Mueller Report

“Attorney General WilliamBarr is not fazed by the demands of Congress. An aspiring autocrat like Trump, a would-be King of America, has at last found a man who understands his need for protection.” Ray Smock

 Robert Mueller and William Barr

After a 22-month investigation and 27 days during which Attorney General William Barr has withheld the report from the public and Congress in order to redact material he deems appropriate, the public finally got a look at the Mueller Report.  Trump has already declared “total exoneration” and Barr weeks ago issued a four-page brief instead of Mueller’s summary putting the best possible spin on things embarrassing to the President.  The primary Republican arguments seem to be that if Trump did things openly, such as pressuring officials to resign, or suggested actions that people under him ignored, these should not be considered collusion or obstruction of justice.  We shall see.

Here is an excerpt from Ray Smock’s essay, “The Barr Blunder.  Or is it a pattern?”:

   Who is William Barr and how has he managed so far to stonewall the entire federal government in his protection of the president? He served for about 18 months as George H. W. Bush’s attorney general back in 1991-92. He is a staunch conservative Republican with the typical views of the Constitution that come from places like the Federalist Society, where the “original intent” of the Founders should determine our views of the Constitution.

    Barr supported Trump’s ban on Muslims entering the country, the one the courts threw out. He claims the Founders didn’t think abortion was a good idea, even though they never wrote or spoke about the issue. Beware of people who tell you what the Founders said and thought unless you can find documentary evidence. Barr says Roe v. Wade is settled law and he was not going to challenge it. But given his views on abortion, why wouldn’t he find an opportunity to open this again, especially if President Trump wants this as a campaign issue in 2020?

    In his earlier stint as AG, Barr took a hard line on criminals and believed the United States, the nation with more people incarcerated than any other, should lock up even more criminals to deter crime. We have seen in subsequent decades the bitter fruit of his position with the massive expansion of incarceration and the rise of a private, for-profit jail system that depends on a steady stream of inmates to make it profitable. Whether we like it or not, this is the prevailing attitude of the Republican Party and most Republican senators, and even some Democrats seem unwilling to buck Barr’s hard-liner positions and his narrow view of constitutional law.

                                          IUN student Iris Contreras and Helen Boothe

above, bridge exhibit at IUN; below, Joe Chin bridge lesson

After a run of bad luck, Helen Boothe and I finished strong in duplicate bridge to finish slightly above average (53 percent).  She mentioned a clip on MSNBC where a Parisian reporter asked Pete Buttigieg a question about the Notre dame cathedral fire, and he answered in fluent French.  We bid and made a small slam, as, holding a Diamond singleton, I got the King of Diamonds to fall on my third lead from the board, making my Queen good.  Against a top couple I held 6 Clubs and 6 Hearts and was doubled in five Clubs.  I made an overtrick for top board. Googling Helen’s name, I came across these photos and an article entitled “Sharing bridge and Oral History” in the Unit 154 “Recap Sheet” edited by Kim Grant in Fort Wayne:

    Bridge players and an IU Northwest Oral Indiana History class have been paired together during this fall semester to share bridge experiences and Northwest Indiana days of yore in a weekly correspondence. The students’ journals will be filed in the IU Northwest Calumet Regional Archives as part of the bridge collection. Dr. James Lane is spearheading this unique plan to involve university students in the bridge experience and bridge players to become more familiar with Indiana’s past.  Joe Chin has spoken to the IU oral history students and has given them a beginning lesson about bridge. Joe’s lessons are sprinkled with humor and always have the participants enjoying his thoughtful and worthwhile presentations. We hope that some students will be encouraged to develop an interest in this intriguing game. We have seen several IU students coming to our games — shadowing their assigned partners from the bridge community.

In “Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments” Saidiya Hartman used the expression “bull dagger” to describe black butch lesbians.  From Sasha Goldberg’s paper at the Oral History Association conference in Montreal last October I learned that it was Southern slang for what some crudely call bull dikes.  Describing the “beautiful anarchy” on the corner of Seventh and Lombard in Philadelphia, where W.E.B. DuBois did field work for “The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study” (1899), Hartman wrote:

 Slick, fresh-mouthed boys, comely, buxom girls, policy runners, ne’er-do-wells, petty gangsters, domestics, longshoremen, and whores – the young and the striving, the old and the dissipated – gathered. The air was thick with laughter, boasts of conquest, lies bigger than the men who told them.  Idlers loud-talked one another in an orchestrated battle of words.  Pimps crooned, “Hey girl, send it on” to each and every woman under thirty who strolled by. Bull daggers undressed the pretty ones with a glance. . . .  Free association was the only rule and promiscuous social life its defining character. Newcomers refreshed the crowd; strangers became intimates.

 Diana Chen-lin (left) promoted to full professor, 2017

Leaving IUN’s library, I ran into Diana Chen-lin, attending a luncheon honoring faculty whose years of service were multiples of five, in her case 25 years – hard to believe.  Next year will mark 50 years I’ve been associated with the university. I told Diana that if I’m not invited, being officially retired, I plan to come anyway. Coincidentally, Diana had sent me this email earlier in the day:

 Thanks for the latest issue of Steel Shavings! I am going through it slowly and savoring the details about people I know and about the region. It was good to see Toni's picture--she looks really good! And it was good to see Ron Cohen mentioned. I am on a page where you were discussing Tiger Woods' second place finish in the Valspar Championship last year, which seemed to promise Woods would be making a bigger comeback, which he just did. I also found your quote on David Letterman very interesting, having watched Letterman on and off for years. I will continue slowly through the journal and enjoy the reading.

 Kerns at Lake Junaluska, July 10, 2016

Paul Kern, back in Florida after a cross-country drive to see son Colin in California, sent a much longer response; here are highlights:

  I enjoy the references to students from the early days: Jim Reha, Al Renslow, George McGuan, Fred McColly, Dan Simon.  They’re old men now.  I was sorry to see that Tom Eaton died. I didn't know him, but saw him often at Gary high school basketball games in the 70s. He stood out because he never took off his coat, no matter how hot it was in the gym. Lance Trusty was another person I did not get to know, but wish I had.  Every once in a while an event shakes me to the core. Phil turning fifty is one of those events

  McKinney Springs, where your friend Aaron Davis camped on his bicycle trip, is in the Big Bend National Park, our favorite Park. We went there twice and encountered bicyclers both times. Sanderson, where I lived for a few years (first through third grades), is nearby. It was a railroad town and when the Southern Pacific pulled the plug it no longer had any reason to be. Only a few railroad retirees are left. No Country for Old Men was filmed there, but I never watched it because I heard it was very violent. I did read Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy.

  I was glad to read that the Gary Public Library is reopening and sad to hear that Wirt-Emerson is closing. Is Westside the only public high school left in Gary? The gutting of public schooling in America is sickening to watch.

  Allow me to come to the defense of Maximilien Robespierre, not the “architect” of the Terror but, as the spokesman of the Committee of Public Safety in the Convention, it did fall to him to defend the policy, something he did very ably. In the 1950s, inspired by NATO, some American historians, most notably R.R. Palmer, rejected the contrast between the “good” moderate American Revolution and the “bad” radical French Revolution and argued that there had been an age of “Atlantic Revolutions” that had established modern western political values. He called Robespierre one of the great democratic prophets of the eighteenth century, pointing to his belief in equality, including for the slaves in the French West Indies (whom the French Revolution emancipated in contrast to you know who), his belief that democracy required some degree of economic equality that anticipated the modern welfare state, and his suspicion of representative democracy, insisting that elected officials had to be held strictly accountable to the people through frequent elections, recalls, etc. Without quite approving of the policy of Terror, Palmer and others pointed to the relatively small number of deaths and cautioned against exaggerating its violence.

  Vic Bubas may have started Duke's basketball greatness, but more important to the ACC was Everett Case who coached NC State from 1946 into the 60s. Case had coached the Frankfort Hotdogs to four Indiana state championships in the 20s and 30s before he went to NC State. He brought Indiana players to NC State, forcing arch rival North Carolina to hire Frank McGuire from New York and Duke to hire Vic Bubas (one of the Indiana basketball players Case had recruited to NC State) to keep pace.

  I'll have to warn Colin about the pick pockets in Barcelona. He and his girlfriend Kelly are going there for a conference in July. Like you, Colin has become quite the international scholar, having attended conferences in Ireland and Australia the last two years. It sounds like you and Dave had a great trip to Finland.  Reading in “Air” Keller's journal that she has a collection of manga reminds me that Chris had a large collection of manga also. When he graduated from Ohio State, he donated them to the library. They cataloged them as the “Chris Kern Collection.”

  You mention the specter of an unaffiliated historian at the OHA meeting and use the words ominous and tragic to describe the tight academic job market. Exactly. Chris is on a treadmill of one-year gigs and is beginning to wonder if he will have to pursue some other career path. No one wants someone in pre-modern Japanese in an atmosphere in which everyone is paranoid about enrollment. He starts a three-year non tenure track appointment at Auburn in the fall and if nothing pans out by that time it could be his last hurrah.

  There was this period of time during the 1970s when the old sexual morality embodied in the concept of moral turpitude had died but the new morality embodied in concepts of sexual harassment had not been born. You attempt to exonerate faculty who married students by saying that the students took the initiative but by today's standards the relationships would have been highly suspect.

Here is part of my reply: “Thanks so much for the comments about Steel Shavings.  It was great reading names I had not thought about in many years, like student Phil Oretsky and English professor Richard Hull.  I’m always interested in how your sons are doing.  I exchanged emails with Chris after the student wrote about manga. Thanks for telling me about North Carolina State coach Everett Case; I’ll have to learn more about him.  Interesting take on Robespierre; I planned to audit Jonathyne Briggs’ course on the French Revolution but he taught it on line, an unfortunate trend in higher education. Did I write about running into our old colleague Mark Sheldon on campus, dressed nattily as always?  He poked fun of my winter coat (“Are you going hunting?”he said); I replied, “Are you wearing a hat because you’ve gone bald?”  He took it off and was indeed bald.  Later I worried needlessly that he had cancer.

Because of bowling, I missed Billy Foster’s Senior College talk on Big Band vocalists and the film noir event at Valpo U that Peter Aglinskas hosts.  He’s showing “Nightfall” (1957), which co-stars the still lovely Ann Bancroft as a model whose life is in jeopardy after she gives someone wanted by hit men her address. According to reviews, “Nightfall” featured innovative work by cinematographer Burnett Guffey and the skillful use of flashbacks by director Jacques Torneur.  The Engineers won just one game but got free beers because we all struck during the fifth frame; I didn’t even know about that since it’s never happened to us before. Terry Kegebein, a Steel Shavingsrecipient last week, asked how I knew Game Weekend host Jef Halberstadt.  They worked together at Bethlehem Steel (now ArcelorMittal). He took my summer Sixties class 40 years ago and invited me.  I’ve been a regular ever since.

 art by Casey King; below, "Norman the Animal"

IUN student Casey King dropped by to pick up Steel Shavings, which includes excerpts from his journal about being an artist and and examples of his work.  When I mentioned the upcoming Dave Davies concert in Hobart, he said his work was on display right next to the Art Theater at Green Door Books (below).  I dropped by there on the way to bowling and was impressed with the variety and cleverness of Casey’s work. The used books all sell for a dollar, and I hope to drop in before the concert with Josh and Alissa. The owner is an IVY Tech professor.

 Bogazici University overlooking Bosporus

Former IUN Chemistry professor Atilla Tuncay joined Mike Olszanski and me for lunch at Little Redhawk Café.  During the 1960s Tuncay received a degree from Roberts College in Istanbul, renamed Bogazici (Bosporus) University in 1971.  I stayed on its campus 19 years ago while attending an International Oral History Association conference.  Each morning I’d walk down a steep incline, buy coffee at a MacDonald’s, and, seated on a bench, look out on the Bosporus Strait.  When a student, Tuncay said, he’d often see Soviet ships passing by from the Black Sea on their way to the Mediterranean.  Every so often a sailor seeking asylum would jump overboard and attempt to swim to shore.  At its narrowest point the body of water was just a few hundred feet wide.

Jeopardy champ James Holzhauer, a sports gambler, won a one-day record $131,131, breaking his own former total. Having accumulated more than $71,000 prior to Final Jeopardy, he could wager $60,000 without fear of being dethroned after nine days.