead character of Oliver on the two undergraduate roommates he knew while attending Harvard, Jones, and Gore).”

“At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, he presented the nominating speech for…Gore, as the Democratic Party’s nominee for President of the United States.”

He was a guest star in a bunch of dramatic shows such as Barnaby Jones and Baretta that I used to watch. But it was before I knew who Tommy Lee Jones was. I did see him in these movies, and almost always like HIM, even when the movie is not great.

Lincoln (2012) – Thaddeus Stevens. I was rather fond of his portrayal. Jones received his fourth Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actor
Hope Springs (2012) – as a part of a couple aging.
Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)
A Prairie Home Companion (2006)
Space Cowboys (2000) – a bunch of aging astronauts

Men in Black (1997) – the movie that sealed Tommy Lee Jones as a bankable actor
Batman Forever (1995) – as Two-Face / Harvey Dent
The Fugitive (1993) – One of my favorite movie trailers ever. Richard Kimble (Harrison Ford): But I’m innocent! US Marshall Samuel Gerard (Jones): I don’t CARE!” No wonder he won Best Supporting Actor for his performance
JFK (1991) – as Clay Shaw. If I’m remembering right, he was sleazily great. He earned another Oscar nomination

Lonesome Dove (TV Mini-Series, 1989) – he earned another Emmy nomination for his portrayal of Texas Ranger lawman Woodrow F. Call in the acclaimed mini-series, based on the best-seller by Larry McMurtry
The Executioner’s Song (TV Movie, 1982) as Gary Mark Gilmore. Chilling. He received an Emmy for Best Actor for his performance as the murderer in an adaptation of Norman Mailer’s book
Coal Miner’s Daughter (1980) as Doolittle Lynn; for which he earned his first Golden Globe nomination for his portrayal of country singer Loretta Lynn’s husband

Letchworth State Park: Grand Canyon of the East

Mary Jemison eventually lived in western New York on the Genesee River.

Letchworth State Park, July 17-18, 2016

When we traveled on vacation from northeast Ohio towards the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York, it was the longest time we spent continually in the car. So we were rather spent when we finally got to what has been described as the Grand Canyon of the East. In fact, by the time we drove into Letchworth State Park late that Sunday afternoon, there was no one collecting money. So we drove around, then got out of the car several times, and looked at the amazing scenery for a bit.

But we needed to get to our hotel before it got too late. So we came back the next day. As it turns out, because I’m 62 or over, with an NYS driver’s ID, we were able to get in for free!

The history of the area was fascinating to me. “The park is the present-day site of the grave of Mary Jemison, a Scots-Irish immigrant pioneer who was captured at the age of 12 from central Pennsylvania by a French and Shawnee raiding party during the French and Indian War. She was soon adopted by a family of Seneca people and eventually lived in western New York on the Genesee River. She had become thoroughly assimilated and chose to live with the Seneca for the rest of her long life.”

I can look at waterfalls for a good while, and we saw two of the three major ones in the park. Some of the picnic tables were made from stone. The playgrounds were nice, and my traveling companions liked posing in the giant chairs. Oh, and it had at least one antique: a working payphone.

Truth is, though, we didn’t come close to fully taking advantage of all the amenities, We didn’t get to the William Pryor Letchworth Museum. We didn’t walk on any of the “66 miles (106 km) of hiking trails” use the “two large swimming pools, cabins, campsites for tents, trailer sites with dumping stations, and horse-riding trails. Activities within the park include hiking, biking, fishing, whitewater rafting and kayaking, geocaching, and hunting.”

This means only one thing: we need to come back, and spend more time!

J is for scientist Joseph Henry

Joseph Henry created a program to study weather patterns in North America, a project that eventually led to the creation of the National Weather Service.

Joseph Henry (December 17, 1797 – May 13, 1878) was born in Albany, New York, to William and Ann Henry, two immigrants from Scotland. “In 1819 he was persuaded by some influential friends to pursue a more academic career, he entered Albany Academy, where he was given free tuition. He was so poor, even with free tuition, Joseph Henry had to support himself with teaching and private tutoring positions.”

Henry excelled academically. He “discovered the electromagnetic phenomenon of self-inductance,” which I shan’t attempt to explain, but it’s a big deal.

“The SI [international standard] unit of inductance, the henry, is named in his honor. Henry’s work on the electromagnetic relay was the basis of the practical electrical telegraph.”

After teaching at the precursor of Princeton University, and excelling as a scientist, he became the first Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, always working “tirelessly to support the field of American science.”

“Henry focused the Smithsonian on research, publications, and international exchanges. The system of international exchanges begins in 1849, with the Smithsonian providing a clearinghouse function for the exchange of literary and scientific works between societies and individuals in this country and abroad. Also by 1849, he created a program to study weather patterns in North America, a project that eventually led to the creation of the National Weather Service.”

The Albany (NY) School District science fair is named after Joseph Henry.

See the glass window? I view it almost every week, as it is a Tiffany creation, found in the Assembly Hall of First Presbyterian Church of Albany. Mr. Henry was baptized in the church, albeit in an earlier building.

Here is a memoir of Joseph Henry by Simon Newcomb, read in 1880, shortly after his death in his quarters in the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, DC.

ABC Wednesday – Round 19

The Phyllis Schafly legacy

Phyllis Schafly is the godmother of the current conservative movement.

When the death of Phyllis Schafly was announced, there was plenty of “Ding, dong! The witch is dead!” sentiment. I understood the feeling, though, and it wasn’t only because she was the antithesis of everything I believed about equal rights for women, being the leader of the successful anti-Equal Rights Amendment faction in the 1970s.

I had started reading Chris Mooney’s 2012 book, “The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science – and Reality” this summer, and only got 50 pages before getting too busy. Still, on page 1 of the Introduction, Equations to Refute Einstein, Mooney introduces us to Conservapedia, “the right-wing answer to Wikipedia, and ground zero for all that is scientifically inaccurate, for political reasons, on the Internet.

It was created by Andrew Schafly, “a lawyer, engineer, homeschooler, and one of six children of Phyllis Schafly.” While his mother used mailing lists and newsletters, Andrew would “marshal ‘truth'” through the web.

Conservapedia includes “items attacking evolution and global warming, wrongly claiming…that homosexuality is a choice, and incorrectly asserting… that abortion causes breast cancer.”

The site not only spends 6000 words “debunking” Einstein’s theory of relativity, but it also claims that liberals have “‘extrapolated the theory’ to favor their agendas.” Never mind that GPS, PET scans, and particle accelerators, for three, rely on an understanding of relativity.

It has fanned the flame of people operating with their own “truth” so that what I had assumed was unpoliticized “fact” often comes into question for a wealth of issues, from the identity of the President of the United States to the current status of the economy, to the United States being “Christian nation,” to evolution.

Mooney says, “The rise of the Religious Right was the epitome of conservatism on a psychological level – clutching for something certain in a changing world; wanting to preserve one’s own ways in certain times, and one’s own group in the face of difference – and cannot be explained without putting this variable into play.”

Thus Phyllis Schafly is the godmother of the current conservative movement. Both she and her son Andrew are Harvard educated. She excelled in school at a time women were not often given a chance, which would suggest a budding feminist, but she became quite the opposite.

Mooney says of Andrew: “His own words suggest that he’s arguing to reaffirm what he already thinks (his “faith”), to defend authorities he trusts, and to bolster the beliefs of his compatriots, his tribe, his team.”

And liberals, including President Obama, fail to understand the psychology of conservatives. Someone I know recently referred to him as the most arrogant President ever; this makes no sense to me at all, from my mindset. But if you see the world in a much different light – one this book that I’m only a sixth of the way through promises to explain to me – then it’s a much more plausible viewpoint.

Phyllis Schafly, more any almost anyone else, helped create the alternative world of “facts” that have made fruitful discussion of the important issues of the day so difficult to achieve.

My lesson from 9/11

But, of course, the Iraq war started anyway.

Back in 2002, there was some entity that devised a plan that people all over the country would sing the Mozart Requiem on September 11 of that year. In Albany, the performers were the group Albany Pro Musica. For that performance only, two of my fellow choir members, Gladys and Tim, and I crashed Pro Musica. On a very windy Wednesday morning, we went down to the bandstand by the Hudson River and sang. (That was probably the only day I’ve ever worn a tux to work.)

But that left me grappling – what can I do for peace? My friends Jay and Penny let me know about a peace vigil at the Capitol building just up the street from where I work, which I saw disperse. I didn’t go the next week, but on September 25, I started participating in a weekly vigil for peace, organized by some Quakers, though the participants were not all from the faith.

I knew then that we needed to stop the war from starting since Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. I attended other rallies, in addition to the Wednesday noon events. I went to NYC on February 15, 2003, to be part of the now forgotten largest protest in world history (In 2011, I supported a Kickstarter film about that date; now that it WASN’T nominated as Best Documentary, maybe I’ll FINALLY get the video this year.)

I boldly predicted that if the war were to start, in five years, there would be at least two countries where one was now, believing the Kurds, who had been all but autonomous in the 11+ years since the Gulf War, due to the northern “no-fly” zone enforced by the US and the UK, would opt out of a country so torn by sectarian tension.

But, of course, the war started anyway. I still protested, but now it was seen as even more treasonous than before, and some of the passersby let us know it. Finally, after the fall of the Saddam regime, one of the more regular complainers came over to gloat. “See, it’s over!” he crowed.

Of course, it wasn’t over. “Mission” was not “accomplished.” In fact, according to Wikipedia, by 2006, the war had had more operations than a cut-rate surgeon could perform. By then, some of the neocon warmongers have admitted that they were wrong about Iraq. Somehow, that was small comfort, after “three years, tens of thousands of Iraqi and American lives, and $200 billion – all to achieve a chaos verging on open civil war.”

At some point, during the run-up to war, someone had designed a simple white on green button that said: “Choose Peace”. I wore it on my coat regularly. When we ran out of buttons, I went out and had more made, giving them away to whoever would wear them.

This is oddly true: I STILL have some of those buttons left, 15 years later, which I will gladly give/send you, as long as you agree to wear them. The trick is: I don’t know what peace will look like anymore, at least in Iraq. And Syria. And Afghanistan…

Starting war is easy. Starting peace is tough. And don’t get me started about “freedom fries”…

2006: Remembering the Iraq War’s Pollyanna pundits. (Thanks, Dan.)

2015: 70,000 Muslim Clerics Issue Fatwa Condemning Terrorism

This is an edited repost from March 19, 2006.