Better Days?

“O, yes, I say it plain

America never was America to me

And yet I swear this oath

America will be!”

  Langston Hughes, from “Let America be America Again,” quoted by Martin Luther King and the epilogue to Spike Lee’s “Da 5 Bloods”

 

scene from "Da 5 Bloods"

Interviewed by Joy-Ann Reed for Time magazine, film director Spike Lee, he recalled sitting on his Brooklyn stoop at age 11 when he heard his mother screaming hysterically, “They killed Dr. King!  They killed Dr. King!” What followed were cities across the nation going up in flames. I was a teaching assistant at the University of Maryland and a day or so later stopped class when I heard a crowd headed to the chapel and joined them.  No words could soften the bitterness I felt.  Directed to hold hands with people near me and sing “We Shall Overcome,” when we came to the words “Black and white Together,” I could feel the anguish in my heart and imagined how empty those sentiments must have felt to people of color. Bobby Kennedy’s assassination not long afterwards seemed confirmation that America was no longer blessed, that King’s hopes of a multiracial society living in harmony was a pipe dream.

 

With most movie theaters still closed or shunned, first-run films are debuting on Netflix or some other streaming service.  So far, I’ve found enough free movies on premiums channels I get such as HBO or Showtime, and I got hooked on the TNT series “Snowpiercer,” set during a time in the future when scientists, hoping to counter the effects of global warming, caused a new Ice Age so severe that the only survivors were on a thousand-car train that must keep circling the globe in order to keep everyone alive.  On board is a class society, with the very rich segregated from others, including “tailies” in the last car who managed to get on board without a ticket.

 

The country has gone without major league sports since March, and the greed of baseball owners threatens to derail plan for an abbreviated season without fans.  Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David Murphy compared the deadlock to past labor wars, writing: “There are few things more American than the battle between capital and labor.  The national league was founded the same year as the Molly Maguire trials, the American league two years before Mother Jones led her march of Mill Children from Philadelphia to New York.”

 

In “Where the Crawdads Sing” by Delia Owens, a wildlife scientist, Kya, the so-called Marsh Girl, came upon the term “Sneaky Fuckers” in a scientific digest, a term first coined by evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith to explain that subordinate males often take advantage of the opportunity to mate attracted to a dominant male that is already occupied. Owens provided this example: “Pint-sized male bullfrogs hunker down in the grass and hide near an alpha male who is croaking with great gusto to call in mates.  When several females are attracted to his strong vocals at the same time, and the alpha is busy copulating with one, the weaker male leaps in and mates one of the others.  The imposter males were referred to a ‘sneaky fuckers.’”  Kya also learned about competition between males to inseminate females:

    Male lions occasionally fight to the death; rival bull elephants lock tusks and demolish the ground beneath their feet as they tear at each other’s flesh.  Though very ritualized, the conflicts can end in mutilations.  To avoid such injuries, inseminators of some species compete in less violent, more creative methods.  Insects, the most imaginative. The penis of the male damselfly is equipped with a small scoop, which removed sperm by a previous opponent before he supplies his own.

Some male inseminators aren’t so fortunate.  A female praying mantis eats the head of the male while mating and then for nourishment devours the rest of his body.  Such sexual cannibalism led to several species of Latrodectus being nicknamed black widow spiders.

 

Union stalwart Bill Carey posted a poem by Imelda May, a singer/songwriter most famous for recording “Tainted Love.”  “You don’t get to be racist and Irish” recalls a time when Irish immigrants were discriminated against.  It begins:

You don’t get to be racist and Irish

You don’t get to be proud of your heritage,

plights and fights for freedom

while kneeling on the neck of another!

You’re not entitled to sing songs

of heroes and martyrs

mothers and fathers who cried

as they starved in a famine

 family of Heath Carter

Heath Carter’s second talk on the history of religion in America dealt with protests over the forced removal of Cherokee Indiana from Georgia in the age of Andrew Jackson. As Carter stated, history holds no easy answers and some Christian believers had deeply flawed beliefs; but the church-led opposition to Indian removal generated the largest national protest movement up to that time.  Many petitioners were assimilationists who urged Native Americans to adapt to white man’s ways.  Most Cherokees did just that, taking up farming, drawing up a constitution modeled after the U.S., and even converting to Christianity. Missionaries who championed their cause were incarcerated by Georgia authorities and put in chains.   Even though the Supreme Court ruled in their favor, the federal government forced them west along a “Trail of Tears” that saw 5,000 perish. Even though the anti-removalists failed to stop this atrocity, many who heretofore had favored resettling former slaves in Africa changed their position and joined the ranks of abolitionists demanding an immediate end to slavery.

 

Don Coffin wrote this haiku while peering out his back door:

Sunset approaches,

Clouds shifting in the wind and

I need only watch.

Photo by Don Coffin taken from his back door

When I’m down, lyrics to The Head and the Heart’s “Library Magic” give me a small measure of hope:

I can see the sunshine's rays gleaming through the clear waters
Telling me you gotta hop in for this chapter's ride
There will always be better days

A Clear Midnight

 “Tell my friends I’m coming down

 We’ll kick it when I hit the ground.”

   Paramore, “Hard Times,” from “After Laughter”

After reading in New York magazine about Hayley Williams, longtime vocalist for Paramore who just recorded a solo album, “Pearls for Armor,” I checked out Paramore’s 2017 studio album “After Laughter’ and put it on heavy rotation with Weezer, Daft Punk, Lush, and Bob Dylan’s “Blood on the Tracks.”  Paramore is often grouped with emo bands such as Panic! At the Disco (once a favorite of Becca’s) and Jimmy Eat World (one of my favorites) who grew out of the punk scene and feature confessional lyrics.  Here’s an example from Paramore’s “Fake Happy”:

I’m quite alright

Better hope I don’t blink

Delia Owens

At the library, open for curbside service I also picked up “Where the Crawdads Sing” by retired wildlife biologist and environmentalist Delia Owens, which I noticed Alissa was reading last weekend. A 2018 novel that was on the New York Times best seller list for 30 weeks, it takes place in a coastal marshlands of North Carolina.  NYT reviewer Marilyn Stasio called it “a painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature.”  I’m intrigued.

 

New York magazine’s special issue, “Listening to the Very Old,” opened with a section titled “Long Lives: Old People have never been so powerful – or, now, so vulnerable.” A photo showed wheelchair-bound Bill Streiber peering at his son through a window at Solheim Senior Community in Los Angeles.  Amelia Schonbek interviewed 90-year-old former farmworkers organizer Dolores Huerta, who marveled at how quickly people can be mobilized into action on the internet.  She added:

    One negative thing about the online issue, though: You realize that you don’t know your neighbors.  Yesterday, on my daily walk, a women greeted me and said, “Are you Dolores Huerta?,” and it turns out she’s a schoolteacher.  And a man shouted, “Are you Dolores Huerta?,” and it turns out he just bought a house and he recognized me because he was active in a labor union in L.A. I guess we’ve had social distancing in a different kind of way about relating to our neighbors.  And that’s different than when I was young. When I was young, you knew everyone on the block.

 

Poet Susan Howe, 82, told Amelia Schonbek that lying down and going to bed, she thinks of Walt Whitman’s poem “A Clear Midnight,” written near the end of his life.  It goes:

THIS is thy hour O Soul, thy free flight into the wordless,

Away from books, away from art, the day erased, the lesson done,

Thee fully forth emerging, silent, gazing, pondering the themes
thou lovest best,

Night, sleep, death and the stars.

Howe’s poem “The Midnight begins:

For here we are here

BEDHANGINGS

daylight does not reach

Vast depth on the wall

Neophyte

 

On “Final Jeopardy” with the category “Pre-Civil War Presidents” the clue was, “After a grand tour of Europe he retired to a life of obscurity in Concord.”  One contestant, thinking of Concord, Massachusetts, guessed John Quincy Adams; I knew that was incorrect because Adams spent his final years as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives.  I knew it had to be New Hampshire native Franklin Pierce, like James Buchanan, whom he preceded, a Democrat who favored appeasing the South in a vain attempt to save the Union from Civil War. Next day, a “Jeopardy” clue asked where Noah kept the bees. It was a riddle Calumet Regional Archivist Steve McShane always asked his Indiana History students the first day of class.  Answer: the ark-hives.  When I told Steve about it, he replied, “They owe me royalties.”

 

Cindy C. Bean posted a photo of her grandmother’s Oak Forest bowling team, Pin Crushers, in 1973.  When I said I wish I had known her, Cindy replied: “She was so awesome! So ahead of her time! She ran their Flower and Garden shop and was also a cosmologist! She was extremely social! Always had her hair and nails perfect! She was great! You would have liked her!”

Guy Rhodes photographed East Chicago Central’s drive-thru graduation and posted

    I enjoyed my time this afternoon checking out East Chicago Central High School's first-ever drive through graduation ceremony, brought on by social distancing measures still in place for the COVID-19 pandemic. To my knowledge, this is the first time something like this has ever been done in the city's 127-year history. Students and families drove to several stations set up around the campus for gifts and hand-outs before students got out and walked a short distance to receive their diploma. A parking lot traffic island replaced the stage, a DJ playing popular music replaced a choir, and the resulting atmosphere was fun and lively. I later got word that more than a few people suggested it be done this way from here on out. 

Vanessa Hernandez Orange, left, (Coach V) added: “My go to guy, he’s the man who steps up and makes it happen. Whatever you need I got your back! You have had EC Students back for the past twenty something years!! I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Now let’s get drive through graduation going. Mr. Dave Lane, senior class sponsor, Honor Society Sponsor, English teacher, tennis coach, the voice of EC Athletics, the of Central High School. All love, Coach V”