Spring Solstice

“Spring is nature’s way of saying, ‘Let’s party.’”  Robin Williams

Toni prefers celebrating the Spring solstice rather than Easter, but egg dying is an annual ritual, as is hiding James and Becca’s Easter basket.  The busy weekend began with James moving in, Toni making a standing rib roast, and the arrival of Phil’s family en route to Naples, Florida.  Becca and Angie returned from their Florida choir trip Saturday in time for Chinese carry-out.  Sunday, Toni was up at 3 a.m. to see Phil’s family off to O’Hare Airport, then served a delicious roast to eight of us, including Angie’s dad and Tamiya Towns, who forwarded photos she took (below) to me. 

above, Toni; below, Tamiya, John Teague and Jimbo

“Roseanne,” which debuted 30 years ago, is back on the air with the original cast. The initial episode received huge ratings and a congratulatory shout-out from Trump since actress Roseanne Barr is a supporter, as is her character on the show, who resembles “All in the Family” bigot Archie Bunker.  Sister Jackie is the liberal foil, and there is an African-American grandkid to demonstrate, I guess, that Roseanne isn’t a racist.  As always, John Goodman (as Dan Connor) was hilarious, first appearing in bed wearing a breathing mask for sleep apnea.  At one point Dan goes outside to urinate because the bathrooms were occupied and then claims to have waved to a neighbor with his free hand. Like most sitcoms, the plot seemed contrived, with one of Roseanne’s daughters wanting to be a surrogate mother and a grandson attending first day of school in girl’s clothes.  When Dan first hears about it, he escapes to the garage. Roseanne cautions about disturbing him until he’s had a couple beers, then moments later says, “That should be long enough.” 

Sometimes I confuse Roseanne Barr with Rosie O’Donnell, whom Trump hates.  The feud evidently goes back 12 years to when O’Donnell criticized Trump for not firing a Miss USA winner who admitted to drug use and underage drinking.  Trump responded by calling her fat and a real loser.  Five years later, when Rosie became engaged to Michelle Rounds, Trump tweeted that he felt sorry for Rounds and her parents.  In 2014, when O’Donnell returned to the TV show “The View,” Trump tweeted, “Rosie is crude, rude, obnoxious, and dumb – other than that, I like her very much.”  During the first Presidential debate of 2016, when Megyn Kelly questioned Trump about demeaning women by using words such as pigs, slobs, and disgusting animals, Trump interrupted to say, “Only Rosie O’Donnell.”

In Richard Russo’s “That Old Cape Magic” Jack Griffin encounters an Archie Bunker type while at the Old Cape Lounge.  After the guy belittles his companion and ex-wife Marguerite, Jack ruminates: “How good it would feel to coldcock him, knock him clean off his bar stool, bloody his fucking nose.  Here she was, trying valiantly to be happy, and this asshole wouldn’t let her.” After he breaks up with Joy, Jack dates fun-loving Marguerite. When he meets Joy’s new “friend,” Jack labels him a fart-hammer, an expression he recently picked up from an old-timer.

Danna Conley thanked me for latest Steel Shavings, which mentions her and late husband Pat several times and contains excerpts of an article by Hayley Sekula, whose grandmother is her good friend.  A year ago, Danna thanked me for volume 46 and wrote: “Recently my granddaughter mentioned seeing someone dressed as a flower child who looked as if she came from the 1960s.  She had learned about the Hippie Era in history.”  On the card’s cover: Georgia O’Keefe’s 1937 painting “Red Hills and Flowers,” which juxtaposed still-life elements against a far-off desert landscape alive with color and undulating curves similar to a human body.  Many feminists believed O’Keefe’s flowers were symbolic of female genitalia.  She was adamant that, in her words, “the subject matter of a painting should never obscure its form and color, which are its real thematic elements.”  O’Keefe’s work reminds me of the photos of Liz Wuerffel, who often focuses her lens on symbols of decay and aging.  At present Liz is at Bryce Canyon National Park, where IUN grad Amanda Marie Board worked last year.

 Bryce Canyon National Park photo by Liz Wuerffel

For Nicole Anslover’s Diplomatic History class dealing with Ricard Nixon’s Vietnam policy I gave a short report on Rick Perlstein’s “NIxonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America” in order to point out that secrecy and deception  were standard Tricky Dick operational procedures.  I had Nicole put these paragraphs on the screen: 

    In March of 1969, Nixon ordered the bombing of sections of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that meandered through Cambodia, the beginning of a long-term plan called Operation Menu (its component parts were Breakfast, Lunch, Snack, Dinner, Dessert, and Supper).  This scaled new peaks of deception: the bombings were recorded on a secret ledger, which was later destroyed.  A half million tons of ordnance were eventually dropped on this neutral country, 3,875 sorties without Congressional knowledge.  “The State Department is to be notified only after the point of no return,”Nixon instructed.  

. . . .

    On May 15, paratroopers from the 101^stAirborne Division stormed up an objective Americans called Hill 937.  The AP ran an evocative dispatch on May 19:  “The paratroopers came down the mountain, their green shirts darkened with sweat, their weapons gone, their bandages stained brown and red – with mud and blood.”  It reported them cursing their commander, whose radio call was Blackjack: “That damned Blackjack won’t stop until he kills every one of us.”  It became known as Hamburger Hill.  The soldiers won the objective, just as Americans often won their military objectives; 633 North Vietnamese main-force soldiers were killed, fewer than 100 Americans. Then the hill was abandoned, just as Americans often abandoned objectives in Vietnam.  “We are not fighting for terrain as such,”Commander Creighton Abrams explained.  “Don’t mean nothin’,”answered the troops, a refrain echoed all the way back home. Senator Ted Kennedy called the Hamburger Hill assault “senseless and irresponsible, madness, symptomatic of a mentality and a policy that requires immediate attention.”

To an obscene degree, Nixon expanded upon trends begun by predecessors, including dirty tricks against political opponents and basing diplomatic maneuvering on domestic political calculations. During Nixon’s presidency over 21,000 Americans died in Vietnam and about a million and a half Vietnamese. The terms Nixon settled for in 1973 were obtainable when he came into office, but he continued the war for political gain, an unforgivable sin, in my opinion.  The result was not “Peace with Honor,” as he claimed, but an obscene stain on America’s legacy.

March Madness climaxed with Villanova, my pick to go all the way, winning its second NCAA title in three years.  With star player Jalen Brunson on the bench saddled with foul trouble, sixth man Donte DiVincenzo scored an amazing 31 points to enable the Wildcats to cruise to victory.  Within hours, Sports Illustratedhad DiVincenzo on its latest cover.

 Faye Anderson; photo by Barb Walczak

Bronze Life Master Faye Anderson, 98, passed away. Barb Walczak wrote:

  It was never in Faye’s plans to become a Life Master, but one day I said, “Let’s hop a plane to Reno and get started on our Life Master gold.”  She was game for the adventure.  We traveled to many places in the next nine months until we had our 25 gold.  We even had the thrill of playing with Eddie Wold and Mike Passell (ranked in the top 12 in ACSL) in Lake Geneva.  Faye was feisty (in a lovable way) and had a fun teasing personality endearing her to everybody.  Gunnar Berg called her “Bulldog” – and I think she liked that nickname.

  One of Faye’s biggest regrets was that she was not able to go to college.  It was in the 1930s and there were 12 children in the family, and it couldn’t happen. It was a shame – her potential was never fully realized.  She was a smart lady.

At bridge, on director Alan Yngve’s advice, I asked Barbara Stroud about Bridgerama, whose origins in Northwest Indiana go back decades.  Evidently started by women belonging to Tri Kappa, an Indiana service sorority, Stroud took it over when it was in danger of ending.  There’s one group of women and a second male-female group.  Couples play 20 hands at the host’s home, turning in the results to Stroud.  I told her about the Archives Bridge collection, and she said she recently emptied a file cabinet of many back records. Dee and I finished slightly above average (53.17%) for .28 of a master point.  In one hand I was dealt 8 Diamonds, including the top 5, two King-Jacks, and a bare King.  After determining that Dee held one Ace, I bid 5 Diamonds.  There was a Club lead to my singleton King, leaving no way to cash in one Dee’s Ace and Queen.  Even had Dee’s Ace overtaken the King, leading the Queen of Clubs would not have helped.   We went down one, as did another couple. The two other North-South pairs made 6 Diamonds when opponents led out an Ace rather than a Club.

Beverly Gray’s “Seduced By Mrs. Robinson” revealed that “The Graduate” (1967) was a low budget movie with a relative unknown, Dustin Hoffman, in the lead role as a disillusioned college graduate who has an affair with an older woman but is hot for her daughter.  It became a surprise box office hit primarily because of its appeal to Baby Boomers.  Though it did not deal with race tensions, the Vietnam War or campus protest, the film, wrote Gray, “appeared in movie houses just when we young Americans were discovering how badly we wanted to distance ourselves from the world of our parents. . . .  If we were anxious about parental pressure, or about sex (and our lack thereof), or about marriage, or about the temptations posed by plastics, it was all visible for us on the movie screen.”

 John S. Haller

My old fellow Marylander and IUN colleague John Haller reviewed Philip F. Gura’s “Man’s Better Angels: Romantic Reformers and the Coming of the Civil War” for the Journal of American History.  Haller concludes that the seven reformers, including Horace Greeley and Henry David Thoreau, culminated their intellectual journey “in their fatuous worship of John Brown and his murderous band of outlaws.”  Haller equates their “high-minded resolve to acquire liberty and equality even if it necessitated violence” to Maximilien Robespierre, architect of the French Reign of Terror.  Really?  

Teaching in Saudi Arabia 30 years ago, I was shocked at how down on John Brown the students were because Brown’s Kansas band of Free State volunteers murdered five pro-slavery Border Ruffians who had burned and pillaged the Free Soil town of Lawrence.  Later, when one student claimed that Nixon would have been a great President had it not been for Watergate, I replied that compared to John Brown, Nixon was a mass murderer, responsible for more than a million Vietnamese dying in an unwinnable war.  Some hold Brown partly responsible for bringing about the Civil war, which killed a half-million Americans.  Does Haller?

Hollis Donald dropped off an Easter essay about turning around one’s life through faith. He wrote: “Life can take you on many roads and can get so tangled up and twisted and lost in the tide, there can appear to be no way out.  You may need a new life, and Jesus is the giver of life.”  As the Doobie Brothers put it, “Jesus is just alright with me.”