Ragnarok - a film review

Magne (Thor) and his brother Lauritz (Loki)

When my father was a boy, he loved to tell me, it cost him fifteen cents to take in a movie: ten cents for the movie, five cents for candy. He didn’t live long enough to marvel at the fact that we now watch more movies at home than in theaters, and that, between Netflix and Amazon Prime and several other purveyors of modern-day films, we have something pretty close to movies-on-demand. That’s the good news.

The bad news is you still have to take the time to separate the good stuff from the shlock, of which there seems to be an endless supply. But I feel guilty even bringing that up. People who complain their luxuries aren’t luxurious enough should be ashamed of themselves, the scold who sits on my shoulder whispers regularly in my ear.

x

OK. Got that out of the way.

“Twilight of the Gods” means something to anyone familiar with Wagner’s operas and his fascination with Nordic myths. It’s the title - Götterdämmerung, in German - of the last opera in his four-opera ring cycle. Less familiar is the fact that Wagner borrowed it from the Old Norse word Ragnarök, a term from a 13th Century Icelandic literary form known as the poetic edda. It’s an account of an end-of-the-world battle between the gods and the giants. The gods represent order, the giants, chaos. Nobody wins. The end isn’t pretty. We all die.

My idea of the most beautiful place in the world is Norway, known especially for its fjords where the mountains drop dramatically into the ocean. People travel from all over the world just to have their breath taken away. That’s a very good reason for renting this Norwegian series, Ragnarök. The story takes place in a town called Edda, and we're just getting started here with mythical references. The original conception is a brilliant one, I think, to infuse a modern-day tale with ancient Norse mythical characters and have them act out a battle between the forces of order and the forces of chaos where you never know from one moment to the next which side is winning.

Unfortunately, they don’t pull it off all that well. It’s kind of fun to watch, particularly if you have at least a bit of knowledge of Norse mythology. If your knowledge is, like mine, pretty much limited to the recognition that we have named four of our days of the week after Norse gods (sometimes called Germanic gods), to wit:  Tiusday (Tiu is the Anglo-Saxon way of saying Tyr, the son of Woden, the Supreme Deity), Wodensday, Thorsday (Thor is the god of thunder, strength and protection) and Freyasday (Freya is Woden’s missus), it wouldn’t hurt to get at least a Wikipedia article or two under your belt before diving in.

Ragnarok is the brainchild of screenwriter, playwright and restaurateur Adam Price, the creator of one of the very best TV series of all time, in my opinion - about the Danish political scene, Borgen. That the same person could do both Borgen and this piece illustrates nicely the Japanese saying, “Even monkeys fall from trees.”

It’s not that you can’t get into the story. And the acting is good. It’s not just the Norwegian scenery. But the plot is a complete mess. Characters change their behavior on a dime; you have no idea what motivates them from one minute to the next. The battle between good and evil is between environmentalist teenagers and an adult generation that failed them by choosing global warming over clean drinking water. But the sides are never drawn. The kids are never sure who their adult allies are, and after the kids demonstrate that the town's drinking water is seriously toxic, everybody in town shows up at church to mourn the CEO of the offending corporation. And when the hero - the hunk who plays Magne - the “Thor” character, learns that his girlfriend was actually murdered by the corporate weasels, he surrenders his powers because killing is wrong. His mother lives for her sons, but is so clueless about what’s going on with her boys you get angry at the writers for making such a sympathetic character so stupid. And then it turns out blood is destiny, not family; father’s blood, that is, not mother’s blood, of course.

Maybe if you’re a reincarnated Viking this makes sense. But the personality changes are way too frequent to make the characters believable.

The fact that the film is of the YA genre - a new concept for me - “young adult” as a genre - may be another reason for having a look. You might even call it a high school movie, with all the goings on about who’s into who and who’s still a virgin - if that sort of thing interests you. And if you’re LGBT there’s a bunch of both gay and lesbian relationships to make the point that Norway is an enlightened place these days. (But still tribal and Viking macho?)

The hero, the Thor character, is a hunky blonde handsome fellow, vulnerable (dyslexic) and kind-hearted. A hero chosen by the witch Wenche to become the modern-day Thor (throwing into confusion whether it's destiny which drives him or whether he's the chosen instrument of the gods). He stops needing glasses, his muscles grow and he busts out of his shirt, and he can suddenly throw a sledge hammer a kilometer and a half. But he remains the sweet new kid in the neighborhood who doesn’t want to hurt anybody. What’s not to love about that, I ask you.

Two seasons. The first is more high school drama, the second brings out the fact that these are gods and giants bringing on the apocalypse, and we're all going to die. (In Season 3 maybe?)

Not the worst thing on television.

 

Photo credit:

Italian Polka - a partial review

Rachmaninoff composed his Italian Polka originally for two pianos.  It is played that way, or with four hands on one piano, or by a single soloist.  Rachmaninoff first heard the tune in Italy, we are told, played on a street organ pulled by a donkey. He wrote it down and carried it back to Russia, where he arranged it for the Imperial Marine Guard Band https://www.windrep.org/Italian_Polka_(arr_Lucas) . It begins in E-flat minor and switches midway to E-flat major. Starts melancholy; ends joyful.

The Polka has a number of arrangers, beginning with Alexander Siloti. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=481AKTIWc7o. Not my favorite by any means. Too fast, too rigid.

The two best versions, in my view, are the ones arranged by Arcadi Volodos and Vyacheslav Gryaznov. Volodos’s version is a show-off piece and a little on the crazy side. Gryaznov’s is, for me, pure joy. I have a go at it at least once a week, and it’s one of the best pick-me-up pieces of music I know.

Listen to Anna Fedorova have at the Volodos version and you’ll see what I mean - not for the faint of heart. A real technical challenge: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5IbL5AsSGI Mind-blowing, especially since I believe she was only about twenty-one years old at the time of this recording.

My personal favorite remains the Vyacheslav Gryaznov version for its rich musicality. Also technically challenging, it seems to be the one most people choose to play. He chose to perform it when giving a concert in Italy some years ago and it launched his career. People can’t seem to get enough of it. Here he is playing at a concert in a small church in Naples, Florida. I love the “wow” from a member of the audience at the end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj8vzloRKQ0

When you think of classical music, you think maybe first of all of the great German composers: Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, the Schumanns, Robert and Clara, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Handel (OK, so he gets to be called an English composer), the two Strausses, Wagner, Offenbach and all the many others. But I have a soft spot for the Russians, starting with Rachmaninoff, but also Tchaikovsky, Glinka, Borodin, Prokofiev, Rimsky-Korsakov, Moussorgsky, Scriabin, Stravinsky, and so many more. OK, Stravinsky not so much a soft spot as respect. I loved hearing Vyacheslav Gryaznov thank his predecessor Rachmaninoff for providing him with the gift that launched his career - almost exactly 100 years later.

Another version definitely worth listening to is the one by what I think is the greatest pianist of all time, at least modern times, Vladimir Horowitz. Horowitz, you may know, was actually born in Kiev, now Ukraine, but in 1903 it was part of the Russian Empire and he thought of himself as Russian. So when he returned in 1985 after abandoning his homeland for sixty years, he received a very warm welcome. To get an idea of how warm, listen to his version of the Italian Polka and to the ovation that followed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtxynUhUqFs  And if you’d like to see a transcription of the Horowitz version, it’s available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EMFWuGd7vSo

And, a brief discursion here, if you want to see more of that Return To Moscow Concert, it’s available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p4gALGMf3Mw

All sorts of people have fooled around with the Italian Polka. There’s the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szn0th8u39M

There’s the super jazzed up version by Igor Roma, played at the speed of light. Here is Roma doing a performance with Enrico Pace: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHdSPmIfO5U 

Here’s one arranged by Fritz Kreisler, a piano-violin duet with Tobias Ringborg on the violin and Anders Kilström on the piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XD9GLtiUyoU 

And one for two pianos, eight hands, which I like to think of as the drunk version, more gimmicky than musical: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fTvc_BHtOs

A version played by Russia’s latest child prodigy, Elisey Mysin and the man who I think is probably Russia’s leading concert pianist of today, Denis Matsuyev:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBcJ3krU3Wc

And not last, but maybe least, a version for two marimbas: (OK, that’s unfair. Sorry.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5wrdcXsvjk

Here’s a really good performance done to show off the Steingraeber E 272 Grand Piano by Oleg Volkov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e04sbY1zeqs. You may appreciate the fact that he’s playing the Vyacheslav Gryaznov version.

Apologies to all of you who may think I’ve gilded the lily and overdone it terribly. But I hope some of you share my appreciation of how many different ways there are to make music and to vary a familiar or particularly loved piece. YouTube has provided many more, which you can easily find with a simple search.

I'll list a few more, which I consider vanilla, but no less enjoyable, versions and top of the line performances. The list is anything but exhaustive:

1. Dmitry Alexeev & Nikolai Demidenko https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-HtOsZpZwf0

2. Jun Ho Kim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlqtq5z9yNU

3. Evgeniy Kissin and Daniil Trifonov: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jnnqSeaSg34

4. Anna Hetmanova & Anastasia Podniakova: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuclttQTix4

5. Dutch version, four hands, (2009) arranged by Igor Roma: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eO6Y7UjtN5o 

6. Miloš Grnčaroski (17): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBfOzKr-Ay8

7. Szymon Nehring - wonderful young Polish pianist (born 1995) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=naD7iba50v4

And with that, I’ll call it a day…

 

Someone Has to Die - a film review

It's astonishing that people are talking about this film as if it was proof the the Spanish-speaking world is now producing the same kind of quality films that Hollywood is capable of.

Someone Has to Die is worth watching, if you can handle characters who, with one or two exceptions, all deserve to be in the running for this year's "Should have been smothered in the crib as babies" award.

It will take you probably half the movie, if you respond as I did, to reach the point of thinking there's something worth watching here. Mostly it's an exercise in psychological sado-masochism.

Franco's Spain, circa 1935. Outside, where we never see it, there is a civil war raging between the communists and the republicans on one side and fascists/Franco supporters on the other. We're in the house of the Falcón family, most definitely Franco supporters, corrupt as they come. Headed by a stainless-steel bitch of a grandmother, the family welcomes son Gabino home after ten years living in Mexico. The father, whose idea of a good time is raping his wife and killing pigeons, goes about arranging a marriage for Gabino to the daughter of an equally corrupt business partner. Gabino isn't interested. He's gay. And he brings Lázaro, a Mexican friend of his, home with him.  Lázaro is a ballet dancer (read: nancy boy, except he isn't.)  Everybody soon participates in rumors that Gabino and Lázaro are faggots (the word is used at least 100 times).

It helps to understand that during the Spanish Civil War Mexico came out in support of the Republicans, so Mexicans are a despised lot. Gabino and Lázaro are beaten repeatedly by thugs - for being Mexican, (Gavino's mother is also Mexican) - or for being fags - take your pick.

Won't go further into the plot. It's sufficiently convoluted to hold your interest.

Despite the absurdist turns - and it gets truly absurd in places - it's a terrible terrible movie (I like absurdity, you see - it's just that I like it done well).

But although I've gotten quite good at turning movies off when they begin to disappoint, I'm glad I stuck with this one. For the unbelievably stupid ending.  And it ends with the third episode, for some reason. Netflix Streaming.

What were these guys thinking?

The acting is good. Maybe that's the draw.

And the costumes. And the cars.

And maybe there's an underlying reason I got sucked in that I am unaware of. The more I think of it, the more I wonder if it's just that I'm not Mexican enough to appreciate the playfulness of the thing. That's it. It's playful, rather than absurd. It was created, produced and directed by Manolo Caro, who is currently enjoying great popularity in Mexico. Caro has his own production company, Noc Noc Cinema (and I'm sure there's a clue to the film hidden in that choice of silly names.)

One Spanish-language reviewer puts his finger on the problem: the topics touched on are all terribly interesting. It's just that the filmmaker misses the boat and keeps everything on a superficial level. Nobody has any depth. Nobody's behavior is even half-justified.

Watch it, if for no other reason, for the ending.

And do tell me if you think I've got this wrong.

The Next Three Days - a film review

What would you do if your wife was arrested for a murder she didn’t commit and was sentenced to life imprisonment? How far would you go to get her out once you had exhausted all legal means?

How much would the fact that she had attempted suicide in despair figure into your plans?

At first sight, The Next Three Days may come across as just another thriller/car chase. The premise is well put together, and credible, so even if you just watch it as escape, it makes good entertainment. 

But, seriously. What would you do? Would you raise your young son alone as a single father and write her off?  Would you take steps so drastic that if your wife found out about them she might not love you anymore? Would you go out of your mind?

Reading movie reviews of The Next Three Days, I came across one that I can’t shake. No amount of injustice, this reviewer stated, justifies breaking the law and becoming violent against people who oppose you. Well yes. Two wrongs don’t make a right. Everybody knows that. Any Sunday School teacher can tell you that.

The moral philosopher Lawrence Kohlberg produced a theory of moral development that is widely shared and part of any serious course in ethics. People grow morally, Kohlberg assumed, the same way they grow cognitively. They move up through six levels of growth from Level 1, the infantile “me-me’ stage, through the mid-level stages, where you make decisions as a member of society, to the most advanced stage, where you are guided by the highest moral principle - following the law because it’s the law, a way of restating the assumption that all of us rise or fall to the degree we are able to sacrifice our individual desires for the well-being of us all. To do otherwise is to invite chaos and disorder and permanent insecurity.

Russell Crowe plays John Brennan, a man whose wife is accused of murdering her boss, is tried and found guilty, and is sentenced to life in prison. Brennan knows his wife is incapable of such behavior and makes it his life’s mission to get her out when her lawyer tells him there is no hope of a reprieve or of gathering further evidence that would exonerate her. He’s up against a blank wall, and soon runs out of options, having begged and borrowed everything he can. He is facing an absolutely unsolvable moral dilemma.

Brennan finds his way to Damon, a man who has succeeded in escaping prison seven times. Damon (played by Liam Neeson) gives him some advice. “Don’t worry about how to escape - that’s the easy part. You just wait for the opportunity; it will come along. The hard part begins then. You’ve got to plan what you’re going to do afterward, down to the last detail. Where you’re going to go and how you’re going to get there. And you’re going to have to decide what your priorities are: can you kill, if you have to? And you’ll need some good luck.”

In one sense, this should have been a boringly predictable movie. The advice sets up expectations. It’s like Chekhov said, “If you hang a gun on the wall in the first act, you have to use it by the third.” We are primed for John to spring his wife and make a clean getaway. And this outlines the course of the movie. The thrill is all in the close calls and the film doesn’t disappoint. I went to bed thinking, “Well, that was pretty good escape material.”

But when I woke up, I realized I had spent the night playing the story over and over again in my dreams. Something was resonating that I had not expected. The fact that the film is a genuine moral dilemma makes it a cut above a simple thriller. It invites you to speculate about what you would do if the world failed you so completely. If the justice system got things so spectacularly wrong. If your friends and neighbors all gave up on you. If your wife went so far as to tell you she actually committed the murder, not because she did, but because she loves you and wants you to move on with your life.

I had a Venezuelan friend look me up after many years. She had left Venezuela when Hugo Chavez took over and gone to Miami, where she had married a Cuban refugee. Both of them lived with a white-hot hatred of Chavez and Castro for tearing their countries apart. We realized early on in our reunion that we would not be able to maintain an ongoing relationship. They had thrown in their lot with the American right-wingers because they saw them as tougher on communism. I found myself thinking at some point, “But there are more important issues than fighting communism - there’s gun control, the destruction of the climate, the gap between the rich and the poor in America.”  I had found another example of irreconcilable differences to supplement the one I already had to deal with, the fact that loving members of my family were Trump supporters because he was more likely than any democrat to oppose abortion, their single overriding issue.

When you come up against this kind of dedication to a cause - communism, anti-abortion sentiment, or any other issue people fight passionately for - you know that reasoning is not likely to make a difference. You can only hope your side outnumbers the other side and that action can follow the rule of the majority.

Perhaps it’s because we are living with this kind of polarization these days, and possibly it’s because I came face-to-face with the inability to reason with an opponent back in the day when I was fighting for the right of lesbians and gays to marry. I realized there was no shortcut but to try to get in the shoes of my opponents and deal with their fears and insecurities, to respect their value system and try to find common ground.

Kohlberg’s moral theory is not without its critics. One of these, Carol Gilligan, takes a feminist perspective, sees claims of certainty about moral principles as a masculine trait and argues that justice must co-exist with mercy, that forgiveness and understanding of values formed on the basis of life experience must be taken into consideration when deciding what is right.

When the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed, I found myself worrying that we would now have to face gloating on the part of right-wingers that would temper the joy I naturally felt after living so close to the cruelty of division in Berlin, for a time, the place I had determined to make my home. Serious mixed feelings, and the 90% joy did not erase the 10% regret.  Who would speak now for all the victims of vulture capitalism, for the countless people living in the streets of American cities? Who would keep the dream of social equity alive? Certainly not organized American Christianity, where the rule was “Let the children come unto me -- unless they’re Mexicans.”

I’m not going to resolve this issue of how to balance justice and mercy or respond adequately to the moral dilemma of whether to sacrifice self and family for the greater good of the larger society. I just brought it up because The Next Three Days sent me spinning in circles with these thoughts.

And that makes the story, at least for me, much more than a simple thriller. What is theater, after all, but a venue for getting your thinking going on things that really matter?

photo credit

The Next Three Days was originally produced in 2010, where it had only modest success at the box office and mixed reviews. Fortunately, Netflix thought it was worth adding to their offerings.

Move to Heaven - a film review

l to r: neighbor, uncle, Geu-ru, father

I learned a long time ago that there are conflicts that do not actually need resolving. Sometimes it’s perfectly OK to just let two conflicting views sit there, side by side, each side saying what it has to say. Resolution doesn’t add anything, since there is no action that needs to be taken.

I decided the other day I’d take that approach to a Netflix Streaming film called Move to Heaven. Korean movies are not my favorite things. I find the acting style a turn-off. Too exaggerated, histrionic, over the top. And while I’ve known lots of Koreans who were delightful people, I’ve never related well to Korean culture as a whole. Can’t stand kimchi. Hate eating out of metal dishes with metal chopsticks.

For some reason, I tuned into Move to Heaven when I read it was about a crew of people who make a living cleaning up after people who die and leave their place in a mess and don’t have family to pick up the pieces. Japan has such a profession too, and for all I know so may dozens of other countries. I checked, just now, and found a website of one right here in the San Francisco Bay Area, in fact.

Move to Heaven opens with Jeong-u and his autistic son, Geu-ru, preparing to go out on a job with the family business, one of these clean-up operations. Geu-ru is handicapped by what used to be called Asperger’s Syndrome, but these days is generally referred to as ASD - autism spectrum disorder. The father suddenly drops dead of a heart attack and a lawyer-friend manages to locate the father’s younger brother, Kim Su-cheol. Su-cheol is a thug and moves in thinking only of how to take advantage of the situation, full of resentment for his older brother, who, he believes, abandoned him when he was a child. Another major character, who keeps the action going, is Yoon Na-mu, who lives across the street and tries to get between Geu-ru and his shifty uncle and prevent him from being taken advantage of.

Now here are my two ways of looking at the movie:

Perspective 1:

Moving to Heaven is one of the worst examples of Korean films of the histrionic acting genre I’ve ever seen. It’s sentimental sometimes beyond human endurance, filled with unlikely plot twists, manipulative and unrealistic from almost any perspective. It swings from tragedy to comedy and back, never really finding its way. It takes on Korean social problems (homosexuality, bullying, corruption, gambling, sending orphans abroad to be adopted) without resolving any of them, drags mercilessly in spots, and portrays the kid with ASD as a wunderkind, and not as somebody with special needs and special gifts. Tear-jerking at the graduate level.

Perspective 2:

Moving to Heaven grabs hold of you from the very beginning, sucks you in and makes you care about the characters. The father, Jeong-u, deserves an academy award for warmest-faced actor of the year. It even has you rooting and cheering for the bad-guy uncle who gradually comes around because of his association with others in his life who live theirs without his cynicism and teach him the meaning of love and family. Most episodes begin, like the much earlier serial, Six Feet Under, with a tragedy around which the plot-line is based. Eventually the many separate lines are drawn together into a single whole, leaving you teary-eyed and wishing for more.

There.

That’s all I have to say.

Pick your narrative.

And don’t say I didn’t warn you.

photo credit (link also takes you to a trailer worth watching)

 

Roots

This old house was built by my great-grandfather Thomas Johnston himself not too long after the American Civil War.

Which, I imagine, he didn't give a lick about, since it stands about four kilometers down a dirt road off the main road in North Ogden, Nova Scotia, population nearly nobody these days. Not that he cared all that much for Victoria, his queen, either, I suspect, even though she intimidated the hell out of me hanging on the bedroom wall of the room I slept in in his daughter Carrie's house, a good many years later.

The gravesite of my grandmother and grandfather
on a hillside in Guysborough

My great-grandfather Thomas, and his wife, Mary, raised nine kids in this house, if memory serves. Clarence was the oldest.  Then came Cliff. Mabel, my grandmother, was the third child and first girl.  Carrie, her sister, followed after her.  Then Lola, who died at age two. Then Austin, then Harold, neither of whom had any children of their own. Then came Rowlings (Rollie), the second to the last, just before Everett Earle, the last child and last boy, who died at age four.  

Mabel went off to Boston where she met and married Thomas McCornick, of Kirkconnel, Scotland, and had three sons, including my father. Her sister Carrie, came to Boston four years later with her husband, Charlie Simpson, a farmer from the other side of Guysborough, the county seat, from North Ogden. Charlie joined the U.S. Army in World War I while Carrie underwent nurse's training until Charlie's father took ill and they returned - "for a while" - but stayed forever.  Carrie and Charlie had only one child, Kenneth, who died at the age of three.

Aunt Carrie and Uncle Charlie's house, where
Betty grew up and I visited every summer from
the age of 7 on.

All this birthing and dying took place back in a day when the average person lived to the age of thirty-five, so I enjoy being able to declare that now, in the year 2021, not only am I - and my sister, the great-grandmother - still alive, but there are people of my father's generation still going. Don't know how strong, but they are still there.

Clarence, the oldest kid, had five kids of his own, including Nellie and Vera, my great-aunt who is still alive at 95. Nellie had a daughter, Brenda, my second cousin, who is two years younger than me. Brenda and I are still in touch.

With all these kids, there were people around to pick up the pieces when things went awry. Brenda was taken in by Uncle Austin and his wife Lillian when her mother ran on hard times. Betty was taken in by Aunt Carrie when her mother died and her father couldn't manage three little girls on his own. Carrie also took in her mother, my great-grandmother Mary, whom I knew as a child as a wonderful old lady sitting in a rocking chair by the kitchen stove and lighting matches. Only in my advanced years am I aware of what injustice I have inflicted on her by remembering her as the lady who everybody was afraid was going to burn the house down rather than a lady who lost two of her babies under the age of five.

The highlight of my childhood was the two weeks we made our way up the Maine coastline (before the age of freeways) into New Brunswick and to Nova Scotia, where we spent every summer with Aunt Carrie and Uncle Charlie and "Cousin Betty."  Betty, my father's cousin and my first cousin once removed, is familiar to people who know me well as the childhood hero who taught me to milk a cow when I was only seven. 

Piper wearing what I think is
the Johnston tartan
 The photo is used without
permission, so if you don't see it,
I've probably been sued.

When I was sixteen I had an accident and sliced my right hand open on a Maxwell House coffee can. Carrie had nurses training and poured Lysol in the wound until I could get to the hospital in Antigonish, 45 minutes away by car, which we had to drive to when the local doctor said he wasn't up to the job. I owe him and the doctors at St. Martha's the fact that my hand healed and I have had full use of it all my life since. I spent a month in the hospital being entertained by the priests at St. Francis Xavier University who came every day to visit the "boy from Conneck-ticut who had no family to visit him. I had come that year with an aunt and uncle who had to get home, and since Carrie and Charlie had cows to milk and only a horse and wagon to make the long journey on the highway, that was out of the question. The good fathers kept me great company, taught me a little Gaelic, the language they used with each other, and shared my love of bagpipe music (What can I say - I was only 16!) which was broadcast every day at noon. 

Then some additional time alone with Aunt Carrie, picking beans with my arm in a cast and eating them with bacon for dinner, realizing for the first time how she and Uncle Charlie actually lived when the American offspring were not there to provide more exotic variety in their diet. I'm thinking of salmon - lots of fresh salmon.

Betty just sent me a notice from Cousin Brenda that (Great) Aunt Vera has been hospitalized and will go into a nursing home, at 95, when she recovers. The reason I, at age 81, can have a great-aunt alive at 95, if I have my facts right, is that Great Uncle Clarence fathered her when he was 60 years old. Going to have to double-check that information!

My husband and I have two little canine daughters, Miki and Bounce, but no human children. But if you go through my sister's line from Grandma Mary Johnston, it goes like this:

Mary and Thomas begat Mabel who begat John who begat (me and) my sister Karen who begat Joseph, Jr. who begat Joseph III who begat Ella. Six generations of direct personal contact.

Can't say I don't have roots!

Ella Rose, six generations removed from
North Ogden, Nova Scotia. She's much
older than this picture now, but it
remains my favorite, so I'm
including it here.

Fear of the Other, not a need to dominate

I have a friend who is smart and very insightful and deliberately annoying. He insists it is his role in life to annoy people so they start paying attention to important things. He gets under your skin with a rhetorical ploy. He pushes his statements to the limit. Politicians are not 99% crooked; they are 100% crooked – you can’t trust a single one of them – not a one. Americans are not only stupid about things many others are smart about; they are irretrievably stupid and there’s no point in trying to change them.

There’s more to this friend than his style of communication and I’ve learned to sift through his rants for the rewards, which are definitely there if you are patient. But how much better, it seems to me, his contributions to knowledge would be if he showed greater interest in nuanced thought and expression.

 

I fling that criticism at him knowing that I too live in a glass house and have been no less guilty of jumping on bandwagons and leaving nuanced thought in the dust myself.

 

Case in point – the charge that Trump supporters are white supremacists. Many of his base are just that, but very likely not the majority, and maybe not even a large minority. What’s wrong with assuming they are the heart of the base is that, as when my friend lets the bad guys represent the whole, we are getting the basic facts wrong. That’s not smart. It means we’re heading off to war when we might well accomplish a better outcome by staying at the negotiating table a bit longer. Not all Muslims are terrorists; not all Evangelicals are bigots; not all Catholic priests are child molesters. Overgeneralizations can lead us to poison the well.

 

Dr. Robert Pape is a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the founder of an organization called CPOST, the Chicago Project on Security and Threats. It is funded by the Carnegie Corporation, the Pentagon, the University of Chicago and the Argonne science and engineering research laboratory, connected with the Department of Energy. It’s got credentials, in other words.

 

I saw Dr. Pape interviewed last night on (Christiane) Amanpour and Company, one of the best things on television, in my view. He reported on a new study – actually three separate studies, each with its own methodology, of the January 6 attack on the Capitol, designed to figure out who exactly these particular Trump supporters were. By taking down of the Stars and Stripes and replacing it with the Trump flag, they left no doubt they were Trump supporters; the only questions that remain at this stage are what degree Trump himself was responsible for goading these men on – they were 86% men (that’s not a false generalization).  And how exactly were they able to justify not merely storming the steps of the Capitol, but smashing the windows and breaking in.

 

Pape’s conclusions? If you look beyond the obvious, the fact that 86% of them were male and 93% of them were white, you find some quite interesting facts not immediately evident. They are not poor, for example, and not the kind of folk you expect to see rabble-rousing. What unites them – and this is true across all three studies – is the fact that they come from counties in which minorities have made gains against white folk. Not from red states but from blue states. Not from Trump Country but from Biden Country.

 

That slogan shouted at the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville has stuck with me: “Jews will not replace us!” What? Jews? Who the hell is afraid of Jews? You’ve got to be seriously out of touch to think that Jews in America are out to replace anybody. They are a tiny minority of the population and they are already well integrated into the larger national community. Their goal is continued integration, not replacement. That’s stupid-talk, pure and simple.

 

But there’s the key word: replace. That’s what Pape’s study revealed about the mob at the Capitol. They were concerned not about an army of invaders; they were concerned about having their white representatives in Congress replaced by minorities, people of color and Hispanics in particular.

 

“White supremacy” is the wrong term. It may sound like splitting hairs, but most Trumpists don't want to lord it over everybody – being supreme involves suppression, thuggishness and strutting. What’s going on among this segment of the white population is fear, not desire to be on top. A large number do, and when you encounter them, it's not surprising your stomach turns. But if you take them all one by one, you see they are not, for the most part, thugs. You can argue that the reason is likely that after being on top for so long throughout American history, and treating minorities as also-rans, it’s not surprising that many fear that when the tables are turned whites are going to get their comeuppance. Bullies are quick to assume the whole world is made up of bullies. They fear they will, in turn become objects of derision, abused and cast aside. But a quick look around should tell you that that’s not what is happening. Hispanics learn English, some gay people even join the Republican Party – there is complexity in the system. Catholics were a despised minority in the early years; today, they share with Jews the control of a Supreme Court which currently lacks a single WASP member. And it’s not a radical body but an archly conservative one. Nuance. I can't stress enough the importance of nuanced analysis.

 

Donald Trump and his Fox Network lapdogs have been spreading this fear from the start. Fear-mongering is one of the most-used tools in the fascist toolbox. It is now mainstream policy within the Republican Party to disenfranchise black voters, who, they realize, will vote democratic. They have chosen to do this via non-democratic means, thus revealing their true colors. I wish I could say that good will out in the end, but I lack that faith. If we don’t find a way to move the average fearful American voter, their lickspittle representatives will go on coming up with non-democratic proposals for disenfranchisement.

 

Remember the battle for same-sex marriage in California in 2008? That was probably the last time I put my body on the line for a political cause. I went into the No on 8 headquarters day after day to make phone calls to urge people to vote no in the upcoming election, which was a proposition to overturn the right of lesbians and gays to marry. We lost. And the loss was painful. It struck home, close to the heart. I knew in my own life and the lives of my many gay friends who had lived in a state of marriage without the legal benefits and the social recognition, which was so essential for dignity, that there was no reason to take away the right to marry we had, however briefly. The only serious opposition came from religious bigotry, from Catholics and Mormons largely. Ordinary people with healthy sex lives, we knew from experience, don’t bother with other people’s sex lives – and with how they build families.

 

The loss woke us up. Gay leaders realized it’s not that they hate us, it’s that they don’t know us. Suddenly we began seeing scenes of two gay daddies playing on the floor with their rug-rats. And big strong men going all soft and squishy about how much they loved their two moms. We had to stop arguing legal rights and start appealing to our fellow citizens' best instincts.

 

It worked. As we became more human in the public eye, the resistance withered away. A Pew Research Center poll taken in 2004 showed Americans opposed same-sex marriage by a margin of 60 to 31%. Today, less than twenty years later, those figures are reversed. 61% of the population support gays and lesbians who want to marry. If you ask liberal democrats, the number is 88%. Only the conservative Republican subset of the population, the place where authoritarian patriarchal religion still holds sway, are opposed, and even a third of them (36%), are in favor. People can change their minds.

 

What has to happen is that we need to get more voices out there to counter the fear-mongers like Tucker Carlson and others who would lead Americans, like lemmings, off a cliff, taking democracy with them.

 

It’s happening. More and more films and streaming videos are taking up the cause of black folk. More and more people realize that learning Spanish makes our Hispanic neighbors feel more welcome; it doesn’t mean we’re throwing out the English language.

 

Have a listen to the May 6 interview with Dr. Pape on Amanpour and Company.

 

Really enlightening.