“Most of those
who made the Movement were the nameless, the marchers with tired feet, the
protesters beat back with fire hoses and Billy clubs, and the unknown women and
men who risked jobs and home and life.” Julian Bond
Julian Bond in 1966 and 2007
Civil Rights icon Julian Bond passed away. A leader with the Student Nonviolent
Coordinating Committee, Southern Poverty Law Center, and, most recently the
NAACP, Bond was a professor at the University of Virginia whom I ran into
several times at Oral History Association conferences. Bond’s father was a university president and
his mother a librarian. Ray Smock said
he personified what W.E.B. DuBois labeled the “Talented Tenth” of potential
African-American leadership, and he risked life and limb on behalf of the
dispossessed. I recall vividly his
excitement that the Birmingham, Alabama, Civil Rights Institute had a “Memory
Book” for ordinary folks to describe their participation in the 1963
demonstrations that paved the way for the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Bond was co-director of an oral history
project entitled “Explorations in Black Leadership.” Eulogizing Bond as “a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend,” President Barack Obama
stated: “Justice and equality was the
mission that spanned his life. Julian
Bond helped change this country for the better.
And what better way to be remembered than that.”
In 1977, in an inspired move by producer Lorne Michaels, Julian Bond
hosted Saturday Night Live. Famous
Julians include John Lennon’s son, a musician in his own right, and
controversial WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
Julian the Apostate, so-named because he renounced Christianity, ruled
the Roman Empire between 361 and 363. A
learned philosopher and brilliant military commander, Emperor Julian was the
subject of a 1964 novel by Gore Vidal, who, along with William F. Buckley, is
featured in a new documentary, “Best of Enemies,” about their televised debates
during the 1968 national conventions.
The liberal Vidal and reactionary Buckley had a visceral hatred for what
the other stood for. When Vidal labeled
Buckley a “crypto-fascist,” Buckley lamely retorted by calling Vidal a “fag.”
Fifty years ago the Watts ghetto in Los Angeles went up in flames, set
off by an incident involving the nearly all-white police force. A blue-ribbon committee
concluded that the uprising, which critics dismissed as a commodity riot, was a
result of rising expectations and blocked opportunities. Chicago
Tribune columnist Clarence Page wrote:
Watts was a pivotal event in shaping the
polarized racial and political landscape through which we Americans struggle
today.
Coming on the heels of President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s historic civil rights bills and the early days of his “war on
poverty,” Watts helped spur a conservative backlash that continues to push back
against similar progressive reforms today.
You can even hear echoes of the Watts debate
in today’s “Black Lives Matter” protests over fatal encounters between unarmed
black men and white police officers – although without today’s cellphone
cameras.
A day after Watts erupted, looting broke out in Chicago’s Garfield
Park neighborhood after a fire truck veered out of control and uprooted a street
sign that struck and killed 23 year-old African American Dessie May Williams. The all-white crew left the station without a
tillerman, whose responsibility was to control the ladder that had knocked
over the sign. Unconfirmed rumors spread
that the tillerman had been drunk at the time of the accident.
below, Mamie Gummer and Rick Springfield
In “Ricki and the Flash,” the best movie I’ve seen this year, Meryl
Streep plays a small-time musician who after many years returns home to deal
with a suicidal daughter and two resentful sons. Her brother having died in Vietnam, Ricki has
an American flag tattoo on her back and twice voted for George W. Bush. The musical numbers are awesome, beginning
with Streep belting out Tom Petty’s “American Girl.” Eighties heartthrob Rick Springfield played
her band mate and love interest and Kevin Kline her decent but square ex. At one point Julie, played by Streep’s
real-life daughter Mamie Gummer, says, “Hey,
you guys are fighting; it’s like the 80s all over again!”
In John Updike’s “Rabbit Remembered” plug ugly Ronnie Harrison, now
married to Harry’s widow Janice, has a middle-aged son who’s a gay dancer
struggling to survive in New York City as a hawker of Broadway tickets. At a 1999 Thanksgiving dinner he tells
Harry’s love child Annabelle, “The most
amazing production I’ve seen lately has the rather embarrassing title ‘The
Vagina Monologues,’ a one-woman show by Eve Ensler, and it’s really more
serious than it sounds. It’s about us
and our bodies. All of us. Men, women, and in-between.”
Taylor Swift, on the cover of Vanity
Fair’s style issue, seems to
have jettisoned her distinctive eyebrows that contributed so much to her uniqueness. Ryan Adams
recently announced that he would record a complete cover version of Swift’s
“1989” CD. Swift, tongue in cheek,
supposedly declared, “COOL. I’m not gonna be able to sleep tonight or
ever again, and I’m going to celebrate today every year as a holiday.” Adams promised his version of the
celebratory “Welcome to New York” would be the “saddest ever.” Proclaiming “the lights are so bright but they never
blind me,” the song also includes these lines:
“When
we first dropped our bags on apartment floors
Took
our broken hears, put them in a drawer
Everybody
here was someone else before
And
you can want who you want
Boys
and boys and girls and girls.”
When I saw “The Vagina Monologues” at IUN, its large cast included Sociology
professor Tanice Foltz. The sexual
candor caused one secretary to storm out in disgust. The play has been performed in 140 countries
with such celebrities as Jane Fonda. Glenn Close, Cyndi Lauper, Whoopi
Goldberg, and Oprah Winfrey. The most
controversial skit, “The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could,” involved a teenage
girl given alcohol and then seduced by a 24 year-old woman, which is portrayed
as “a good rape” – in other words, a positive experience in contrast to sex
with abusive men.
front, Oliver, Ben, Bella; back, Mary Ann, Toni, Jimbo, Lisa
Toni and I visited nieces Lisa and Mary Anne in Granger, the affluent South
Bend suburb. Lisa’s sister Mary Anne and
husband Derik Cavignano had just returned from Iceland and showed us striking photos
of the rugged terrain through which they hiked.
During the trip Bella and Ben, whom we hadn’t seen in several years,
stayed with Lisa and Fritz Teuscher, who had lost 40 pounds in the past year. Fritz recently picked up a 40-pound weight and
shuddered at having carried around that much excess baggage.
Saturday I watched “Birdman” on HBO, bought a steak taco for $2.50 at
Chesterton’s European Market, and at the library read a review of David McCullough’s
account of Orville and Wilbur Wright and the dawn of the airplane age, a
follow-up of sorts to McCullough’s books about such engineering marvels as the
Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal. After
dining at Miller Bakery Café eight of us played bridge at Hagelbergs, four
hands each with the seven others. I won first
place, $4.00, thanks to a hand Toni played as my partner. An opponent holding over 20 points doubled
our two-spade bid, and with a couple singletons and brilliant cross-roughs,
Toni made the game contract plus an overtrick.
At the Star Plaza Becca performed in the sold-out production of “Jesus
Christ Superstar.” Playing Jesus was
Michael Cunio, who is in the vocal group Under the Streetlamp and has starred
on Broadway in Hairspray and in the
Chicago cast of Jersey Boys. Providing comic relief as King Herod was
Hoosier Marc Summers, host of Double Dare
on Nickelodeon and the Food network hit Unwrapped. Local talent Nicole Garza shined as Mary
Magdalene. In the Playbill my buddy, former IUN Fine Arts major Stevie Kokos, was
listed both as Maintenance Manager and part of the set construction crew. I’d love to see Star Plaza CEO Charlie Blum
and General Manager Mark Bishop stage Henry Farag’s “The Signal” in the same
manner as “Jesus Christ Superstar,” combining local talent (i.e., the ensemble
already assembled by Farag) with established star Michael Cunio and maybe an
Oldies performer such as Lou Christie or even Frankie Valli.
I agree with David Bromwich’s critique of online
education. In the New York Review of Books “Trapped in the Virtual Classroom,” he
concluded:
In the age of No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, it is not a
foregone conclusion that our society will continue to support teaching at all
levels as one of the honorable professions, a respected calling on a par with
medicine and law. The support will
continue only if – against the allure of the most seductive of technologies –
we remind ourselves how much the contact between teacher and student can matter
in the physical classroom. I can’t see
what is risked by this conservative approach.
Without embracing online education, we can still choose to take the help
it offers.
IUN grad and incoming law student Marla Gee wrote from Valparaiso:
Hitting the ground running. Orientation week is winding down,
we've been going 9:00-5:00 all week. Assignments are already due for next
week, reading cases and writing briefs. Meanwhile, I'm liking Valpo! With
my I.D., THE BUS IS FREE: magic words for me, whose world revolves around
public transportation. There is a V-Line bus stop about a block and a
half from my place. So far so good with school stuff. Law students
have 24/7 ACCESS TO THE LIBRARY, simply swipe the I.D. at the front door. This
was amazing news to me, such a privilege.
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