Remembering Naomi

She was my first friend in California. I was newly married that summer in 1954. My ex-wife met Naomi on the City College campus and we joined her in the Labor Youth League…. a progressive social action group.

Naomi and I spoke the same language …. from Woody Guthrie’s Talking Union to Paul Robeson’s songs of the Lincoln Brigade. As Tom Lehrer put it, We lost the war but we had the best songs. We also shared the same lost causes against injustice and suffered the same illusions.

By the mid-sixties, she and Roger, along with my wife and me, started an encounter group and brought in 4-5 other couples. It was the fashion of the day…. lay yourself emotionally bare and take on the frontal attacks. Such fun.

I’m remembering Naomi’s answering machine message, direct and simply put…You know what to do. So do it. As if to cut through all the excuses, hesitations, ambiguities and conundrums of life. It was, at once, an expectation, demand, wish and invitation. Looking back, I might take this as her philosophy of life. She had no patience for the niceties and frills of convention. 

If she was talking to a friend, she told you what she thought. She had her complaints and let you know them, from sending food back in restaurants to demanding the air-conditioner be turned down in theaters. If she was addressing the society, at large, the government in fact didn’t know what to do but they did it anyway or they did know and didn’t do it.

Every time we went to a restaurant or movie with Naomi she would spot a friend in the room. She was a sort of visionary. She invented social networking before Zuckerberg.

For about a dozen years Peggy & I hosted what we called our Sunday Salon. Naomi and Roger were part of the group we gathered to show and discuss a documentary film. Naomi was one of our most staunch supporters. She hung in until she could no longer manage the stairs because of a hereditary disease resulting in muscular weakness that would eventually incapacitate her.

The common denominator of all this was her love to be in social groups. That was her joy. Whether it was politically based, psychological or aesthetic she simply enjoyed the company of others.

I last saw Naomi less than a week before she died.  We were a table of eight in a noisy deli. We could hardly hear each other but it didn’t matter. Naomi was in her element awash in the decibels.

I want to think she died surrounded by family and friends in her dream life. Ultimately, she may have addressed those words to herself, You know what to do. So do it. Given her degenerative condition she did. She let go. To the extent we have a say over the way we leave this world I can think of no better way to exit.

Cinema as History

Imagine having to write your life as a movie. Most of us are too busy living it. But if set to the task or even in collaboration with a filmmaker it could be one of those now infamous, based on the compelling story of…

I expect it would generate a few grumbles, aha’s and perhaps disbelief from the cast of co-stars and supporting cast with all those omissions, embellishments and the juggled time-line. At best it would be one version of the truth.

We seem to be saturated with biopics these days. Each movie has prompted articles pointing out how it really was. Sadly many moviegoers come away accepting the drama as History itself. I can recall, as a kid, relying on Hollywood's adaptation of Dickens' Tale of Two Cities for my understanding of the actual French revolution. The phrase, based on, gets lost

Is it just my imagination or are Millennials and those who preceded them our least informed generations about world history? Teacher friends tell me that some of their students think Aristotle was contemporaneous with Lincoln and Churchill with Julius Caesar. Anything that happened before they were born falls into the same trash bin. Maybe this is a corollary to the wireless world in which History is scant and deemed so very Yesterday. It’s as if today’s population invented the universe and all else is irrelevant.

Great poetry requires great audiences, wrote Walt Whitman. The same might be said about any art form. A certain sophistication is needed to delineate the art of cinema from the document of historical fact. Liberties are taken for dramatic effect; a certain concision and scrambling of the chronicle may be part of the process. If done to serve the aesthetic I accept it.

However when an actual event is depicted falsely as in LBJ’s role in the Voting Rights Act or the erasure of rabbis in the front line locking hands with MLK in the film, Selma, the choice seems less in the service of the art than in advancing a political agenda. More’s the pity. Cherry-picking the events severely diminishes the credibility of the narrative and leaves the audience with a false account of those times.

I suppose the creator might argue that she is reaching for a greater truth than the actual. I respect that. Certainly the several marches from Selma to Montgomery are a defining moment in American history. Sacrifices might be in order to drive home the force of the drama. However getting it right only strengthens the point. Getting it wrong is either laziness or deliberately misleading. Jewish activism in the Civil Rights movement and the subsequent Black / Jewish divide is a story in itself.

There are factual errors in The Imitation Game as well. The accomplishments of the code-breakers at Bletchley Park were not made public until the early 1970’s, 20 years after Alan Turing’s death. There is a strong case to be made that his death was accidental rather than a suicide. Again the distortions are troubling.

Such a nuisance when reality doesn’t conform to the emotional thrust of the story. There you are on the big screen and they got it not quite wrong but not altogether right either.

Sniper as Hero

Tricky business being a hero. On the pedestal one day and under it the next. In 1941 Sergeant York won the Oscar with Gary Cooper playing the, aw shucks hero of World War I. He was a Tennessee mountaineer who gulped his way into the trenches. Ever humble, he killed 32 and captured well over a hundred Germans and received a hero’s welcome as the great American sharpshooter. As a reward he got Joan Leslie and some fertile boTrittom farmland back home.

Seventy odd years later we are presented with another real-life (real-dead) American hero, Chris Kyle, who bagged 160 Iraqis, confirmed. Clint Eastwood has moved the cowboy overseas allegedly protecting us from an invasion of our frozen yogurt shops. Bradley Cooper’s Kyle comes home damaged, a self-described warrior and ends up himself a victim of friendly fire from a PTS buddy. Whether the movie is an anti-war statement or a celebration of it is up for debate. I suspect one leaves the movie reinforced in either direction.

I wonder if the 1918 German and 2007 Sunni Iraqis also had snipers as their heroes. As long as we de-contextualize it, killing is killing. Hardly heroic in my book. Eastwood never questions why we were in Iraq thus perpetuating the lie that our devastation of that country was somehow connected to the 9/11 attack. The real Sergeant Alvin York out-lived his movie by 23 years. In later-life he wondered what his war was all about.

People seem to need their heroes. I had mine growing up. Most were athletes, the idealized self. The notion of the hero comes out of innocence and a reluctance to enter the complex world of flawed human character. There is also an element of self-promotion around those crowned as heroes. Perhaps we are all heroes having survived the vicissitudes of childhood, tedium, infirmities and an ever fractured society.

Certainly there are those in history whose story compels us to take notice. And it doesn’t hurt to see them in totality. Thoreau was a hermit and also the life of the party when he danced the jig. He chose an austere life (for one year) close to Nature. Yet he brought his dirty laundry to his mother and sisters. He was an abolitionist who, heroically and at great risk, escorted slaves to safety. He owned a pencil factory. He went to jail in protest over the Mexican-American war. The closer we look at anyone the more complex his life.

Emerson thought great thoughts on his way to his friend's Walden Pond cabin to chat. His father got rich by ill-gotten gains in the Chinese opium trade, as did FDR’s maternal grandfather, Warren Delano. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite. His two brothers ran oil wells on the Caspian Sea in Baku. By 1900 this city produced 50% of the world’s oil. It was also one of the filthiest cities in the world with impoverished workers dead by age 30 on average. Now we know Nobel by those prizes bestowed in his name as we remember Carnegie by his libraries and Frick by his museum. As Balzac said, Behind every great fortune there is a crime. Their philanthropy feels like compensation or possibly atonement.

Back to movies- The Oscar list pits, among others, the sniper against those afflicted with disease (ALS and Alzheimer's) and the shame of the British for their tragic dim-witted policy that may have shortened the life of a war hero, Alan  Turing, who killed no one but himself… against the true American hero, Martin Luther King, who led the Civil Rights march, and was then slain by an American sniper.

Beholden to the 1%

In their infinite fog of wisdom the Supreme Court Citizen’s United decision of 2010 has rendered our elections as money battles between rival billionaires. The Koch Brothers recent sponsorship of a forum of Republican presidential hopefuls is a shameless event of public servants parading under the money tree to see what they can shake loose. Democrats will have their own pandering to Liberal wallets. It’s the new normal.

All this struck a chord in my memory bank. I was regressed to my 5^th grade class in P.S. 99. It was 1943-44 and I was ten, more or less. We were a nation at war. I can’t remember the day I went from not-knowing to knowing.  My father was an air-raid warden complete with helmet, arm-band and flashlight. I saved tin foil, even knitted squares to be sewn together to make a quilt or was it an afghan. The war was raging not only overseas but also played out in our classroom. Everyone, even kids, were urged to save their dimes, quarters and dollars to buy war bonds.

I can think of nothing that recalled the tenor of the times as well as those bonds. They bonded us together not only by raising money but rallying the home front. Both private companies and the government partnered in advertising. Movie theaters offered free admission with the purchase of a bond.  $18.75 got you $25 in ten years; 2.9% interest. Hollywood stars toured the country raising over 800 million bucks. Irving Berlin wrote with both hands. Any Bonds Today, was on The Hit Parade sung by The Andrew Sisters. Kate Smith weighed in with God Bless America. Three mediums and an extra large.

There was a most unique exhibition baseball game played between (among?) the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers and a team of servicemen. Prior to that was an old-timers game in which Babe Ruth hit a ball, thrown by Walter Johnson, over the roof of the Polo Grounds. My friend, Earl, is my witness. Only a war bond could get you in. The take was 56 million dollars. Final score…..who cared?

The fierce competition waged at school was between my class and the one above. We had our one percenter in Claire W. as in Double You and they had Patricia Yellen. Was she related to our current chief of the Federal Reserve? Maybe she printed money in her basement. Claire was more than Double Me. She had breeding…in her fashionable threads, her posture and her penmanship. I imagined her parents holding soirees where admission was a bond or two. In any case we looked to her to bring our total above our rivals. Certainly we couldn’t depend on those ten centers, like me, to do battle. Yet somehow I managed to buy two-$25 bonds cashed in when I moved to California ten years later. 

Who won? We all won. Money was an abstraction then and still is until you must do without. A psychiatrist friend once suggested that I don’t love money enough. I don’t disagree. But back in the day it was a bit less abstract. We were quantifying our patriotism.

I should say these four years were a brief window in the American chronicle as seen through the eyes of a kid. To be sure there were war profiteers and the class divisions, Antisemitism and racism before the war was in evidence after it.

By 1946 half the population (85 million people) had purchased war bonds. The 185.7 billion dollars raised is unmatched in history. (Thank you, Wikipedia) But that was then. Today we have a polarized landscape with class divisions like never before. Maybe the Koch’s pronounce their name to rhyme with Gotcha. But they didn’t get their way in 2012. It might take a planetary threat to mend the fabric of our nation so the interests of the 1% are indistinguishable from the 99%.  

The Alternative World of Downton Abbey

The last soap opera I can remember was possibly Ma Perkins. I had the measles or mumps back in the 30s and followed it for 3-4 days. As I recall, nothing much ever happened. One could listen to the radio show in October and pick it back up in March. There in the speaker of my RCA was pie was still cooling on the window sill and Uncle George hadn’t quite hauled all the firewood in from the shed.

These days about 8-10 million mostly Boomers and parents of Boomers watch Masterpiece Theater currently running season five of Downton Abbey. Unlike those old soaps Downton is filled with action of a sort. Somehow we hold in our ever-diminishing minds the dangling threads of twenty characters. Such goings-on! We can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff. What is it about these folks that demands our avid attention? It is certainly a testimony to the script, performances, polish and production values. And more.

My guess is we are seduced by their tidy universe; the civility of a world in which everyone knows his/her place. Quibbles and squabbles, yes, and any number of small spots of bother but nothing to upset the order. This has a powerful pull on our society, feeling as we do un-moored and dislocated where change has never before been so accelerated. An hour a week at Downton is almost enough to anchor us.

Enter, Ms. Bunting. Is she not obnoxious? Inappropriate? How dare she speak to M’Lord that way at the table? The woman has no breeding! No couth! She’s a flaming revolutionary! In a few sentences she has brought down Downton. Off with her head!

Yet she speaks truth to power. She is Michael Moore seated at the Koch brother’s dinner party. She represents the shock of abrupt change. We won’t have it. We want genteel, imperceptible movement, not alien ideas and certainly not at the sacred table. It reminded me of the phrase the Warren Court used when knocking down the Separate but Equal doctrine, with all deliberate speed.

(Bunting might have also reference Basil Bunting, the British poet of that time who was jailed as a conscientious objector during World War I. He also wrote Modernist poetry which was to overthrow the prevailing mode.)

As an audience we are being prepared for the dissolution of the Edwardian ways. Lord Grantham is about to learn how to put on his own pajamas. Yet we resist as Lord Grantham resists. We don’t want it in our face as Ms. Bunting would have it. It would be too much of a stretch to say we are the Russian émigrés living in exile from the familiar life before the upheaval. However, gone is civil discourse, Ma Perkins, Rockwellian images, good wars, the Brooklyn Dodgers, double features without gore, rhyming poetry, and melodic music.

The very fact that Downton calls itself an Abbey recalls a time of great change. Abbeys were named as refuges for nuns and monks during the reign of the Catholic Church. Certainly this is more of a manor house than a mere abbey but the name sticks as a reminder of another period of dissolution.

I suppose every age has its turmoil. Just when we think we’ve got it in our grasp it slips away. We have one foot in Downton and the other leaving its print in the unknowable and forbidden moors. If Downton is no more than soap it at least washes away our worries for the moment and we walk away feeling cleansed.

A Most Unarmored Man

Saturday about two dozen friends and family memorialized Sam Schultz. This was the second such event especially for those who couldn’t make it back in November. Sam is my late-step-ex-husband-in-law, once removed. Or to put it another way, Peggy’s first husband. We were, in certain ways, kindred spirits having been so chosen. It didn’t take long to find that resonance. Sam was a lovable guy and I grew to love him as a brother over the last third of his life.

We were treated to a projection of movie posters from films he had small parts in and his early photos showing him in the army where he earned two bronze stars for bravery building bridges across the Rhine in the liberation of Germany. Sam never spoke of it. Most of the stories told revealed him as self-effacing. How he lit a cigarette during a blackout during combat and the sergeant said, Oh, it’s you, Schultz. This became a running joke for the next 70 odd years.

Russ spoke about Sam’s visit to Alabama for a college football game just a few years ago. With their red Alabama t-shirts the two found themselves seated in the visiting teams cheering section. Sam’s big smile won over even the most ardent opponent’s supporters including the cheerleaders. Russ brought with him buttons for all in attendance with Sam’s winning smile.

Sam liked to go sailing as in yard sales. He could smell a bargain five garages away. Always on the lookout for an overlooked Jackson Pollock drip or Picasso lithograph he more than often walked away with an Irving Picasso…….his no-account brother.

He had a touch of the entrepreneur / visionary in him. About 25 years ago when I had the pharmacy he supplied me with a line of greeting cards he had created. I don’t believe I ever sold any because the over-sized envelope required 46 cent postage………….demonstrating that he was a man ahead of his time.

His spirit of generosity flowed constantly. When the family exchanged Christmas gifts he was always the one with the most. Even when we set a rule that nothing could cost over a dollar he raided the 99 cent store. I have a pile of flashlights, pens, screwdrivers, mugs and even a Norm’s Restaurant T-shirt.

But it wasn’t just things that he gave, he gave himself. If he detected some disharmony in the family he was eager to mend it.

How to take the measure of a man? By the feeling of warmth and humanity that overwhelms when he comes to mind. Sam was possibly the most un-armormed of men. Vulnerable as he was with his sight, hearing and knees failing, one by one, yet he was fully present in his quiet essence. As he retreated he grew another dimension, inward. Even to the end he saw the world absurd. A sure sign of wisdom.

A week before the end he sensed death and asked Ron to say goodbye and his love to everyone, friends and family. But Dad, Ron said, the doctor was here this morning and took your vital signs; you’re not going to die today. I’m not?, Sam said, then I’ll have a scotch.

Aging

Age is such a variable thing, a number that won’t hold still. Today with my back bent I am going on 82, at least. Two weeks ago I was no more than 52. By next week I hope to be back in my 40s. Aging may be nothing more than a weather report with patches of sun and clouds approaching.

I’m in my Quasimodo phase looking for a belfry to bong. I know how Jake La Motta felt, a raging bull taking the nine count on his back.

The Green Hornet had Kato (Bruce Lee) for his assisted living. Tonto was always there at the Lone Ranger’s side. I could use either one or both this morning. Rimsky-Korsakov’s, Flight of the Bubble Bee was the one cue and Rossini’s William Tell Overture brought Hi, Ho Silver galloping. Music inspiring enough to either lift me into a saddle or peel back a wall leading to an underground garage where my shiny car awaits. 

Unlike today there was always crime to fight. A stream of two-bit thugs, cattle-rustlers, syndicates, goons, shady night-club owners with casinos and card sharks in the back room. It’s enough to make a guy nostalgic. No one could escape the long arm of the law. When the bad guy had the good guy cornered in an abandoned warehouse on the other side of town someone always had his back. Now I can feel my own back reverting as I speak.

Here I am leaping higher than a pop fly. Now I’m the glue-fingered receiver making a circus catch on a bullet pass. Or driving to the basket twisting off the dribble with a hang-time of ten minutes, give or take an hour.

I’m writing myself out of my backache shedding years with every sentence. Kelly and Astaire never ached or better yet, Baryshnikov.  These were anti-gravity guys who glided up walls in one take. I’m getting weightless as Busby Berkeley floats me up a stairway to the clouds, winged feathers and all. Wait, this is getting too close heaven. Let me down.

I’d rather be scooting around like Groucho overthrowing the order with a raised eyebrow and cigar as my artillery. I’m almost ready to be stealing home with Jackie Robinson or hopping a freight train with Woody Guthrie.

Why exert myself? Maybe I ought to just settle for Cary Grant, ever suave and debonair, who never worked up a sweat. His death at 82 is just a rumor. No number could really be attached. Trouble, like water, fell off his duck’s back. Where do I get myself a duck’s back?

Maybe I should be thinking, Mickey Rooney. At age 11 he was 5 ft, 2 and never grew which is probably my height at the moment. He lived to 94 close to the ground, and when asked how he won over all those statuesque woman (8 wives) said that he lied about his height. If my inner Daniel Day Lewis has become Al Pacino there must be a way back. With Peggy, hobbled though she is, at my side like Kato, I'll think of something.