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.

Secularists

“Teachers are the one and only people who save nations,” Mustafa Kemal Ataturk

If asked my religion, I sometimes call myself a deist (like Thomas Jefferson), a Universalist (a form of Unitarianism that believes everyone goes to the same place after death, whether it be heaven, floating in the cosmos or “ashes to ashes”) or a secular humanist, a philosophy embracing reason, ethics, and social justice and opposed to dogma and superstition.

At lunch Atilla Tuncay and I talked about the mischief caused by religious fanaticism and Turkey, which he plans to visit after he retires.  He has not returned to his native country in over 25 years and wants to take his daughters.  We discussed the protests against the regime of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who, we both agree, has guided Turkey on a path toward prosperity. Erdogan has created so many new universities (all over Turkey, not just in Istanbul) that there is a shortage of professors.  Perhaps the police brought the problem on themselves by violently cracking down on peaceful protesters objecting to construction of an old Ottoman barracks on Gezi Park near Taksim Square.  Reporting on “the rise of a new generation in protest,” Mehmet Sinan Birdal wrote in the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram: “The young generation is much more accustomed than their parents to living together with people who are different. This explains the vast plurality of the Gezi protesters: soccer fans, college students, feminists, LGBTs, anti-capitalist Muslims, Kemalists, liberals, nationalists, socialists, anarchists, ecologists, Alevis.”  Kemalists believe in the secularist principles of Mustafe Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, and fear Erdogan is gravitating too closely to Sunni clerics.  Alevis, belonging to a Shiite offshoot, are Turkey’s largest minority, comprising 20 percent of the population.  Alevis are angry at the naming of a bridge over the Bosporus after Sultan Selim I, a.k.a. Selim the Grim, who was “the executioner of Alevis,” according opposition leader Huseyin Aygun.

I emailed Chris Kern: “Have you heard about the pinkeye epidemic in Japan, thought to be from ‘worming’ or eyeball licking? I recall your mother having pinkeye; do you think she and your dad had been worming?”  Julie had been teaching when she came down with conjunctivis, or pinkeye, and her students were fascinated by how gross it looked.  Paul joked: “You caught us.  You should try it.”  According to Bossip.com, an online gossip magazine, the practice, also called oculolinctus, hopefully will “remain one of those peculiarly Japanese fads such as bagelheading (injecting saline into your forehead until it swells out of all proportion, yaeba (undergoing dental surgery to give you crooked teeth) and shippo (wearing a neurologically controlled tail that reveals your moods).”

“Sesame Street” has a muppet with blue hair, a green nose and a hoodie named Alex whose dad is incarcerated.  Jerry Davich thinks this might create controversy, but I cannot fathom how anyone could object.  Some 2.7 million kids have a parent in prison, and children of soldiers are growing up missing a loved one.  Bob Estelle quipped: “Bring back Mr. Green Jeans.”  Just like it’s not easy being green, the same is true when your old man is behind bars.

A woman at Lake County Government Center, doing research for the Dillinger Museum, wanted to know the identity of someone in the famous photo of bank robber John Dillinger with Sheriff Lillian Holley and Prosecutor Robert Estill.  After Dillinger escaped from Crown Point Jail, FBI critics referred to it as the “petting picture” because Estill’s arm was around Dillinger.  The shot, taken in February 1934, ended Estill’s aspirations for higher office.  The UPI caption identifies a man to Dillinger’s right as East Chicago Police Chief Nicholas Maker.  The problem is, two men are to Dillinger’s right.  One might be Gary Chief of Police Stanley Buckland. A photo of Buckland in an FOP “History of the Gary Police” resembles, I think, the fellow on the extreme right while Steve believes it may be the man with the hat slightly in the background.  That theory makes more sense since it’s less likely that he would have been identified in the original caption.

 below, from left, Angela Lane, Jimbo, Marianne Brush, Beamer Pickert, Phil Lane, Lorraine Shearer

I sent nephew Beamer Pickert photos taken during his stay with us.  He liked them and, a fan of They Might Be Giants, remarked: “For some reason I had a song stuck in my head out of seemingly nowhere... ‘The Statue Got Me High!’ Once this faded (after maybe 7 or 8 repeats) it was quickly replaced with ‘Ana Ng’ (extended version)!  What a trip down memory lane!”  I replied that the verse I liked best in “Ana Ng” began, “All alone at the ’64 World’s Fair.”  Subsequent lines went: “Who was at the DuPont Pavilion?  Why was the bench still warm?  Who had been there?”  Referencing the chorus, Beamer’s friend Josh Sheridan Talley wrote: “Ana Ng and I are getting old, and we still haven't walked in the glow of each others majestic presence.”

I listened to 1950s Vee-Jay hits in preparation for Steve’s class.  I may focus more on “Pookie” Hudson and the Spaniels than last time when the emphasis was on founder Vivian Carter.  I plan to give students copies of Steel Shavings, volume 41, which ends with Henry Farag describing Pookie closing an Oldies show with the Spaniels a few years ago at the famed Chicago theater.  Henry wrote: “He was a quiet guy and not a braggart, so it was impossible to know what was on his mind when he took the stage.  Perhaps his thoughts fleetingly harkened back to Jackson Street in Gary, growing up listening to the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots and singing in his church choir.  He had a casual yet intimate voice and a delicate timbre that put emotion into every syllable and attracted girls.  He joined a group named after a dog breed.  Their hit records were the ignition that launched the first Black-owned label, Vee Jay Records, that would go on to produce and release hits by the Dells, Jerry Butler, El Dorados, Gladys Knight, Dee Clark, the Four Seasons, the Beatles, and many more before it all went to hell.”

Harper’s reviewer Jane Smiley discussed four rather self-indulgent new memoirs, whose villains include ex-husband, mother, father, and agricultural commune leader.  The best of them, Jeanne Nolan’s “From the Ground Up,” deals with caring for a large public garden.  Smiley concludes: “The hardest memoir to write is the one that is honest but not self-obsessed: Nolan accomplishes this with clarity and poise.”  Dismissing Philip Caputo’s “The Longest Road,” as dull, Smiley asserts that it was “wedded to the organizational principle of which every memoirist should be wary: chronology.”  I, on the other hand, am an advocate of chronology.

Dave cooked delicious catfish with a Hawaiian sauce and steamed crab legs; then we played four board games, including League of Six, which arrived from Amazon the previous day before turning our attention to San Antonio’s heartbreaking loss to the Heat due to despicable two no-calls when Miami players basically mugged Manu Ginobili and Danny Green.

 Lake Michigan at sunset, photo by Anne Gladys Balay

Anne Balay is back in Miller after trips to England with Riva Lehrner and to Wisconsin to see Leah.  Preparing for her upcoming Gender Studies class, Anne asked” “What’s an easily recognizable cultural reference that links blue collar workers to traditional family structures? (they say Roseanne is too old, and complicated).”  Anne doesn’t own a TV, and I don’t watch sitcoms, but several folks suggested ‘Family Guy’ and ‘Larry the Cable Guy.’”  “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” takes place in Paddy’s Pub,” but the characters are selfish eccentrics rather than your typical blue-collar family unit.

In Nicole Anslover’s class I watched “Coming Home (1978),” starring Jane Fonda as Sally Hyde, the wife of an American marine corps officer in Vietnam who falls in love with a paraplegic war casualty, Luke Martin, played by Jon Voight.  “Hanoi Jane” took lots of heat for appearing in this anti-war flick, but both Fonda and Voight deservedly won Oscars for their performances.  The soundtrack to “Coming Home” is amazing, especially the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time.”  The ending of “Coming Home” really got to me, especially as Tim Buckley’s “Once I Was a Soldier” played in the background.  I great film, better than another about the effects of Vietnam on soldiers, Best Picture Oscar winner “Deer Hunter.”  Poet Walt Whitman, who cared for wounded Civil War casualties, declared: “The real war will never get in the books.”  That being true, despite cinematic efforts such as “The Platoon,” “Coming Home” provides a glimpse of the seething anguish returning soldiers often go through.

I called up former neighbor Dave Elliott, first time we talked since he moved back to Virginia, and told him I was listening to a J.J. Cale CD he burned for me.  His email address starts out Wavy Dawg, the first part in honor of hippie crown prince Wavy Gravy, and the second part from his nickname, Road Dawg, when he was a truck driver. 

Anne and Emma Balay had dinner with us at Sage Restaurant.  I told Emma that our nephew Beamer posted a review on Foodspotting and she did the same on Tumblr and got a huge number of responses.  Back at the condo, we played three rubbers of bridge.  The Stanley Cup game was still in progress when I turned it on.  Amazingly the Blackhawks scored six goals, the final one in overtime.