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Mother’s Day 2016

I was watching Anderson Cooper and his mother, Gloria Vanderbilt, talk about the book they wrote together.

In the interview, Cooper said that he “realized there were many things that neither of them actually knew about the other. We decided, on her 91st birthday, to change the conversation that we have and the way we talk to each other.”

“According to Vanderbilt, it was all done by email.”

“‘I think we’re both at a place where both of us didn’t want to leave anything unsaid,’ Cooper added.”

It struck me, HARD, that there are plenty of things that I never asked my mom, because… well, I don’t know, actually. Maybe it’s because she often spoke as though she were reading from the same script.

I’d ask her how she was doing, and invariably she’d say “busy but good.” Busy with what? Sometimes I’d get an answer, but more often than not, a response that really didn’t answer the question.

If I could ask her now, on this Mother’s Day 2016, I think I’d want to know:

*How were you punished as a child? Did they use corporal punishment?

She was an only child, surrounded by her mother, aunt, grandmother, and sometimes, an uncle, so she didn’t get away with much.

She didn’t like to give corporal punishment, that’s for sure. She was pressured by my father, who, especially when he was working nights at IBM, didn’t always want to be the disciplinarian hours after the fact.

One time, she actually struck me on the butt. But you can tell her heart wasn’t in it.

*How is it that you never learned to cook?

Your mother and aunt could cook.

*Were my sisters and I breastfed?

I suspect not, because the convention at the period was to use the bottle. And she could be very conventional.

*Did you think my father was faithful to you? Or did you have reason to believe he was not?

Then I’d get some names to fill in some genealogy holes. I’d ask her some questions about her theology, something beyond the perfunctory responses she often gave me.

Of course, that window of opportunity is more than five years past.

Martin Luther King, Jr.: “A riot is the language of the unheard.”

“We’ve waited too long. ” – ML King, Jr., 1966

From CBSnews.com:

In an interview with Mike Wallace in 1966, Dr. King continued to stress the path of non-violence, despite a summer of violence. Race riots were taking place across the country, and rifts in the civil rights movement were widening.

Militant leaders – like Stokely Carmichael and his call for “black power” — demanded that the movement part from Dr. King’s gospel.

“The mood of the Negro community now is one of urgency, one of saying that we aren’t going to wait. That we’ve got to have our freedom. We’ve waited too long.

“So that I would say that every summer we’re going to have this kind of vigorous protest. My hope is that it will be non-violent.”

King: from Montgomery to Memphis. A powerful three-hour 1970 documentary of the public life of Martin Luther King, Jr. here. A “lost” film restored.

Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated April 4, 1968.

“Love never was just a straight thing”

It’s been nearly 50 years since CBS News first took on the subject of gay rights.

Earlier this month, Arthur posted Uniquely Nasty: The US Government’s War on Gays. I had not heard these stories.

Also, 42 years ago, and I had heard about this, possibly from the aforementioned Arthur, The Worst Mass Murder Of Gay People In US History.

Not to mention Franklin D. Roosevelt’s forgotten anti-gay sex crusade.

So, during Pride Month, it is a most pleasant comparison to celebrate the Supreme Court case OBERGEFELL v. HODGES, Argued April 28, 2015—Decided June 26, 2015. Here are President Obama’s comments, and Andrew Sullivan: It Is Accomplished.

As Jim Obergefell, the name on the case said in an ACLU fundraising letter:

The road to this incredible victory stretches back to 1970, to Jack Baker and Michael McConnell, who brought the first challenge to laws against same-sex marriage. It runs up to 2013, to Edie Windsor, who toppled the Defense of Marriage Act. And it extends through 2014, when Kyle Lawson, Joanne Harris, Paul Rummel, and many others fought for the freedom to marry in their home states. We owe a deep debt of gratitude to these heroic people.

On the CBS Evening News of June 26, the On the Road guy, Steve Hartman said: “It’s been nearly 50 years since CBS News first took on the subject of gay rights. It was in a documentary. You’ll recognize the host, Mike Wallace, but you won’t recognize your country…”

You can watch the controversial report, which aired March 7, 1967 – my 14th birthday, and I believe I watched it at the time – and read Wallace’s later regrets about it. (You can find the former video elsewhere, tied to very pointed anti-gay propaganda.)

Hartman continued:

So much has changed in the last 50 years. But one thing hasn’t. At the end of the 1967 documentary, the guy behind the plant [to hide his identity] said something that could have just as easily come off today’s satellite feed. It was a wish.

“A family, a home, someplace where you belong, a place where you’re loved, where you can love somebody. And God knows I need to love somebody.”

Love never was just a straight thing. As the court has now confirmed, it’s a human thing.

***
The NPR news story.

More Than A Dozen Landmarks Turned Rainbow.

The conservative case for marriage equality.

Book Review: A Reporter’s Life by Walter Cronkite

Walter Cronkite as a morning show newsreader had dialogues with a lion puppet and Dick van Dyke.

At some point a year or two ago, I bought a whole bunch of books for not very much money; can’t remember where. They sat on my bookshelf en masse, all but untouched until I got into this recent reading binge. First up had to be the 1996 autobiography of Walter Cronkite (November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009), for he was my all-time favorite news anchor.

The early chapters, about him growing up in Kansas City and later Houston, I found to be a bit bloodless, even as he tells about murderous racism. It seemed very “that’s the way it was.” His World War II retelling was somewhat livelier. When he described being stationed in Moscow for CBS News, he realized “how effective lies can be when the truth is suppressed,” so that his Russian driver was convinced that the Soviets had invented baseball and the Jeep.

When he gets to the issue of television, though, he lets his personality, and his opinions, shine through. He believes that the press’s focus on the “sizzle rather than the steak” of politics created a cynicism that resulted in an “international embarrassment” of low voter participation.

During Cronkite’s tenure as the anchor, US government officials were looking for the network to take a more supportive role toward the Vietnam war. He replied, “It is not the journalist’s job to be patriotic. How can patriotism be determined anyway? Is patriotism simply agreeing unquestioningly with every action of one’s government? Or might we define patriotism as having the courage to speak and act on those principles one thinks are best for the country…?”

My favorite parts of the book are the insights about the early days of television, where folks established in radio and print figuring out the new medium, including his tenure as a morning show newsreader having dialogues with a lion puppet and Dick Van Dyke. Later, he recognizes that he had become an “800-pound gorilla” of news trying not to upstage his news colleagues. When he retired, he developed disgust with the new CBS News ownership of the early 1980s over its concern with profits over content.

Of course, he tells about reporting the important events of the times, including the John Kennedy assassination and the landing on the moon. He namechecks his college physics teacher, who would be amazed how well Cronkite explained the technical aspects of the space missions.

I think that the state of television news, from the time he wrote this book until he died, must have filled him with despair for his chosen profession. Still, it was a most interesting read by a most stellar individual.

O is for Our Town

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act.

How did a play written 72 years ago about a small town in New Hampshire, with no scenery and few props, “transcend the ages to become America’s most produced play”? Maybe it’s because it contains some universal themes.

From SparkNotes.com:
[Thorton] Wilder’s principal message in Our Town — that people should appreciate the details and interactions of everyday life while they live them — became critical…when the play hit theaters in 1938. It was a time of tremendous international tension, and citizens across the globe suffered from fear and uncertainty. Our Town directed attention away from these negative aspects of life…and focused instead on the aspects of the human experience that make life precious. Wilder revealed his faith in the stability and constancy of life through his depiction and discussion of the small town of Grover’s Corners, with its “marrying . . . living and . . . dying.”

Hal Holbrook as the Stage Manager

Specifically, the dying. Act 1 is the ordinary, even mundane lives of the townspeople. Act 2 addresses the budding romance of George Gibbs and Emily Webb. Act 3 is in a cemetery but has a flashback to a time about a decade in the past. This prompts a character to ask of the Stage Manager, the narrator: “Does anyone ever realize life while they live it…every, every minute?” And, of course, the answer is “No”. But how could we?

There have been 4000 productions in the last decade according to this CBS News video, which shows segments of a recent long-running Off-Broadway production that closed only last month. One of the participants noted that if we realize life while we live it, every minute, we’d probably be on Twitter, tweeting 24/7, which would puncture the value of actually EXPERIENCING life.

The 2010 NYC off-Broadway production’s George and Emily

While there was a 1940 movie, the play has always been the thing. According to Wikipedia, there was a live musical 1955 TV adaptation starring Frank Sinatra as the Stage Manager, Paul Newman as George, and Eva Marie Saint as Emily. I remember watching the 1977 TV adaptation of the play starring Hal Holbrook, Robby Benson, and Glynnis O’Connor, though not the 1989 telecast with Spalding Gray, Frances Conroy, Penelope Ann Miller, and Eric Stoltz. And I HAD to view the adaptation of a 2002 Broadway revival starring Paul Newman, this time as the Stage Manager, a segment that can be seen here.

I should note that I was in a production of Our Town, some 25 years ago, produced by the FOCUS Churches of Albany. I played the drunken choir director Simon Stimson, one of the characters in the cemetery in the third act, who bitterly proclaims: “That’s what it was like to be alive. To move about in a cloud of ignorance; to go up and down trampling on the feelings of those…of those about you. To spend and waste time as though you had a million years. To be always at the mercy of one self-centered passion, or another. Now you know- that’s the happy existence you wanted to go back to. Ignorance and blindness.” Even in death, Simon seemed to miss the point.

Wilder was full of pithy sayings beyond the realm of this play. Perhaps my favorite: “If you write to impress it will always be bad, but if you write to express it will be good.”

ABC Wednesday – Round 7