Changing of the Guard

"Eden is burning, either getting ready for elimination
Or else your hearts must have the courage

for the changing of the guards

    Bob Dylan, “Changing of the Guards,” 1978

“Changing of the Guards” literally refers to sentries being relieved of duty by another contingent at such places as Buckingham Palace in London and Arlington National Cemetery.  I’ve witnessed both, the latter while working summers during the late 1960s at Boys Village of Maryland.  Even the young teenagers under my watch during the annual field trips were impressed.

There’s been a changing of the guard – without fanfare or ceremony, unfortunately, due to the pandemic - at IU Northwest: Chancellor William J. Lowe has retired after a decade of steady-at-the-helm leadership. He inherited a situation where after his predecessor had gone through several vice chancellors of academic affairs in quick succession, Bloomington had selected one of their own, strongman David Malik, to oversee IUN’s academic policy-making.  While in theory IUN has home rule, the mother campus still has preeminence over budgetary and tenure decisions.  As a result, Lowe, for the most part, deferred to Malik and concentrated on other duties, such as interacting with the outside community, lobbying for a new Arts and Sciences building, and attending campus events.  He was a fixture, for example, at Redhawk basketball games, academic events, and student functions and even dressed as Elwood Blues for a fundraising commercial. The son of a New York City police officer, he tended to administer with a velvet glove rather than an iron fist and apparently did not hold grudges, which cannot be said of some previous chancellors.  Lowe taught a seminar on Irish History last year and officially is taking a leave of absence with the intention of returning as a professor in my old department.  Incoming chancellor Ken Iwama has addressed faculty at a zoom town hall and appears to be a good choice, given his background and credentials, in this uncertain age for higher education. 

 

IUN’s Calumet Regional Archives has lost its longtime curator/archivist Steve McShane, whom Ron Cohen and I hired some four decades ago.  As I wrote in Steel Shavings, volume 49, which I dedicated to him, while I have learned that nobody is indispensable, it is hard to imagine the Archives without Steve.  His stellar service and unfailing patience and good humor sustained what has become a vital resource and repository under his leadership.  The pandemic derailed our plans to have a successor in place for him to mentor, and a top priority will be to convince Chancellor Iwama to authorize the search to continue with all deliberate speed.

Becca and Denzel Smith

Becca’s graduation party Sunday at the Chesterton American Legion Hall was a success despite participants wearing masks except for when they ate and a brief rain shower that interrupted outdoor activities.  We enjoyed house guests who began arriving Friday.  Good friend Tom Wade told me about a podcast on revisionist history that I’d enjoy. Jef Halberstadt recalled that his father worked for the Budd Plant in Gary, once the second largest employer I the city next to US Steel, until it closed four decades ago. When he noted that his father had developed several patents for the Budd company, I said that Vic, who died at age 50, had been a chemist for Penn Salt who had done the same thing regarding the use and treatment of chlorine. We talked about March of Dimes drives when we were in school, and Jef speculated that FDR was on the Roosevelt dime, first minted in 1946, because he started the organization in 1921 after he contracted polio.  It was great seeing Dave’s former student Denzel Smith, now a college graduate and playwright about to take a production on the road. He told me to check out Johnny Cash’s rendition of the Nine Inch Nails song “Hurt,” one of the last songs he recorded, about an old man’s regrets.

If I could start again
A million miles away
I would keep myself
I would find a way

For Dave’s birthday number 51 we had Chinese food from Wing Wah in Miller and cake left over from Becca’s graduation open house.  Although everyone was somewhat weary from weekend events, Dave and I got in to games of Pitch, and James joined us for Space Base.  I eked out a win just in time; another round and Dave would have run away with it.

 

A new book by Aram Goudsouzian, “The Men and the Moment,” about the 1968 election and the rise of partisan politics, describes how third-party candidate George Wallace’s blend of racist populism and resentment against mainstream elites gave birth to a new conservative movement that Trump successfully exploited.  Goudsouzian wrote:

    To his followers, Wallace was both hero and outlaw.  He promised order while delivering chaos, dismissed charges of racism while associating with bigots, and championed traditional morality while crushing dissent.  Slipping back and forth from country preacher to the macho bad boy, he applied the modern tools of a national movement to the rituals of an old-fashioned barnstorming tour.  In the process, he forged a near mystical connection with his followers.

Trump becomes more reckless and incendiary as his poll numbers drop; a changing of the guard in the White House has become imperative for the republic’s institutions to survive intact. An increasing number of articulate Republicans have come out against him, and lackeys in Congress and the media are reduced to anti-anti-Trump rationalizations, i.e., seizing on something off-the-wall a Trump opponent might have uttered and attributing the sentiment to Biden and all Democrats.

 

Because Trump is a pathological liar, he has no credibility.  Even if an anti-corona virus vaccine miraculously appeared before election day, few voters would believe the claim. He recently signed a long overdue bipartisan conservation measure, the Great American Outdoors Act, funding neglected national parks, giving no credit to Democrats, mispronouncing Yosemite as Yo-Semite, blaming Obama for past policies going back 20 years, and bragging that it was the greatest conservation measure since Teddy Roosevelt was president.

I’ve just started “Redhead by the Side of the Road” by Anne Tyler.  Unfortunately, in my opinion, social realism is no longer in vogue among Literary Modernists, but I love novelists whose books are firmly root in time and place, in Anne Tyler’s case, Baltimore. Tyler’s previous novel “Clock Dance” is about 61-year-old Willa, whose temperamental mother sarcastically called her father St. Melvin.  Her younger sister became a rebellious teenager whose eyes in 1977 “were so heavily outlined in blush that she resembled a pileated woodpecker.” A poster in her bedroom read “Nobody for President.”  Willa’s son wanted to quit school and hitchhike around the country to meet people.  Her self-indulgent husband died in an auto accident driving recklessly in anger.

Twenty years later, Willa (named for lesbian Willa Cather, one wonders, whose forte was depicting loneliness) receives a call that lures her to Baltimore to care for a nine-year-old girl, Cheryl, that someone mistakenly thought was her granddaughter.  Remarried to an overbearing man and bored with life in Tuscan, Arizona, Willa is ready for a change of scenery.  Tyler writes: “She knows the world, which has largely ignored her, expects her now to coast along that deferential rut into oblivion.”  Aware her time clock was ticking, she had always conformed but now was open to adventure, ready to dance. 

 

Coming to prefer an eccentric new “family” to a lonely life in Arizona, Willa heeds the insight of an elderly Baltimore neighbor who tells her: “Figuring out what to live for.  That’s the great problem at my age.” Willa thinks to herself, “Or any age.”  Reviewer Ron Charles concludes:

   The bond between this lonely child and this obliging woman forms the emotional heart of “Clock Dance,” radiating what Tyler calls a “sweetly heavy, enjoyable kind of ache.” But there’s a steelier theme here, too, an existential sorrow cloaked by the embroidery of Willa’s grandmotherly demeanor. “Sometimes Willa felt she’d spent half her life apologizing,” Tyler writes. “More than half her life, actually.” She knows that the world, which has largely ignored her, expects her now to coast along that deferential rut into oblivion.