Electrical Storms

 “The lofty pine is oftenest shaken by the winds; High towers fall with a heavier crash; And the lightning strikes the highest mountain.” Horace, Roman poet during the reign of Augustus

One hundred years ago, according to the Chesterton Tribune’s “Echoes of the Past” column, a severe electrical storm struck Northwest Indiana. Hawley Olmstead, President of the Prairie Club, was struck by lightning near his group’s clubhouse in the Lake Michigan dunes and died instantly. His friend Kenneth Ross, was caught in an undertow and drowned. A bolt of lightning struck a horse belonging to Chesterton resident Mrs. Joseph Wozniak, knocking it to the ground and rendering it unable to walk for some time. Mail service aviator Frederick Robinson took off from Gary, but the dire weather conditions forced him to make an emergency landing in a field near the Porter Swedish Lutheran Church.

When we lived atop a sand dune within the Indiana National Lakeshore, now a national park, we frequently observed lightning storms nearby over Lake Michigan. If they were accompanied by loud thunderclaps, we grew apprehensive. Usually, the worst consequence was losing power, though sometimes we’d be without electricity for hours or even days. Once, however, a bolt of lightning hit our house. While in the kitchen we smelled a worrisome odor emanating from the fireplace room. Our record player had been damaged; the smell was an electrical fire, and sparks were coming from the appliance. Toni quickly unplugged the device from the power source (the socket) and, except for the foul odor, averted greater damage. Later we found evidence out back that our house had been struck.

Golden Gate Bridge and orange sky

Thunderstorms are causing hundreds of wildfires throughout the west coast that have burned millions of acres, forced the evacuation of thousands of residents, and left the air quality in cities such as San Francisco so poor that breathing it into one’s lungs for a sustained length of time is the equivalent to smoking a carton of cigarettes. Fierce winds, draught conditions, and intense heat due to global warming have created near-apocalyptic conditions. As California governor Gavin Newsom declared, the future climatologists warned us about is upon us.

Oregon blaze

Jerry Pierce wrote that his mother in Oregon is living less than 30 miles from one of the many out-of-control fires.   Ray Smock recalled:

    I can remember when the skies in Gary, IN and Pittsburgh, PA looked forest-fire orange most of the time, sometimes depending on the wind, or when a stagnant inversion layer held smokestack emissions low. And the smell was awful. We got rid of a lot of the industrial pollution, only to succumb to our global failure to keep the planet's atmosphere from carbon dioxide pollution. Carbon dioxide is an invisible gas, but burning forests make it all too visible in other ways.

    As the physicist George Feynman reminds us, trees come from the air. They take in carbon dioxide from the air. They take in water that falls from the air. They convert carbon dioxide into a carbon-based thing called wood. They exhale some of the oxygen. When they burn, they release all their carbon dioxide, all their wood, and return to the air and leave a residue of ash.

    The fires will get worse. The skies will be orange more often. The CO2 in the air will increase. Nature is out of balance already. Not from the old industrial pollution, which helped, but from our current disregard over the last 30 years to stop the imbalance. This is so far beyond the old industrial pollution. Humans have just about changed the planet enough that we have basically ruined it for future generations. Even the trees, from which our species evolved, have turned on us because we have made it too hot for them to keep helping us.

When a teenager living on Third and Fillmore in Gary, Dorothy Mokry recalled trying to cross Fourth Avenue when it started storming and having her hands upright when she got a shock on her left hand and actually noticed sparks coming off her fingers.  It freaked her out and ever since, she worries about being outside during a lightning storm. She added: “Plus, now I have hardware in my ankle and always worry that it’s like an electrical conductor.” 

Before delivering a talk on “Novels as Social History” to my Saturday Evening Club (SEC) colleagues via zoom, Dave helped me get set up so the lighting and background were adequate.  After mentioning books I read on my own, such as “Peyton Place,” “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Advise and Consent,” “Hawaii,” and “In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash,” plus so-called nonfiction novels by “New Journalists” Tom Wolfe, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, and Norman Mailer, I cited novels I assigned in twentieth-century American history courses, such a “The Jungle,” “Babbitt,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Native Son,” “The Catcher in the Rye,” “Breakfast of Champions,” and “Rabbit Is Rich.” Finally, I read excerpts from my three favorite current favorite writers: Richard Russo, Anne Tyler, and Elizabeth Strout.

Larry Galler and Pat Bankston; below Vonnegut self-portrait 

As customary, each SEC member reacted to the talk for 5-10 minutes.  Most were complimentary.  Former IUN colleague Pat Bankston, now living in Florida, brought up having read the nineteenth-century William Thackeray novel “Vanity Fair” in college.  VU emeritus professor Hugh McGuigan noted that Charles Dickens and other English novelists first published their works in serialized form in magazines. Ben Studebaker brought up the current vogue for fantasy novels such as the Harry Potter series.  Larry Galler quipped that I was the first SEC speaker to use the utter the phrases mother fucker and blow job.  I had observed that many libraries banned Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five” (1969), supposedly because it contained dirty words.  In one scene in question G.I. Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut’s alter ego, froze under fire, prompting Roland Weary to yell, “Get out of the road, you dumb motherfucker!”  Then Vonnegut added: “The last word was still a novelty in the speech of white people in 1944. It was fresh and astonishing to Billy, who had never fucked anybody – and it did its job. It woke him up and got him off the road.” I also quoted from John Updike’s  novella “Rabbit Remembered” where grandson Roy joked about Bill Clinton’s sexual proclivities during the Senate impeachment trial:

   One 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.” His father thought to himself, “After this Lewinsky business, even kindergarten kids know about blow jobs.”  

Super Tuesday

“It’s a good night.  I’m here to report that we are very much alive.  It may be over for the other guy,” Joe Biden

Like the much-hyped Super Bowl, Super Tuesday does not always produce dramatic results; but in 2020, as CNBC reported, “Joe Biden is the front-runner again after he shocked the world.”  The tide began to turn three days before, in South Carolina.  After U.S. House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn endorsed him, Biden cruised to a landslide primary victory over Bernie Sanders thanks to overwhelming support from African Americans. Pundits doubted this would have a major impact on Super Tuesday since many voters had cast their ballots early, Biden was almost out of money, and his campaign had almost no foot soldiers on the ground in key states such as California, Texas, and Minnesota.  Then, in short order, billionaire Tom Strider, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Senator Amy Klobuchar, seeing the handwriting on the wall, dropped out of the race and endorsed Obama’s former vice-president.  On election eve, Texan Beto O’Rourke embraced him at a rally where both Buttigieg and Klobuchar made eloquent speeches on his behalf. Biden won 9 of the 13 contests, including Texas and Minnesota, and picked up almost as many delegates in California as Sanders.  Next day, Mike Bloomberg dropped out and threw his support to Biden.  Elizabeth Warren has suspended her campaign, so it appears to be down to a two-candidate contest.

For the first time in weeks, I am cautiously optimistic about Trump being a one-term president. That’s the most pressing issue for most Democrats, and Bernie heading the ticket would be a disaster.  At bridge Terry Brendel was similarly buoyed by the outcome.  When someone, probably a Republican, said she wasn’t for Sanders but thought others were unfairly ganging up on him, I replied that other Democrats should gang up on him, he’s not even a Democrat but rather an Independent and socialist.  Had Republicans ganged up on Trump in 2016, I added, maybe the country would have been spared the scourge of his unprincipled presidency. 

Here’s Ray Smock’s take on the sudden shift in momentum:

     It appears that Democratic Party primary voters had an epiphany when Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and a powerful voice in South Carolina politics, endorsed Joe Biden for president. Congressman Clyburn cut through all the campaign hype and talked from his heart about how fearful he was about the situation in our politics right now. He said we were at an “inflection point," a time to change the arch of our political trajectory because we cannot sustain the current situation. While Clyburn mentioned issues such as affordable and accessible healthcare, education, and housing, he talked mostly about Joe Biden’s integrity and his commitment to the cause of good government. He said it was an inflection point because we needed “to restore the country’s dignity; the country’s respect….”He said “I know Joe. We know Joe. Most importantly, Joe knows us.”

    Jim Clyburn’s emotional call for decency and integrity in our nation and in the person we send to the White House struck that deep chord in many voters. It cut through the fog of the campaign and its myriad issues. We want normalcy to include dignity and respect. If our leaders do not have integrity, if they cannot speak honestly to us; if they do not have strong character, a character not measured in TV debates but in what we see in their hearts, then we will continue to be fearful of our future. It’s not that the other Democratic candidates lack honesty and integrity, or any appearance of normalcy, so much as the strong perception that Joe Biden stood for these things above any other issue. He conveyed a presidential gravitas the others could not match.

    We want desperately to believe that normalcy includes goodness. We want a person that can unify the nation and begin to heal the wounds of vicious partisanship that have too long dominated our politics. The Super Tuesday elections confirmed what Jim Clyburn set in motion. We will see if the upcoming primaries will sustain the amazing momentum, a leap toward normalcy, that Democrats see in Joe Biden, as if for the first time.  Democratic Party primary voters across the board said Joe Biden best exemplified the qualities that make him the standard bearer who can do battle against a president who does not appeal to our better angels and is not normal.

Lois Turco responded to Ray’s post and photo of Biden: “I like a President who eats ice cream in a cone. Normalcy is comforting.”

After a historian labels our sixteenth president a self-serving, racist politician who hated abolitionists, as Fred Kaplan does in “Abraham Lincoln and the Abolitionists: John Quincy Adams, Slavery, and the Civil War” (2017), one might expect a cool reception in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association.  Reviewer Daniel Feller, University of Tennessee Knoxville historian and editor of the  Andrew Jackson papers, didn't disappoint; he skewers Kaplan as incompetent and his book as incoherent, then lists several dozen factual inaccuracies, including Lincoln leaning toward Jackson’s Democratic Party before that party came into existence. Feller concluded: “Kaplan’s sanctimonious prating about what Lincoln should have known and should have done is at first grating and in the end insufferable. . . There are many fine books out there worth buying and reading.  Don’t waste your time on this one.”

Lincoln funeral train

Faring much better was “Mourning Lincoln” (2015) by Martha Hodes, reviewed by John McKee Barr, who praised its “thorough research, stirring prose, and aptly placed quotations.” Here’s how Barr summarized the reaction of most Northerners to Lincoln’s assassination : “Astonished.  Astounded. Startled. Stupefied.  Thunderstruck.  A calamity.  A catastrophe.  A dagger to the heart.  A thunderbolt from a clear blue sky.  The feelings that had engulfed the confederates less than a week earlier now overtook their conquerors.”  Barr acknowledges that most Southerners were overjoyed, Copperheads not unhappy, Radical Republicans apprehensive but hopeful that Andrew Johnson would be more malleable, and freedmen devastated and in intense mourning. Nearly a million people witnessed the Lincoln funeral train as it meandered on a 1,654-mile journey from Washington, DC, to a tomb in Springfield, Illinois, lying in state at a dozen locations, including Indianapolis and Michigan City, Indiana.

Driving to Miller, I dropped off my new Steel Shavings to Ron and Nancy Cohen and Celeste and Michael Chirich.  Ron gave me a New York Review of Books issue with a Kara Walker drawing on the cover. Accompanying the article by Zadie Smith, “What Do We Want History to Do for Us?” was a 1994 illustration showing two grotesque woman, slave and mistress presumably, bound by a rope, whose identities were forced on them rather than chosen.  Mike and Celeste had just returned from Puerto Rico, where they had stayed at a condo a block from the Caribbean.  One night they heard police cars and helicopters hovering overhead, attempting to capture, they learned later, a boatload of immigrants who’d arrived illegally from the Dominican Republic. I had intended to drop off a magazine at Ayers Realtors for Judy and Gene Ayers, but police cars were blocking traffic – apparently a traffic accident.

In Breakfast of Champions author Kurt Vonnegut’s alter ago Kilgore Trout, an unappreciated science fiction writer whose only outlet for his work was in porno magazines, found this message in the men's room of a seedy New York City movie house: “What is the Purpose of Life?”  Trout’s answer: “To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator of the Universe.”  In “Pity the Reader: On Writing with Style” (2019) Suzanne McConnell noted that the implication, as a Vonnegut character put it, was that the creator was “the laziest man in town.”  Thus, it was up to writers to be that conscience.

Vonnegut poked fun at pretentious critics. Midland City English teachers, he wrote, constantly berated students for grammatical mistakes, incorrect pronunciation, and poor choice of words:

  They would wince and cover their ears and give out flunking grades and so on whenever students failed to speak like English aristocrats before the First World War.  Also: students were told that they were unworthy to speak or write their language if they couldn’t love or understand incomprehensible novels and plays about people long ago and far away, such as Ivanhoe.

    The black people would not put up with this.  They refused to read books they couldn’t understand – on the grounds they couldn’t understand them.  They would ask such impudent questions as, “Whuffo I want to read no 'Tale of Two Cities?' Whuffo?”

    Patty Keene (a white waitress who had dropped out of high school and had programmed herself in the interest of survival to be stupid on purpose) flunked English when she had to read and appreciate Ivanhoe, which was about men in iron suits and the women who loved them. And she was put in a remedial reading class, where they made her read The Good Earth, which was about Chinamen.

Vonnegut claimed to be in the business of making jokes and compared his method to setting a mousetrap: “You build the trap, you cock it, you trip it, and then bang!”  Here is an example from “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,” about quixotic philanthropist Eliot Rosewater, son of a conservative Indiana senator, who believed Kilgore Trout to be a genius:

    “You know,” Eliot said to the Senator, “Kilgore Trout wrote a whole book about a country that was devoted to fighting odors.  That was the national purpose.  There wasn’t any disease, and there wasn’t any crime, and there wasn’t any war, so they went after odors.”

    “This country,” said Eliot, “had tremendous research projects devoted to fighting odors.  But then the hero, who was also the country’s dictator, made a wonderful scientific breakthrough, even though he wasn’t a scientist, and they didn’t need the projects any more.  He went right to the root of the problem.”

  “Uh huh,” said the Senator.  He couldn’t stand stories by Kilgore Trout, was embarrassed by his son.  “He found one chemical that would eliminate all odors?” he suggested to hasten the tale to a conclusion  

   “No.  As I say, the hero was a dictator, and he simply eliminated noses.”

In a Bridge Bulletin letter titled “Worst Hand Ever?” Ken Parker claimed that, sitting West at a game in Leland, North Carolina, he was dealt a hand containing four 2s, four 3s, three 4s, a 5, and a 6. After North bid a Diamond, his partner doubled, a force bid once South passed.  Parker bid a Spade, his only 4-card suit, and his partner raised to 4 Spades.  Parker actually made the bid after getting a favorable opening lead.  I scratched (that’s a good thing, meaning I earned master points) at Chesterton Y on Tuesday with Joel Charpentier and  at Banta Center on Wednesday with Dottie Hart.  On the final hand Dottie made 3 Spades doubled for high board.

Liz at El Camino Real, by Al Schuette

Liz Wueffel emailed: “Allison and I are in Santa Fe on spring break and enjoying the full sun. It’s cold at night, being 7000 ft above sea and the start of the Rockies, but beautiful during the day. Today we’re off to the Georgia O’Keefe museum and then we’ll hike a bit!”  I replied: When the OHA was in Albuquerque, I was in Santa Fe with Toni and granddaughter Alissa when she was a pre-schooler.  We toured a Native American museum.   It happened to be near Halloween and merchants were welcoming trick-or-treaters.  Alissa didn’t have a costume, so Toni put a camera around her neck and she went as a tourist.  Making out like a bandit, on the bus ride back to Albuquerque Alissa handed out treats to fellow OHA passengers.  An unforgettable memory.

Bowling against Just Friends, the Engineers won the first two games but in the third were down 13 pins going into the final frame.  Our leadoff man Joe Piunti doubled to get us close.  I threw a strike and then buried my next ball only to leave the ten-pin.  Frank had an impossible split but picked up 2 of the 3 pins, keeping us close. Our clean-up man, Don Geidemann doubled but so did theirs, Denny Cavanaugh, so we lost by 3 pins. We made them earn it though.  Mikey Wardell seemed delighted to receive Steel Shavings, which mentions the delicious fudge he often brings to share.  In fact, I enjoyed a caramel treat he offered me.  George Leach, to whom I’d given a copy the week before, enjoyed the remembrances of retired Gary cop Al Shanahan, passed on to me by Jesse Salomon.  George recalled such Glen Park joints where Gary veteran cops hung out as Pete and Snooks and Junedale Tap, which on Friday nights served delicious fried lake perch dinners.  

March has been designated National Reading Month in honor of Dr. Seuss’s birthday.  Miranda read “Wonder” by R.J. Palacio to her students, the story of a kid born with facial bone abnormality who enters public school in fifth grade after having previously been homeschooled.  A reviewer for The Guardian concluded that it has “such charm and heart, even in the sad parts,” and called it a “great emotional journey that . . . will leave any reader feeling better.”

James is on a two-week semester break from Valpo U. At dinner we had leftover Chinese fortune cookies for desert. Mine read: “You are the master of every situation.”  If only that were true.

Free Will?

    “Your particles are just obeying their quantum-mechanical marching orders,” theoretical physicist Brian Greene

Denying the existence of free will, Columbia University scholar Brian Greene (above), author of “The Elegant Universe,” asserted: “You have no ability to intercede in that quantum-mechanical unfolding.  None whatsoever.”  In a Time  interview Greene added: “How wondrous is it that I am able to have this conscious experience, and it’s nothing more than stuff, but that stuff can produce Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Mona Lisa, Romeo and Juliet?  Holy smokes, that’s wondrous.”  Greene’s research field is string theory, in particular quantum gravity.  With Tracy Day Greene in 2008 launched an annual World Science Festival whose purpose is to cultivate a general public informed by science.

Protestant Reformation theologist John Calvin (1509-1564) rejected the Catholic doctrine of free will and embraced the concept of predestination, arguing that due to God’s omniscience, the fate of individuals must be preordained.  Others rejecting Roman Catholicism were not so rigid, accepting what came to be known as the paradox of free will, the seemingly irrational belief that while God orders all things somehow human freedom is preserved.  Religious skeptic that I am, but less dogmatic than Brian Greene, as much as I respect him, I maintain that I am responsible for my actions.  Somewhat of an existentialist, I agree with Hoosier humorist Kurt Vonnegut that “There is no order in the world around us; we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.” In “Slaughterhouse Five,” Vonnegut’s most important novel, the author utilizes protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s experiences to address the issue of  free will. Throughout his life, Billy is forced to be part of things against his free will. In his childhood his father throws him in the water to teach him how to swim. He was unwillingly drafted into the war, taken prisoner, and miraculously escapes the firebombing of Dresden. Later, he is kidnapped by Tralfamadorians, who believe that all moments occur and reoccur simultaneously: they have already happened and no one can change fate.

Hearing Bruce Hornsby’s “The Way It Is (some things will never change)” on WXRT’s Saturday morning show devoted to the year 1986 reminded me that things sometimes are beyond one’s control. Maryland basketball star Len Bias died that year of a cocaine overdose just two days after the Boston Celtics took him as the second pick in the NBA draft.  In the year of Halley’s Comet’s return, a Soviet nuclear reactor exploded at Chernobyl, wreaking havoc across much of Europe, and the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds after takeoff, killing the seven crew members. An deadly earthquake in San Salvador and volcano in Cameroon each killed over 1,500 people.  In 1986 Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was murdered and Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta (Lady Gaga) was born in a Manhattan hospital – hard to believe their fates were predetermined.

Lady Gaga in 2016

One of my favorite songs of 1986 was REM’s “I Am Superman (I Can Do Anything” – an assertion of free will, perhaps.  Dave’s high school band LINT performed “I Am Superman” acapella.  LINT also did a rousing version of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right to Party.”  Other top hits that year included Peter Gabriel’s “Sledgehammer,” “Papa Don’t Preach” by Madonna, and Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name.”  On the Ramones album “Animal Boy” were “Somebody Put Something in my Drink,” “Apeman Hop,” “Love Kills,” and “My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down (Bonzo Goes to Bitburg),” a rare political statement by the New York punkers criticizing Ronald Reagan’s visit to a German cemetery where Nazi storm troopers lay buried.

protesting Reagan's Bitburg visit

Connie and Brian Barnes hosted monthly bridge night.  Beforehand, we dined at Red Lobster, first time since Toni and I went there on Valentine’s Day for her birthday years ago and got rushed out ahead of the evening crowds.  Our entrees arrived almost simultaneously with the drinks and salad. Saturday, even though our group arrived at 3:30, it was already crowded, but we only had a ten-minute wait, the food delicious, and the service fine.  For an appetizer I had four tasty scallops and Toni the lobster bisque; we both then ordered fish and chips and had enough left over for Sunday.  As always, Brian had Stella in the fridge for me and red wine for Toni.  Brian had recently completed Glenn Frankel’s “High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic” (2017), which Ron Cohen will report on for our July history book club meeting. Beforehand, we’ll show the 1952 Western classic starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly.

Historian Jon Meachem (above), who has called Trump “the most vivid manifestation of our worst instincts,” and whose most recent book is “The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels,” compared 2020 Presidential frontrunners Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump to 1948 candidates Henry Wallace and Strom Thurmond.  The big difference: the latter were third party candidates, former Vice President Wallace, who disagreed with President Harry Truman’s bellicose Cold War policies, heading the Progressive Party and Thurmond, a segregationist opposed to the Democratic Party’s commitment to civil rights, atop the States Rights (or Dixiecrat) ticket.  Republican nominee, New York governor Thomas Dewey, was a moderate who lost in an upset to Truman.  Compared to 1948, political parties today are toothless.  On the one hand, Trump had never been a Republican prior to acting on his Presidential ambitions, while Sanders and Mayor Mike Bloomberg were not Democrats. I fear that if either became the Democratic nominee, it would spell disaster for the party.  If they wished to compete for President, they should run as Independents or, in Bernie case, as a Socialist.  

 Bernie Sanders in Soviet Union, 1988

Bernie’s rivals are taking aim at him but in a heavy-handed way, slamming him for praising the Sandinistas (at a time the U.S. was secretly supplying murderous Contras with deadly weapons), for declaring that the Cuban government under Fidel Castro increased literacy and health care for the poor (true, indeed), and for honeymooning in the Soviet Union in 1988 (a time of glasnost initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev, Time’swell-deserved person-of-the-decade).  On CNN’s presidential town hall Sanders recently said: “I have been extremely consistent and critical of all authoritarian regimes all over the world, including Cuba, including Nicaragua, including Saudi Arabia, including China, including Russia. I happen to believe in democracy, not authoritarianism.” The same, sadly, cannot be said of most officeholders, especially Trump, currently in India praising Prime Minister Narendra Modi as he is attempting to strip Muslims of their civil rights. I want Democratic candidates to go after Bernie but without using tactics akin to Red-baiting.

Speaking at Art in Focus was musician Joe Rauen, who fashions unique instruments from unlikely objects such as canes, pipes, tennis rackets, suitcases, and hockey sticks. For example, he played a guitar with a shovel as its base.  Rauen was quite at ease, personable, and very talented, making use of a loop that enabled him to lay down a track from one instrument and have it play back while he played another  of his concoctions.  Afterwards, director Micah Bornstein said that if Dave is unable to accompany me for my appearance in two weeks, he’d be happy to play YouTube selections of 1960 Rock and Roll songs (I’ll send him a list of 25, and he’ll have them all ready to go).  While at Munster Center, I noticed that Henry Farag was putting on an Ultimate Doo Woo show in April headlining the Marvelettes (“Please, Mr. Postman”) and Edsels (“Rama Lama Ding Dong”).  I’ll plug it during my talk.

We celebrated my 78th birthday at Craft House with Dave, Angie, Becca, and the Wades, who brought two inflated balloons, one a belated “Happy Birthday” to Toni. Dave brought me a case of Yuengling and promised to burn me an Of Monsters and Men compilation CD.  He’s scheduled to participate in an East Chicago Central “Dancing with the Stars” fundraiser and will be playing guitar with three students performing Johnny B. Goode at a Black History Month assembly (he’s invited me as a special guest).  I received birthday calls from Michigan Lanes and one from my brother in California. Facebook announced my birthday to my “friends” and who knows how many others, and I got over 50 likes and a dozen responses, including “Feliz cumpleaños” from Roy Dominguez, and later, in person, at bridge and bowling.

IUN sociologist Jack Bloom, still teaching although well past his 78th birthday, asked me for book titles covering Progressivism.  He was already familiar with classics by Richard Hofstadter and Robert Wiebe, so I suggested “A Fierce Discontent” by Michael McGerr (2003) and Murray N. Rothbard’s “The Progressive Era” (2017) as well as John Dos Passos’s 1920s classic  U.S.A. trilogy.  Nicole Anslover invited me to her class on the Scopes “Monkey” trial.  I may quote Dos Passos’s take on the “Great Commoner,” whose reputation was tarnished by his participation as an attorney for the prosecution.  Here is an excerpt from Dos Passos:

    It was in the Chicago Convention in ’96 that the prizewinning boy orator, the minister’s son whose lips had never touched liquor, let out his silver voice so that it filled the gigantic hall, filled the ears of the plain people:

his voice charmed the mortgage-ridden farmers of the great plains, rang through weather-boarded schoolhouses in the Missouri Valley, was sweet in the ears of small storekeepers hungry for easy credit, melted men’s innards like the song of a thrush or a mocking bird in the gray quiet before sunup, or a sudden soar in winter wheat or a bugler playing taps and the flag flying;

    Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world, supported by the commercial interests, the laboring interests, and the toilers everywhere, we will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: 

    You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.

    They roared their lungs out (crown of thorns and cross of gold)

carried him round the hall on their shoulders, hugged him, loved him, named their children after him, nominated him for President,

silver tongue of the plain people;

    Bryan grew gray in the hot air Chautauqua tents, in the applause, the handshakes, the back-pattings, the cigar-smoky air of committee-rooms at Democratic conventions, a silver tongue in a big mouth.

    In Dayton he dreamed of turning the trick again, of setting back the clocks for the plain people, branding, flaying, making a big joke of Darwinism and the unbelieving outlook of city folks, scientists, foreigners with beards and monkey morals.

Instead Clarence Darrow made a fool of him.

Hostilities

“The nicest veterans, the kindest and funniest ones, the ones who hated war the most, were the ones who’d really fought.” Kurt Vonnegut, “Slaughterhouse Five”

 Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove

Even though I already knew the doomsday ending of “Cat’s Cradle” (1963) by Kurt Vonnegut, it still moved me deeply.  As one who personally witnessed the horrors of war, the author brought out the absurdity of the Cold War arms race in ways that hadn’t moved me so deeply since the black comedy “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” (1964).  During a Memorial Day ceremony Vonnegut has Ambassador Horlick Minton deliver this devastating critique of glorifying warfare:

 Perhaps when we remember wars, we should take off all our clothes and paint ourselves blue and go down on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs.  That would surely be more appropriate than noble oratory and shows of flags and well-oiled guns.

Battle of Missionary Ridge, chromolithograph by Kurtz and Allison

Minton then recited these lines from “Spoon River Anthology” by Edgar Lee Masters, written in 1915 on the eve of American entry into the Great War: 

 I was the first fruits of the battle of Missionary Ridge

When I felt the bullet enter my heart

I wished I had stayed at home . . .

Instead of running away and joining the army.

The 1863 Battle of Missionary Ridge near Chattanooga was a Union victory at a cost to General U.S. Grant’s army of 6,000 casualties.

I’m listening to a greatest hits CD by Jackson Browne, whom I saw twice at the Star Plaza, that includes “Lives in the Balance,” about “men in the shadows” selling us everything from our President to our wars. “Lives in the Balance” was released when Reagan was flirting with intervening to overthrow the socialist regime in Nicaragua.  When I spoke at a history conference in Rio about women steelworkers, I played a video of Browne performing it at a 1990 concert in Santiago, Chile.  The final lines go:

And there are lives in the balance
There are people under fire
There are children at the cannons
And there is blood on the wire

Our bridge group dined at Captain’s House and then played at the Hagelbergs, who had purchased a delicious carrot cake from the Miller eatery.  I had a mediocre score but helped Toni edge out Brian Barnes to finish first.  Going into the final round, she trailed him by about 500 points.  After two hands he and Connie were up a game, but then we made two game bids to overtake them; first Toni made 4 Spades and on the final hand I bid three No-Trump and then took every trick thanks to two successful finesses and a 2-2 split with the four Diamonds in opponents’ hands. Like me, Brian and Connie had loved “Green Book.”  Noting that pianist Don Shirley should have known better than to flash a wad in a bar, Brian said that when working in Chicago for Sears, he always carried a wad.  Then if mugged, he could easily hand it over and hopefully then be left unhurt with his wallet.

I watched IU, led by Jawun Morgan (above), defeat Rutgers on Senior Day to clinch a bye in the upcoming Big Ten tournament.  Then, after running out for a cold cut Subway on an Italian roll, I enjoyed a 76ers win over Indianapolis thanks to 33 points by MVP candidate Joel Embiid.  Phil called to report on attending a week-end Comedy Fest with Delia, Alissa, Tori, and Anthony.  They had fun although unable to get tickets to 87 year-old Ed Asner’s one-man show, “A Man and His Prostate.”  In April Asner is coming to Memorial Opera House in Valpo.  I told Phil about being at Marquette Pavilion for Asner’s one-man show about FDR when he collapsed on stage and had to be removed on a stretcher.  A couple months later, he returned to Miller and fulfilled his vow to put on the show.

Former IUN professor Mike Certa returned from a cruise that included a stay in Hong Kong and just started “A Jazz Age Murder in Lake County” by Jane Simon Ammeson and noticed my name in the acknowledgment section as well as Ron Cohen’s and Steve McShane’s.  He emailed:

  So far, the first chapter is full of local references that I recognize in East Chicago, Indiana Harbor, and Gary.  The fatally injured woman in the book was taken to Mercy Hospital on Polk Street that I passed every school day for four years while attending Holy Angels Elementary School (fourth to eighth grades).  There are also references to St. Catherine’s Hospital in East Chicago where I was born.

  This seems to be my month for running across places from my youth.  At a recent political gathering in Crown Point I met an elderly gentleman named Frank, who lived in a house on Magoon Avenue in East Chicago (near the Four Corners) just across the street from Dr. Benchik’s office.  Dr. Benchik delivered me and my six siblings.  My mother insisted on him being our family doctor for years even though it meant trundling over to East Chicago from Gary.  His waiting room had the hardest wooden benches and the scratchiest horse-hair covered chairs I’ve ever endured.  However, we all liked him.  We went to him until he finally retired.  Frank knew the doctor and shared our high opinion of him.

After I told him about spending a month in Hong Kong a quarter-century ago, Certa replied:

  We were only in Hong Kong a couple of days at the end of our trip.  We stayed at the Intercontinental Hotel in Kowloon.  They have a really good dim sum restaurant in the hotel.  The day we had lunch there, we were the only non-Asians in the place, which we took to be a good sign.  The walnut encrusted mud fish balls were very good. Oddly enough, the people at the hotel didn’t seem to speak much English, and the concierges they didn’t seem to know much about attractions in the area.  We had much better luck on the street and in the subway stations.  There always seemed to be someone who noticed us and asked if they could be of assistance.  I’m thinking particularly of the day we took the subway, and a local bus to find the Walled City Park in Kowloon.  It was an English fort, then it became a slum containing about 15,000 people.  The city razed the slum and created a lovely park that houses some of the more historic buildings. We wandered around the park for 90 minutes or so.

While lecturing in Hong Kong at Chinese University, I visited that park by subway.  Numerous groups of well-behaved youngsters were walking in step behind an adults holding different colored flags.  I told Mikethat I may be attending a history conference in Singapore and asked how he like it, eliciting this response:

  Because I was still trying to shake the effects of bronchitis, I stayed in the hotel while Mary went with our tour group on the Singapore city tour.  They all came back raving about the phenomenal botanical gardens that line the river.  They talked about the amazing orchids they saw.  Evidently being 1 degree (85 miles) above the equator is a good climate for orchids. 

  As I was feeling better that evening, I booked what was called the “Night Safari” at the Singapore Zoo.  We were bused to the Zoo where we started with a very nice buffet. By the time we finished dinner it was dark.  You can do the tour two ways:  ride the tram or walk the trails at your own pace.  We took the tram.  Animals that tend to be nocturnal are in enclosures fairly close to the road bathed in a low intensity blue light.  They show up amazingly well.  The enclosures are quite big, and sometimes the animals had wandered off to the far corners.  I’d say we saw about 85% of the animals on the tour.  Near the end of the tram ride, we discovered a third option:  you can get off the tram and walk along the trail on your own.  We did this in an area where there were smaller animals.  We got to see the very rare pangolin (an Asian armadillo-like animal).  I thought it was an interesting experience.

 Kirk Muskrat and Winston Choi triptech

Maestro Kirk Maestro brought guest pianist Winston Choi with him to the Munster Center for his “Art in Focus” talk on “The Keys to France,” the title of the upcoming Northwest Indiana Symphony Orchestra performance.  Personable and entertaining as always, Muspratt wore a Number 88 Jonathan Kane Chicago Blackhawks sweater, as he was attending an ice hockey game at the United Center that evening as a symphony fundraiser. He spoke about French composers Camille Saint-Seans (1835-1921), whose specialty was organ music, and Maurice Ravel (1875-1937), best known for Bolero, a ballet that opens with a seductive 16-minute flamenco piece.  While dimming the lights for a clip showing the inside of Ravel’s home, Kirk briefly put a hand on my shoulder, either recognizing me from his 2018 presentation, thankful for asking him about Ravel’s private life (a bachelor, he lived alone except for a housekeeper), or perhaps  familiar with my blog.

Camille Saint-Seans and Maurice Ravel

Someone asked Muspratt about the Chicago musicians’ strike in progress, and expressed sympathy after mentioning that starting salaries were around $150,000.  The main disagreement involved cuts to the pension program. Another woman referenced the universally panned movie Bolero (1984) starring Bo Derek as a wealthy virgin looking to be de-flowered who becomes a matador after her lover gets gored.  Pointing out the steamy nude sex scenes, movie critic Roger Ebert wrote: “There are two Good Parts, not counting her naked ride on horseback, which was the only scene that had me wondering how she did it.” I checked out those Good Parts on YouTube and was amazed “Bolero” did not get an X rating.  Derek definitely deserved the 10 in the 1979 film of that name.

Young virtuoso Winston Choi, who teaches at Roosevelt University and, like Kirk, is a Canadian native, played bits of several Saint-Seans numbers and ended with a rousing crescendo by Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953). In the front row near the Baldwin piano, I noticed that instead of sheet music, Choi made use of a computer and a floor device that changed pages upon his command.  According to Muspratt, Prokofiev had the misfortune of living in the age of Joseph Stalin.  In 1948 the Politburo denounced him for the crime of “formalism” and banned most of his compositions.  His wife was found guilty of espionage and sentenced to 20 hears of hard labor in a Soviet gulag. Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.  Afterwards, I asked Choi the spelling of Saint-Seans, which he had pronounced like Sasson.  Rather than view it as a dumb question, he was very solicitous, even showing it written down.

Kirsten and Ed Petras; Night Ranger

Kirsten Bayer emailed: “It’s gonna be a great day when you park at work the moment Sister Christian comes on the radio. Hold please work while I enjoy.”  I responded: “I love Night Ranger and wore out my “Midnight Madness” album in the 80s. Had a similar car moment when "The Beat Goes On/Switchin' to Glide" by the Kings came on.”  “Sister Christian” lyrics include these lines 

Sister Christian . . .

You know those boys 
Don't want to play no more with you 
It's true

You're motoring 
What's your price for flight

When Phil and Dave were in high school, we showed up at a Jack Bloom end-of-the-semester party with “Midnight Madness,” which opens with “You Can Still Rock in America,” and had the back room hopping and people up dancing.  A YouTube video of “Sister Christian” that has received almost 18 million hits opens with girls receiving diplomas and concludes with scenes of them commingling with the long-haired San Francisco band.