March 2021 - Page 2 of 7 - Ramblin' with Roger

Lydster: advantage of having a child “later”

At least, I know who Robert was.

I have this friend Fred, whose parents were about 40 when he was born. In an apparent act of hubris, I didn’t have my child until I was a decade older than that.

I suppose the advantage of having a child “later” in life is that I suppose I am more patient. Hey, I’m not saying totally cool, but better than if I’d been younger.

One cool thing is that I get to hear music I might not have heard. Some of it I even like.

I get her perspective on the issues of the day. She’s been watching the news since she was nine. Of course, she now consumes in a manner that I generally don’t, on the phone. She is savvy enough to ask what of it is real and what is bogus.

Issues such as Black Lives Matter, and race generally, are of great interest to her. She’s passionate about helping others, participating in a monthly food drive. Saving the earth is very important, and she can cite statistics about how much more environmentally damaging meat is. She’s almost entirely a vegetarian.

We often have similar sensibilities. She and I enjoy bananas far less ripe than my wife does. Our sense of time is about the same. I’m the one she’ll usually tell certain stories about school experiences.

Torture

On the other hand, she knows there’s a lot of current mundane pop culture stuff that my brain simply refuses to absorb. So she’ll learn it and then test me on it.

Her current torture involves the Kardashians. Who are they, what are their kids’ names, etc.? For instance, she has told me, that the father of Khloe Kardashian’s baby True is Tristan Thompson. Then 15 minutes later, I won’t remember which Kardashian is a parent to which child. I don’t care, she knows I don’t care, and she has great fun with it.

It’s a joy to be her dad. But don’t tell her I said so.

The trials of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’

Leadbelly song

As the story goes, “No crime in American history– let alone a crime that never occurred– produced as many trials, convictions, reversals, and retrials as did an alleged gang rape of two white girls by nine black teenagers on a Southern Railroad freight run on March 25, 1931.

“Over the course of the two decades that followed, the struggle for justice of the ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ as the black teens were called, made celebrities out of anonymities, launched and ended careers, wasted lives, produced heroes, opened southern juries to blacks, exacerbated sectional strife, and divided America’s political left.”

Britannica notes: “Despite testimony by doctors who had examined the women that no rape had occurred, the all-white jury convicted the nine, and all but the youngest, who was 12 years old, were sentenced to death.

“The announcement of the verdict and sentences brought a storm of charges from outside the South that a gross miscarriage of justice had occurred in Scottsboro. The cause of the ‘Scottsboro Boys’ was championed, and in some cases exploited, by Northern liberal and radical groups, notably the Communist Party of the U.S.A.

Here’s a video from Ancient History, though it’s not so ancient.

SCOTUS

History.com notes: The trials and repeated retrials of the Scottsboro Boys sparked an international uproar and produced two landmark U.S. Supreme Court verdicts, even as the defendants were forced to spend years battling the courts and enduring the harsh conditions of the Alabama prison system.

One of the cases was Powell v. Alabama (1932), in which SCOTUS ruled that the Scottsboro defendants had been denied the right to counsel. This violated their right to due process under the 14th Amendment. “The Supreme Court overturned the Alabama verdicts, setting an important legal precedent for enforcing the right of African Americans to adequate counsel, and remanded the cases to the lower courts.”

The second, again overturning the guilty verdicts, was in Norris v. Alabama (1935). The “systematic exclusion of blacks on Jackson Country jury rolls denied a fair trial to the defendants… This second landmark decision in the Scottsboro Boys case would help integrate future juries across the nation.”

You can “meet” the individuals involved through the American Experience piece Who Were the Scottsboro Boys?

In 2013(!), Alabama posthumously pardoned three of them after 80 years, “essentially absolving the last of the Scottsboro Boys of criminal misconduct and closing one of the most notorious chapters of the South’s racial history.”

Music

Here are the lyrics to the song Scottsboro Boys by Hudie Leadbetter, known as Leadbelly. Listen to the song.

There was a Broadway musical of this story in 2010. Music and lyrics were by John Kander and Fred Ebb, who had done Cabaret and other successful shows. It ran for 29 previews and 49 performances. Watch the 2011 Tony Awards performance.

Review: The Trial of the Chicago 7

Aaron Sorkin’s learning curve

I became totally caught up in the movie The Trial of the Chicago 7, which I saw on Netflix. The time period in which it took place corresponded with my political awakening, so I was certainly a “market” for the film.

For those who didn’t know, there was violence between the police and Vietnam war demonstrators during the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1968. The Justice Department under President Lyndon Johnson declined to press federal charges against the protestors, although there were local charges. But after Richard Nixon was inaugurated, Justice, under John Mitchell decided to prosecute eight men.

They (and the people who played them in the film) included Tom Hayden (Eddie Redmayne) and Rennie Davis (Alex Sharp), from the Students for a Democratic Society. Also, Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Alex Sharp), founders of the Youth International Party, or Yippies. Plus the pacifist David Dellinger (John Carroll Lynch), leader of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam (MOBE); Lee Weiner (Noah Robbins), and John Froines (Daniel Flaherty).

Wait, that’s seven. Bobby Seale (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) was the national chairman of the Black Panther Party. “Seale’s attorney, Charles Garry, cannot attend due to illness, leading Judge Julius Hoffman (Frank Langella), [no relation to Abbie] to insist that William Kunstler (Mark Rylance) represents all eight defendants. This insistence is rejected repeatedly by both Kunstler and Seale.” Eventually, Seale’s trial is severed from the others’.

A long path

I did not know this. “Aaron Sorkin stated… that he first found out about the planned film during a visit to Steven Spielberg’s home in 2006… Spielberg told him “he wanted to make a movie about the riots at the 1968 Democratic Convention and the trial that followed.” Aaron, who was born in 1961, had no idea what Steven was talking about.

Sorkin wrote the script in July 2007, but the making of the film was delayed numerous times. He noted, “Spielberg saw Molly’s Game and was sufficiently pleased [with Sorkin’s directing] to suggest I direct ‘Chicago 7’… At his rallies, (Donald) Trump started being nostalgic about the good old days beating up protestors and the movie became relevant again,” with the Black Lives Matter protests.

Praiseworthy

The Trial of the Chicago 7 was nominated for several awards, especially for Sorkin and Sacha Barron Cohen. On Rotten Tomatoes, “the film holds an approval rating of 90% based on 305 reviews, with an average rating of 7.8/10. The website’s critics’ consensus reads, ‘An actors’ showcase enlivened by its topical fact-based story, [it] plays squarely – and compellingly – to Aaron Sorkin’s strengths.”

I fully admit that I totally surrendered to the film, which showed the antiwar movement was not a monolith. It could be funny, shocking, and ultimately moving. This was a function of Sorkin’s use of language, as is his wont. Plus this was a fine ensemble, including Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richard Schultz, assistant federal prosecutor, and the various actors who played the cops infiltrating the demonstrations. I’m a sucker for a good courtroom drama.

Yet I do understand the frustration some critics have, unhappy that Sorkin played fast and loose with the timeline and certain facts. I’ve even soured on certain movies – the climax of Bohemian Rhapsody, for instance – myself.

John DeFore of The Hollywood Reporter writes, “Sorkin has made a movie that’s gripping, illuminating and trenchant […] It’s as much about the constitutional American right to protest as it is about justice, which makes it incredibly relevant to where we are today.”

In search of the COVID vaccine

not throwing it away

From day one, I’ve wanted it. I’ve been in search of the COVID vaccine since its availability was first announced.

My wife, the teacher, was the first one in the household to get a shot at the very end of 2020. She received a letter from her school system then got on the state site. As she put it, she got her two doses on national holidays, Sundays, February 14, and March 7, at SUNY Albany.

A couple of weeks later, around January 12, they let the 65+ on the list. As my wife warned me, the slots filled up quickly. Sometimes, while I was in the system and clicked on a date, by the time I finished, the slot was already gone. Finally, I got one. March 31. Ugh. At least it was also at SUNY Albany.

Friends of mine got appointments in Utica, 95 minutes to the west of Albany. Or Plattsburgh, about 2.5 hours to the north. Or White Plains, two hours to the south.

Consumer Value Stores

But then some of my buddies who were 65+ started getting appointments in the area. I didn’t try Walgreens because one had to register as a member or some such. But I did go to the CVS site, and it was always full locally, at least when I had checked.

On the morning of Tuesday, March 2, I woke up at 5:30 a.m. No useful info was accessible on the CVS site. At 6 a.m., there were – suddenly, as a host of angels singing Hallelujah, even during Lent – available appointments! And I got two, the first on March 3, a/k/a, the very next day, with the other about three weeks later!! (Worthy of at least two exclamation points.)

Later that day, a volunteer from the Albany Public Library called me to ask me if I needed assistance tracking down a vaccine. Twenty-four hours earlier, I would have screamed, “YES, HELP ME!” BTW, I understand that the Schenectady library is also reaching out to its constituents, and I think it’s grand.

I got to the store on Central Avenue in Albany, a 10-minute bus ride, and about the same time on foot, at 9:35, 25 minutes before my slated appointment. The guy in front of me was scheduled for 9:45. I was feeling bad for the store employee who was both working the registration table AND running the front store register. (Eventually, they got someone to just work the vaccine table.)

Following the blue tape, I stood in line. Soon, there were about a dozen people behind me. Then at 9:55, two guys appeared from the pharmacy area and started administering the Pfizer shots. Didn’t hurt at all. I shopped around the post-vaccine area, then chatted with another recipient. She admitted that she was one of those people who checked the various websites for hours each day looking for her “golden ticket.”

One more time

The next day, my wife said that friends had alerted us that the Washington Avenue Armory site was now accepting all eligible folks from the whole city. They weren’t just inoculating selected ZIP Codes that included where my wife used to live (12206) but not where we live now, a half dozen blocks away. This would be for our daughter who has a note from her doctor specifying her underlying conditions.

Early on, I was making zero progress. Then I got an email from the city of Albany school district with a direct link to the state site, and the Armory had been added to the list. Bottom line, my daughter has an appointment in mid-April.

But I COULD have gotten her a shot at a pop-up in Albany on March 6. At first, it was for 65+ only, but when they had vacancies the day before, they expanded the pool. By the time I found out about the change, all of the slots were gone.

The COVID vaccine rollout has been like the wild and wooly west. Some folks actually feel guilty for receiving their shots when others have not. While I appreciate their sensitivity, I would never fault them for getting protected. This process could have gone better at the outset, but as some musician once wrote, “It’s getting better all the time.” A Hamilton song also seems appropriate.

Review: The Stringer graphic novel

Mark Scribner

The details about the declining US press are so accurate. You might think that the graphic novel The Stringer was a piece of nonfiction. Surely writer Ted Rall has captured the essence of newsrooms experiencing severe budget and layoffs.

As the publisher’s description notes, “veteran war correspondent Mark Scribner is about to throw in the towel on journalism when he discovers that his hard-earned knowledge can save his career and make him wealthy and famous.” All he has to do is reframe his entire journalistic ethos.

The title, incidentally, describes “a newspaper correspondent not on the regular staff of a newspaper, especially one retained on a part-time basis to report on events in a particular place.” They are generally poorly paid, with little or, usually no job benefits or security.

The Stringer shows how “fact-based journalism,” which means reporters on the ground, has often taken a hit. What’s more important in an age of social media, is to get eyeballs to view your “content” on social media. It might make someone rich and famous but at the potential cost of one’s soul.

Mark Scribner, as shown by Rall and Pablo Callejo, has figured out the system and how to game it. The book is an “action-packed timely statement about how a society without a vibrant independent culture of reporting can degenerate into chaos and a warning of the dangers of sophisticated new technologies that enable the manufacture and modification of ‘truths’ with no basis in fact.”

Would Bryan Cranston approve?

Some have compared Scribner to the Walter White character in the TV series Breaking Bad. He was once a decent person who, due to circumstances, ended up committing acts that he once could not have imagined doing. And cynically rationalizing it.

Publishing Weekly calls the conclusion “well-crafted overkill,” and I would agree, though I found Scribner more than “two-dimensional.”

Ted Rall is “a nationally syndicated political cartoonist, columnist, graphic novelist, editor, author, and occasional war correspondent.” Rall and Callejo have worked together previously on The Year of Loving Dangerously, a semi-autobiographical tale about getting booted out of college, then grifting.

The Stringer is available from NBM Publishing, Amazon, and Target.