The Quest

“It is the mission of each true knight

His duty, nay, his privilege

To dream the impossible dream.”

         Don Quixote, “Man of La Mancha”

photo by Bettie Wilson

Thanks to an invitation from librarian Scott Sandberg, I participated in a community discussion about Martin Luther King’s 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech.  It took place on the second floor of IUN’s Anderson library on the fiftieth anniversary of his assassination.  The panel also included ministers, attorneys, and Archives volunteer Maurice Yancy (who was great).  Discussion facilitator Junifer Hall, head of the Katie Hall Educational Foundation, asked us to elaborate on statements from the address, such as King’s contrasting contemporary technological achievements with what he termed a “poverty of spirit.” From past experiences in this setting, I knew how to concentrate on certain points I wanted to make - such as that King’s dream of a nonracist society was one that inspired people of all races and backgrounds, myself included.  I brought up Richard Hatcher’s civil rights activities using King’s tactics prior to his becoming mayor.  I emphasized that employing nonviolent acts of civil disobedience to protest unjust laws allowed King and his followers to assume the moral high ground and that his principled opposition to the Vietnam War was an act of courage that cost him support from President Lyndon Baines Johnson and probably hastened his death. Lutheran pastor Delwyn Campbell and Deacon John Henry Hall got into a doctrinal dispute over the relative importance of faith versus good works and love of self as opposed to love of others. NAACP attorney Barbara Bolling-Williams mentioned lawsuits by her organization against Republican efforts to infringe on poor people’s voting rights. Regarding prospects for the future, I stressed the need for inspired leadership and importance of studying the past.

Reminiscent of John Updyke in “Rabbit Run,” Richard Russo portrays ministers hilariously.  In “That Old Cape Magic” a Unitarian man of the cloth presides at Jack Griffin’s daughter’s wedding, unencumbered, Russo writes, “by liturgical obligation.”  He “clearly fancied himself a comedian and used those parts of the service that might otherwise be given over to prayer to relive memorable moments of the rehearsal dinner to a smattering of nervous laughter.”  When Griffin’s date “set upon the Unitarian comic on the dance floor,” he “looked everywhere but at Marguerite’s chest, unintentionally providing the very comedy that had eluded him during the wedding ceremony.”   I enjoyed “That Old Cape Magic” so much I decided to reread Russo’s “Straight Man,” about a professor at a mediocre Pennsylvania branch campus where getting promotion “was a bit like being proclaimed the winner of a shit-eating contest.”  The sentiment was similar to Griffin’s parents complaining of being stuck at as Hoosier college in the “Mid-fuckin’-West.” Hank has a white German shepherd named Occam (for Occam’s razor, the principle that the simplest explanation is usually the most valid) whose signature move is to put his wet pointed snout in a visitor’s crotch and tug upward.

The Cubs’ quest for a second World Series championship in three years got off to a rocky start, as they failed to score a run in 2 consecutive games, plus the final 14 innings of a 2-1 loss to the lowly Marlins.  They finally broke out of it in an 8-0 win over the Brewers and then took the series three games out of four.

Sergio Garcia

At bowling an overhead TV broadcast round one of the Masters from Augusta, and I watched Tiger Woods fight back from 3 over par with 2 birdies on the back nine.  When last year’s winner Sergio Garcia put five balls in the water for a 13 on a par 3 hole named Firethorn, I thought I was watching instant replay since the set was on mute. Sergio’s wife Angela recently gave birth to a girl named Azalea, nickname for the thirteenth hole at Augusta. When Golf Channel’s Rich Lerner quipped that Sergio won’t be naming his next kid Firethorn, Angela Garcia called him an idiot.  Lerner subsequently apologized, needlessly, I thought. 

The annual Portage High School (PHS) variety show lasted 3 and a half hours and featured 37 acts, culminating in a number from the spring musical, “The 25^thAnnual Putnam County Spelling Bee.  James appeared in it as William Barfee (“That’s Bar-FAY!”) Administrators had put the kibosh on plans to stage “The Drowsy Chaperone” because of alcohol references but did not censor a group singing “Californication” by Red Hot Chili Peppers.” Go figure!  Must have slipped through the cracks.  Thirty years ago, when Dave and friends performed “Cretin Hop” at a similar PHS show, the brochure left out the name Sex Pistols.   I recognized Meghan Trainor’s “Like I’m Gonna Lose You,” sung by Lailah Abdulla and Danny GoShay as the number Becca did at Alissa wedding. Highlights included Angelo Turner singing Coldplay’s “Everglow,” Jaden Vandever crooning the John Legend number “All of Me,” and a dance number by multi-talented Andrea Vance, who also sang with the PHS Dance Group and PHS Thespians.

 Andrea Vance

Larry Lapidus, "Vintage Couple"

Gregg Hertrieb

Over the weekend two exhibit receptions took place, “Straight Shooters: Photographs by Larry Lapidus” at the Munster Center for the Arts, and “Time Ghost,” curated by Lapidus and featuring surrealistic watercolors and acrylics by Gregg Hertzlieb at Gardner Center in Miller.  A brochure for “Time Ghost” stated: “Enter a world inspired by nature and art, where characters and elements exist as fantasy or metaphor.  Hertzlieb’s message is one of peace, delight, and joy in the possibilities of the imagination.”  I told Gregg, VU’s museum curator, that he had a fertile mind.

“Scandinavia,” a travel book by Rick Steves, asserted that nearly every educated young person in Finland, where Dave and I will be going in two months, “speaks effortless English – the language barrier is just a road turtle.”  I’d never heard the phrase “road turtle” and subsequently learned it stands for raised pavement highway reflectors sometimes called road studs or cat’s eyes.  While our destination is Jyväskylä, virtually the entire chapter dealt with things to do in Helsinki, the only European capital without a medieval history.  Its most distinguished buildings were constructed during the nineteenth century when Finland was part of the Russian empire and modeled after architecture in St. Petersburg. Steves wrote:

  In 1917, Finland won its independence from Russia and enjoyed two decades of prosperity until the secret Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939 assigned them to the Soviet sphere of influence.  When Russia invaded, Finland resisted successfully, its white-camouflaged ski troops winning the Winter War of 1939-1940 and holding off the Russians in the Continuing War from 1941 until 1944.

  After WW II, Finland was forced to cede territory to the USSR, accept a Soviet naval base, and pay huge reparations.  The collapse of the Soviet Union has done to Finland what a good long sauna might do for you.

At Gino’s in Merrillville for a book club meeting, I enjoyed a free plate of raviolis at the bar to go with my 8-dollar pale ale 16-ounce draft. Two guys in their sixties talked about having to deal with a catheter and urine bag, one due to a kidney stone and the other after prostate surgery.   Sitting nearby, Debra Dubovitz commented that it’s tough growing old.  On the TV were shots of snow falling at Wrigley Field, forcing cancellation of the Cubs home opener.

 J.D. Vance

Joe Gomeztagle talked about J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy,” a surprise best-seller in the wake of the 2016 election, frequently comparing and contrasting Vance’s background and his own and Middletown, Ohio, with Gary, Indiana. While it is primarily a work of self-congratulation by one who overcame a rough childhood (with a drug-addicted mother and 15 stepdads) and made it out of a former Ohio steel town by joining the marines and then going on to graduate from Yale Law School, conservatives have touted Vance as the voice of the rustbelt and the book as the explanation why Trump is so popular with Appalachian whites.  Though proud of his Scotch-Irish hillbilly roots, Vance admonishes those who “spend their way into the poorhouse and choose not to work.”   Like his Yale mentor Amy Chua, author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Lady,” Vance preaches a message of tough love and personal responsibility.  Vance now works for a Silicon valley investment firm, and many Republicans want him to run for political office, perhaps an Ohio Senate seat. He seems content making an obscene amount of money from speaking engagements.

During the discussion Brian Barnes mentioned that the Scotch-Irish have tended to be tribal and violence-prone, dating to when they relocated to Catholic Ireland and later emigrated to the American frontier.  Debra Dubovitz said that her Irish family considered it a “mixed marriage” when she married someone Polish, even though they were both Roman Catholic. Lee Christakis did her one better, claiming that his folks disapproved of a Greek girlfriend because she was from a different island.  I mainly criticized “Hillbilly Elegy” for tending to blame poor people for their own economic plight and criticizing welfare state programs that at least ameliorated their situation rather than corporate capitalists who exploited and then abandoned them.  Citing David Goldfield’s “The Gifted Generation,” I concluded that the primary cause of their work ethic decline was not moral failure, or what Vance calls “learned helplessness,” but unhealthy corporate concentration, the weakening of organized labor, and governmental neglect.