The Prince

“There you see what it is to serve a prince!  We should be wary of their vacillations of temper.” George Cavendish to Thomas Cardinal Wolsey referring to King Henry VIII in Hilary Mantel, “Wolf Hall” (p.45)

 

Like King Henry VIII, would-be autocrat Trump is loyal to no one but himself and his immediate family but demands total obedience from others.  Still, he has no compunction about jettisoning them if expedient.  Who doubts that his lapdog vice president will be replaced if DT believed another running mate would help him be re-elected?  Ditto even his most obsequious cabinet members. “Prince” Donald Junior (whose half-brother, I kid you not, is named Baron) is his political hatchet man, spreading the most egregious lies and conspiracy theories about political rivals and critical commentators, while palpably unqualified son-in-law Jared Kushner is put in charge of a “shadow” coronavirus task force and the Mideast peace process. In “The Prince” Niccolo Machiavelli wrote that “the first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the people he has around him.”  By that standard our leader fails badly.

 

Machiavelli also said: “It is much safer to be feared than loved because ...love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”  So far this tactic seems to have allowed Trump to stifle dissent within Republican ranks.  Senator Mitt Romney stands virtually alone in calling out Trump’s outrageous lies and attacks that harken back to the rancid days of Joe McCarthy. He deserves a "Profiles in Courage" award. This from Ray Boomhower: “I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny—fear, ignorance, bigotry and smear.” Margaret Chase Smith, who died on this day in 1995

 

George Floyd

Minneapolis is under the microscope since the killing of George Floyd at the hands of police, one of whom pinned the victim’s neck with his knee for nearly ten minutes while the handcuffed black man, allegedly suspected of cashing a counterfeit $20-bill, pleaded for his life and repeated, “I can’t breathe.”  As usual, Trump has weighed in, calling the mayor a radical leftist and unruly protestors thugs.  It is dismaying to see a small minority looting stores and setting fire to cars and buildings, but incendiary rhetoric by the president is the last thing Minneapolis needs at this time.  I couldn’t help thinking of the late Twin City icon Prince’s song “Purple Rain” (“I know times are changing/ It’s time we all reached out”) and how his music championed the diversity of America.  To see his city in flames makes one weep.  Gary native Ben Clement wrote “Mourning Sickness” to express his grief:

Here we go again.

Waking to nightmares that aren’t dreams.

They’re real. Too real. Surreal.

You saw what I saw.

Not through lying eyes

But, dying eyes. His...dying...eyes.

And his final pleas, “Please!”

Your ears did not deceive. They didn’t lie.

You heard the man. Clearly.

Plaintiff wail. Begging. Pleading. Praying.

Unanswered prayers.

That’s what makes me sick.

The man cried for his mama!

Doesn’t that bother you?

Aren’t you bothered?

Aren’t you disturbed?

Aren’t you sick?

I am.

Every morning when I wake and George Floyd is still dead.

 Coincidentally, the Mayor of Gary is named Prince.  Born in 1964, Jerome Prince graduated from Lew Wallace in 1982 and enlisted in the marine corps.  After a career selling insurance and real estate, Prince unseated 40-year Fifth District Gary council veteran Cleo Wesson. After two terms he was elected to the Lake County Council and later Lake County assessor.  He defeated incumbent mayor Karen Freeman-Wilson by emphasizing the need for economic development.  One of his first appointments was Indiana National Guard Lieutenant Colonel Richard Ligon as the city’s new police chief.  When the current pandemic abates, I hope to interview Prince as part of an effort to update “Gary’s First Hundred Years.”

 

John Fraire shared brother Gabriel’s poem “The Perfect Flour Tortilla”:

Less than four years old

Standing on a chair

Tiny tummy leaning

into the counter

hands on pin

rolling dough balls

into flour tortillas

It is all black and white

Grandma by my side

With her faded flower apron

Short greying hair, eye glasses

Scowl on her face

She snapped orders

For the few things she did not do herself

Never once did she say,

“I love you.”

But I felt it in those hands

That cupped mine

As she showed me how

To knead

and roll

The perfect flour tortilla

Dipped in Steel

And though they were sad, they acted quickly
And sealed his glorious head to preserve it for all time
His dead mouth slowly opened
It would be frozen, sealed, dipped in steel
Screaming thy last scream
Or breathing thy last breath
Or laughing his last, endless, infinite laugh

    “Dipped in Steel,” Flaming Lips

The new Flaming Lips concept album “King’s Mouth,” featuring narration by former Clash guitarist Mick Jones, is receiving four-star reviews.  It tells of a benevolent king who sacrifices his life to save his city from an approaching avalanche; in gratitude subjects remove his head, dip it in steel, parade it through the streets, and preserve it as a monument to his feat. “Mouth of the King” opens with these lyrics:

Even in death, the king seemed to be still alive
Into his giant mouth, come on, climb inside
And see the stars, the storms, the swirls
And other worlds that are still there in his head
Still there in his mind

I’ve been a fan of Wayne Cole and the Flaming Lips ever since their 1993 hit “She Don’t Use Jelly.” My favorite Lips song is “Waitin’ for a Superman” on “The Soft Bulletin” (1999).  A close second is “Do You Realize?” from “Yoshemi Battles the Pink Robots” (2002), which like “King’s Mouth” deals with fate and death, grief and veneration.  Marianne and Missy Brush saw the Lips in Chicago and reported that the concert was awesome.

 Richard M. Dorson

In a section of “Land of the Millrats: Urban Folklore in Indiana’s Calumet Region” titled “A Piece of the Heat” folklorist Richard M. Dorson recounts a body of persistent legends concerning workers falling into the heat.  At a temperature over 2800 degrees victims instantly burn to a crisp and become one with the 150-plus tons of molten steel. One Old Timer claimed to spot a dead man’s steel-toed work boots surface momentarily before dissolving.  Another described the smell as resembling roast pork. Some claim that workers have jumped in to commit suicide. One tale claims the image of the victim’s face appeared briefly over the kettle. Since it’s impractical, even illegal, to bury 150 tons of steel on land or in the lake, the heat is processed same as any other, the impurity negligible. In one story, a 150-pound ingot was delivered to the funeral home for burial in the man’s coffin.

 Gabriel Fraire

In Gabriel Fraire’s novel “Mill Rats” (2012), a rookie working the night shift atop a five-story high coke oven made a misstep with tragic consequences, which a veteran helplessly witnessed as the hapless steelworker lost a leg to the heat.  Fraire sets the scene:

  The fire explodes ten feet in the air.  Although Haysus is less than two feet from the flame, he doesn’t flinch.  The heat appears to wrinkle the face shield of his asbestos hood.  The asbestos suit he wears over his work clothes only keeps him from catching on fire. It does nothing to relieve the heat.

  He moves to the next oven lid, knocks it with a seven-foot long steel pole, grabs the handle off the lid with the hook on the pole’s end, and pulls the lid off, causing another fire explosion to shoot high in the air.

  On the night shift they work in teams on a row of lids.  Each man is responsible for three of the six in a row.  It takes all his strength to make it through the eight-hour shift.

A shocking “Game of Thrones” scene occurred when Dany’s weaselly brother Viserys Targaryen attempted to be crowned king.  Dany’s husband Drogo poured molten gold onto his head.

I interviewed IU Northwest graduate Martha Azcona for the IU Bicentennial Project, along with son Adam, who received an undergraduate degree at Bloomington, then took CIS (Computer Information Systems) courses on the Gary campus, and presently works for the med school.  Martha’s family hailed from Mercedes, Texas, near the Rio Grande border and were migratory workers until hearing about the availability of good-paying mill jobs in the Calumet Region after World War II. Her father Willie wanted no part of the mills and worked for Jewish grocers. Martha went to several Gary schools, including Froebel, prior to entering Horace Mann. When Willie abandoned the family for another woman, his boss, who had lost several family members in the Holocaust, warned that he’d be let go unless he reconsidered.  When Willie refused, eldest daughter Martha and her mother became seasonal farm workers to make ends meet.  She ultimately decided to attend IUN intent on becoming a nurse. 

Martha Azcona’s favorite professors were Bill May in Biology (who praised her note-taking) and Gary Martin from the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (a great storyteller). While subbing at a Lake Ridge elementary school, she found the environment so rewarding that she earned a degree in General Studies and enjoyed a successful career as a Title I Teacher for the Calumet Township School District. Son Adam recalled: “I have fond memories of my sister and I doing our homework in the Hawthorn Hall hallways as my Mother watched us from the classroom while my Father worked shift work at Inland Steel when we were younger.”  Martha and her three children lived on Carolina Street in Glen Park.  Adam frequently sneaked out late at night to go skateboarding. His favorite haunt was Burns Funeral Home and later IU Northwest’s library courtyard with its slopes, steps, and railings to test one’s skill.

Nick Castellanos and Thurman Munson

As the baseball trade deadline approached, the Cubs acquired outfielder Nick Castellanos from Detroit.  He requested No. 6. as his son just turned six and Tiger Hall of Famer Al Kaline (my favorite player while living in a Detroit suburb) mentored him early in his career.  Unlike most Cubs, Castellanos rarely fans and sprays the ball to all fields. During a needed victory over Milwaukee, in the course of which Castellanos hit the ball hard every at-bat, TV announcers Len Kasper and Jim Deshaies traded anecdotes about Seventies Yankee legend Thurman Munson, who died while attempting to land his Cessna Citation exactly 40 years ago.  After urging the Yankees sign free agent Reggie “Mr. October” Jackson, the hard-nosed catcher came to despise the flamboyant slugger Once the team was forced to take a commercial flight; Munson played loud music on a boom box and threatened to punch a passenger who complained if he didn’t get out of his face.  When a coach asked him to reduce the volume, Musson snarled, “I didn’t know you were music coach, too.”  After the Sporting Newsreported that rival Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk had more assists than him, Munson deliberately dropped a half-dozen strikeout pitches, then threw to first in order to eclipse Fisk.

having read the final “Licks of Love” selection, “Rabbit Remembered,” several times, I looked for compelling passages I might have overlooked.  Author John Updike places the small Pennsylvania city of Brewer south of Philadelphia in the Lehigh Valley rust belt area where Allentown, Bethlehem, and Easton (my birthplace) are located.  A generation ago, Updike wrote, Brewer was “a fast, crummy town, a town run by gangsters and crooked cops and the enforcers for the steel and coal and textile companies, a town where children could buy numbers slips from the cigar stores and so-called cathouses filled the half-streets around the railroad station [during a time] when the vast old hosiery mills were still mills and not discount clothing outlets.”  The industrialists’ heirs were now living on “the wealth of honest material industry, its machinery sold south, its employees long dismissed and dead of lead and toxic relaxants.”

Roy Angstrom, 14, Rabbit’s grandson, emailed crude jokes to his father Nelson in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, which focused on White House sexual peccadilloes. One such wisecrack went: “President Clinton was visiting Oklahoma City after the May 3rd tornado and a man whose house was demolished put up a sign: HEY BILL HOWS THIS FOR A BLOW JOB.”Roy thought, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”

Ronnie, Rabbit’s former rival, now married to his widow, has an aging gay son still hopeful of dancing in a Broadway production and meanwhile working as a ticket agency salsman.  At a 1999 Thanksgiving dinner he raves over, “The Vagina Monologues, claiming, “It’s about us and our bodies. All of us.  Men, women, and in-between.”  I recall going to an IUN production of “The Vagina Monologues,” whose cast included Tanice Foltz, describing getting in touch with her vagina. One indignant secretary walked out as a cast member told of seeing her clitoris for the first time in a mirror and saying, “Looking at it, I started crying. Maybe it was knowing that I had to give up the fantasy, the enormous life consuming fantasy, that someone or something was going to do this for me – the fantasy that someone was coming to lead my life, to choose direction, to give me orgasms.”

Jean Edward Smith’s “FDR,” an upcoming book club selection, weighs in at 855 pages. I’m quite familiar with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s life and presidency, so hope to find a few new nuggets. One, for instance, compares FDR’s close relationship with mother Sara to Douglas MacArthur and his mother Mary Pinkney Hardy MacArthur, nicknamed “Pinky.”  Both moved into hotel suites near their sons attended college, Roosevelt at Harvard and MacArthur at West Point.  At the 1912 Democratic convention, FDR supported Governor Woodrow Wilson, who secured the nomination thanks to former standard bearer William Jennings Bryan, who, wrote Smith in a reference to Macbeth,“hovered over the convention like Banquo’s ghost.”

Lake Effect

“Lake-effect snow: a phenomenon created when cold dry air passes over a large warmer lake, such as one of the Great Lakes, and picks up moisture and heat.” Dictionary.com

Route 49, photo by Jerry Davich

We had lake effect snow yesterday and again today.  It isn’t too bad, but I worry about the Michiganders coming down from Grand Rapids through the infamous snowbelt.

No stranger to controversy, Speros Batistatos, President of the South Shore Convention and Visitors Authority, wants the 2014 air show held at Fair Oaks Farms in Newton County.  I personally don’t care and am relieved the city of Gary isn’t shelling out money needed for support services.  Hammond mayor Thomas McDermott, however, called the plan to earmark funds from a Lake County hotel/motel tax to benefit counties nowhere near the southern shore of Lake Michigan a travesty.  Batistatos wants to extend his empire south and, as Jerry Davich asked, “Is this move about a regional power grab more than keeping the air show flying above the many beaches across Northwest Indiana?”

The Archives was booming Wednesday, but the campus was not as crowded as normal, with many cancelled classes.  In my 37 years of teaching I can’t recall ever calling off class.  Even after my knee operation, I had Ron Cohen take over my upper division course and Supplemental Instructor Tom Pawelski show a documentary on Reconstruction in the surveys.  I guess that’s what one might call old-school.

Marla Gee, who sits next to me in Nicole Anslover’s class, asked me to read her “personal statement” for admission to law school.  It is charming, traces the various jobs and life experiences she has had in the 42 years since she graduated from high school.  After saying that she left IU after a year to travel and then the various jobs and education she had had since then, she concludes: “With what I suppose must be some form of karmic justice, I am standing at the door with my hat in my hand, over 40 years later, asking for admittance and a second chance.  I labor under no delusions here.  There is no federal bench in my future.  Sidley Austin will not be wining and dining me, six-figure contract in hand.  Many graduates with IU law degrees will be found in the paneled board rooms of Fortune 500 companies and hotshot law firms.  That’s terrific.  But by the same token, the poor and elderly are just as entitled to first-tier legal counsel as the rich and powerful.  Ideally I would like to return to the federal government, (volunteering unfortunately will not repay my student loans), where ageism and mandatory retirement are not as widespread, in addition to hosting weekly volunteer Talk-To-A-Lawyer sessions at a homeless shelter or senior center here in Gary.  Folding metal chairs, cookies and Kool-Aid over there on the table in the corner with the cheap plastic tablecloth.  Not pretty, but I like to believe that I could make good things happen there.  Thank you for the opportunity to tell you about myself.  I look forward to proving to you what a dedicated, passionate student I will be; and in turn, a lawyer worthy of Indiana University.”  Marla’s compassion for those who need attorneys the most shines through in her beautiful letter.

Gabriel Fraire included this note to me along with his book “Mill Rats”: “All my work reflects the challenges and triumphs of being Mexican-American.  I was a Mill Rat.  I was born in East Chicago, Indiana, in the Mexican-American barrio known as ‘The Harbor.’  It was adjacent to the steel mills.  I worked the steel mills.  My father worked 43 years in the mills; his stepfather was killed in a mill.  Growing up, everyone I knew worked the mills.”  Gabe, or Rocky as I knew him, moved to Sonoma County, CA, in 1975 with wife Karen and has two daughters.

Ron Cohen informed me after the fact that he appeared on WBEZ, being interviewed by Mike Puente about an upcoming event honoring the Gary Roosevelt and Indianapolis Crispus Attucks teams that played in the 1955 state basketball championship.  He sent me chapters of another manuscript dealing with vernacular music in the 1930s.  I learned what chanteys were, songs sung by sailors while at work aboard the ship.

Ray Smock wrote: “We always find popular shorthand language to describe political conduct. Once Watergate happened, any scandal or crisis in Washington had to have a ‘gate’ as part of its name. The ‘Nuclear Option’ became a dramatic phrase to suggest the extreme nature of changing the rule dealing with cloture, the way the Senate ends debate. ‘Nuclear’ suggests laying waste to the Senate rules, not merely changing or reinterpreting them.  This hyperbole also suggests that the Senate itself will never be the same again. This may be the case. But just naming something ‘nuclear’ does not make it so.”

The Engineers won five of seven points thanks to John’s 590 series.  On the next lanes The Legends were wearing new shirts with their nicknames.  Walter Peasant’s read “Sweetness” and bore the number 32, Walter Peyton’s old number.  Shannon McCann was a no-show, so no hugs for me or Melvie.