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.

Let's Be Still

“The world's just spinning

A little too fast

If things don't slow down soon we might not last.

So just for the moment, let's be still.”

         The Head and the Hand, "Let's Be Still"

 The Head and the Heart

I have been playing the CD “Signs of Light” by The Head and the Hand, a Seattle indie rock group formed in 2009, on heavy rotation along with albums by Weezer, Blink-182, The War of Drugs, and Phoenix.  The Head and the Hand’s “All We Ever Knew” reminds me of my favorite Roy Orbison song, “In Dreams” and contains these lyrics:

When I wake up in the morning

I see nothing

For miles and miles and miles

When I sleep in the evening, oh lord

There she goes, only in dreams

She's only in dreams

At Chesterton library I checked out “The Hawaiian Quilt,” a novel about an Amish young woman (Mandy Frey) on a cruise who gets stranded on the island of Kauai and is taken in by a Hawaiian couple who run a bed and breakfast.  Having lived in Honolulu in 1965-66 and spent a memorable week in Kauai, I am finding the book interesting.  My friend Suzanna Murphy has been living an Amish lifestyle for more than a decade and is a fan of authors Wanda and Jean Brunstetter.  I even watched a few episodes of the reality TV series “Breaking Amish.”  Like Mandy, I’m descended from Pennsylvania Dutch settlers on my mother’s side.

Post-Trib correspondent Nancy Webster interviewed me about remembering Pearl Harbor at a time when the last few survivors of the December 7, 1941, attack are dying off.  I talked to her about writing my University of Hawaii M.A. thesis on territorial governor Joseph B. Poindexter, unfairly blamed by islanders for allowing military rule under martial law for the duration of World War II.  Historians regard the Japanese attack on our fleet at Pearl Harbor as one of the pivotal events of the twentieth century because it was dramatic proof that America could not isolate itself from what was occurring in the rest of the world. Bullet holes on buildings at Hickam Air Force Base are still visible as a reminder to be ever vigilant. Over two million people visit the USS Arizona Memorial annually, including Japanese tourists.  In three weeks Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and President Obama will visit the site together. There was a time when Japanese-Americans were not allowed to work there due to a misguided fear that some veterans might object.

 Hickam Air Force base building

Jermaine Couisnard game winner, Post-Trib photo by Jim Karczewski

With son Dave announcing from behind the scorer’s table East Chicago Central defeated top-ranked Merrillville 69-67, as Jermaine Couisnard drove the length of the court and scored with four seconds left.  Jonah Jackson, who had drained two threes to tie the game with 10 seconds left, got off a final desperation shot that bounced off the front of the rim.

After taking grandson James to Inman’s for bowling, I told Kevin Horn that my knuckle sometimes rubs against the side of my new ball’s thumb hole.  He told me that one can buy special strips of tape to remedy that problem and introduced me to friendly teenager McKayla Smith, who uses them on her thumb. Inman’s pro shop didn’t have the brand she recommended, Genesis, so McKayla opened a container that resembled a fishing tackle box, containing all sorts of accoutrements, and gave me two of hers.  She refused to take any money for them.

Sunday at Temple Israel Ron Cohen spoke about folk music during the 1930s.  Introducing him, I plugged the Archives (which we founded) and Steel Shavings magazine (ditto).  Thirty years ago, Ron and I talked about another joint venture, our book “Gary: A Pictorial History,” a similar Temple Israel brunch.  On hand were old friends Bobbi and Larry Galler.  He and I were discussing music and I told him about the CDs that Robert Blaszkiewicz made at Christmas of his favorite song of the year.   “He was my editor at the Times,” Larry exclaimed, referring to his Marketing column in the paper’s Sunday Business section.  Union stalwart Robin Rich introduced me to a lesbian couple, Sandra and Nancy Hagen Goldstucker, who moved from Chicago to Miller because of Anne Balay and have known her since her daughters Emma and Leah were babies. 

Ron played a half-dozen folk songs, including selections by Lead Belly, the Almanac Singers, Earl Robinson, and Woody Guthrie and mentioned the odd fact that in 1931 Gene Autry, the singing cowboy, recorded “The Death of Mother Jones,” whose lyrics included these lines:      

The world today's in mourning

O'er the death of Mother Jones;

Gloom and sorrow hover

Around the miners' homes.

This grand old champion of labor

Was known in every land;

She fought for right and justice,

She took a noble stand.

Ron speculated that Autry had never previously heard of labor champion Mother Jones; I countered that the Great Depression temporarily radicalized many people.   I asked Ron if Pete Seeger, when performing in union halls during the 1940s, got workers to sing along, something that became his trademark later in his career.  Pete started the practice when he was blacklisted and appearing mainly on college campuses and for kids at school, at progressive summer camps, and eventually on Sesame Street..

above, Gene Autry; below winter scene with deer by Marianne Brush

below, Becca second from right

As several inches of snow covered trees and slickened streets, we drove to see granddaughter Becca perform in Chesterton High School’s forty-fourth annual Madrigal Feast fundraiser.  Dressed as a maid, she was a bell player, server and singer in the chorus.  CHS cafeteria resembled a medieval baronial hall, and a herald (Wyatt Lee) introduced guests with fanfare after banging his staff to attract attention.  Becca escorted us to the Prince James of Wessex table.  Before dinner the herald read off 11 rules of etiquette, including not to pick your teeth with a knife, wipe your greasy fingers on your beard, rest your legs on the table or dip your thumbs in your mead. The program featured music, dancing, and jesters performing for the guests of honor, many whom I recognized from the musical “Godspell.” Although too religious for my taste, the production was impressive.  At any rate seeing Becca in action was worth the price of admission.

Son Phil knocked me out of the Fantasy Football playoffs by a mere four points.  My receivers, the strength of my team all year, let me down.  Mike Evans, Emmanuel Sanders, and Jason Witten combined for just 7 points compared to 25 for Phil’s trio of Jordy Nelson, Brandin Cooks, and Eric Ebron.  Top draft pick Rob Gronkowski was on injured reserve, and T.Y. Hilton was questionable, so I didn’t play him and he racked up 29 points.  Go figure. In the CBS Office Pool I picked Atlanta over Kansas City and got done in on a freak play.  Atlanta went ahead 28-27 late in the fourth quarter and elected to go for a two-point conversion. The pass got intercepted and run back 100 yards, giving K.C. 2 points and the victory.

At the IUN History Club program on Weird History I talked about flour sacks once becoming fashionable dresses and Abraham Lincoln’s wrestling prowess. In fact, Chris Young had linked me to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame website where I learned that George Washington had been a county-wide champ and at age 47 defeated seven challengers from the Massachusetts Volunteers.  David Parnell cited weird facts about Roman emperors, and Diana Chen-Lin talked about Chinese women who gather in parks, sidewalks, and other public places and dance in groups – perhaps harking back to when they were in the Red Guard during the Cultural Revolution and participated in parades and other syncopated activities. Jonathan Briggs compared the marketing of the Ku Klan Klan in the 1920s as a money-making enterprise to Amway’s pyramid scheme of enlisting followers to find others to sell memberships and other paraphernalia.  Coming up with additional weird facts were History Club officers Sylvia, Scott, Tyler, and a handsome ROTC officer I recalled from Nicole Anslover’s class on World War II.  The group was still going strong after two hours when after a gross story about a New Orleans spinster I exclaimed, “On that note I’m out of here.”

 Ralph utters the "f" word in "A Christmas Story"

An Vanity Fair article entitled “How A Christmas Story Went from Low Budget Fluke to an American Tradition” contains some great anecdotes about by the late Hoosier humorist and screenwriter Jean Shepherd, including this retort to critics who labeled his work nostalgic: “[It is] anti-sentimental, as a matter of fact. If you really read it, you realize it’s a put-down of what most people think it stands for—it’s anti-nostalgic writing.” Of Ralphie’s mother, played by Melinda Dillon, Shepherd said she “is the kind of woman I figure grew up in a family of four or five sisters and married young. She digs the Old Man, but also knows he’s as dangerous as a snake.” During the filming of “A Christmas Story” Shepherd became so disruptive that he was barred from the set. 

My favorite “In God We Trust” Jean Shepherd tale (incidentally, not part of “A Christmas Story”) is “Leopold Doppler and the Great Orpheum Gravy Boat Riot.”  During the Depression theater owners employed all sorts of gimmicks and giveaways to lure customers during week days, including Dish Night.  Each week at the Orpheum in Hohman, Indiana, women customers received one item from a 112-piece dinnerware set, starting with a bun warmer, a cup and saucer combination, and an egg cup.  “The town was hooked,” Shepherd wrote:

  Ladies in the last stages of childbirth were wheeled into the Orpheum, gasping in pain, to keep the skein going.  Creaking grandmothers, halt and blind, were led to the Box Office by grandchildren.  Ladies who had not seen the light of day since the Crimean War were pressed into service.  They sat numbly, deafly in the Orpheum seats, their watery eyes barely able to perceive the shifting, incomprehensibly images on the screen, their gnarled talons clasping a sugar bowl for dear life.

  There was only one Big Platter in every complete set of dinnerware, the crowning jewel in Doppler’s diadem.  For weeks we had filed past the magnificent display in the lobby and there in the exact center, catching the amber spots, glowing like the sun, was the Big Platter.  And tonight it was ours.

  One of the saddest sounds I have ever heard was the crash in the darkness by some numb-fingered housewife, carried away by a brilliantly executed scene by Joe E. Brown loosened her grip in laughter.  A sudden panic and her platter was no more, scattered in a million Pearlescent slivers among the peanut shells and Tootsie Roll butt ends that formed a thick compost heap underfoot.  Recriminations, suppressed sobs, and the entire family rose and filed out, their only reason for being there gone in a single split second.  My mother held ours with both hands clamped over her chest in a death grip.

All went well until gravy boats kept arriving over and over again each week.  Finally, when Doppler took the stage to assure the crowd that they could be exchanged later, a “blizzard” of gravy boats filled the air.  Shepherd wrote:

  A great crash of Gravy Boats like the crashing of surf on an alien shore drowned out Doppler’s words.  And then, spreading to all corners of the house, shopping bags were emptied as the arms rose and fell in the darkness, maniacal female cackles and obscenities driving Doppler from the stage.

  High overhead someone switched off the spotlights and Frankenstein flickers across the screen.  But it was too late.  More Gravy Boats, and even more.  It seemed to be an almost Inexhaustible supply, as though some Mother Lode of Gravy Boats had been struck. The eerie sound track of The Bride of Frankenstein mingled with the rising and falling cadence of wave upon wave of hurled Gravy Boats.  Outside the distant sound of approaching Riot Cars.  The house lights went on. The Orpheum was suddenly filled with blue-jowled policemen.

  The audience sat among the ruin, taciturn, satisfied.  Under the guidance of pointed nightsticks they filed into the grim darkness of the outside world.  The Dish Night Fever was over, once and for all.  The great days of the Orpheum and Leopold Doppler had passed forever.