The defense
I’m no Jeffrey Toobin, but it seems to be that, at least by the old rules, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev would have a good legal case in his defense. The suspect spoke at length to investigators, reportedly confessing to multiple crimes, before he was read his Miranda Rights. When a judge finally ordered that he be Mirandized, he immediately stopped talking.
So how can his confession be admissible if this Constitutionally-protected right had been denied to him? This is very established court precedent. In the cases of both Timothy McVeigh and Eric Rudolph, there were no delays in notifying the suspects of their Miranda Rights, and the Rudolph arrest even took place post 9/11, so our new-fangled and very-suspect rules would have even applied, no? There might still be an insurmountable case against Tsarnaev if a confession had to be thrown out, but could the 19-year-old not conceivably attempt to pin the motivations of his actions on his brother as a domineering personality over his life? If a jury agreed that he had been forced to go along, even to some extent, isn’t it even conceivable that one day he could walk as a free man?
Of course this would not be an issue if Tsarnaev was being held as an enemy combatant, but he wasn’t, and he shouldn’t be. The authorities are able to use that “public safety” exception to justify an interrogation prior to Mirandizing a suspect, but 16 hours of questions? And all of them after authorities had made a public announcement that there was no longer a threat to public safety? I wish I was this guy’s lawyer.
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If Clarence Darrow were alive, he would have been banging on the door of the infirmary trying to get between Tsarnaev and his interrogators. Democracy’s great defender would often take the hopeless cases, especially if there was a chance to save the accused from a sentence of death.
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ESPN is really only interested these days in its own manufactured stories. First case in point of how they create their own spectacle was revisited last week with their breathless, marathon coverage of the NFL Draft, an annual event that had almost no cultural meaning until ESPN began feeding it steroids.
Now today comes the first currently-active player in the history of any of the four major North American team sports coming out of the closet, and ESPN
buries the story under a garbage pile of news about Tim Tebow, the New York Jets' fifth-string quarterback.
The NBA’s Jason Collins announces he’s gay--
to ESPN's media rival Sports Illustrated -- on a day when the Jets cut loose the “superstar” quarterback that ESPN independently manufactured. It's no contest what the lead would be.
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I’ve begun teaching my Kenyan-born fiancé about the resplendent game of baseball. But I’m not going to tell her about the designated hitter until it becomes absolutely necessary.
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I'm taking this week off for my annual trip to New Orleans. The advance word is that the situation in America's most culturally-significant city remains, as ever, desperate but not serious.
I ain't gonna let nobody play me cheap, and I got 50 cents more than I'm gonna keep. Laissez le bon temps rouler!
Stray observations and a little news
The freshman news anchor fired in North Dakota for swearing in the first five seconds of his first broadcast is New York City born and raised. He sort of betrays the hypothesis of John Kander and Ebb that if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.
In fact, he might embody the most persuasive counterargument to that musical proposition since
Tino Martinez.
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Fun fact:
Any of the ten richest Americans could pay a year's rent for all of America's homeless with their 2012 income.
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Don't digest the criticism of this season's
Mad Men. They said the same thing about
The Sopranos as it grew ever darker. If you didn't expect things to turn pitch black for Don, I'm not sure what show you have actually been watching?
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Stupid glasses. What I need is a prescription windshield.
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There's going to be a
Moms Mabley documentary on HBO later this year.
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There's a week left in April and the Cubs are already 5 1/2 games behind the
second-to-last-place team in their division.
Having the right words for the occasion
I feel kind of bad for that first-day news anchor in North Dakota whose on-air debut last week went viral after he dropped a pair of expletives as the first two words out of his mouth. For one thing, it’s hard not to detect a little bit of condescension being directed towards under-populated North Dakota.
Just look at those rubes and their low-production value news set.
But couldn't we just quickly fast-forward to the point in this country at which swearing on television no longer causes people to become overwrought? Those grizzled veterans of journalism at the New York Post committed a much worse offense in the same week when they labeled two very innocent-- and brown-skinned-- men as terrorists on the cover of their shithole daily. Nobody got fired over that one.
The words this junior anchor uttered are considered unforgivably offensive, yet the next day, every newspaper and television station in the country has a link to the uncensored video clip on their website. Wouldn’t it have been a thoroughly charming reaction by the guy's bosses to have simply chuckled it off and hit the restart button? Nobody was impressed with their mechanical decisiveness in canning him.
That being said, television news personalities, national and local, are, as an aggregate, gutless corporate sellouts that don’t deserve our sympathy.
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Maybe it was the FBI interrogation itself (in 2011) that radicalized Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
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Kurt Vonnegut Letters is a bang-up collection of the author's lifelong correspondence edited by his friend Dan Wakefield. Vonnegut is the Mark Twain of the first post-Twain century. There are letters to family, friends, colleagues, publishers, admirers, critics, and even a woman who led a fight to ban and then burn one of his books in North Dakota. (Jesus, some things never change in North Dakota.)
Here's a favorite letter of mine from the hardcover, addressed to the head of the state library in Indiana...
February 10, 1983, New York City
Dear Mr. (Charles Ray) Ewick,
I am in receipt of a letter from your research librarian Linda Walton, which tells me that your institution is no longer able to buy books. She asks that I give the State of Indiana a copy of my latest novel, Deadeye Dick. I have complied with this request.
Since books are to libraries what asphalt is to highway departments, I assume that Indiana is also asking donations from suppliers of asphalt for her roads. Or has it been decided that asphalt is worth the money, and that books are not?
It may be that whoever told Linda Walton to write that letter supposed that I myself get all the books I want for free. I in fact must pay for them what bookstores pay. So what I have sent you represents an actual outlay of about $7.00, plus postage and the price of a bookbag, plus a fair amount of my time, which may indeed be worthless. Let us forget the time. Are all of Indiana's suppliers of goods making equivalent sacrifices? Or are they to be more respected than I am for the way they make their livings? Are they more manly, more practical, less decorative?
If you have a cost accountant, he can easily prove to you that Ms. Walton's letter to me cost far more than one copy of Deadeye Dick. If you reply to this letter, and you discuss its contents with others on State time, the cost to the taxpayers will soon exceed the retail price of my collected works bound in the finest leather.
Yours truly,
Kurt Vonnegut
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Quote of the day: Kurt Vonnegut, to his friend Robert Maslansky, also in 1983, "There is no chance that I could ever respond warmly to upper class sensibilities, no matter how brilliantly expressed. This is politics. Example: T.S. Eliot. Fuck him. Everybody knows he's from St. Louis-- everybody but him."
Monuments to the movement
The state of the Earth this Earth Day is not strong, but the calendar date is cause for celebration. There are places just in the United States that can be considered
environmental success stories, and activists made them happen.
(Pictured: the Earth, in her Sunday best)
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Billions of dollars went down the hole of “Homeland Security”/TSA/Patriot Act/“War on Terror” preemptive paramilitary policing bullshit, and still we had nada on the Tsarnaevs. Even the video of the two suspects that aided in their capture came courtesy of the citizenry, and the missing suspect was discovered by a boatman out for a smoke. We have traded our rights for our security and received neither. Yet somehow you get that sick feeling that we’re going to be throwing even more money at our newest government agency, and several of the bureaucratic stooges will even get promotions over this episode.
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Is there any doubt that violence only begets more violence? How can you look closely at these people from Chechnya, Dagestan, or any of the Caucasus states and not see the scarred survivors of Stalin's terror?
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Quote of the day: "War is God's way of teaching Americans geography."-- Ambrose Bierce, long ago
Why the government's response to the Boston bombings will hinge entirely on the perpetrator's race
Author and activist Tim Wise:
“White privilege is knowing that even if the bomber turns out to be white, no one will call for your group to be profiled as terrorists as a result, subjected to special screening or threatened with deportation. White privilege is knowing that if this bomber turns out to be white, the United States government will not bomb whatever corn field or mountain town or stale suburb from which said bomber came, just to ensure that others like him or her don’t get any ideas. And if he turns out to be a member of the Irish Republican Army we won’t bomb Dublin. And if he’s an Italian-American Catholic we won’t bomb the Vatican.”
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If I give you the expression "grief showmanship," you may already have an idea what it alludes to. If not, here's an example.
Bloodlust punishes Boston
What I find fascinating in so many of the comment threads about the Boston Marathon stories is the tempered expression caused by not knowing who the attacker-- or attackers-- were. The reactionaries that distrust-- and even overtly hate-- Muslims have to make sure first that the bombings were not the work of a right-wing fringe group made up of white males. (Funny how we frequently refer to Muslim terrorist organizations, but never to Christian ones, even though nearly all our white separatist groups, like the bombers in Oklahoma City, are Christian fundamentalists to their most core beliefs.)
We live in such an insanely violent country, but you're not going to get exactly the harangue about domestic violence you might be expecting from me on this. (Or maybe you are.) I do support common sense gun laws like thorough background checks, waiting periods, the closing of loopholes for gun show and internet purchases, and limitations on what ammunitions and types of guns people can legally possess. I support the requirement of permits and I want it known very publicly the name of every person in my community who possesses one of these permits to carry. After all, the Second Amendment
requires that our gun-owning citizenry be “well-regulated.” That’s a Constitutional mandate. Everybody agrees that an individual citizen should not be allowed to own an Uzi, one of those over-the-shoulder missile launchers, or a nuclear weapon, so if you’re denying that there are Constitutional limits imposed on weapon ownership, you’re being hypocritical. The debate instead should be centered on where we draw the line. Also, personally, you won’t see me loitering within two blocks of a gun, if I can help it at all.
But I also share some of the concerns of our gun rights advocates. Like them, I definitely don’t want to live in a country where the government possesses all the guns. Not this government.
The root of most of our violence in this country is at the federal level. It’s our government that has dehumanized us. It’s our government that has cheapened human life in both our domestic and foreign policy. It has ranked the value of life by skin color and economic circumstance. I hate to have to be the jerk that points out that there were 55 people killed in coordinated car bombings by insurgents in Iraq on the same day the bombs went off in Boston. Violence is the shit we swim in when we eagerly take sides in regional conflicts far away from our region of the world. And that's who we are.
When the first question posed to the governor of Massachusetts yesterday is about the specter of a “false flag” bombing by the government, I don’t consider the person who asked the question to be a “nut.” I’m not at all convinced that this particular attack holds the characteristics of such an attack, but I’m not ignorant of history either.
Our federal government conspired to and successfully murdered Martin Luther King Jr., a man of peace that it considered very dangerous. Despite the lack of media coverage then and now, a civil jury in Memphis, Tennessee actually ruled this to be the case when the King family brought a wrongful death suit in 1999 alleging that James Earl Ray was used as a scapegoat in the shooting. Additionally, we’ve all seen Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of the assassination of John Kennedy and anybody with half a frontal lobe knows that a head doesn’t recoil backwards when it’s penetrated by a bullet from behind. Nobody can quite agree what happened regarding Kennedy, but we each acknowledge that the most sensitive government files pertaining to the assassination remain sealed.
We know that this government invented an attack upon the U.S.S. Maine in Cuba in 1898 when it wanted a war against Spain. We know it invented an attack by the North Vietnamese in the Gulf of Tonkin when it wanted war in Southeast Asia in 1964. We know it manipulated intelligence when it wanted war with Iraq in 2003, and that in the ongoing “War on Terror,” it has turned over nearly all of its military operations to the C.I.A. for the purpose of keeping as many of those actions as covert as possible. We also know that our government is decidedly more interested in prosecuting Bradley Manning, a whistle-blower to war crimes committed by U.S. military personnel than it is the war criminals he exposed and the authorities that covered up their offenses.
When you see such prominent “mainstream” media as the New York Post and Fox News jump so quickly-- and incorrectly-- towards a story about a Saudi national being held in custody in Boston in connection with Monday's bombings, some of us immediately recognize a potential repeat of historical treachery and deceit. If you’re one of those people laughing today at the “false flag” conspiracy theorists surrounding Boston, know that some of us think it’s simultaneously possible for you to be correct in your individual assumptions, but also a useful idiot in your knee-jerk dismissals.
If you're concerned in the slightest about the oceanic depths of our government’s culture of secrecy, now is not the time to keep quiet about it. This would be like victims of gun violence turning silent immediately following a high-profile shooting. These acts of terror are inherently political events. Why is only one side prohibited from being political? And if you want to avoid having a cluster of “truthers” in your midst, do your shit in the open.
Mark Twain charged the nation with bloodlust in 1907: "We build a fire in a powder magazine, then double the fire department to put it out. We inflame wild beasts with the smell of blood, and then innocently wonder at the wave of brutal appetite that sweeps the land as a consequence."
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Each year Patriot’s Day in Massachusetts marks the anniversary of the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War, the battles fought by militia men against the British army at Lexington and Concord. Maybe we shouldn’t have so many holidays commemorating historical acts of violence, however justified. Save your patriotism for the 4th of July. Better yet, make it December 6th. That was the date in 1865 when ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment extended the right of independence to all Americans.
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Why does it matter so much to our leaders whether the bombings in Boston are labeled an act of "terrorism"? Because doing so opens the door politically for the president to lead us into war.
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Here’s
the AV Club’s report of the ostensibly-boisterous memorial for Roger Ebert at the Chicago Theater on Thursday. Among the heroes in this life are those that make their trade more democratic in convenance. That’s what Roger did for the narrow and esoteric world of film criticism. I appreciate the theory of the AV Club author that film is an inherently liberal art in that it engenders human empathy.
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Bob Newhart is going to be guest-starring on the popular series
The Big Bang Theory during its May 2nd season finale, and in a role that may lead to future appearances. This is wonderful news. I watch this program and I love Bob. But just as importantly, we need to get Bob back into the forefront of the American consciousness so that somebody... anybody... will release the remaining DVDs for Bob's two previous hit series. Both
The Bob Newhart Show and
Newhart stalled out in the DVD format under 20th Century Fox in 2007.
Senseless tragedies
This script is a U.S. President's best friend:
"Our thoughts and prayers tonight are with the people of ___________. This senseless tragedy and outburst of violence only serves to remind us of the resilience of the American people. In times like this, we recognize those individuals who put their lives on the line every day to protect and to serve, whether it's in ___________ or someplace else. We are in contact with state and local authorities and the full weight of justice will come down on those responsible for this violence, this I promise you. The American people will say a prayer for the people of _________ tonight."
The North Korean outlook
The traditional news media has apparently learned nothing from Iraq and Afghanistan. In their all-too-predictable coverage of the North Korea standoff, we get nothing but unfiltered talking points from the Pentagon. But Americans are admirably skeptical. Do you know anybody personally that really believes Kim Jung-un would launch a nuclear bomb at the United States in a fit of longing for assured mutual devastation? And right before the NBA playoffs?
The U.S. is now engaged in large-scale war games, along with South Korea, in hopes of heading off the modern Red Menace-- deploying missile-interceptor ships and sending “nuclear-capable” B-2 Stealth Bombers to the region, but what our subservient news media don’t focus on is that this is nothing new. South Korea and the U.S. were already launching test missiles over the Sea of Japan months ago. That’s what set Kim off in the first place.
At this point, it’s not even known if the North Korean government has garnered enough fuel to launch a missile. It's incapable of flying a modern air force. Secretary of State Kerry has been called to duty in the region to provide his look of gloom. The man is perfect for his job in that his natural facial construction peddles the perception of a multitude of military threats facing the Great Power at all times. He’s manna from Central Casting for a country that's afraid of its own shadow.
Don’t you feel that palpable sense that the people just aren’t buying this one? This is not to say they can’t be manipulated. If the U.S. chose to strike Pyongyang, public support would skyrocket in the way that it always does when a new war begins. In this country, war is still something that always takes place “over there,” so if Obama and Kerry decide to direct an Israeli-style missile assault against the Korean Peninsula’s munchkin army, Facebook would surely back up the effort, exploding with humorous attacks upon the comical appearance of Kim Jung-un. The dictator’s image would be tacked up over the firing targets at gun ranges all across the country.
Yes, the time has come for war. The budget stalemate rages on, and the threat of having to make significant military cuts has become otherwise inescapable. Our last decent Enemy of the State, at least one that could be named by a majority of consumers at your city's largest box superstore, has been dead so long, they’ve had time to make a movie about it. We’ve been so lacking in nation-states as legitimate threats, we've even had to invent them (Iraq) to force our imperialist agenda. Those asshole 9-11 terrorists had the gall to kill themselves as part of their attack, defeating any chance we might have had at the true emotional closure of Texas-style justice.
So bring on the North Korean Dr. Evil. Our ruling elite in Washington are in more desperate need of an engrossing television serial than is the National Broadcasting Company. The once-frightened populace requires freshened incentive to run back to the enemy-industrial complex with submissive temperament and open wallet. We’ve been making war for too long with nobody in particular. And losing.
Jonathan Winters
Jonathan Winters was so funny. He's on the Mount Rushmore of Comedy with Jack Benny, Richard Pryor, and I don't even know who would be the fourth. The word genius has lost its meaning so let's just call him the best comic ever.
Here's
a wonderful bit from the Dean Martin Show.
Voices
Russell Brand has written
a fascinating essay for Huffington Post about coming of age in Margaret Thatcher's England, and now reacting to her death. Thousands of column inches have been devoted to encapsulating Thatcher's life this week, and the most germane come from a comic with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who is also a recovering alcoholic, heroin and sex addict, and has been arrested 12 times...
The blunt, pathetic reality is that a little old lady has died, who in the winter of her life had to water roses alone under police supervision. If you behave like there's no such thing as society, in the end there isn't. Her death must be sad for the handful of people she was nice to and the rich people who got richer under her stewardship. It isn't sad for anyone else. There are pangs of nostalgia, yes, because for me she's all tied up with Hi-De-Hi and Speak and Spell and Blockbusters and "follow the bear." What is more troubling is my inability to ascertain where my own selfishness ends and her neoliberal inculcation begins. All of us that grew up under Thatcher were taught that it is good to be selfish, that other people's pain is not your problem, that pain is in fact a weakness and suffering is deserved and shameful. Perhaps there is resentment because the clemency and respect that are being mawkishly displayed now by some and haughtily demanded of the rest of us at the impending, solemn funeral are values that her government and policies sought to annihilate... I do recall that even to a child her demeanour and every discernible action seemed to be to the detriment of our national spirit and identity.
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Ta-Nehisi Coates on Brad Paisley:
Paisley wants to know how he can express his Southern Pride. Here are some ways. He could hold a huge party on Martin Luther King's birthday, to celebrate a Southerner's contribution to the world of democracy. He could rock a T-shirt emblazoned with Faulkner's Light In August, and celebrate the South's immense contribution to American literature. He could preach about the contributions of unknown Southern soldiers like Andrew Jackson Smith. He could tell the world about the original Cassius Clay. He could insist that Tennessee raise a statue to Ida B. Wells.
I would add that another good way would be to pay tribute in his music to a fellow artist, Louis Armstrong. Or how about organizing a 100th birthday musical tribute celebration this year for Rosa Parks?
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I haven't seen the new Jackie Robinson film "42", but I've heard a rumor about it, I have developed at least one theory about it, and I have one direct criticism after having seen the trailer.
The rumor is that the picture is light on drama. Jackie is supposedly portrayed as a pretty one-dimensional hero that white people get to react to, and the white people get to experience all of the personal growth in the story.
My theory is that the movie will make no reference, even in passing, to the political "radicals" that were instrumental in helping to integrate baseball, notably Lester Rodney, columnist for the Daily Worker, who was a very influential voice in New York City neighborhoods during the 1930s and '40s.
And my criticism, gleaned from the trailer, is that the filmmakers are thoroughly misrepresenting Jackie Robinson's speaking voice in this movie. They've dropped it at least two octaves. Why? Is Jackie not going to be perceived as "man enough" if he's portrayed as having a speaking voice that's rather highly-pitched? Because it was. It's almost seven full decades since Jackie entered the American consciousness and our heroes still have to fit inside a box.
Londoner Underground
Margaret Thatcher was a nasty woman, responsible for the deaths of almost a thousand Britons, Argentines, and Falkland Islanders in the Falklands War of 1982. She gave her fellow Shock Doctrine disciple Augusto Pinochet a medal when the Butcher of Chile was finally arrested for his crimes in Spain. She propped up apartheid South Africa for a decade and called Nelson Mandela a terrorist. She wrecked the economy of her nation in ways that are still being felt today, stripping the investment world there of its system of checks and balances, which led directly and ultimately to the Libor manipulation scandal uncovered a year ago. Her political handiwork capitalized initially on a sort of post-colonial despondency in Great Britain during the late 1970's that modern-day Americans should have no trouble recognizing. And she knew exactly what she was doing with each greedy, destructive action she took because, to people like her, it will always be more important to manufacture wealth for a few than to protect the welfare of the many.
Her death will not be mourned in this space, as it will not be mourned in places like Scotland, Northern Ireland, and the northern mining fields of England. There will be no hand-wringing over the fact. The reflexive concern over speaking ill of the dead was born of superstition. Many of the same people who would scold us for this cold attitude towards Thatcher today were cheering the death of Osama bin Laden 23 months ago. Thatcher has surviving family. So did bin Laden. You earn your courtesies in this life.
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Country music star Brad Paisley has a controversial new song out with LL Cool J called "Accidental Racist." It's M.O. seems to be a sort of combined apology for, and defense of, the Confederate flag, clumsy at best, and offensive at its worst, particularly in its off-the-wall equation of the original sin of slavery with a defense of black urban fashion. It contains possibly the worst lyric ever contained in an American popular song, uttered by Cool James, "If you forget my gold chains/I'll forget the iron chains." Clearly Paisley's heart is in the right place, despite his being embarrassing ignorant of the fact that the "Southern heritage" of his "red flag" has been, and remains as strongly as ever, a terrorist taunt directed at
black Southern heritage.
My tangential angle to this story is this: Paisley is from West Virginia. So when he says he's " a proud Southerner" in this context, that's more historical ignorance. You might already be aware that West Virginia was a state actually formed as a direct result of the Civil War, a new government carved out of the secessionist Old Dominion State by Unionists. West Virginia army regiments fought off the treasonous Southern army in costly and bloody battles at both Antietam and Gettysburg, and the new state set up a system of near-equal education for black children in 1863.
Paisley and other West Virginians' bizarre modern-day evolution towards identification with Southern culture recalls a chapter in Tony Horwitz's kaleidoscopic 1998 book "Confederates in the Attic." In the author's travels through the South almost two decades ago, he found that some of the strongest Confederate sympathies (and modern Ku Klux Klan activity, for that matter) lied in Kentucky, birthplace of Abraham Lincoln, a border state, like West Virginia, that remained firm with the Union throughout the war, and in which the tribal loyalties to the North were strongest among the poor, yeoman farmers that are theoretically the ascendants of today's poor Kentuckians. It's ignorance of one's own history really. Psychologists call it "False Memory Syndrome" as it relates to contemporary recovered-memory therapy. Of course, we also see Confederate battle flag decals on pick-up trucks all across Iowa so what the fuck do I know.
Roger Ebert
I’m emotionally impacted today by the death of Roger Ebert. (Please make sure to
visit his website and read both the posted obituary and his last blog posting from yesterday "A Leave of Presence.") Roger was a mammoth cultural figure, overgrown far beyond what one would expect of a simple “movie critic.” I used to watch Roger and his late partner Gene Siskel on their "At the Movies" program, of course. They would also make the rounds together on the late night shows I've so enjoyed. Whenever David Letterman was asked why his talk show set had two guest chairs, he would answer, “Because of Siskel and Ebert.” Roger was the most widely-read and important film critic of all-time.
Like he did for so many others, Roger taught me to better understand the movies and to love them more-- movies of any age and of any genre. Though they were never laid out one-by-one, he and Gene are responsible for my most basic and firmly-set adopted rules about film. One of those is that you can always go by yourself to the theater because when it’s a great picture, you’re really just by yourself anyway. Two, if it’s alternately a “chick flick” or a “guys’ movie,” chances are that I won’t like it. The great films can be appreciated by all. They are gender-less. From Gene: a great movie has two great scenes and no bad ones. And most importantly, from Roger, the value of a movie never lies in what it's about, but
how it is about it.
When Roger Ebert championed a movie that I also loved-- especially a small one like
Eve's Bayou, I felt like we were thicker than thieves. Roger's greatest gift to cinema was actually helping to make small movies into
big movies, as he did for
Nashville, My Dinner with Andre, Sling Blade, and countless others. But it was really the last years of his life, his blogging years, that helped bond me to him for the remainder of my life. It’s kind of funny to think about this final prolific period of his writing, necessitated by his cancer fight, coming on the heels of an already-historic output of print. For more than three decades, he kicked out six or more movie columns a week for his Chicago newspaper, the Sun-Times, as well as essays, interviews, and question-and-answer columns pertaining to the movies. He became the paper's de facto obit writer for every film star that died. And all while he was also appearing frequently on both local and national television.
When he lost his ability to speak, the harvest of writing actually increased, and now he was writing also about his spiritual beliefs, his memories, his influences, his politics, his marriage, his employer, and his great loves—both human and in the humanities.
I found myself a couple months ago cribbing from one of his last published books, a memoir entitled “Life Itself,” for my own theoretical autobiography. I told my brother only a couple weeks ago, as he was moving to borrower the book: “Look here at how he lays it out by chapter." There's one on his genealogy, one on his hometown, one on his parochial elementary school, others about his best friends, and his favorite places to visit, his alcohol addiction and recovery, a cherished one entitled 'How I Believe in God.' And he just pours out as many precious memories as he can for each chapter. "I could do that!” Or at least, I
should try to do that.
I smile when I think even of the
idea of Siskel and Ebert. Always biting and barking at each other, competitive, but with a deep love and respect at the core of their relationship. Ebert's Sun-Times obit today called the partnership "complex." And Roger also belonged in company with the great Chicago and national journalists that were outside the sphere of arts criticism, people like Studs Terkel and Mike Royko, who also both doubled as good friends of his. He was just a marvelously humane writer regardless of the subject, and I feel so fortunate just to have shared so many interests and passions with a man that had so much talent to contribute to them. I like to think of him now sitting with all of his dear friends who parted before him, all of them seated in a balcony somewhere, maybe discussing the movies, maybe not, but for sure, trying to break a subject down to its very essence.
The Late Shift shifts again
Ken Tucker wrote
this piece last week for Grantland outlining the new landscape of late night talk television. (Yes, Grantland is a sports site. I don't get it either.) Of David Letterman, he writes, “No one other than Dave does it with the same combination of intent to further precedent, awareness of lineage, and motivation to unite a mass audience that began with Steve Allen’s ‘Tonight’… Letterman is the last man in front of the camera who carries the whole history of the genre in his head; he both honors and fucks with the tradition on a nightly basis.”
As somebody who has been firmly-- strictly-- in the “Dave” camp for going on three decades, and whose time spent watching Jay Leno averages about ten minutes a year, I find it interesting how much the celebrated, upcoming Jimmy Kimmel/Jimmy Fallon “face-off” suggests the Letterman/Leno one that has never left us.
To my mind, Jimmy Fallon is shaping up as the perfect replacement for Leno on NBC’s
Tonight Show as I cannot stomach him. The man is an absolute suck-up on the air, not only to his guests, but indirectly, to his bosses, who clearly formulated the comic's thoroughly-unironic persona through corporate strategy. He's a dispenser of confectionery silliness. Whereas Dave and Conan played principally to the college dorms on their versions of
Late Night, Fallon’s act plays to early teens-- and not the cool ones either. He literally giggles before the camera, and he's striving so hard for ‘adorable’ that sometimes I forget the hour and think I’m watching
Parks & Rec.
The constant presence of a Mac laptop at his desk is such a pandering nod to the young demographic that supposedly favors him, I’m amazed that so many media critics seem legitimately impressed by it. (Maybe Steve Allen should have kept a television on his desk when he hosted the original
Tonight Show.) To put it another way,
Late Night, under Letterman, was revolutionary, the archetypal program for the post-ironic age. (Dave completely changed television before "the late night wars" even began.) Under Conan O’Brien, the franchise enjoyed another decade and a half of twisted excellence. Under Fallon, members of the studio audience receive free gifts hidden under their seats.
Johnny Carson wasn’t famous for his sarcasm, but he was a host capable of deflating the show business bubble anytime it threatened to engulf the screen. According to his long-time producer Peter Lassally, Johnny once asked a birdbrained starlet during a taping, “Have you read a book?” In interview after interview, however vacuous it might be, we see Fallon almost falling down with laughter, convulsing violently to even the slightest attempt at humor by his guest. Programs in this genre can be easily hijacked by publicists so the ability and willingness to detach from the mechanics of corporate Hollywood come as a prerequisite to the job.
Meanwhile, with the NBC-spurned O’Brien now relegated to the ghetto of basic cable (creatively, there are worse places he could be), Kimmel stands as the heir apparent to Dave. It was Jimmy K who introduced the televised tribute to Letterman, his hero, at last year’s Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in Washington. Yet declaring Kimmel "the Next Dave" implies there will ever be another. Letterman, beyond the range of any of the other fellows, is our national barometer, even a counselor of sorts during
moments of tragedy. Dave has always promoted the widely-held belief that Carson is the benchmark, but it’s actually Dave who defines the job today in almost every way. Dave is the man all these others are either aping, or, in the case of Fallon, purposefully counteracting.
Dave passed Johnny a year ago in longevity, and that's not to mention the many more shows Dave has already taped after you factor out the guest-hosted episodes of Johnny's
Tonight. Fallon was just formally named Leno's successor today, but for several weeks, the narrative has already been about the two young Jimmys that would be-- and likely
will be-- king. The highlight of the next two to four years for me though will be our precious remaining time with Dave.
Little boxes
David Kushner’s book, “Levittown: Two Families, One Tycoon, and the Fight for Civil Rights in America’s Legendary Suburb,” is a gripping, true account of a story I had never heard before. The two families referenced, both couples with young children during the mid-‘50s, led the fight to integrate one of the early and most famous suburbs in the United States-- Levittown, Pennsylvania, a community located approximately 10 miles outside the city center of Philadelphia.
One family was African-American, that of Daisy and Bill Myers. They did the integrating while standing up to humiliating abuse and threats of terror from their neighbors, including cross burnings and broken windows. The other was that of an ethnically-Jewish couple, “tenant activists” Bea and Lew Wechsler, who worked behind-the-scenes to get the previous owners to sell the home next-door to theirs to the Myers, then faced threats themselves and had the letters “KKK” spray-painted on the side of their house.
Unfortunately, the heroes in this story are not well-known today, though Daisy Myers has often been referred to, in civil rights circles, as “the Rosa Parks of the North.” (Bill died in the 1980s, but the other three players all survived to be interviewed for this book, which was published in 2009. Only Lew is still living today.) Many of the Levittown neighbors played the role of villain, but the principal villain was William Levitt, the celebrated home builder who provided much-needed housing to war vets and their families, and who became so famous doing so that he once appeared on the cover of Time magazine, but who excluded blacks in his housing developments in shockingly-open defiance of the Supreme Court and the Constitution even for his time. When the author calls Levitt’s legacy “complicated” at the end of the book, you get the feeling he’s just being charitable to the surviving members of the developer’s family who agreed to be interviewed for the project. Throughout the rest of the book, whose narrative continues to follow Levitt until his death four decades after Levittown’s integration, he comes off as a thoroughly bigoted asshat.
Levittown, New York, Levittown, Pennsylvania, and Levittown, New Jersey together came to define American suburban life in the 1950s and even still today. The Levitt operation promoted “conformity” to its customers, that’s what it delivered, and that’s what the American suburbs have delivered for decades in its image. Kushner's Levittown speaks to how doggedly persistent racism has been-- and will continue to be into the distant future. Codifying the law was the start, not the finish. Late in his life, Dr. King started to focus his campaign primarily on
economic justice. He was in Memphis campaigning on behalf of striking sanitation workers when he was killed. He knew that integrated cities and neighborhoods held the most promise for equality.
Black and whites were overtly segregated in housing from 1920 all the way to 1970 thanks to Jim Crow laws and the early policies of the Federal Housing Administration that are discussed in Kushner's book. Gains during the '60s and '70s have been eroded by worsening economic conditions and disparities in recent years. Between 1958 (the year of the Levittown, PA integration, incidentally) and 1997, the percentage of whites that said they would move away if a black person or family moved in next door to them dropped from 44% to 1%, but actions speak louder than words, and gaps in income keep the numbers in home ownership far apart and blacks largely isolated in what are called "hypersegregated" neighborhoods. In 2010, 71% of whites were homeowners, versus only 45% of blacks. Non-hispanic whites are less than 64% of the country's overall population, according to the 2010 Census, but make up 87% of all homeowners.
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Opening Day quiz! What is the most historically-lopsided of all the famous baseball rivalries?
If you said Yankees/Red Sox, you need to update your records for the 21st Century, Einstein.
Yankees Championships—27
Red Sox Championships—7 (26% of the Yankees’ total)
Cardinals Championships—11
Cubs Championships—2 (18% of the Cardinals’ total)
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May you each have a truly wonderful Opening Day. Baseball is the oldest sport in North America. Shut up, yes it is. And it
will be the last one still standing years from now when you and I are both on the other side of the grass.
That’s because the other sports are unsustainable. Boxing is on a respirator and football is being transported by paramedics to the hospital because of the new science surrounding head injuries. Wrestling already died in 1976. It won't be resurrected because you're not going to want to wrestle anyone when the whole world is armed. Auto races will go when the crude oil is gone. Golf courses require an obscene amount of water, especially when we consider that most of the new courses being built now are in the desert. Plus, all the rich people will be locked up inside their compounds afraid of being beheaded. Basketball will have to go because there will be no more trees left to cut down to maintain the courts. Nobody will want to participate in foot races after the power grid goes out and the iPods can't be charged.
You're probably ahead of me already on hockey, and you're absolutely right that the Earth's climate won't support it-- or any other activity on ice, and soccer will lose popularity once parents discover that all of that hand-eye coordinator Junior has been building up through video games does him or her no good in a sport where you're not allowed to use your hands. So it will just be baseball left, and, I guess, swimming. There will definitely still be swimming, as I think this through all the way. We'll be playing baseball and swimming our asses off.
